Gary M., list,
*On solipsism:* If you find an "other," unexpected and uncontrolled by
you, even in your internal world, then that seems even more reason for
rejecting solipsism, whereas it seems to lead you to solipsism as a
psychological truth. Yet to find this interior other is to find that
there isn't even a /part/ of the appearance-world that is securely
'self' rather than 'other', so how much less likely is it that the
/whole/ appearing world is really oneself only, /solipse/ , without
other? Likewise, if the world is so vaguely and insecurely defined,
lacking clear unity and bounds, how could there be a "worldself" that
would be oneself? Anyway, I was talking about one's totality of personal
experience, which involves a brute element opposed to one (and that,
says Peirce, is what makes it /experience/ ). Or maybe one should speak
of what Peirce called the phaneron, the totality of appearances in any
way present to the mind (such appearances are the subject of Peirce's
phenomenology). That world, already there, precedes the distinction into
self and other. Anyway I wasn't speaking of the world in any physical or
metaphysical cosmological sense. As regards the problem of whether
Peirce thought solipsism to be solved by basic phenomenology, or by
semiotic ideas of representation, the problem is my ignorance, I just
don't know. I doubt that he would demote it to psychology (if that's
what you meant by a "mere description of experience"). There are,
though, psychological problems that arise when one makes the wrong kinds
of distinction between self and other, and at least a tendency toward
solipsism-in-practice, treating all and sundry as if they were merely
oneself, with no ends of their own, would be a psychological dysfunction
against which I suppose we have some degree of natural and cultural guards.
*On ordinary discourse as the final cause of or to all intellectual
endeavors:* As to final cause, I did mean the Aristotelian telos,
anything from natural terminus of a process, to human purpose. I just
can't think of any reason to see ordinary discourse as the final cause
of/to all intellectual endeavors and not just as well vice versa, and
not just as well see both as having further final causes later in time.
Moreover, there are many intellectual endeavors for which ordinary
discourse would need to be revolutionized in order to be able to
accommodate them. Such intellectual endeavors include any theory
seriously dependent on mathematics, for example and, more generally, any
intellectual endeavor that requires active experimentation and practice,
mental or otherwise, in order to understand it. I also wonder how many
important visual 'aids' in chemistry, biology, etc., could be
efficiently translated into ordinary discourse.
Peirce adopted the common distinction between theorems and corollaries
(corollaries follow more or less obviously from their premisses), and
developed ideas about theorematic and corollarial reasoning. Here he
calls "schemata" that which elsewhere he usually calls "diagrams."
[....] Theorematic reasoning invariably depends upon experimentation
with individual schemata. We shall find that, in the last analysis,
the same thing is true of the corollarial reasoning, too; even the
Aristotelian "demonstration why." Only in this case, the very words
serve as schemata. Accordingly, we may say that corollarial, or
"philosophical" reasoning is reasoning with words; while
theorematic, or mathematical reasoning proper, is reasoning with
specially constructed schemata." (' Minute Logic', CP 4.233, c. 1902)
*A longueur on volition regarding the past: the rest of my post.* This
thread already seems chock full of longueurs, so why not? Readers are
forewarned!
Regarding volition, I was alluding to the scholastic view that there is
no volition of the past, since obviously one cannot change the past. I
was pointing out that we have pastward-oriented volition - e.g.,
adherence and (volitional) habit - just as we have pastward-oriented
cognition - memory, recognition - and pastward-oriented affectivity -
e.g., the feeling of attachment.
The idea of volition as a power like cognition or affectivity goes back
a long way. Aquinas said that, as /judgment/ is related to /reasoning/ ,
so, in the same manner, /choice/ is related to /deliberation/ . Tetens
apparently it was who introduced the idea of the three-way division of
the psyche's powers into feeling (including pleasure and pain),
understanding, and will. Kant more or less went along with that (but
took desire as a sort of will). Peirce made a three-way division into
(1st) feeling, (2nd) will, and (3rd) general conception. I'm unsure how
Peirce would place or distribute affectivity in that division (Peirce
spoke of feelings in terms of qualities such as redness).
Pastward-oriented volition no more implies pastward time travel of
effects than pastward-oriented cognition implies retrieving or receiving
data from the past by some sort of time machine. There isn't cognition
OF the past in that sense any more than there is volition OF the past.
Memory is not simply cognition of the past, as if one could simply use
personal memory to investigate, for example, the solar system's origin;
instead it is one's cognition of something _/as/_ having been previously
cognized by one. In parallel to that, one's (volitional) habit and
adherence are one's willing of something _/as/_ having been previously
willed by one (also, one may /break with/ the past). What I was getting
at with the comparison of pushing against the ground was this: If one
wants to think of volition as to the past as volition OF the past and as
an effort to transmit effects onto the past, one might think of it in
this somewhat metaphorical way: The would-be effect of volition as to
the past simply instead "rebounds," as it were, onto the one doing the
willing, likewise as pushing on the ground is one's way of pushing
oneself along or away from the ground. Only more so, since a person's
pushing the Earth moves the Earth by some vanishingly small amount,
whereas one's "pushing" on the past presumably affects the past not at all.
As to spontaneity, constraint, etc., I didn't happen to be discussing
those questions about the will. Of course we can and do question, test
for limits, etc., as to the freedom and power of the will, just as we do
in regard to the unadulteratedness and aptness of competence, the
unmanipulatedness and goodness of affectivity, and the unfooledness and
truth of cognition. People can at least sometimes be forced, corrupted,
manipulated, or deluded, so, are those what really happen ALL the time
to everybody? Is it simply what nature or reality does to us? Socrates
would complain that such radical skepticism, taken seriously, makes the
thinker lazy, excusing and promoting uninquisitiveness. Logically, such
radical skepticism can't survive its own causticity, and anyway few if
any behave as though they believed in it. But skeptical puzzles along
such lines, especially as regards cognition and knowledge, are quite an
industry in philosophy. Whatever the uses of Cartesian doubt and its
less totalistic but still radical progeny, I agree with Peirce that it's
not the most fruitful thing in philosophy.
Best, Ben
On 5/15/2012 6:30 AM, Gary Moore wrote:
*Subject:* [peirce-l] Title Corrected: ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL
CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS
[peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE OF ALL INTELLECTUAL
ENDEAVORS
Monday, May 14, 2012 2:31 AM
*From: * Benjamin Udell <[email protected]>
*To:* "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
*Sent:* Sunday, May 13, 2012 11:44 AM
*Subject:* Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE OF ALL
INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS
Benjamin Udell: I don't find anything on /ens ut primum cognitum/ at
Arisbe, and I find very little about it in connection with Peirce on
the Internet.
-----------------
Gary Moore: This /maybe/ is a Deely ‘thing’ although he makes
associations repetitively in his books between the ‘act’ of
“Firstness” as being the necessary whole one is within in knowing
consciousness as fundamental to linguistic knowing and /ens ut primum
cognitum / which Delly points out comes before the distinction between
/ens reale/ and /ens rationis/ , loosely between sensation and
abstraction.
------------------
Benjamin Udell: Be sure to put quotes around Peirce's name as well as
around the sought phrase (like so: "Peirce" "ens ut primum cognitum"),
otherwise Google includes results for "Pierce". Also be sure to type
it cognitum, not cogitum, a typo that probably results from
associating cognition with cogitation, but the words are not cognate.
---------------
Gary Moore: Yes, you are right it is a typo.
_________________
Benjamin Udell: I've read little Deely or Kant and no McGrath.
-----------------------
Gary Moore: McGrath merely provides us an example of putting two terms
together and assuming everyone knows and uses the combination
especially /*as if* / it were a single logical form. John Deely has
written extensively on Peirce – I can provide information or look up
Wikipedia – and essentially says he has substantially extended
Peirce’s thinking. I question some of this, but I admit he does
extensively relate Peirce to both scholasticism, especially John
Poinsot, and the context modern philosophy in general. However, his
criteria of what is proper to consider or just summarily dismiss
leaves much to be desired. He definitely has a specific program that
he wants to implement.
-----------------------------------
Benjamin Udell: There are a few passages of Aquinas that I read many
times many years ago. Anyway I won't be able to address a good deal of
what you've said. I might point out /à la/ Merleau-Ponty that one is
in language as one is in one's body. (Also, as Peirce said, as the
body is /in/ motion, so one is /in/ thought, all thought is /in/
signs, etc.) One can't get out of one's body but one can self-relate
as by thumb against finger, hand against hand, etc., some sort of
interplay of external and internal where the circuit is never quite
closed. It's one's own body, extended and flexible in space and
lingering with one in time, that lets one deal with one's own body
from outside. One also finds other bodies that, from the outside, are
like one's own. Body and language can access themselves from outside
so to speak. Moreover, in or as one's body, one moves in the world.
One pushes against the ground and thus moves oneself, and so on;
motion is relative but, for example, a center of gravity is not merely
perspectival. ¶
---------------------------
Gary Moore: The Merleau-Ponty is great and succinctly put which I find
very hard to do for him. My body produces unknowns, like cancer, that
are completely from ‘outside’ our consciousness. But “my body” is an
ontological distinction or region, if that is legit, and “other bodies
that, from the outside, are like one's own” is experiential,
objective, phenomena, which, however, if own wants to find out if one
has cancer in the sense of communal medical practice must take as
analogues for one’s own body but with careful comparison of parameters
and specifics, that is, the language used about their bodies compared
specifically with the experience of your body and the language you use
about it.¶
----------------------
Benjamin Udell: Something like pushing against or standing upon the
past is how one can conceive of volition regarding the past, /pace/
the scholastics. We empower ourselves in one sense with things that
our beyond our power in another sense. ¶
--------------------
Gary Moore: Is “volition” the right word to use? Spontaneity,
circumstances, and history tend to obliterate that. If you are talking
about “free will” then do not both Aristotle and Peirce place
voluntary human change whether coming from self or a teacher the
repetitive installation of a ‘good’ _/*habit* / _ ?¶
--------------------------------
Benjamin Udell: One does get to test, and learn about, oneself, one's
body, one's language, in their interplay with things over which one
has often very little control, and so external perspectives get
further into one's awareness. The distinction and indeed struggle,
between self and other, seem to appear within a whole of experience
(or maybe I should say like Peirce, within the whole phaneron) which
is already there. If one thinks of that interface and struggle as
'external', then one can get Peirce's view that knowledge of the
internal world comes by surmise from external facts.¶
-------------------------------------------------
Gary Moore: Here we come to the problem that if I examine my internal
world it is no longer ‘internal’ but rather becomes objective and
‘external’ to me. However, in turn again, the ‘internal’ world
bifurcates between what I ‘know’ is internal and what is internal that
empowers, and overpowers, me to speak and write in a context of
meaning far beyond what I can consciously objectivize. In a
conversation with someone, you follow the thread with general and
loose rules of what is appropriate and inappropriate – but you do not
specifically pick out the words you are going to say unless you are in
a strict role such as actor or lawyer in court where precise
replication of the exactly proper word is absolutely necessary.
Normally, then, you just respond spontaneously within vague and very
broad rules which therefore admit the possible “Freudian slip” of
synonyms and homonyms one really would prefer not to use. The point
is, that normally there is a very thin line between conscious and
unconscious agency. You ‘use’ the unconscious to spout normally
expected responses. Yet your mistakes tell you there is more than one
thing going on ‘within’ you that is not at all objectivized, presented
to yourself. Nietzsche in his /*The Gay Science* / says quite
technically that all appearance is staging and performance, that is,
you establish a model of yourself as you want yourself to be to both
primarily yourself and secondarily to others. ¶
--------------------
Gary Moore: Spontaneous speech or writing is therefore literally an
‘other’ speaking or writing, and is not at all an automaton or machine
following a pre-set course of response. But – that is how we must
trustingly use it. We think we control, but if we examine the matter
closely we see we do not. We can see where we hesitated at this turn
and at that turn. This is the whole process of being ‘creative’ which,
when it goes the way we want we approve of, but when it does not we
suppress and condemn. So in a very real sense, there is “more” than
what “seems to appear within a whole of experience (or maybe I should
say like Peirce, within the whole phaneron)”. It is the same thing
with language as a whole and my body which gives us numerous
presuppositions we rarely or never question simply because we never
objectivize them to ourselves. ¶
--------------------------------------------------
Benjamin Udell: At least from the external as struggled with by
oneself. Now, a solipsistic world in which one has little or no
control over many things and in which one is often surprised and is
often unable, for example, to fully anticipate or emulate another's
mind, - such a supposedly solipsistic world seems to lack any
conceivable /practical difference/ from the world as we usually think
of it. ¶
------------------
Gary Moore: The word "world", I may have of just now come to think is
really a very loose and extremely ambiguous concept because you know
from experience it is radically incomplete, it does not at all contain
a whole of all things in any sense whatsoever. So literally there is
no “world” as specific, identified entity. Such an identified entity
presupposes a power holding that unity together. According to what I
said above about unconscious agency, it cannot be me or you. Not only
do we know there is more within our self than you know about yourself,
but in the objective use of language with external others (instead of
"internal" others) , the fact that you learn new and relatively
unexpected things all the time, though sometimes vaguely suspected and
anticipated - however sometimes it is a complete surprise whether
pleasant or not, shows you that there is always more in the EXTERNAL
'external' world (as opposed to the externalized 'internal' world of
the self from above) so that one realizes that the 'world' is a
totally unrealized and empty abstraction. It is a 'comforting' word in
the sense that it seems to give definite boundaries to the unknown
that without faith in the 'known world' totally overwhelms us when we
factually realize all the possibilities of 'mere chance'. ¶
-------------
Gary Moore: I have elsewhere - God knows where - written about how
this realization of the reality that chance utterly controls
everything in our world created the theology of John Calvin who
thereupon created predestination, and of course God, as a bulwark and
insurance against wholly unknowable chance. He was afraid of
everything both external, as one would expect, and internal, which
makes the vast majority of people very uncomfortable. You can pretend
to prepare for external accidents, but how do you prepare for a
completely unexpected response arising in a time of great stress from
within oneself? This later actually occurs because one has laid out
lines of appropriate behavior as if they bounded everything. Therefore
to discover something within yourself wholly unexpected and
uncontained utterly terrifies oneself. We are contingent creatures
altogether and this was what terrified Calvin. So "solipsism" is
simply a fact of perception, and even with that we realize we have
many different perceptions of the same thing that, again, we comfort
ourselves with the soothing expectation that it is indeed the same
thing when we know better. This is in the shadow of Aristotle's
terrifying dictum that A equals A only at the same time and same place
- literally. There is no abstraction or approximation in real
experience, but I know of no one that can really handle that - except
maybe a highly combat experienced Special Forces type person who is
awake even when they are asleep. Reality is a bitch. And it is not
contained by "world".
-------------------------------------------------------------
Benjamin Udell: Something like that seems to be Peirce's view of it.
Then solipsism seems as superfluous as the idea of the Ptolemaic
epicycles, or the idea of the luminiferous ether. However, I don't
know whether that view would keep philosophy from continually sliding
toward solipsism as Deely describes; it feels above my pay grade to
make an assertion about that. ¶
------------------------
Gary Moore: I would say “solipsism” and “extreme nominalism” should
never have been regarded as metaphysics or whole philosophies, but in
reality actually describe real aspects of human experience. Perception
is always necessarily MY perception and that only as immediate. The
field of perception has boundaries of distinctly perceived and vaguely
perceived. There is not a firm distinction of what is “in” perception
or “out” of it. That is no of the things I like about Peirce’s
philosophy, its ragged boundaries, it ‘if-ness’, its *“Fallibilism”.* ¶
--------------------------------------------
Benjamin Udell: Peirce's view of self-other relations seems to have
its locus in his phaneroscopy, or phenomenology, i.e., prior to logic
(as formal semiotic). ¶
--------------------
Gary Moore: That would be “Firstness” would it not, and /ens ut primum
cognitum/ ?¶
--------------------------------------------
Benjamin Udell: Now, I'm kind of ignorant here; I'm not sure to what
extent he would view the idea of representation as the solution
against solipsism; maybe he thought the problem needs to be revisited
in semiotic in order to be solved, or maybe he could address
representation enough to deal with solipsism in his phaneroscopy since
representation and mediation are Thirdness, a topic in phaneroscopy.
But in any case representation is how he has one expand beyond one's
direct acquaintance with things, in prospective, generalizing, and at
least conceivably testable ways.¶
------------------------
Gary Moore: Would demoting “solipsism from metaphysics or philosophy
to a description of experience solve this problem?¶
----------------------------------------------
Benjamin Udell: As to ordinary discourse as the final cause of all
intellectual endeavor, it's not clear to me why one shouldn't just as
well view all intellectual endeavor as at least one of the final
causes of ordinary discourse. ¶
-----------------------------------
Gary Moore: */Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa./ * My mistake. I meant
“final cause” in the Aristotelian since as the end towards which we do
it. “Ordinary discourse” is the final end for humans just as Aristotle
says death is the final end or telos of human life. It is our nature
as generation and corruption in time. And ‘my thing’ about time is
that, as really experienced, it is one direction only, making the past
and the future figments of our imagination yet also our whole
motivation in living. ¶
--------------------------
Benjamin Udell: Among such things it seems to me a two-way street,
or a whole concourse, what with endeavors of imagination, sensory and
so-called intuitive faculties, and concrete perception. A further
final cause of all these things would seem some sort of evolution of
humanity, or intelligent life, including the evolution both of
ordinary discourse and of cognitive endeavors, among others.
I should note for the sake of some readers reading your Deely quote
that Deely and a few others use the word "sign" otherwise than how
Peirce uses it. For Peirce, "representamen" is a technical term just
in case sign as theoretically defined turns out to diverge from sign
as commonly understood. See " Representamen
<http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/terms/representamen.html> " at
the Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms . Peirce eventually stopped
using the word "representamen" (except in at least one late manuscript
in which he seems to be working anew on a distinction between sign and
representamen). But for Deely and some others, _sign_ refers to the
whole semiotic triad of the representamen, the object (or the
significate, or significate object, as Deely calls it), and the
interpretant.
Best, Ben
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Best Gary Moore
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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