Ep. 396: Peirce on Knowledge (Part Two)

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0:21Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life, episode 396, part two. We've been discussing some essays by Charles Sanders Peirce, questions concerning certain faculties and some consequences of the four incapacities, which is sort of a continuation of that. So we had ended by saying that all mental processing on Peirce's account takes place via reasoning, via symbolic reasoning, even if it's not symbols that we can understand as symbols, right?

0:53If when the rods and cones in the eyes send particular signals, they're sending information, but it's not like an English sentence that we, but somehow he wants to say that the data that is received becomes part of a premise in an argument. And the results of that, the inference from the various premises to what we experience is an inference. And you might say, well, why bring, even if you say, fine, they're not all deductive inferences.

1:23Some of them are inductive inferences or an abduction reference to the best explanation, the best making a hypothesis about something. You still might say, but, you know, doesn't logic, doesn't the idea of argumentation imply validity, right? Whereas people, right? If you're dream logic, that does not follow, oh, there's, I have this premise and the conclusion falls for it. But he actually says in this second essay, questions concerning certain faculties, that even, this is page seven, an apparent obstacle to the reduction of all mental action

1:54to the type of valid inferences is the existence of fallacious reasoning. But he wants to say, look, we're not talking about sound arguments where all the premises are true. We're just talking about getting to conclusion from premises. So when something appears to be an irrational leap, it's because there's some premise that is being held unconsciously, whatever, that makes that make sense. So if you're talking about dream logic and I see one of Freud's example,

2:25there was something about a donkey and my father, I can't remember, maybe, in any case, if I make some sort of what seems like an irrational leap between I see a donkey and then this donkey becomes my father, well, there is some underlying belief, something that has put itself in there as a premise of that particular cognition that is pushing me logically toward the second image from the first one. So all of these associations of images, they're not just random, as you might think

2:56if you just looked at the conscious phenomena, but on Purse's account, they have to be backed up by some sort of underlyingly held additional premises. Yeah, I mean, it's unclear how you ground an associationist psychology. They're not premises in the strictest sense. And he doesn't try to tell us at length how you would ground, or at all, how you might ground associationists. Right, so for Locke or Hume, what are the three associations? Resemblance?

3:27Contiguity. I think he talks about those in here. Well, he does, yeah, but where does he talk about it? Causality is the third one. So it's page 16. Right, so let's just read that a little bit. If this be the case, what goes by the name of the association of images is in reality an association of judgments, right? So he is trying to reduce association to inference, right? Because Mark, what you were giving is a prime example in Freud of association. I just have some kind of free association from one image to another, and it's illogical,

3:58except that the horse comes to represent my father, my fear of horses is representative of my fear of my father, or something like the affect just jumps from one thing to another because of some contingent event in my life. All right, but here he's going to say, but it would be equally true to say that signs denote what they do on the three principles of resemblance, contiguity, and causality. There can be no question that anything is a sign of whatever. Is a sign of whatever. Yeah, is associated with it by resemblance, by contiguity, or by causality.

4:29Nor can there be any doubt that any sign recalls the thing signify. So then the association of ideas consists in this, that a judgment occasions another judgment of which it is the sign. Now this is nothing less nor more than inference. I'm not sure if this is reducing association to inference, or if what he's saying is that the elements of inference, because they are signs, are already function according to associationist principles, and then inferences are built up on top of that

4:59and something like that. But yeah, it's not clear to me. Should we just go to the second question? Back to our first paper here. Do we have an intuitive self-consciousness? Which we've been saying, you know, for our paradigm case of intuitions, an intuition of a physical object, or of red, or something like that. But knowing that he has Descartes in his sights here, right, one of the prime intuitions we have, right, are of mental contents. Thoughts exist, or the I. You might think that I have direct experience

5:31of myself as a thinking thing, or you could interpret it that I only directly have an intuition of the thoughts, and I conclude, but then I must have an intuition that every thought must have a thinker. Somewhere, there must be some intuitive judgments that came in here, and you would think, in any case, all of what Descartes is doing is intuitive psychology, is examining his own intuition. So, do we have an intuitive self-consciousness? And Peirce wants to argue, actually, we don't. Anything that we say about our inner world

6:02is an inference from something observed about the external world. He's not saying we don't have it. Yeah, it's just not intuitive. And this is not new. Kant says we don't have any intuitive self-consciousness. We have an empirical form of self-consciousness, which is like being aware of an emotion, for instance, being aware of some other inner state in time that's intuitive, from which we can make inferences about an empirical self. But when it comes to

6:34some sort of transcendental self, that becomes a formal condition of the unity of experience. It's not an object within experience. It's not intuited. It's not known in any real sense. So, it seems to build off of that type of idea, this rejection of an intuitive self-consciousness. Now, did Descartes think we had an intuitive self-consciousness? I suppose if he thinks that we can infer a metaphysical substance, the self, but it is an inference. So, it's unclear to me.

7:04So, this is where I find myself just, I get myself wound around and don't even know what words mean anymore. So, what does intuitive mean? What do we mean if someone says, oh, it is an intuitive self-conscious? That's what I'm talking about. It's directly determined by the object, by the self. The self is lying there before me as just like the glass or whatever it is, the phone that I was contemplating in the external world, and I merely intuit it directly.

7:35Or... Not inferred, right? And a question one, he tells us it just means not inferred. It's a given. It's like an axiom or a premise. It's just given to us. And then we start inference off. Or it's, if I said manifestly apprehended? I don't know about that because manifestly apprehended, I think that's the thing that we start with are like these experiences that we have and we do manifestly apprehend them. It's just a question of like, what is the source of it? Is it the thing? Or is it some chain of reasoning?

8:08So I want to make a distinction here because I think it will help answer Dylan's question. There is no intuitive self-consciousness. That's not even what he says in there. He's asking, do we have a special intuitive faculty that allows us, that gives us the ability to directly apprehend our own private eye unmediated as a given with no intermediate concepts or any reasoning to get there? Do we just have this immediate given experience of ourself? Do we have that capability?

8:39Yeah. So I was just trying to understand the word intuitive. Yeah. And if I understand that as unmediated direct experience of the self, if I talk about intuitive self-consciousness. Perfect. Love it. Okay. I'm just asking, is that what he means by that? I know he's denying it. And the way in which we're talking about it makes me feel like, how could anybody possibly think there's anything such a thing as intuition? Well, that's what he's ultimately going to conclude at the end of the paper. Lots of people think there's intuition for sense data. That's a live philosophical question.

9:11I don't think you'll find philosophers today who think we intuit the self. But if there were to be that, it would be on the model of intuiting any external object, right? The intuition for objects is there's mind-independent objects, things in themselves, and they causally affect us. So they hand us, in the first moment of cognition, the given, the data, the axioms that we can then infer on top of if we want, or associate on top of. But in this case, to do this, this would be a metaphysical position where there's a substantial self

9:42and that somehow our consciousness can be affected by that soul or substantial self. That would be one position where we're handed an intuition of its existence as the thinker behind the thought or something like that. But yeah, I think that's a much more controversial position than intuition for sense data. So him rejecting it is not some new thing here. Well, Seth, when I started to say, do we have an intuitive self-consciousness? And you said,

10:12well, we do have it. It's just not intuitive. But this is, I thought that's what he goes on to deny two questions later. So why were you insisting that on his, seemed like you wanted to say that, oh, we do have self-consciousness. It's just not intuitive. No, no. I'm just saying the question he poses is, he says, how do I know this thing, the private self? Do I know it by a special intuitive faculty or is it determined by previous cognitions? So he's not asking whether or not,

10:43at the top, he says whether we have an intuitive self-consciousness. And he says, oh, well, here's what I mean by self-consciousness. Right? It's pure apperception, the self-assertion of the ego, self-consciousness and the recognition of my private self. And he says, the question is, how do I know it? And so, at first, we have to get to this thing like he's basically saying, so if you are asserting that you have an intuitive self-consciousness, then you have to be asserting that you know it either by the special

11:13intuitive faculty or by previous cognitions. It's only later that he's going to question or deny that we have any such self-consciousness as it's characterized here. Right. I think that one of the questions we're going to get to is, is he effectively some kind of behaviorist? Wes was stressing at the beginning, he's not. He believes in qualia, but I'm not so sure. I feel like he is having just started reading some Denet. Well, you should have read

11:44more about, it's not up for. Having just read some Denet, I feel like he's in a very similar category with Denet that yes, we do have qualia, but they don't do anything. The things that actually operate within us are all propositional. Qualia are not propositional. Qualia are instantaneous, this instantaneous feeling of something, and we can't even put it into words. To put it into words, we have to connect it with other experiences, so it becomes a process and a judgment. So qualia end up being entirely epiphenomenal

12:15in that they maybe provide some of these initial premises that we then build into what we would actually describe as our experience, but is that a judgment like, I am thinking of an elephant right now, saying that is not the same as like the feeling of the elephant in your imagination or something like that. What he'll say is that the qualia is a material part of the sign. So it's important to him as signs have qualia

12:46attached to them, but they're not by themselves cognitions. They make their component of cognition, but the cognitions in a way begin with signs. So every object, the object in the real world has color, but color doesn't exist with the object. I mean, as we're going to get, color doesn't exist in abstract, like a particular swatch of color at time T in location P is not something we apprehend

13:16because we always refer it to other instances of that color, of red or whatever. So it becomes universal, right? This is just the Hegelian thing. Like you think that there's sense certainty, but no, it's actually you're only grasping universals. But isn't it the same thing for qualia? That's my only point. Isn't qualia something that is always attached? A qualia is something that's always attached? Yeah. So the feeling of red is a qualia that's attached to the sign for red. Yes, exactly. And he doesn't

13:47try to eliminate them. The thing is, we don't really read about that in these papers. I only know this from background research, so I don't know that it helps to, you know, there's this thing called firstness that he loves. But yeah, so we jumped from self-consciousness to Mark. Well, so 2-33, paragraph 2-33 is this thing about testimony. He gives this alternative, we sort of referred to it at the beginning of our discussion of how do we get self-consciousness if we don't just apprehend the self? Hey, there's the self.

14:17If it is an inference from observation of outside things, well, he does have this, how do we think as children, how do we attribute properties to things? Well, they only have those properties if we are feeling them right then. So they really are qualia, right? If you ask, is the stove hot and the child is not touching the stove, the child will say, no, the stove is not hot because the child, the stove is hot when he touches it and feels that it is hot. Otherwise, it's not hot.

14:48And this is something that once they can, you know, use language and understand that other people, you know, shared attention as we keep, that other people have opinions on things, then he realized, oh, I'm actually wrong. Like, I said the stove was not hot and then you said, well, fine, I dare you to touch it. And so I touched it, ah, okay, I guess it was hot, I guess I was wrong. And in fact, all these things, you know, when I'm sad about something, it's not that I'm aware of my own sadness, I'm aware of this situation as being a sad situation. But then mom comes along

15:19and she says, oh, it's okay. Is she just denying the sadness of the situation? Well, no, I somehow get the idea that other people have a different point of view and that the emotion, my sadness must be a private thing because not everybody shares that immediately. Whereas maybe, you know, a moral thing, if there's something nobody disagrees on, even if it's affective, you might keep thinking that it is external. I don't know, I'm going a little further than the next there. Well, he goes on to say, you know, once we find out we can be ignorant, this is why I compared him to Descartes.

15:50We need a cell for that to inherit. And we say, okay, there are those people over there and they were right and I was wrong. And that distinction between rightness and wrongness in a way becomes a distinction between others and me. I was wrong, therefore I am. Which in the way I told the story sounds a little, you know, it seemed like, oh, the child is thinking, you know, the stove is hot when I touch it. Like, no, no, there's no I coming into that yet. It's just describing the field of consciousness.

16:20There are hot things, there are sad things, and none of it is broken down to objective and subjective. And it's only when you get differences of opinion, difference of perception between people that you get the idea that there must be a subject at all. So the subject, obviously, you know, we perceiving things still in the phenomenal subjective field before that, but you only call it a self that has these, as you were just saying, Wes, that has to in here, you know, when we get these errors or these differences from others. Well, and before

16:51the error, right, you have, well, I guess it is tied to the error, but this is in 233, it's the notion of any kind of testimony that then results in a self. I guess in the end, that's all just tied to the notion of error that you would be factoring in testimony at all. But I guess the testimony part, there seems to be the recognition of an error that would come from either observations or testimony, but there's, I guess,

17:22I'm imagining, I'm thinking about testimony that is in the space where there's just no, there isn't a question of error going on. There's a kind, maybe that form of testimony is really a indication or a pointing at that is, you know, when you don't have a question, you just have an indicator that you're getting from someone, something else outside you, such that you would, you know, again, the part that inheres inside you that holds that testimony is itself.

17:52It could just be a differing point of view, right? You like ice cream, I don't. The private realm, to say that we have a private realm that's cordoned off from the public, right, the public realm is just the testimonial realm. Others have different points of view, and so I become aware of myself as a bearer of points of view that deviate from those of the community, from the testimony of the community, whether I'm right or wrong, they might be wrong. So I think it's a little more fundamental than that. So if you look at 231, 232,

18:23and 233, he basically says, one argument he's making is there's a lot of thought going on before there's self-consciousness. So like that's an important data point to talk about whether we have this intuitive direct contact with self-consciousness if we can be living creatures without it. Like that's a strong argument that it's not nearly what we think it is. But he says, okay, essentially before the child learns language, all it has is, as Mark pointed out,

18:53the kind of immediate observational experiential, it doesn't know that things could be otherwise or might be different or it's just like it experiences hot stove or it experiences cold stove and it's learning and as it acquires language, then it can enter into this realm of the social where you get the possibility of testimony, which is to say somebody can say, oh, the stove is hot and the child gets that verbally from another person versus

19:25observationally. So if the child thinks, yeah, the stove is hot and somebody says, no, the stove is not hot and it goes over and it touches it to find out and it finds it, then it realizes, oh, I could be wrong about something. And it's kind of like I, I, I. And so when he says that this self-consciousness arises out of ignorance and error, it's combined with learning language, right, and entering into this social realm where you

19:55start to begin to learn things or take things as given through testimony. And so the fact that you can have a belief that could be proven wrong because you now are in a place where you could articulate beliefs and be told things, that's how you become a self-conscious being. Were you thinking you were disagreeing with me about something? No. Okay. You know, the thing he says about testimony is really interesting. He says it's a stronger mark of the fact than the facts themselves and that,

20:27right, a testimony will convince a man that he himself is mad. This is something I've, you know, been thinking about a lot with respect to conspiracy theories, right? But if we are in a room and we thought we saw a glass on the table and no one else saw it and we concluded that they weren't playing a prank on us, we might think we're crazy that we're seeing things, right? Testimony is in fact often the best evidence that we have, even better than the evidence of our own eyes and the evidence of our own eyes often relies on the support

20:57of the community and testimonial evidence. Deny, you know, seeing the glass and saying it's there when everyone else is saying it's not, that's the mark of someone who's psychotic. The senses are not the best evidence without the community. And in fact, we had the analogy with the inferences with a triangle. And so, each of those is operating like testimony, right? so, even if you're talking about trying to think through something yourself on your own, right?

21:27And the process of refining a mistake to decide that it was a mistake or decide that it was not a mistake is going to be sequences of inferences, all of which act like testimony, even if they come from yourself. Memory is a form of testimony, right? Exactly. And that way, you're quantizing each testimony is like an individual cognition that was a judgment. Judgment is not quite the right word. It's an individual kind of cognition about the state of things.

21:57Proposition, that would be the word that you would use. The cognition that's rendered as a proposition because they all are effectively. And then all those instances of testimony then are the material for figuring things out. And that testimony, it turns out, it perfectly goes over into another person gave the testimony. You got that cognition from that testimony from them. Section 237 is the next one that I have that I thought was really interesting. It sort of sets up some

22:28of the stuff that we've already said about all mental processing being reasoning. It's like, why would Descartes think that self-consciousness is intuitive? Well, because we're more certain of our own existence than any other fact, right? And one of Descartes' other premises or, you know, methodological assumptions was that you can't have a more certain thing based on a less certain thing. That this is just built into his really medieval idea of causality that you can't have more reality in the effect than in the

22:58cause or more certainty or more clarity in the cause. Always the best things, right? God really is the best thing. Slowly gives birth to less good things and sort of everything goes downhill. And he wants to argue that's not the case. A conclusion for it. Let's suppose, for example, a dozen witnesses testify to an occurrence. My belief in the occurrence rests on the belief that each of these men is generally to be believed under oath. Yet the fact testified to is made more certain than that any one of those men is generally to be believed.

23:28In the same way to the developed mind of man, his own existence is supported by every other fact and is therefore incomparably more certain than any one of those facts, but it cannot be said to be more certain than that there is another fact since there is no doubt perceptible in either case. So, yeah, what do we think about that? Apperception, it's not just that I directly observe it all the time, it's that these cases of error or me having a different social position, a different point of view than everybody else, all these things give me

23:59the inference that there is a self there that is different than yourself and yourself and yourself. And so I can be very, very sure of that because it's, but I could have been wrong at any given, you know, actually maybe I perceived a disagreement where there was no disagreement in this case or in the case, you know, with his analogy, maybe some of those witnesses actually were full of shit and it doesn't matter. That's the way induction works is you have a lot of cases that lead to the general conclusion and actually if you look at some of those cases, maybe they were

24:29bogus, but because there are enough other cases, the cumulative effect is more certainty. Here's an example. I might be able to know with more certainty that there is such a man as Lincoln than something that was just reported in the news today or even something that's right in front of my eyes because Lincoln, even though he lies at the end of a long chain of testimonial transmission where you might think, well, there's a lot of, right, with so many links, if any link fails,

25:00maybe the testimony is wrong and maybe I'm deceived. That kind of reliance might seem to weaken things, but it actually strengthens things because there are many different testimonial chains and there are reasons through that discursive process, that process of testimonial transmission, it's almost like a check.