Dear John, Lists He thought that we set aside a certain class of experiences that we take (fallibly in each instance) to be externally caused (an abduction) because they surprise us. However our thought does not get outside of the sequence of signs that are connected in our thought (or experience more generally, if you make a distinction).
He does indeed claim that all thought is in signs - but I do not recall him saying those signs are "in our thought". I think he is careful not to make his concept of mind a concept of the psyche, let alone "our" psyche. Ok, I find this idea too bizarre to contemplate seriously. We will have to part company here. I think if you read carefully his papers on the faculties you will see why I make the interpretation I do, even if you don't agree with it. I am sad to hear you offer no better argument against Peirce's p-o-v than that it be "bizarre". Same: I think if you read carefully his papers on semiotics you will see why I make the interpretation I do. - Q: Why do you have to re-read your own papers before teaching them in the classroom? This "sucks the world up inside the head", - if the world is sucked up inside the head - where are the head then, not in the world presumably? - is the head then in still other heads? - and where are those heads? - etc. (Peirce thought that nothing could be established a priori.) He vacillated on that, sometimes calling semiotics the a priori theory of signs. Yeh, I know. Always sounded like wishful thinking to me. I had a friend studying mathematics who, when he did not know or could not find a proof, he started with what he did know led towards the conclusion, and jumped over the missing parts with the justification WT for "wishful thinking". Of course the conclusion is connected logically to the premises and steps he did put down, so the connection is there, quite independently of his own thinking. In Peirce's favour, there are two senses of a priori. One, which Peirce describes as problematic, depends on reason alone. The other, which may apply to the theory of signs, does not depend on particular experience, but we can discover that there is no alternative, no matter how the world is. I don't have much problem with the latter kind, but one has to be careful about failures of imagination. This can take unexpected forms, for example many people think they can imagine a universe with exactly two objects of identical properties (Max Black's balls). Ha! However I would ask if they never interact what does it mean to say they are in the same universe? I am not at all convinced the supposed example is meaningful. Or for a more mundane case, many people would think we can imagine a centaur. As my mentor David Hull liked to point out, this is dubious -- how many hearts, lungs, or livers, for that matter, does a centaur have? Right. Imagination leaves blank what is not explicitly presented. As I said in a posting a couple of days ago, I think Peirce's implicit (sometimes explicit) notion of the a priori comes closer to that of the Husserlian tradition than to Kant's: it deals with inescapable structures of reality which you must often consult the foundations of the special sciences in order to learn about. But those sciences are also not only "in the head". The signs we exchange in this very List conversation are distributed by servers to computer screens and are not confined to anybody's head. Here, I think common sense supports my p-o-v no less than yours. Best F
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