Jack, List:
To be honest, I am having trouble making sense of your posts so far today.
Perhaps you could boil down your alleged "proof" to a few premisses,
including your definitions of key terms like "value" and "essence," and the
specific conclusion that you see as following necessarily from them. As it
stands, you seem to have a few misunderstandings about Peirce's relevant
views.
What he denies is Kant's claim that there is an *absolutely
incognizable *thing-in-itself.
He defines the real as that which is as it is regardless of what any
individual mind or finite community of minds thinks about it, and he
affirms that whatever is real is capable of being represented and thus
capable of being known. Accordingly, he warns against confusing the
*object *of a sign with its *interpretant*, as you seem to be doing in your
example--salt (dynamical object) is *exactly *the same reality for humans
as it is for snails, but its effects on them (dynamical interpretants) are
different. As a result, our general concept of salt includes not only the
fact that it is savory to humans, but also the fact that it is poisonous to
snails, as well as the fact that it *would *have had all the same
characters even if humans and/or snails had never *actually* existed.
Moreover, Peirce acknowledges that no discrete collection of dynamical
interpretants could ever constitute a *complete *description of any
dynamical object. That is why cognition, reasoning, inquiry, and semiosis
are all examples of *hyperbolic *continua, as I discussed yesterday--a *fully
*determinate representation of any reality (final interpretant) is an *ideal
*limit that would only be reached in the infinite future, after infinite
investigation by an infinite community, when "the all of reality"
*itself *would
likewise be "completely determinate" (CP 5.549, EP 2:378, 1906). As he adds
a few paragraphs later ...
CSP: Now thought is of the nature of a sign. In that case, then, if we can
find out the right method of thinking and can follow it out,--the right
method of transforming signs,--then truth can be nothing more nor less than
the last result to which the following out of this method would ultimately
carry us. In that case, that to which the representation should conform is
itself something in the nature of a representation, or sign,--something
noumenal, intelligible, conceivable, and utterly unlike a thing-in-itself.
(CP 5.553, EP 2:380)
Regards,
Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA
Structural Engineer, Synechist Philosopher, Lutheran Christian
www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt / twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt
On Wed, May 3, 2023 at 11:04 AM JACK ROBERT KELLY CODY <
jack.cody.2...@mumail.ie> wrote:
> Consider all known knowledge/values and all unknown but knowable values.
>
> E-E' (human)
>
> Combinatorial possibility over/through "time" is that which defines the
> above (all values, as such, ever derived).
>
> But it always implies V(X).
>
> That is, there is always an additional value to be added. Which value, in
> lexical/mathematical form, can never be the essence of the thing which is
> "valued".
>
> Salt combined with every other possible element (via human
> oversight/tool-use/computer) produces all kinds of reactions/values but
> none of these values/reactions is ever sufficient to define the first
> predicate in totalizing form (the essence of salt itself - which is
> where/why Godel's incompleteness theorem now extends to all varieties of
> logic and mathematics if properly understood). All such logics/mathematics
> amount to value-laden discursive descriptions of things, the essence of
> which is now proven to exist, necessarily (and necessarily beyond "value"),
> but no given discursive mathematical description is ever "complete"
> (totalizing as it were) in the sense that no given (Single)
> predicate/element/value can ever be entirely defined (as it is in itself,
> ever).
>
> And in very simple diagrams, I demonstrate how this holds for all which is
> known, and all which ever can be known (thus accommodating all forms of
> "known" or "possible" temporalities). The V(X) formula implies, always,
> that there shall be a value, no matter if infinite/finite (each considered
> simultaneously, without a problem), of any given object rendered
> discursively via logic/mathematics but that said value will never be the
> essence (X) of the represented object (thus representational inadequacy of,
> imo, all possible branches of knowledge over all possible temporalities). A
> Value will always be added (combinatorial pos. via contiguity) but the
> essence of any given value (X) will not/cannot ever be known (thus pointing
> beyond the conditions of universal contiguity via contiguity itself, or
> indexicality in the Peircean sense). And that, no matter what way I look at
> it, stands as necessary proof of Kant's noumena. (A lot more would have to
> be added - but I'm curious to see what Peirceans make of it since Peirce
> rejects the noumenal but his schema only "works" insofar as you admit the
> contiguous/combinatorial relationship which = semeiotic and which now says
> "thing in itself" is necessarily true) .
>
> Jack
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* JACK ROBERT KELLY CODY <jack.cody.2...@mumail.ie>
> *Sent:* Wednesday, May 3, 2023 4:37 PM
> *To:* Peirce-L <peirce-l@list.iupui.edu>
> *Subject:* The Thing In Itself (Kant and Peirce - Again).
>
> I wanted to raise the topic of the ding an sich as it pertains to Peirce
> visavis Kant.
>
> This has been done to death here previously, but I believe I have a
> reached a proof (which I need to formalize) of the necessity of Kant's
> noumenal/thing in itself. The irony of this proof is that it comes via
> Peirce (his influence with respect to contiguity and a whole lot more).
>
> 1. Salt-Snail-Poison
> 2. Salt-Human-Savoury
> 3. Salt-Human-Poison
>
> A quick sketch.
>
> In (1), the quality produced by the Salt/Snail interaction (with human
> perspective implied, but presumed to persist if absent) is Poison. In (2),
> it is Savoury. In (3) it is poison again.
>
> Salt to snail and salt to human (2) and (3) all, then, produce different
> qualities regarding the value of "salt".
>
> Question: What does this say about salt in itself and the possibility of
> knowing the essence of what salt is in itself?
>
> For that has been the contentious area in Peircean discussions regarding
> Kant's ding an sich (on this messaging list) for a long time. Peirce - and
> many here - maintaining that you can know what a thing is in itself
> (calling Kant a "confused realist" iirc).
>
> But if Salt is poison for a snail, and savoury for a human (and then,
> also, poisonous to some other humans, or even a different form of savoury),
> then what is Salt in itself?
>
> It cannot be what the human makes of it. It is not possible for it to be
> whatever the human experiences/defines it as, because it is not a
> anthropocentric thing. Which is obvious enough in the
> perspectival/anthropological ethnographies which follow a loose or rigid
> Peirce schema with respect to ontology (thinking of Kohn and South American
> studies with regard to animal perspectives and flat ontoloogies).
>
> Thus, what is salt? It has to exist in itself, for we cannot doubt that it
> exist as an individual quality removed from "snail" and "human" and,
> simultaneously, it has to exist in contigious relationship with the various
> other minerals/subjects/predicates.
>
> It seems very simple, and it is, but in extended diagrams/reasonings
> (proof, imo, which I call the value/essence or V{X}) proof, it is not so
> simple. That the thing in itself exists - something I had thrown away as I
> went with Peircean phaneroscopy (a term I had forgotten) - is now beyond
> questioning to me. Which leaves me with many questions - firstlly, what
> does this mean for Peircean studies?
>
> Peirce rejects the thing in itself, in Kantian form, twice, in his
> manuscript, along the same basis. He views it as an absurdity (I'd have to
> check again). But this puts him in the same category of post-Kantians
> (Hegelians/neo-Hegelians) whom, to me, seem to take Kant's logic (formulae,
> as Peirce does in tabular form with obvious Hegelian influence) but ignore
> the primary metaphysical point which underpins everything Kant ever wrote.
> The thing in itself. Because it is so hard to accomodate, even the Kantians
> confuse it - Schopenhauer called it the "will" (which I am certain it
> isn't).
>
> Hydrogen
> Oxygen
> Water
>
> H20
>
> No one doubts there is such a thing as "water" and few doubt the existence
> of "hydrogen" and "oxygen". But water is not hydrogen nor oxygen - nor is
> hydrogen nor oxygen what what they are, in themselves, to humans for the
> simple fact that they predate human existence (taking evolutionary models)
> and exist outside human contact of such elements, if you want some other
> model.
>
> Thus:
>
> Salt-Snail-Poison (value of-Salt/Snail-*for-human = *Poison) (essence of
> Salt remains noumenal/thing in itself X).
>
> The irony, for me, is that you cannot make sense of it without Peirce but
> have to disregard Peirce's own disavowal of Kant's noumena/thing in itself
> to get there.
>
> What is Water to Fire, for example? Or even ice to a penguin? For ice to a
> penguin cannot be what it is to a human but must be ice, all the same.
>
> Peirce said you can "know" the thing in itself, I believe, but cannot
> represent it? I went with that for a long time but am now of the opinion,
> that you cannot know the thing in itself or represent it (the latter being
> most obvious).
>
> If we assume that we can know the thing in itself, but cannot represent
> it, we move closer to Peirce, I think, if only because his categories of
> firstness and secondess as well as general phaneroscopy point in that
> direction.
>
> Long story rendered short: salt is not the same thing to a human as it is
> to a snail. And this isn't the usual perspectivalist deviation. It is
> rather the affirmation of the Kantian noumenal. For salt must have its own
> essence in absentia of all human existence - unless we become solipsist -
> and that essence, therefore, is never what we make of it in our own
> representational schemas.
>
> This moves into mathematics/logic insofar as we consider received
> "arbitrary" lexicals as mathematical discursivties and then Godel and his
> incompleteness theorem as well as Russell's famous paradox. The discursive
> representation (value, mathematical/logical, within/between a given system,
> logical or mathematical) is never the essence of the thing therein
> represented [V(X)]. Russell's paradox, to me, is a paradox of received
> "reason" (the idea that sets express something universal beyond the logical
> idiom) which is, in its own way, highlighted by Godel's incompleteness
> theorem which I now contend holds not for only some forms of
> mathematics/logic but for all.
>
> Which gives way to Chomsky. Chomsky's idea of universal grammar, brought
> forward from various contributors but made distinctly new, is that of an
> innate (X) preload if you like which goes beyond any given "input/output"
> logical categorization of the "essence" of language. Poverty of stimulus,
> for example, demonstrates precisely the point I am trying to make: the
> Kantian metaphysical apriori, formal, rhymes with Chomsky's universal
> grammar and poverty of stimulus (it is the only, logical, way which, given
> a finite set of "data" children may produce infinite derivations of said
> "data" including malapropisms which are not taught but are logically
> "sound" if grammatically "incorrect").
>
> That is, in a very long-winded post/message, Chomsky's UG (poverty of
> stimulus and recursion) seems, now, to be proven beyond all doubt in its
> most simplistic or "weakest" (general) form. It handles the Kantian apriori
> (metaphysical essence) and retains Kantian objetivity 1.0 (fire is hot
> whatever it is in itself, therefore we have minimal thresholds of objective
> understanding) whilst also expressing the disjuncture between whatever the
> value of a given lexical is and the essence of language (the first knowable
> and second, I think, forever beyond human understanding - by infinite
> regressive definition, if made "positive").
>
> tl;dr
>
> in a given series such as salt-snail-poison, the human "value" visavis
> perspective/ontological is always presupposed but typically removed (not
> present in the series).
>
> Morever, from a position of pure contiguity, the universe itself, we infer
> a kind of non-contiguous necessity (that which is beyond the walls of
> intelligence, whether human or computational, insofar as intelligence
> implies logic/reason for none of the values derives from logic/reason,
> whether science or philosophy, are ever the essence of the "thing" which is
> valued but that such a thing exists and necessarily has an essence is now
> beyond all doubt). That is Peirce's contribution (via indexical-contiguity
> and general cosmic outlook) to what I know to be a proof of the noumenal
> thing in itself (expanded elsewhere in diagrammatic form).
>
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