Eric, list:
Here is how I understand the nature of your thought: You consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, you conceive the object of claiming about the nature of other people’s thoughts to have. Then your conception of these effects, which makes you raise your eyebrow and get twitchy, is the whole of your conception of the object. And so, now what? What does the Jamesian maxim and not Peircean recommend? For a Peircean would recognize that some “perversity of thought of whole generations may cause the postponement of the ultimate fixation”. ~*What Pragmatism Is * “Nevertheless in the nature of the case the essential elements of demonstration are three: the subject, the attributes, and the basic premisses. I say ‘must believe’, because *all syllogism*, and therefore a fortiori demonstration, *is* *addressed* *not to the spoken word, but to the discourse within the soul*, and though we can always raise objections to the spoken word, to the inward discourse we cannot always object. That which is capable of proof but assumed by the teacher without proof is, if the pupil believes and accepts it, hypothesis, though only in a limited sense hypothesis-that is, relatively to the pupil; if the pupil has no opinion or a contrary opinion on the matter, the same assumption is an illegitimate postulate. Therein lies the distinction between hypothesis and illegitimate postulate: the latter is the contrary of the pupil’s opinion, demonstrable, but assumed and used without demonstration (*Post. An*. I-10). And therefore, “I have long ago come to be guided by this maxim: that as long as it is practically certain that we cannot directly, nor with much accuracy even indirectly, observe what passes in the consciousness of any other person, while it is far from certain that we can do so (and accurately record what [we] can even glimpse at best but very glibberly) even in the case of what shoots through our own minds, it is much safer to define all mental characters as far as possible in terms of their outward manifestations.” *~An Essay toward Reasoning in Security and Uberty* That is, What is C? What is A? What is B? Hth, Jerry R On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 10:20 AM, Clark Goble <cl...@lextek.com> wrote: > > On Feb 14, 2017, at 8:41 AM, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.char...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > Yikes! My inner William James just raised an eyebrow. This is probably a > separate thread... but how did we suddenly start making claims about the > nature of other people's thoughts? > > "People think, not so much in words, but in images and diagrams..." They > do? How many people's thoughts have we interrogated to determine that? > > "Consciousness is inherently linguistic." It is? How much have we studied > altered states of consciousness, or even typical consciousness? > > Sorry, these parts of Peirce always make me a bit twitchy. I'm quite > comfortable when he is talking about how scientists-qua-scientists think or > act, but then he makes more general statements and I get worried. > > > Are those two statements really controversial? Honestly asking. It seems > much of our consciousness isn’t primarily linguistic. We are, admittedly, > deciding this both upon introspection as well as reports of how other > people experience it. This gets into the question of what we mean by > thinking of course. Peirce was much more open to thinking not primarily > being about what we’re conscious of. To the linguistic point I’m not sure > that’s controversial either. The idea that our consciousness of objects has > an “as” structure seems common. That is the idea that we don’t just see a > blue sky as raw sense data we then consciously interpret. Instead we see > the sky as blue with blue and sky having those linguistic aspects even if > we don’t pay much attention to it. > > None of this is to deny that we can have non-linguistic experiences. But > I’m just not seeing the problem. (Completely open to being wrong here of > course) > > > ----------------------------- > PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON > PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to > peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L > but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the > BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm > . > > > > > >
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