List,
After so much striving for precision, perhaps a shift to the subject of
indeterminacy would be in order. The following is excerpted from Content and
Context (TS ·15) (gnusystems.ca) <https://gnusystems.ca/TS/xtn.htm#vgn> , where
it includes a dozen or so links to its larger context (omitted below). I don’t
think it says anything controversial among Peircean specialists, but it does
make a salient point about ordinary everyday communication. — gary f.
_____________________________________
According to Peirce, ‘No concept, not even those of mathematics, is absolutely
precise; and some of the most important for everyday use are extremely vague’
(CP 6.496, c. 1906). Genuinely informative communication depends on taking this
necessary vagueness into account. Properly understanding any utterance requires
us to interpret it with the degree of vagueness appropriate to the situational
context. To meet this requirement, every language user has to develop a
sensitivity to context at an early age, though few are conscious of it.
[[ The perspectival nature of linguistic systems means that as children learn
to use words and linguistic constructions in the manner of adults, they come to
see that the exact same phenomenon may be construed in many different ways for
different communicative purposes depending on many factors in the communicative
context. ]] (Tomasello 1999, 213)
To construe is to simplify, and to simplify is to generalize: a symbol, by
referring to a type of experience, can thus refer to many tokens of it on
various occasions, including future occasions. Even proper nouns (names of
specific things, places, people etc.) are general signs insofar as each implies
the continuity of its object through time: each momentary manifestation of the
object is a token of that type, and some features of it may vary from one
occurrence to another – especially if the object is a complex adaptive system.
Things we talk about, whether we perceive them to be in the external or the
internal world, are already construed, categorized and “framed” by the time we
mention them. But each actual reference to them can affect our framing habits;
and these in turn affect our way of talking about them, or hearing others talk
about them. Since everyone has a history of cycling through such loops
countless times, and this history determines for each a “natural” idiom,
synchronizing reference between speakers is not always easy.
The upshot of this in communication is that in trying to connect words with
referents or experiences, ‘all sorts of risks are taken, assumptions and
guesses made’ (Sperber and Wilson 1995, 19). This is the only practical way to
reduce the many possible ‘construals’ of phenomena – or meanings of words – to
the simplicity required for the maintenance of a conversation.
Sperber and Wilson take this as an argument against what they call ‘the
mutual-knowledge hypothesis,’ but they are using the word knowledge here in an
absolute sense, as equivalent to objective certainty (Sperber and Wilson 1995,
19-20). In reality, the common ground that people must have in order to carry
on a conversation is a network of rather vague default assumptions. Actual
conversation often consists of attempts to render some of the ‘mutual
knowledge’ more precise, but in the actual context, there are pragmatic limits
to this precision.
William James, in typically elegant fashion, gives a more psychologically
realistic account of cognition as ‘virtual knowing’:
[[ Now the immensely greater part of all our knowing never gets beyond this
virtual stage. It never is completed or nailed down. … To continue thinking
unchallenged is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, our practical substitute
for knowing in the completed sense. As each experience runs by cognitive
transition into the next one, and we nowhere feel a collision with what we
elsewhere count as truth or fact, we commit ourselves to the current as if the
port were sure. We live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing
wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate direction in falling forward is all
we cover of the future of our path. ]] (James, ‘A World of Pure Experience’)
Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception takes a slightly different
perspective:
[[ My set of experiences is presented as a concordant whole, and the synthesis
takes place not in so far as they all express a certain invariant, and in the
identity of the object, but in that they are all collected together, by the
last of their number, in the ipseity of the thing. The ipseity is, of course,
never reached: each aspect of the thing which falls to our perception is still
only an invitation to perceive beyond it, still only a momentary halt in the
perceptual process. If the thing itself were reached, it would be from that
moment arrayed before us and stripped of its mystery. It would cease to exist
as a thing at the very moment when we thought to possess it. What makes the
‘reality’ of the thing is therefore precisely what snatches it from our grasp.
]] (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 271)
This is, in context, quite consistent with Peirce's definition of ‘reality’:
[[ I define the real as that which holds its characters on such a tenure that
it makes not the slightest difference what any man or men may have thought them
to be, or ever will have thought them to be, here using thought to include,
imagining, opining, and willing (as long as forcible means are not used); but
the real thing's characters will remain absolutely untouched. ]] (CP 6.495, c.
1906)
None of this denies that thoughts can make a difference to the future character
of real things. Nor does it deny Peirce's assertion that ‘we have direct
experience of things in themselves’ (CP 6.95). Experience is not knowledge,
although it is involved in knowing, as Secondness is involved in Thirdness,
which in turn will determine ‘future facts of Secondness.’ In the process of
inquiry or of learning, what James called ‘our sense of a determinate
direction’ is a feeling of being about to know more than we did before, or
getting closer to the Truth. But semiotic experience teaches that our knowledge
is never completely determinate.
[[ No cognition and no Sign is absolutely precise, not even a Percept; and
indefiniteness is of two kinds, indefiniteness as to what is the Object of the
Sign, and indefiniteness as to its Interpretant, or indefiniteness in Breadth
and in Depth. ]] (CP 4.543, 1906)
Any knowledge that will prove useful as guidance into the future must be
general, and thus indefinite in that sense.
[[ Yet every proposition actually asserted must refer to some non-general
subject …. Indeed, all propositions refer to one and the same determinately
singular subject, well-understood between all utterers and interpreters;
namely, to The Truth, which is the universe of all universes, and is assumed on
all hands to be real. But besides that, there is some lesser environment of the
utterer and interpreter of each proposition that actually gets conveyed, to
which that proposition more particularly refers and which is not general. ]]
(CP 5.506, c. 1905)
That ‘lesser environment’ is evidently what Peirce elsewhere called ‘the common
stock of knowledge of utterer and interpreter’ (EP2:310), i.e. the commind or
commens (EP2:478). Its particular subject may be ‘determinately singular,’ but
predicates are always general to some degree, so the proposition actually
conveyed still involves some indeterminacy. Thus we can't say that a
proposition is necessarily and absolutely either true or false unless we deny
the reality of indeterminacy, i.e. of both generality and vagueness. This
denial is formulated as the “principle of excluded middle.”
[[ To speak of the actual state of things implies a great assumption, namely
that there is a perfectly definite body of propositions which, if we could only
find them out, are the truth, and that everything is really either true or in
positive conflict with the truth. This assumption, called the principle of
excluded middle, I consider utterly unwarranted, and do not believe it. ]]
(Peirce, NEM 3:758, 1893)
Even if the dynamic Object of a symbolic utterance is a fully determinate
singular, the sign itself is still ‘indefinite as to its Interpretant’ (as
explained above). ‘No communication of one person to another can be entirely
definite, i.e., non-vague’ (CP 5.506).
____________________________________
Love, gary f.
Coming from the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg
} Everything is involved which can be evolved. [Peirce] {
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