What Distinguishes a Person from a Word? C. S. Peirce's Thought

he called his system of thought pragmatism a word that I did not include in the title of the talk because it's often mistaken for the adjective pragmatic and taken to mean without principles shallow and opportunistic but nothing could be more wrong versus pragmatism is a theory of knowledge that rebuilds philosophy from the ground up it confronts assumptions that have been fundamental to Western thought at least since the time of Rene Descartes and turns them inside out my limited aim tonight is to present just enough of Perces thought so that you might be inspired to pick up his writings and to read more so I'm going to focus on only two points first versus abandonment of the search for absolute certainty although Purse begins as a disciple of Immanuel Kant he does not think that a priori synthetic knowledge of the world is possible instead he offers a more modest goal of increasing our continents in the uncertain but probable knowledge that is within our grasp second versus new vision of reality that discards the dualism which had dominated much of Western philosophy since Descartes and before him since Plato really Purse does not conceive us as prisoners in a cave or isolated bits of thinking race Khajiit ons separated from one another by uncomprehending expanses of material race extensa we and the world that we seek to know are at bottom things of the same kind we are the world is signs and we who seek to know it are signs as well hmm ok the lecture contains seven parts and the outline on this PowerPoint screen which will show up from time to time will help orient you as to what part you're in and how long it's going to take before the whole thing is over before explaining my two points about purses thought I think it'll be helpful to present a thumbnail sketch of the philosophic background against which purses ideas came about purse was widely read by two principal figures that provide a context for his thought are Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant Descartes is sometimes credited with single-handedly turning the course of European thought away from metaphysics and theology and towards epistemology that is the study of how knowledge is possible in de cartes life the foundations of knowledge were being challenged from many directions religious economic and social unrest were widespread in Europe modern science was coming into light with Galileo promoting the new Copernican heliocentric understanding of the world in the midst of this turmoil Descartes proposed new foundations on which knowledge might stand he brazenly rejected all reliance on tradition and ordinary academic research and declared his project to be a reestablishment of all truths solely on the basis of what he himself found with clarity and distinctness within his own intellect it was a move of astonishing audacity for those who admire him and of arrogance for those who don't two features of de cartes thought were especially significant for purse the first is de cartes pretense of complete doubt and his obsessive search for absolutely certain knowledge that could stand up against it in the beginning of his meditations Descartes shut himself up in a room by himself and set out to doubt everything that he could he dismissed religious and philosophic authorities and called into question even the testimony of his own senses until he arrived at a single proposition that he believed was beyond all possible doubt his famous japones dog shows sweet cogito ergo sum I think therefore I am in an era of religious economic and scientific apeople Descartes wanted certainty any propositions that would stood the attacks of his radical doubt would qualify he felt sure as absolute certainties a second characteristic of Cartesian thought that I want to emphasize is his dualism Descartes was not the first duelist thinker but he was one of the most relentless and thorough he believed and stated clearly that the world was divided into two separate kinds of substances race COG Eaton's the realm of thought and race extensa the extended material world the inner world of thought contains reflection reason and all subjectivity the outer world embraces all sorts of things trees and mountains fields and streams shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings but because these two realms are so different it became a puzzle for Descartes how they can influence one another and how one can know the other this question has continued to perplex philosophers for decades and centuries any thinker who begins with an idea of radical difference between thought and matter must wrestle with some form of de cartes question how can we who are thinking beings gain any certain knowledge of the outer extended world when the module Kant confronted this problem a little more than a century after de cartes death his inquiry was intensified by two divergent features one of which made knowledge of the world seem more accessible and the other of which made it seem impossible on the positive side Descartes lived in the shadow of the physical science of Isaac Newton whose scientific picture of the world was so comprehensive and so rigorously tested that it seemed inconceivable that it was anything other than the simple truth of how the world worked for Conn to ask about whether real knowledge of the world is possible is like the Baptist preacher who asks his neighbor whether he believes in infant baptism and the neighbor replies believed in it hell I've seen it done the proper question in Kahn's mind was never whether we can have genuine knowledge of the world hell he'd seen it done Newton did it the only question for him was how we could do it the negative prod to Newton to Const questioning came when he read David Humes treatise of human nature to COTS great annoyance human out that although we can perceive objects and their relations in the world we cannot perceive their causes to cite the Humes famous example we may see one billiard ball approach another one we may see the first stop and the second ball move away however these impressions of sequence and coincidence do not show us the cause why one ball moved and the other one didn't the other one stopped because they don't show the necessary connection between the events that is essential to the idea of cause worse the problem is not limited to billiard balls for instance a little reflection shows that none of the key elements of Newton's great physical science mass force inertia gravity absolute space absolute time none of them appear as distinct impressions to us if we take Humes critique seriously Newton's Principia begins to seem like a crazy quilt of guesswork Khan would have none of that an edifice has exalted as Newton's physics needed an unshakeable basis therefore determined to refute QED Hume skepticism can't set to thinking he thought and he thought and he thought till his thinker was sore and when he was done he had the critique of pure reason the critique begins as humans with experience but it adds a crucial qualification although our knowledge begins with experience it does not follow says he who can't that it arises from experience some of it comes from us appearances say can't show themselves to us only on terms that depend on us as perceivers for instance in order to be appearances caught claims the presentation of the senses necessarily appear in space and in time they do so not because things in themselves are this way but because our Faculty of sensible intuition imposes these forms on their appearances this is a counterintuitive claim to say the least but it has one great advantage since we do not learn about space and time from the world we impose the forms on the world we can know with absolute certainty that they will apply to all possible sensible experience consider a metaphor that I find helpful my television set when I turn it on I don't know what I will see it may be as big as a whale or a mountain it may be as small as a microbe but I can say with complete certainty and ahead of time which in Latin is a priori that the image that appears will be no longer than 24 inches across and that it will consist of a limited selection of colors arranged in a 2-dimensional pattern I know that with a priori certainty not because of the nature of things that I'm going to see on television because that's how my television is constructed in this way Conte argues that we can know some basic characteristics of the world as it appears with perfect certainty besides knowing that all appearances all appearances will be spatial and temporal can't believe that the categories of understanding which all of our experience is shaped by require that every event in the world the world of appearances at least have a cause this is the crux of his answer to Hume furthermore because he held that the three-dimensional Euclidean manifold which appearances occur is a part of the necessary precondition of experience he believed that we can even know a priori that attractive forces like gravity which extend outwards spherically will necessarily have intensities that diminish inversely as the square of the distance that rule of diminution follows from the expansion of the sphere and the sphere is a structure of our sensible intuitions the Scott grounds the integrity of Newton's universe Kant considered his philosophical work to be a sort of Copernican revolution justice Copernicus had turned the astronomical world inside out so that many of the apparent motions of the stars turned out to be the result of our motion and not theirs so Kant found certainty in those portions of experience that are determined not by the objects that we perceive but by the form of our own ability to sense and to think thus Kant addressed de cartes question how can we gain any certain knowledge of the objective world by arguing that some certainties are found within ourselves however as revolutionary is it as his answer might have been it retains some of the basic features of de cartes own positions first con agreed with descartes that the goal to be sought was certain knowledge that would stand the challenge of skepticism second like Descartes Kant retained a sort of dualism instead of the cartesian division between race extensa and race Khajiit ons con separates the empirical world of appearances from the realm of neumann ah the objects of thought that are not found in the sensory experience the chasm between these two is so wide in fact that it's doubtful that it can really be bridged in the former the laws of McKenna is the world of appearances the laws of mechanical physics apply in the latter reside God freedom immortality ideal features of human existence that have nothing to do with Newton's laws we somehow partake in both I apologize for the length of that introduction but as arlo guthrie said in his song alice's restaurant i told you that story so i could tell you this one the young purse steeped himself in the philosophy of con but he did not embrace content descartes scroll of obtaining pert and perfect necessity and universal knowledge about the net perfectness necessary and universal knowledge about the world or of any part of it by the mid 19th century when purse began thinking seriously the plausibility of Kant's project had faded due in part to the innovations in geometry and logic in 1830 non Euclidean geometry burst upon the intellectual seen in the works of nikolai lobo chef Sookie Janos Bolyai and carl friedrich gauss each independently showed that geometries that repealed and replaced the fifth amendment pardon me the fifth postulate of Euclid with other assumptions about parallel lines were not only conceivable but demonstrably consistent these results technical as they were shook the foundations of thought because they dramatically detached logical consistency from sensory appearance for thousands of years logic and geometry were essentially synonymous with Aristotle and Euclid the geometric structure that Euclid presented in the elements had for centuries been identified with the shape of physical space itself so much so that their identity seemed a logical necessity but it was not and Kahn's cheerful assumption that Euclid had shown him the one true and necessary science of space could not survive by the time the young purse was poring over the critique of Pure Reason a book that he claims to have read so often that he had memorized its contents it was evident that Cod had mistaken at least some long-standing familiar beliefs with aa priori truths this was not a minor error he'd attacked the foundations of his entire project the young person alonger assumed as contact that we possess aa priori truths about the world and I quote now quote according to Kant says purse the central question the philosophy is how our synthetic judgments aa priori possible but antecedently comes the question how synthetical judgments in general and still more generally how synthetical reasoning is possible at all this is the lock on the door of philosophy close quote in opening that lock purse expanded and revised the understanding of logic and at the same time he rejected some of des cartes fundamental starting points in the next two sections we turn to two of those changes versus abandonment of the Cartesian quest for certainty and his rejection of des cartes dualistic ontology in an early paper 1868 purse identifies a number of what he calls questions concerning certain faculties claimed for man the first among the is this as a long quote I'm sorry for this weather by the simple contemplation of a cognition independently of any previous knowledge and without reasoning from signs we are rightly enabled to judge whether that cognition has been determined by a previous cognition or whether it refers immediately to its object close quote that is can we know by direct inspection of our own sensations whether any of them connect immediately to the world outside us purses proposed answer to his question is no to show what he means I'd like to try a little demonstration and for that we're gonna need the house lights up I asked you all to be sure to get a handout and a penny what I'd like you to do is to take the handout and turn to the side that doesn't have a bunch of text on it that's got a bunch of lines there's a dark spot on one side and a little rant light circle and the other the dark spot should be on the left have it kind of in your lap in front of you if you've got a book some people do it might be nice to support it with a book take the penny and put it on the little circle to the left to the right rather yes then you know these are these are purses instructions put your left hand over your left eye with your right eye looking at the dot will show you be looking across your nose at the dot take the penny and move it along the line toward the dot when it comes to a place near the middle of the page the penny will disappear if you cannot see it without turning your eye if you bring it nearer to the dot or carry it further away it will reappear but at that particular spot it's invisible I'll give it a try we'll take a minute is it clear to what to do but the penny slide it along toward the dot while you've got you're looking only through one eye and as it goes along it should come to a place where it disappears if and when you get to the point that it disappears keep your eye focus on that dot the penny is your feel the penny with your finger or you can let it go its butt and you won't see it without moving your eye you're seeing out in your peripheral vision pay attention to this the lines are still there in your peripheral vision okay don't move it too fast because you're gonna want to find that place and you may have to kind of lean over limit so you're looking down at it if anybody succeeds help your neighbors let me ask this question has anybody succeeded yes yes all right there are people who have succeeded talk to them later okay there is a simple reason why the penny disappears there's a blind spot near the center of your retina anatomy confirms that this is so it's the place where the optic nerve enters the eye when the light conveying the image of the penny is focused on that spot it stimulates no nerves there's no signal to the brain and the penny disappears the really interesting feature of this demonstration which is straight out of purses pay for consequences consequences of the foreign capacities the interesting feature of this demonstration is not that the penny disappears but that the image of the lined paper is there if you perform the experiment on plain white paper the penny will disappear and there will be whiteness where it was if you try not grasp April they'll be blocks if you try it on text they'll be text although you can't read it it'll mean your peripheral vision and you won't be able to read it that's good because you're not actually seeing anything the demonstration shows very plainly that at least at this spot we do not see what is really in front of our eyes instead some process of inference determines what is likely to be there and shows it to us again to quote Perce it follows that the space we immediately see when one eye is closed is not as we had imagined a continuous oval but is a ring the filling up of which must be the work of the intellect what more striking example could be desired of the impossibility of distinguishing intellectual results from intuitional data by new year contemplation the blind spot dammit the close quote the blind spot demonstration is more than an amusing parlor trick it forces on us the conclusion that we do not simply see what our eyes present to us in the area of the blind spot what we believe we see is not direct visual presentation but some sort of unconscious inference from the surrounding region what's more we have every reason to believe that what happened strikingly in the region of the blind spot occurs also in a more subtle way throughout our field of vision / snows from an anatomical studies that the receptors and the rest of the retina are too widely spread to account for the apparent continuity of our visual field the blind spot experiment demonstrates why our visual field does not appear like a grainy video what we catch ourselves doing in the blind spot is happening really everywhere in our visual field all the time our minds are filling in the gaps in those places just like they do in the blind spot what we see everywhere and at all times is the end result of an extensive process of inference many other optical illusions present the same conclusion some more even even more strikingly here's one if I can get it to work yes notice the squares labeled a and B a is a dark square B is a light square that's obvious our eyes tell us that it's so but our eyes are lying to us with a little manipulation you can assure yourself that the grayscale tone of the two squares is really identical here again what you see is not a direct image of the tones and colors presented to your eyes but a worked-up interpreted presentation of the situation that takes account of the expectation imposed by the image that Square B must be a light Square in the shadow and that Square a is a dark square in full light your eyes do not connect you directly to the world together with their mom with your mind they interpret the world for you it's the same with the other senses what we feel are here is also the result of inference soft or hard texture cannot be distinguished with a moment's touch to tell that something is soft or rough you must run your hand over it and you integrate the manifold of the sensation over time what's reported to your mind as the result of that integration similarly sound results from thousands and hundreds of thousands of rapid pressure oscillations striking our ears we are never aware of any of those individual impulses but only of the tone that results from them the tone that we hear or the softness that we feel is evidently a sensible inference from a manifold of individually imperceptible occurrences what do we learn from the disappearing penny and the other examples a Contin might at first rejoice and feel vindicated after all these demonstrations seem to show the mind is active in shaping the chaos of raw intuition into coherent experience that's just what caught wanted us to believe right not exactly it's true that conch was interested in how the mind formed experience but he was primarily interested in the pre-existing shape of the shape of the mind itself the forms of sensible intuition in the categories of the understanding which he believed he knew from some direct inner intuition or self-awareness and which would be in ineluctably stamped upon all of our sensory experience of the world but we don't have any such direct intuition or intuition moreover when we do catch the mind as in these cases shaping our sensory experience it's not dictating an ineluctable form it's making guesses based on evidence available with the penny and the blind spot the mind fill in regions with guesses about what was probably there with a checkerboard shadow image the mind corrects the tones of the squares in recognition of the circumstances present in the picture in both cases the visual system presented to the mind was an inference and in both cases it was demonstrably wrong other suppositions about the world including some that Khan took to be Otton opry necessary truths fare no better as later experience shows Newton for example thought that objects in the world exist in the three dimensional manifold of in a one-dimensional manifold of time and Kant accepted space and time as aa priori forms of the sensible intuition but after Einstein's theory of general relativity made its appearance just one year after purses death it became increasingly clear that Euclidean space and linear time as separate forms were never more than useful guesses about the shape of the world ponder these examples consider carefully that everything you see here feel is an inference based on other inferences receding into dimness that we cannot penetrate nothing presents itself with immediate directness and if it did you wouldn't be able to know it inference follows inference clue connects to clue without apparent beginning or end as you consider this picture you begin to enter into purses understanding of the world what appears to us as simple perceptions the piece of paper the light and dark squares in the chessboard this lectern that glass of water you people are not presented to us directly even as appearances they are inferences they're built upon premises and they require interpretation in purses way of speaking they result from signs we are surrounded by signs and our lives are constant processes of sign interpretation because we're familiar with the world in which we live and have long practice at maneuvering through it most of our interpretations are correct or at any rate pass off unchallenged they get us to where we're going if we ever become aware of them failing it's because we've encountered conflicting signs that contradict them that call for more elaborate interpretation we know that the retina has a blind spot into which depending is disappeared because we can consult other signs we move our eyes we feel the penny with our finger that's other information that revises our retinas original guess with what is really a better guess but there's never a certainty there's only a web of inference on which our guesses rely a web that we have reason to believe or at least a hope grows continually and increasingly reliable speaking I know it's going to go digression on logic it's worth pausing for a moment over the term inference purse uses it in rather broad sense rather broader sense rather broader sense than might be familiar from traditional logic we may be accustomed to think of inference only along the lines of Aristotelian deductive syllogisms a simple deduction might look like this socrates a human all humans are mortal therefore Socrates is mortal this syllogism can be understood in terms of class inclusion we picture a predication a is B is a drawing in which a shape representing a is included in a larger shape representing B again the shape representing the B's is included in a shape representing C's and so forth and we can go on and on with our deductions and I just went too far didn't I back what well then we move on if you're seeking perfectly certain conclusions from perfectly known premises deductive syllogism is certainly the way to go since once the premises are accepted the conclusions follow necessarily however very little in Firenze proceeds according to deductive syllogism in the real world it is rare to have perfectly known premises indeed much of the work of the mind consists of searching for premises okay come on could you take me back to slide 18 or 16 rather there you that's good for which deductions might be attempted for that search something other than deductive syllogism is required purse embraces are an expansive view of logic as far as he is concerned any mental act that gets you from premise a to conclusion B whether with certainty or only with some enhanced probability is a kind of inference deductions count of course but so do other less conclusive forms of thought for example pose that we said now next Socrates is human Socrates is mortal therefore all humans are mortal there we go Socrates is human Socrates is mortal therefore all humans are mortal what is that it's a fallacy well it's certainly not a deduction it but it is a form of thinking and a slightly different form and a fairly common one in this example the conclusion is very weak because it is founded on lean one instance but suppose we said Socrates is human Socrates is mortal therefore all humans are mortal Plato is a human plato is mortal Aristotle zoomit Aristotle is mortal CS purses human si s purse is mortal I've met or read about thousands of humans and all of them are immortal this is still not infallible reasoning the very next person I meet might be Merlin or the Highlander or the prophet Elijah someone who's not mortal but it's valuable it is induction and everybody uses it consider the following I ate a taco King on Monday and I got sick I ate a taco King on Tuesday and I got sick I ate at taco King on Wednesday and I got sick I'm never going to eat a taco King again that's induction induction is an imperfect but extremely useful form of reasoning by which one can attain universal statements which can be used themselves or fed into deductive syllogisms Universal statements are not only useful in reasoning they're also important to memory universals can often be remembered when the instances on which they're based are forgotten the general statement Taco King is sick making is shorter simpler and more easily remembered than the dates of all the times I got sick much of the usefulness of induction consists precisely in that simplification which Purse identifies with console of reducing the manifold to unity there's another order in which the terms of our deduction can be rearranged Socrates a human all humans are mortal therefore Socrates is immortal let's rearrange it all humans are mortal Socrates is mortal therefore Socrates is human okay what's that it's not a deduction it's kind of a fallacy it's actually hypothesis or what Perce calls abduction with only one instance like this it's a fairly weak form of reasoning but what if I said all humans stand upright Socrates stands upright all humans have two legs Socrates has two legs all humans are warm-blooded Socrates is warm-blooded all humans use speech Socrates uses speech now it's looking better and better now it could be that it's not certainly not perfect Socrates could be a bipedal talking dog but as we get more and more instances the hypothesis or abduction becomes more and more reliable first calls calls this process abduction we use it all the time suppose you hear a rate of report that says that a six foot four inch bearded man wearing dark glasses green pants and a red and yellow striped shirt had just robbed a nearby bank and is armed dangerous and loose in your neighborhood suppose then you saw a six foot 4 inch bearded man wearing dark glasses green pants and a red and yellow striped shirt carrying a gun in a bag with a dollar sign on it walking hurriedly down your street what would you do what would you say to the student of logic who haughtily pointed out that the inference on which you base your decision to go inside lock the door and call the police was fallacious by the way one academic article points out that it's an interesting coincidence I think it is an interesting coincidence if nothing more that purse was formalizing these kinds of reasoning including hypothesis and induction abduction hypothesis induction abduction based on probabilistic thinking at the same time that a new genre of literature the detective novel was becoming popular the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes occurred in a study in scarlet in 1886 just about the time that purse left the only academic post he ever held at Johns Hopkins University Holmes refers to his method as deduction but purse I think would classify many of his conclusion as hypotheses are abductions reasoning doesn't have to be perfect to be useful and it doesn't cease to be a form of inference just because it might be mistaken abandoned the goal of absolute certainty and other forms of inference gained places of respect in your logical system the inference of your visual system that you that your visual system makes with the penny in the blind spot is a form of hypothesis it says in effect the area above the blind spot is white the area below the blind spot is white it would make sense if the whole region were white in the demonstration we made we carefully contrived the situation in order to trick your eyes and we got a mistaken inference but it was not simply a piece of foolishness these non deductive forms of reasoning are crucial to purses renovation of Kant's project conser regional goals were unattainable we have no direct intuitive knowledge of the form of our minds which we might leverage to find out a sort of opera re necessary and universal certainty that can't hope to obtain however though we can't have certainty percebes seeks to find ways that we establish comparative confidence in our knowledge by comprehensive and careful investigation into the grounds of the validity of logic and of probability and of induction well-founded confidence with a margin of anticipate Allaire ur may not have the philosophical glamour of perfect apodictic certainty but it's what's available to us and it's better than the alternative of falling back into Humes skeptical despair speaking of Hume one may ask if purse abandons Kant's dream of obtaining aa priori necessary in universal truths doesn't he just wind up with David Humes skeptical wasteland Innes David Hume skeptical wasteland the very place that Kant was trying to escape the short answer is no and the reason depends in large part on purses different vision of reality human other empiricists empiricists maintain a dualistic separation between the mind and the world that it tries to know if that gap cannot be bridged then there is reason to be deeply concerned however what Hume considered to be impressions of the external world purse understood differently as signs the difference between the two lies in how they connect us to the world an impression isn't it is informative because it arises from the mute extended material world that provoked it a sign by contrast points ahead to the coherent world of thought that it supports to articulate this difference more fully it might be helpful to describe purses concept of reality and distinction between nominalism and realism that pursued ops from medieval logicians a fun-loving crowd that we really need to get to know better the realist John Duns Scotus tanned the nominalist William of Occam the issue at stake between nominalist sand realists turns on the reality or unreality of universals that is general terms that cover a multitude of instances such as animal mammal humankind goes on and on a nominalist holds that such universal terms are fictions that we invent for our own convenience the realist by contrast holds that they are real inevitably the discussion between these two schools cerned soon turns to the hackneyed question what is real an old chestnut that students and sometimes tutors occasionally toss out as conversation Stoppers but purse is not afraid of this question he has an answer for it by real purse means quote that which is unaffected by what we may think of it close quote the real is what we cannot wish away or think away my daydreams are unreal because I can banish them with a thought the stone in my shoe stays there whatever I think until I reach down and take it out this is real my daydreams are not but what are the real things and our logical universals among them here opinions differ some people suppose reasonably that the real comes to us in sensation sensations are what connect us to the world out there they don't change with our thoughts pardon me so for example look at this it's a drinking cup I see it you see it we all see it it's reality does not permit us to imagine it away the nominalist would tell us it is real because we sense it and the fact that it is a cup is just a label that we put on a pattern of sensations the alternative to that sensation based nominalist approach is realism realism is the idea that general light that general ideas embrace and quote that embrace and coordinate a multitude of sensations have a reality that individual sensations do not let me repeat that realism says that general ideas that embrace and coordinate a multitude of sensations have a reality that individual sensations do not purse offers the following story to illustrate the distinction between sensation and the reality of generals suppose he says two men one death and the other blind one hears a man declare he means to kill another here's the report of the pistol and here's the victim cry the other sees the murder done their sensations are affected in the highest degree with their individual peculiarities the first information that their sensations will give them their first inferences will be more nearly alike the first information their sensations will give them their first inferences will be more nearly alike but still different the one having for example the idea of a man shouting the other of a man with a threatening aspect but their final conclusions the thought the remotest from sense will be identical and free from the one-sidedness of their idiosyncrasies the parable warns the reader not to confuse the real with the sensory the blind man heard only sounds the deaf man saw only sights their sensations did not overlap in any way if the real meant what has an existence independent of your mind or mine then these two people's sensations are the opposite of real since the difference between what the one person experienced in the other depended entirely on their peculiar competences however when the blind man reflects on what he's heard and the Deaf man on what he saw the two converge on a reality that does not depend on either of them they don't agree on the flash of light that the Deaf man saw but the blind man did not they don't agree on the shout and the bang which the blind man heard but the deaf man did not they do agree that there was a murder that was the fact that does not depend on the POA Arty's of perceptions available to either observer that a general term removed from immediate sensation is more stable more permanent and independent of the peculiarities of this or that individual is crucial for purse the closer you get to the raw sensation of experience if there even is such a thing which I think purse doubts the more confused and erratic it seems to locate what is universal requires the sort of work that our minds do all the time as they correct for odd perspectives and fill in blanks omitted by our nerve impulses we identify things according to their sort and kind as best we can our freshmen know this from their classification practicum in the mountains up behind the campus this is a juniper tree they say that's a ponderosa pine by so identifying them they slot them into categories that are communicable and independent of this or that observer they employ universals that are in this way of thinking real purse is a realist his realism is not a sort of mystical Platonism that imagines that the ideals wander about in heaven it's a more commonplace recognition that the world we live in does not consist of a blooming buzzing confusion of disorganized sensation but in identifiable things juniper trees and clouds and tables and animals all these label our universals they are in the world that we experience they are the world that we experience the manifold of sensations that we encounter is unreal for us until we find universals in it then we say ah it's a juniper tree or ah it's an aspen where all my jumble of sensations is mine alone an identified object a Juniper or an aspen is real that is what is independent of who is looking at it pers considered that his realism was consistent with his continued allegiance at least in part with Kant's view point he understood Kant's Copernican revolution and philosophy as a turn toward realism in his sense of the term since it meant that one was quote to regard the reality to regard reality as the normal product of mental action and not as the in cognizable cause of it with this framework in mind we can sort out how Perce differs from Hume when Hume talks about sensations he understands them to be impressions that we can think about when Perce considers the same process he considers that what we encounter is always already a part of an inferential process there is no foundation of raw unprocessed perception upon which we base our thoughts rather what we see hear or feel what we think is the result of inferential guesses that have already occurred and will be the basis for more information on up earrin s-- since that might suggest that it is the immediate product of what the world pushes upon us rather Purse calls it a sign because it gets its significance from what it points to for Perce any cognition is a sign pointing to other cognitions in his own words quote this theory of reality would encourage us to regard the appearances of sense only as signs of reality only the realities that which they represent would not be the unknowable cause of sensation but Numan ax or intelligible conceptions which are the last products of mental action which is set in motion by sensation closed our encounters with the world are signs that point toward the universals that constitute the reality of things all thought takes place through the interaction of signs building on signs in this web of signification we too are signs pointing toward an ideal of coherence that each of us may only imperfectly achieve when we think says purse quote then we ourselves as we are at that moment appear as signs the thoughts sign which is our self may through the medium of outward expression which it reaches perhaps only after considerable internal development come to address itself to the thought of another person but whether this happens or not it is always interpreted by a subsequent thought of our own close quote unlike Descartes Hume or even common person visions a non dual world there are not thinking things over here an inanimate extended objects inanimate extended objects over there instead everywhere there are signs things signified and interpretations that are bound together in a triadic relationship that makes inference that is thought of the world possible from this monistic and semiotic that is filled with signs vision of the world that purse can make the strange and evocative pronouncement from which the title of this lecture is taken quote what distinguishes a person from a word says purse there is a distinction doubtless the material qualities and the meaning of the human sign are all extremely exceedingly complicated in comparison with those of the word but these differences are only relative the human sign acquires information and comes to me more than he or she did before but so do words does not electricity mean more now than it did in the days of Franklin a human makes the word and the word means nothing which the human has not made it mean and that only to some other person but since a person can think only by means of words or other external symbols these might turn around and say to him you mean nothing which we have not you and then only as far as you address some other word as the interpreting of your thought in fact therefore humans and words reciprocally educate each other each increase of a person's information involves and is involved by a corresponding increase of a words information in the shadow of scientific and mathematical discoveries of the 19th century Kant's answer to Humes sceptical despair was no longer viable Charles Sandra's purse returned to foundational issues the meaning of the real and the true the real existence of universals as understood in medieval philosophy the foundations of logic and the relation of individuals to the community in which they live and act to plot the course of a new philosophical trajectory versus pragmatism Ridge Quetta rejects the quest for certainty as futile it accepts instead the more humble but valuable job of evaluating probabilities and improving confidence in the imperfect knowledge actually available to us at the same time per sets aside dualistic tendencies that have haunted Western philosophy at least since Plato and that were baked into much modern thought in the questions posed by Descartes instead he envisions our relation to the world as a semiotic web of signs and interpretation in which we too are signs that generate inferences and interpretations versus pragmatism grounds observational science without being reductionist it has a place for human thought in the world without being mystical his vision is sweeping and original and should you choose to look into his works they will repay your time and attention thank you [Applause]

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 26,074

Rating: 4.8972812 out of 5

Keywords: Philosophy, Pragmatism, History of Philosophy, C. S. Peirce, Certainty, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Epistemology, Dualism, Philosophy of Mind, Metaphysics, Semiotics, Fallibilism, Skepticism, Nominalism, Universals, Empiricism, Subject-Object, Mind-Body, American Pragmatism, Problem of Universals, Cartesian, Logic, Theory of Knowledge, Abduction

Id: xyEkmdW6e14

Length: 49min 39sec (2979 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 27 2017