Tags
Do we ever Know Anything for Sure? – The Fallibalism of Charles Sanders Peirce
When we say something is true, what we usually mean is that the words that we are using or the idea that we are holding in our head corresponds to some actual event or thing in the world. This is generally known as the correspondence theory of truth. Implicit in this view is that there is some objective world that exists completely independently of our thoughts and ideas about it. If our ideas are true then they are accurate representations of the actual world that floats in our heads. If they are false then they are misrepresentations of the world. We have all seen cartoon figures that are pictured with thought bubbles that show us what is happening inside their minds and how it accurately reflects what is happening outside in the world.
This conception has seemed inadequate and even naive to many philosophers because it assumes objectivity and implies a passive relationship between the mind and the world. The mind is seen as playing the part of a mirror that inertly reflects reality, but if this is true then how do we account for errors in thinking and judgment? A mirror never makes a mistake. If you look in a mirror and see a sunflower you never look in front of the mirror and see a frog. The reflection in the mirror is always a perfect two dimensional representation of what is in front of the mirror. If the mind was a simple representation creating device this should also be true. How then do we account for the fact that we do make mistakes? We think something one day and then realize that we were wrong the next.
One way to think about how errors occur is to realize that what we see in our heads is not just a mechanical reflection of what exists outside of our heads. It is an interpretation of what is outside of our heads. Let’s throw out the metaphor of a mirror and use the metaphor of a painting to illustrate this more complex situation. A painter can look at a landscape and recreate it on a canvas using paint. The painting will not be a perfect reflection of the scene. The quality and diversity of paint colors available and the skill and ‘eye’ of the painter are just two of many factors that will influence the final product of the painting and create distinctions between it and the landscape as viewed first hand by the naked eye.
And so it is with the images we hold in our heads. They are not perfect reflections of the world; they are interpretations of the world. Our perceptions of the world are more like paintings that we create rather than reflections in the mirror of mind. We are not passive in relationship to our perception of reality; we are partially responsible for creating it. One of Charles Sanders Peirce’s criticisms of Cartesian Skepticism is that Descartes held that it was possible to assume nothing and to start inquiry from the bed rock of no assumptions whatsoever. Peirce believed that we could never assume that any of our perceptions or ideas were completely free of preconceptions and assumptions. Our reality is built of layer upon layer of interpretation and the errors of interpretation that existed in one layer are transferred to the next.
Let’s go back to our metaphor of a painter. Imagine that a painter paints a landscape. The landscape on the page may be beautiful, but it will not be a perfect reflection of the landscape in front of him. Now let us imagine that this painting is given to another painter who tries to paint the landscape himself based on what he sees in this picture. Then that painting is given to another painter who uses it as a model for a third painting and another and another. If we could take the one thousandth painting that was painted based on the nine hundred ninety ninth painting and bring that one back to the original landscape I wonder how different it would be. What if we did this a million times?
Peirce saw our own thoughts building in something like this way. We see something (or some part of something) and develop a thought about it. That thought becomes the object of another thought and that thought the object for another. This happens over and over and over again – I suppose millions upon millions of times. Any preconceptions or errors in judgment get built into all of our thinking, so we can never assume that what we think is true will be accurate to some objectively existing reality. And so no matter how hard you try to be objective in the way that Descartes wanted us to be, you would always have some error – and probably a great deal – built into your thinking. Peirce spoke of this principle as Fallibalism and it would later become the foundation of postmodernism.
A relativist will take this line of thinking and use it to claim that there is no objective reality – there is only interpretation and opinion and none of it ultimately relates to anything objectively real. This wasn’t Peirce’s view. He believed that the universe started with some absolute reality – what he called absolute firstness. It was that which was totally first and before all other. He further believed that at the end of time there would be a final encounter with that firstness in the form of a final secondness. Between the initiation of the universe as some pure original reality and the finality of the universe as the final perfect encounter with that reality there is an evolving process of thirdness. Thirdness is the building of a perfecting interpretation with realty through a process of ever refining interpretation that will lead inevitably to a final perfect encounter with the original firstness that started it all – absolute secondness. We are somewhere in the midst of the infinite evolutionary process of thirdness.
Between the absolute firstness and the final secondness it seems plausible that there can occur a process of thirdness, but not an infinite one. If the final secondness ends time then infinity is not… infinite.
Luckily, there are other explorations of this terrain that are not dependent on the functioning of western modes of thought that cut through these mind puzzles more elegantly. Descartes, unfortunately for Western Man, was locked into a head-neck-shoulders approach to finding Reality.
I am enjoying saying Fallibalism repeatedly, a mantra really. Maybe it will be helpful in realizing a ‘both-and’ rather than an ‘either-or’ sensibility…
The only ‘absolute’ I found (I did not finish yet W.B. Gallie, Peirce and Pragmatism,1952) is the absolute rejection of Descartes ‘intuition’, according to Peirce no such thing exists.
We can only think in signs; these signs are created in reality: it started somewhere. Peirce says that all our knowledge of minds and their working –our own and other people’s- is derived from our knowledge of certain outward physical facts; namely those parts or results of our own and other people’s behavior which we call signs. The meaning of words and other signs grows.
What I like about his line of thought is that he says that most of the interpretation happens unconscious –because it is just structured in our brain- so that is why we can never ‘go back’ and find if our line of thought is ‘according to the truth’.
Pragmatism is finding the basic laws of development, it is the process of testing our thoughts, ideas in reality with mathematical precision.
What I understand is that his development is: there is only one ‘best solution’, one truth and of course when life is evolving, this best solution changes and so this investigation continues.
Science aims at rendering facts intelligible or manageable by discovering the laws which explains them. In every experience there is some law.
There is a certain uniformity in the actual course of nature. Peirce says: ”Evolutionism must eventually restore the rejected idea of reasonableness energizing the world (either through natural selection or otherwise). Every sign can by its development contribute to the ideal end of ‘concrete reasonableness’.
Here is pointed to his Third category, which is given more concrete embodiment of his image of a single forces of evolution towards ‘a world absolutely perfect, rational and symmetrical’.
He says that evolution, whatever its mechanism is, is essentially an adaptive process and this fact is in some way connected with variation postulated by Darwin. Natural selection is the main course of evolution and we should do well to look for appropriate replicas of it when we apply the idea of evolution to the history of human ideas and institutions.
Firstness (Presence) has also to do with the infinite potential qualitative variety of nature (not limits). So unpredictable new ways of being may arise in any part of the universe. Secondness (related) is also coincident, accidents, facts that no law can account for.
Thirdness Gallie describes as laws. It is connected with the tendencies to uniformity, as habits in the making. A law which expresses some ‘would-be’ of a physical or biological system will grow or change as new elements are received into that system, or as other systems begin for the first time to affect it.
Central is that ‘none of the truly operative laws –which we have to discover- escapes the great law of evolution. Peirce sees operative laws as something essentially developable and therefore intelligible. They conform to a supreme over-all tendency in things towards uniformity and continuity of behavior and have developed in the same general sense in which we speak of habits developing, from a primordial state of affairs which was itself inherently capable of starting such development.
The operation of natural laws cannot be regarded as something ultimate, fixed from eternity to eternity. On the contrary, the operation of natural law must be conceived by analogy with that of general signs which tend to produce habits of action to be exercised and developed into the indefinite future.
Hello Liesbeth,
You certianly are able to synthesize information quickly. Thank you for this summary it is very full. The two things I want to write about next are 1. the similarity in the thought of William James and Rudolf Steiner and 2. Peirce’s semiotics.
Thanks for these thoughts!
Jeff
Look forward to it. By the way, in my book Peirce says about James: ‘Who, for example would be of a nature so different from his as I. He so concrete, so living, I a mere table of contents, so abstract, a very snarl of twine’. There is a word of admiration on the first page of the book from Whitehead.
Hi Jeff
The painting example was a great illustration of interpretation. I found myself really wanting to see what a million would look like. Hmmm..maybe a cool project. I’ll have to look into it. Also brought to mind the telephone game, which plays along the same lines.
Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness are new ideas to me and very interesting- though a bit of a mind boggle for me:)
Michelle
Jeff,
“The two things I want to write about next are1. the similarity in the thought of William James and Rudolf Steiner and 2. Peirce’s semiotics.”
I am getting worried there, but at the same time I lok forward to it ! In any case I am so much in devotion with Steiner that maybe, just maybe I am loosing some objectivity here.
Liesbeth,
actually it is already a few of your blogs that I want to answer to. This one is, as Jeff said, full and wonderful. But the one of two days ago made me think very deeply.
You wrote :“The great distinction between our purely formal thinking (as in pure mathematics and deductive logic) and our experimental or factual thinking, lies in this: that in the former the development of our thought is constrained only by certain conditions which we ourselves have laid down –either explicitly, in the statement of the hypotheses we select for the purposes of deductive development, or else implicitly, in so far as they are necessarily involved by the symbolism we elect to use; whereas in the latter our thought is constrained by factors that are in no sense of our own choosing p.51.”
actually while reading this I found that you were touching the heart of the matter here.
When we go to an adventurous enquiry in the realm of ideas, Pragmatism seems to be at the end the only mechanism of control that we have. It goes something like this: we have two legs and two arms and at the end of the day we want some results.
Now Idealism is the really creative force there. The fact as you mention, that the human mind is able to conceptualize, and to work self-consistently within those concepts, like mathematicians do, is very mysterious. Where does this ability comes from? did it emerge from “matter” or was it already re-formed in some kind of genetic code of the Kosmos ?
Is there a DNA for Kosmic evolution ?
Thanks for your wonderful insight, it really made me think a lot !
Well, thank you Catherine, great you write! In the lines that Whitehead writes on the first page he honors Peirce for his brilliancy and profound originality, that is what makes you think. I read that his father was a professor of mathematics in Harvard and that they took often long walks together, not solving young Peirce’ problems but his fathers. When he was young, he was an idealist and he was very well educated in ancient (Aristotle) and medieval philosophy. ‘Peirce’s work as a formal logician parallels and supplements, in its effects on his general philosophy, his experience as an experimental scientist: each of these contributes in striking fashion to his general philosophical equipment, but neither of them dominates or restricts his approach to the broader problems of philosophy’. His powerful grasp of the peculiarities of purely formal thinking enables him to set out in high relief and to articulate with unusual exactness, hitherto obscure or confused features of our experiential factual thinking.
You are of course his idea reader. He somewhere writes: ‘I am a man of whom critics have never found anything good to say. Only once in my lifetime have I experienced the pleasure of praise –not for what it might bring but in itself. That pleasure was beatific; and the praise that it conferred it was meant for blame. It was that a critic said of me that I did not seem to be ‘absolutely sure of my own conclusions’…. My book will have no instruction to impart to anybody. Like a mathematical treatise, it will suggest certain ideas and certain reasons for holding them true; but then, if you accept them, it must be because you like my reasons, and the responsibility lies with you. Man is essential a social animal: but to be social is one thing, to be gregarious is another: I decline to serve as bellwether. My book is meant for people who ‘want to find out’. William James said after listening to a lesson on logic:’ I never heard a man go into things so intensely and thoroughly’.
Special for Jeff and Dianne he saw sports as important part of evolution. He gave as an illustration of the way in which muscular effort may bring about a change of habit ‘if we wish to acquire the habit of speaking of ‘speaking, writing, thinking, etc. instead of ‘speakin, writin, thinkin, as I suspect I now do – all I have to do is to make the desired enunciations a good many times; and to do this as thoughtlessly as possible since it is an inattentive habit that I am trying to create.
Dear Liesbeth and Jeff
some strange ideas are popping out, which are related to our ongoing discussion. It is about our belief system. Recently I went to a fascinating conference in neurosciences. I learned that this field is making tremendous progresses recently, due to new observing techniques like giant IRMs. In short, the state of the art seems to be that scientists are able to locate the part of the brain which reacts to the representation system, as well as to our belief system. On the other hand they have no clue [yet] which part of the brain is activated when the logical thinking is present. They don’t even know whether it is a question of getting a more precise apparatus for measurements, or whether the logics system requires a functioning of the brain completely different from belief and representation.
One striking piece of information, is that within the present sate of knowledge, neuroscientists equate sleeping with an hypertrophy of the representation system [our dreams, archetypes etc…] while the waking state is equated solely with the emergence of the belief system.
Basically what they say, is that when we are awake, what happens is that we start to use our belief system to control and choose our representations, we just are “beliefs in motion”.
For example if you see yourself falling upwards, it will be OK in your dreams in the sleeping state, but in the waking state your belief system will immediately discard this representation is being not “credible”.
Even more fascinating is the recent study comparing the logical system with the belief system. Apparently for 85% of the population [ the tests are extremely suggestive !] the belief system completely dominates the logical one. Basically what those guys are telling us is that as a whole race, we didn’t assimilate our logical system yet ! [the test is very simple: you give people to choose between a conclusion which is logical but absolutely not credible, and the opposite , a conclusion which is credible but absolutely not logical. result : 85 % of the people choose the latter].
This conference was extremely inspiring for me, since I find that what we are trying to do in Evolutionary Enlightenment is related to it. Namely we are trying, as human race, to evolve through our belief system [ which quite evidently makes the core of our cultures], to not take it for granted, for an absolute, but for what it is, a tool which has to evolve. Our representation system has already evolved in order to incorporate our belief system [ which also includes a control system of our representations], likewise our belief system itself is currently evolving, in order to include logics, simple old rationality. We somehow need to become rational and equilibrated beings at the core of our functioning brain.
To gain mastery over our belief system is the most timely liberation towards which our humanity presently strives. We need to learn how t drive the boats of our beliefs, to become an active partner of them, and not a passive victim of them.
It would be fascinating to see how Pragmatism and Idealism would fit within this goal [ next posts ?]
I feel we are really reaching some very important points with this discussion !
Love to all the readers and contributors to it !
Reading your post I thought it is like you have been reading Peirce. I was removing the marks I made in the (library)book and I left one part still with marks and that was exactly the piece he wrote about ‘beliefs’. When I was reading it I thought ‘he does not have a very high opinion of people..’ I am sure he would embrace you reading your post. (do not feel obliged to read it all)…He wrote: while belief lasts, it is a strong habit and as such, forces a man to believe until surprise breaks up the habit. The breaking of a belief can only be done to some novel experience, whether external or internal. ‘Experience’ in this case would not be connect with ‘pleasant’. On the contrary, experience is the main thing that constrains our thinking, and, at any rate on some occasions, compels us to a ‘forcible modification of our ways of thinking’. In a word, belief, like action, must accommodate itself to that which it finds thrust upon it: that is, to the broad course of experience.
Once we are constrained to abandon a given belief, however, a new condition of mind, Doubt, ensues, which provides in almost every aspect the sharpest possible contrast to belief. Doubt is an ‘uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we ‘at once struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief’. Peirce compares it to the irritation of a nerve and the reflex action produced thereby, whereas the physiological analogue of belief would be provided by nervous associations. The struggle to RE-FIX belief, by removing the irritation of doubt, Peirce names Inquiry: and the sole purpose of inquiry is the settlement of belief. ‘we may fancy that this is not enough for us, and that we seek, not merely an opinion, but a true opinion. But put this fancy to the test, and it proves groundless; for as soon as a firm belief is reached we are entirely satisfied, whether the belief be (sc. In fact) true or false…The most that we can be maintained is, that we seek for a belief that we shall THINK to be true… But we think each on of our beliefs to be true, and, indeed, it is a mere tautology to say so. THOUGHT IN ACTION HAS FOR ITS ONLY POSSIBLE MOTIVE THE ATTAINMENT OF THOUGHT AT REST.
For Peirce Inquiry has at its aim the attainment of THAT belief, on any particular question, which shall prove satisfactory under every conceivable relevant circumstance. There is only one trustworthy method of Inquiry, the method of science. The central tenet of this method is that there is one discoverable answer to every genuine question, one answer, to which all who seek to fix opinion on a given question –not for today or tomorrow or in subservience of any practical interest, but having regard to every conceivable circumstance in which the question might be raised- would agree. Whenever this tenet takes full possession of a man’s mind he is driven to devote himself to the ideal –or hope- of approaching TOWARD the one true opinion on some subject, no matter whether he himself is likely ever to reach it. Men of this type may be said to be possessed by the ‘will to learn’ and only such men have any real success in scientific research.
In all its progress science vaguely feels that it is only learning a lesson. The value of FACTS to IT, lies in this, that they belong to Nature; and Nature is something great, and beautiful and sacred, and eternal, and real –the object of its worship and its aspiration. It herein takes an entirely different attitude towards facts from that which Practice takes. For Practice, facts are the arbitrary forces with which it has to reckon and to wrestle. Science, when it comes to understand itself, regards facts as merely the vehicle of eternal truth, while for Practice they remain the obstacles which it has to turn, the enemy of which it is determined to get the better, Science, feeling that there is an arbitrary element in its theories, still continues its studies, confident that so it will gradually become more and more purified from the dross of subjectivity; but practice requires something to go upon, and it will be no consolation to it to know that it is on the path to objective truth –the actual truth it must have, or when it cannot attain certainty, must at least have high probability, that is, must know that, though a few of its ventures may fail, the bulk of them will succeed.
Scientific inquiry is essentially an endless undertaking. Thought without development is nothing..thought must live and grow in incessant new and higher translations or it proves itself not to be genuine thought. Even in most developed phases science remains hedged about, and is to some extent directed by, the needs and interest of practical life. On the other hand, the ends and standards of scientific inuirey cannot be equated with those of practice. For if once science is directed to fixing belief in subservience to the interim needs of practice, it thereby ceases to be genuine science. In hitching its wagon to the star of the one true opinion that MAY be discovered, or at least approached, if only the scientific method be employed, inquiry establishes itself as a partially autonomous activity, with ends, standards, and indeed interests of its own. But what is the peculiar genius of the scientific method? Peirce: ‘conformity to the laws of inference.. he does not mean here the traditional Aristotelian logic, or nineteenth-century logicians, among the laws of inference Peirce Places one which relates to the admissibility of hypotheses –this law turns out to be equivalent to his Pragmatism- and the effects of the extension of the traditional conception of inference are considerable.(.). Even if logical principles are themselves purely critical and uncreative in character, resolute adherence to them may well prove creative. We must not forget the inspired hope, that there IS one opinion to be reached on every significant question. One answer which is destined to be reached if only the scientific method is pursued far enough.
ALL our beliefs, whatever their nature and methods of origination, embody in a sense a claim to truth. Savages, bigots, drunkards, and morons, all claim truth for their beliefs; but they very rarely, if ever, SEEK truth –because they do not know how to. A scientific thinker does. He makes his claims, not so much for the truth of this or that belief, as for the fact that his conclusions, as reached so far, conform to the standards and ideals of inquiry. Strictly speaking, he says, BELIEF is out of place in pure theoretical science, which gives us, in place of belies, hypotheses confirmed to a certain degree or provisionally established truths ‘into which the economy of endeavor prescribes that, for the time being, further inquiry shall cease. Peirce’ point is that the conception of truth enters into science only as an ideal i.e. as the ‘inspired hope’ that inquiry into any problem will, if sufficiently far pursued terminate in that opinion ‘in which the community settles down’.
Peirce, wishes the word ‘inquiry’ to be used to cover any activity, physical as well as mental, which we engage in to ‘remove the irritation of doubt’. The actual physical operations which are involved in experiment are therefore quite as much a part of inquiry as are the doubts and purposes that prompt them. Inquiry is less for some describable mental process, than for the fact that SOMEHOW a wide variety of our activities have come to be initiated and guided by signs which admit of logical criticism and correction; and it is only when men find themselves in this situation that they can set themselves conscientiously to conform to those intellectual standards and ideals which it is the function of logic to formalize (Inquiry depends on the fact that man is a sign-using animal, and that the sign-systems which he employs include signs for the questioning, correction and qualification of other signs.). Peirce is concerned to emphasize that the ideals which characterize inquiry are as real, as unquestionable facts as any other facts we care to mention. It means that inquiry –for all that its history, and the laws of its development, are perfectly legitimate objects of study- can never wholly be appreciated in descriptive or causal terms. Inquiry is an activity directed by its own standards on to its own ideal ends; and to recognize its operation in any give situation involves an element of evaluation –an evaluation of the RIGHTNESS, as judged by logical standards of a give phase of a particular investigation. To practice inquiry is to make manifest, to oneself or to others, one’s acceptance of certain logical standards and ideals, and one’s claim to be acting and thinking in conformity with them.
Catherine, it must look silly that I copy so much of a book, but it all seems so important. I had difficulty stopping because there was more interesting stuff to come, ways of inference. Probable you know most of it, it lead to the Reasonability. The whole line of thought so much precedes Integral. I do not know how you are doing with Gebser. I was just thinking about all problems in the world and how it would be possible that only one solution is the best. Of course so many groups have different solutions. But it all fits in spiral dynamics and the idea of Integral of bringing all science together to find solutions from all different areas, it all seems to make so much sense. I really look forward reading next discussion, probably only reading…
Dear Liesbeth,
I read it all with great interest !
When you write : “The most that we can be maintained is, that we seek for a belief that we shall THINK to be true… But we think each on of our beliefs to be true, and, indeed, it is a mere tautology to say so. THOUGHT IN ACTION HAS FOR ITS ONLY POSSIBLE MOTIVE THE ATTAINMENT OF THOUGHT AT REST.”
this is so true ! [ with sentences like this one I am starting to fall in love with Pierce !] and it seems to be a good definition of what we call the horizon of our awareness. We are surrounded by belief that we make as hard as the rock, somehow to feel secure. Sounds that our culture is based on this human faculty alone.
What would be beliefs in motion, beliefs which are not at rest but which push one another, and challenge our sense of what is “real ”?
Jeff, I just notice that I didn’t express how much I find the post awesome. IT almost convinces me about the firstness, secondness and thirdness, although I am still sticking a bit to the firstness only [ ever present origin of Gebser] because when we talk about origin, we talk about our human power, abut power.
Juts on the sides about Descartes [ you didn’t expect me not to react to this one …?]
“And so no matter how hard you try to be objective in the way that Descartes wanted us to be, you would always have some error – and probably a great deal – built into your thinking. Peirce spoke of this principle as Fallibalism and it would later become the foundation of postmodernism.”
That’s precisely the point: Descarte’s Method IS a method of enlightenment, of Intellectual enlightenment. He is the true expression of what Steiner would call a free Thinker [ Steiner makes this point absolutely explicit in his philosophy of Freedom; I forgot the page but can find it back for you]
The point is precisely that you can never reach the state of emptiness that Descartes talks about, as Pierce rightfully noticed. The state f no assumptions, no conceptions is simply a Void, it is not reachable by the mind. So Descartes asks us to start form an impossible point. Strange…..
The beauty of Descartes’ Method, is that by the very act of trying to reach the starting point, the state of no assumptions, you behave as a true scientist and you become a free thinker. It is one of the most powerful method invented to free the human reasoning faculty.
Catherine,
As far as Descartes goes I probably need to be more careful using his name – I don’t really know his philosophy well enough – Peirce was responding to Descartes, but likely he was really responding directly to whatever Descartes had become in the late 19th century philosophical circles around Harvard College that he was a pat of.
As for your near conversion to firstness, secondness and thirdness – I am now reading Steiner’s “A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Concept.” What I am finding is that Steiner’s thought is remarkably similar to Peirce and James. It makes sense that it would be because all three were primarily expanding on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by using Goethe’s method of scientific inquiry resting on direct observation. (James was particularly influenced by Goethe from what I have read about him.) I am realizing that Steiner was also talking about a version of Peirce’s firstness, secondness and thirdness – and also he spoke about pure expereince in words that could easily be mistaken for William James. I will explore this in some upcoming posts, but I look forward to your reflections on it.
Hello Liesbeth, Thank you for all of this. I have been reading a book by Rudolf Steiner called “A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Concept.” What I am finding is that both Steiner and the Pragmatists (Peirce, James and Dewey) had in commmon that they saw thought as a lawful process of unfolding reality. In that way all of them were battling against a “representational” world model in which thoughts are seen as only descriptions of reality. For Steiner, Peirce, James, and Dewey – thoughts were part of reality, part of a naturally occuring process of unfolding.
I looked in my book to see what exactly where the points of Peirce criticism on Descartes, I give an impression, I think it is what Catherine says. Peirce, thanks to his superior logical equipment goes to the very root of the matter: to the first premises and guiding principles of Cartesian philosophy. His criticisms of Descartes provide, both logically and historically the best possible introduction to his own development of theory of knowledge. The criticism are about three aspects of Descartes’ theory of knowledge:
a) conception of Intuition as the fundamental activity of the mind: According to Descartes, we intuit or see ALL TOGETHER the truth of certain directly known premises, the way that premises necessitates a certain conclusion and thereupon the truth of that conclusion. (This illustrates what is meant by saying that Intuition, or direct knowledge of primary, uninferred truths, is for Descartes the fundamental activity of mind).
b)certain rules of method which seem to be required by this conception of Intuition
c)the kind of facts or object which, according to Descartes can be most completely and certainly known.
Descartes says
1). every Intuition is of an essentially indubitable or self-evident truth i.e. truth such than one has only to understand the meaning of the words used to express it to see that it must be true. Example: if equals be added to equals, their sums will be equal.
2) Every Intuition, in virtue of above must be an absolutely simple two-term relation between knowing mind and know fact or truth. It is as though the truth in question where waiting to reveal itself directly to the ‘ natural light’ which will pick out the whole of that truth and nothing but it.
3) Certain preliminaries may have to be gone through before we actually achieve a particular Intuition; but once it is achieved it is in no way dependent on any other thought.
The original idea of direct knowledge is that before inference can happen, there must first be some direct knowledge on which inference can be based. Descartes idea of Intuition points to absolute directness. His account of Intuition is in the nature of a THEORY about certain facts and as such stands in need for proof or justification. Is the fact that we have intuitions in Descartes sense supposed to be itself know by Intuition? Is this where true, Peirce says, we might expect at any rate among trained thinkers, virtually unanimous agreement as to which sorts of knowledge are intuitive and which are not; but it is notorious that nothing like such agreement is to be found. Nor, if we reflect, should this surprise us; for experience in the law courts, psychological laboratories and elsewhere shows us that, even in terms of the familiar common-sense distinction between immediate and inferential knowledge, it is extremely difficult to distinguish what we have directly seen or heard from the inferences and interpretations we put upon it. How much more difficult should this task be when the quality to be distinguished -that of being an Intuition in Descartes’ sense- is one which calls for careful discrimination and exact definition. The most that can plausibly be claimed is that there are certain specially privileged cases in which we can tell directly -i.e. by Intuition- that a given piece of knowledge is intuitive: in other, for some reason obscurer, cases of intuition, this, it will have to be argued, is not possible. Peirce proceeds therefore to consider three of these allegedly privileged cases. But the result of his examination is that the question: can we tell intuitively that our knowledge is these cases is intuitive? turns out to be premature, if not wholly gratuitous. For in all three cases Peirce succeeds in showing that the original specimens of knowledge chosen are, in all probability, not intuitive at all.
He first examines the allegedly privileged case of the knowledge which each one of us has of himself as a unique ‘ thinking subject’ . Such knowledge, it has sometimes been claimed, is ‘ obviously’ intuitive; but observation of young children, suggests a total absence of such knowledge of them. Children appear to come by the idea of themselves as unique individuals having thoughts of their own a) through interpreting the speech which others (adults) address to them (that is what YOU think, Tommy, now what Peter thinks) and b) as a hypothesis to account for, or provide a locus for, their own errors, dreams etc. A plausible conclusion from these facts is that our self-knowledge is always in fact inferential, although the inferences on which it is based have become for the most part so habitual to us, and as a result of this habituation so ‘ telescoped’ that we very easily come to regard it as immediate or intuitive. (of course it could be possible to get to self-knowledge later by intuition). But intuitive character is not proven.
Next Peirce considers the allegedly intuitive character of our knowledge of our different mental states, in particular our capacity to distinguish a state of belief from a state of mere supposition or a state of doubt. Peirce shows that we distinguish such states, not by direct intuition, but by inference from certain of their observed concomitants and effects. We know WHEN we are believing because of our readiness to ACT on what we believe, whereas, when we merely entertain a supposition, no such readiness to act can be discovered.
Peirce touches briefly on a third of these allegedly privileged cases: our knowledge of the simplest ‘data of consciousness’ or ‘sense data’ . He rejects the claim that we have direct intuitive knowledge of such elementary data on the ground that whenever we know something we know it AS something -as being of such and such a character, or as standing in such and such relations. To know something, we must classify it or relate it; and this, Peirce says, is something that cannot be done without the use of signs or symbols of one kind or another.
Peirce own suggestion that every piece of apparently direct intuitive knowledge -including our knowledge of the most elementary ‘data of consciousness- is in fact of the nature of a hypothesis: since every claim to knowledge involves the assumption that a certain method of classification or systematization will in fact apply to a particular object or set of objects in a particular way. The truth of the hypothesis has to be tested, by its consequences or effects. Just which or how many of these effects must be considered and found to hold good if a hypothesis is to count as true, is a question to which no over-all answer can be given: but it is difficult to believe that all possible relevant tests of the truth of any hypothesis can be enumerated and checked over IN A SINGLE ACT OF INTUITION. Unless this can be done, however, it would seem that recognition of even the simplest quality must rest on the assumption that certain relevant necessary consequences are in fact realized in the case in question. And such an assumption is something which the Cartesian doctrine of Intuition cannot possible allow.
If this argument could be accepted, than it seems clear that the very existence of Intuitions -let alone the claim that their existence can be intuitively known- would be very dubious indeed. It is therefore important to consider a third line of defense to which believers in Intuitions may resort. It says: suppose that Peirce is right and that any judgment we care to examine, no matter how simple and direct it may at first appear to be, turns out to rest on certain assumptions, i.e. to be such that in making it we are ipso facto accepting prior premises as true. Then we may ask: What is the logical status of these premises themselves? Were they, in their turn, established by some prior process of inference? And if so, what about the premises of this prior process? Were these also derived from certain still remoter premises? Evidently this line of questioning can be pushed back and back: but ultimately we must come to some piece of knowledge which was not derived from any prior knowledge: for how, otherwise, since the life of each one of us goes back for only a finite time, could our knowledge conceivably have begun? Peirce says that the series of our thoughts is not a continuous one in the strict sence.
Every piece of knowing depends, not simply causally but logically, on what one has previously learnt, since all knowledge rests on the assumption that certain methods of classification and systematization, which have been learnt in connection with other earlier situations, can be applied in an a particular way, to a fiven situation. Once this is admitted, the great error of Descartes and Cartesians becomes plain: it is the assumption that we cannot learn UNTIL we know. If this assumption where warranted, then it would be senseless to say of any two thought-sequences, neither of which develops or builds on a basis of self-evident first premisses, that one is performed better or more intelligently than other. But to common sense it seems obvious that in most processes of learning we simply must build upon -with a view to testing, improving, or rejecting- whatever prior beliefs or conjectures we can bring to bear on teh problem facing us.
Here Peirce’ fallibilism comes in..there is much more, I will look tomorrow evening is something should be added. I did this very quickly.
Liesbeth, your ability to quickly take in and synthesize information is amazing. Thank you for this. Peirce was a logician of the first order. Logic was his first love and he had a very sharp mind. Many of his insights were made from the application of very rigorous logical thinking as you have said and the conclusion that he came to is that we have to proceed not on a firm ground of certain knowledge, but on a starting point of assumed knowledge that must be both trusted completely and also always left open to question. That is on way to express the core of pragmatism. Thank you again.
It’s kind of you Jeff, but I am just copying. Once one get concentrated it gets more and more interesting, that is why I would like to continue a bit, do not feel irritated, nobody has to read it. Underneath is confirmed what Jeff talkes about in his last post, I had to think of Catherine because she ‘swore the oath of the scientist’ and that goes according to Peirce against Descartes.
After describing the fallibilism (paintings of Jeff) the writer goes back to the main methodological consequences of Descartes doctrine of Intuition.
1) Since all genuine knowledge consists in, or is derived from Intuitions, the possibility that we may continue to harbour opinions not so constituted or derived must be excluded (so what happened after the first painting must be know through investigation=doubt).
2) But any simple belief, which survives the test of the severest doubt, will thereby prove itself an Intuition=simple direct, self-sufficient knowledge of truth.
3) Increase in general knowledge consists in a step-by-step advance from the simplest intuitions. But it is essential to success that we should start with the simplest intuitions, and that in our advance we should follow the right (one and only) order. Mathematics, for example the geometry of Euclid, provides a model on both these scores.
4) explanation, or the understanding of complex facts, result from showing how a certain fairly ‘advanced’ conclusion is derived from the simplest intuitions. But to ask for an explanation of what explains -for example, to ask for the justification of Euclid’s axioms- would be absurd. In all investigation we depend on certain ultimates, which admit of no explanation, unless, to repeat Peirce’s tart observation, ‘God made it so’ is be regarded as an explanation.
Peirce rejects these methodological rules and recommendations on the following grounds:
1) We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter into the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned…A person may in the course of his studies find reason to doubt what he began by believing but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.
The nerve of Peirce’s criticism here is that we cannot doubt without a positive reason: genuine doubt arises only when two or more beliefs appear to conflict with one another.
2) Why cannot the individual consciousness be taken as ultimate criterion of knowledge? What is wrong with asserting with Descartes ‘Whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive is true’?. The history of philosophy supplies one fairly obvious reason. It shows us that meta physicians ‘will all agree that metaphysics has reached a pitch of certainty far beyond that of the physical sciences: -only they can agree on nothing else’. ‘In sciences in which men come to agreement, when a theory has been broached, it is considered to be on probation until this agreement is reached. After it is reached, the question of certainty becomes an idle one, because there is no one left who doubts it. We individually cannot reasonably hope to obtain the ultimate philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for the COMMUNITY of philosophers. Hence, if disciplined and candid minds carefully examine a theory and refuse to accept it, this ought to create doubts in the mind of the author of the theory himself.
Here the observable practice and authority of the community of scientists is contrasted with the excessive individualism which we find in philosophy. We should notice that the authority of the community of scientists derives entirely from the fact that agreement tends to be reached (if we except the most elementary questions) only by those who inquire. Every contribution to science is an appeal to other scientists to go over the same ground for themselves: and this is in practice the scientist’s substitute for Cartesian doubt.Peirce’s conception of the community of inquirers mans more than the observable fact that co-operation and mutual criticism are of the first importance in science; it also embodies his understanding of the first article of faith of every scientist, namely the belief and hope that if investigation into any give problem be carried sufficiently far, one solution will always establish itself as logically superior to all its rivals. This hope is all that Truth means in science, says Peirce. So no-one concerned with the Truth is left to doubt it.
3)It turns out that the third of Descartes’ methodological rules combines three important errors. Descartes wrongly assumes that, to achieve knowledge of any given subject-matter, we must commence from some piece of direct, indubitable knowledge: largely because fo this, he has greatly exaggerated the part which deduction form first premises plays in any branch of knowledge; and finally he has misconceived the characteristic function, ro service of deduction itself. According to Peirce these errors are particularly insidious in case of philosophy which is concerned with wide, and in the main vaguely expressed issues -the very last issues to admit of ‘knock-down’ demonstrative solution.
4)As mentioned in earlier post Peirce consistently urges that science knows nothing of ‘absolutely inexplicable’ facts. In general, science aims at rendering facts intelligible or manageable by discovering the laws which, in the appropriate sense, explains them. It may be that these explanations will involve the hypothesis of further facts whose existence and character remain (thus far) wholly unexplained: but where this is so, the suggestion that these further facts should be counted absolutely inexplicable is one which no scientist will allow. The suggestion of ‘ultimates’ and ‘inexplicable’smacks to the scientist of dogmatism or mysticism or both. In Peirce’s judgement, it commits the supreme sin against the scientific spirit: it blocks the road of inquiry.
It is from my I phone. Guys just. Be careful with Descartes. My point was simply that Pierce didn t understand him because he misses the enlightenment part. It will be fir me the difference with Steiner as well. Both Descartes and Steiner have this in common that spirituality is mixed with their thoughts. Considered only as philosophers means amputing them of the highest dimension. So far I didn t see at all this dimension in Pierce. More soon.
Only later I saw that it is not so good what I wrote. Peirce is a spiritual man, but it is not in this book. I ordered another book of Peirce himself, I think that is much better to read that. The writer does say that his three categories are so much more than they seem at first instance. So just do not take it to serious. I thought it was interesting but did not think about the fact that you are in the middle of proving results. I am sorry for not taking it more serious. So stupid.
“Thinking … is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas.”
A quote from Rudolf Steiner. It looks to me much more like Bateson and his being suddenly immersed in an ocean of ideas, rather than Pierce, but I am curious about what Jeff will tell us there.
Hello Catherine,
I beleive that Peirce was seeing things in a similar way…and perhaps William James even more so. The Pragmatists didn’t tend to use the word thinking or thought in the same way that Steiner does. They more tended to use the word expereince which included all mental perceptions. We live in an ocean of experience is more what they would say, but I think that as I develop this it will become clear that there is more similarity than difference. One of the charactoristics of American philosophy is that it seems to exagerate its differences with European philosophy. I suppose as a young country trying to identify itself this is inevitable, but it leaves us with a legacy of needing to build bridges that were never put in up in the first place. I am finding that there is a general trend in American philosophy today to find these bridges and to explore the points of contact betwen American and European philosophy rather than the differences. A number of German philsophers have led the way in this effort as well. I look forward to your reaction to my next post.
Liesbeth and Jeff, I cannot resist t put this wonderful description of Steiner by the Evolutionist genius and also Anthroposophist Owen Barfield. I recognize in him the same awe at the core of my devotion for Steiner.
Would sign up immediately !
From Barfield:
“So much for externals. As to the substance of his teachings and his life, I cannot see him otherwise than as a key figure — perhaps on the human level, the key figure — in the painful transition of humanity from what I have ventured to call original participation to final participation. The crucial phase in that transition was, and indeed is, modern man’s inveterate habit of experiencing matter devoid of spirit, and consequently of conceiving spirit as less real, and finally as altogether unreal. That experience, for good and ill, lies at the foundation of contemporary science and technology, and is daily confirmed and ingrained by their predominance in all walks of life and areas of thought. Consequently the redemption of science is a sine qua non for the transition. Goethe’s scientific work, properly understood, went far towards achieving that redemption, and Steiner welcomed it for that reason and then went on to develop it further. We see Goethe achieving and applying what he called “objective thinking,” an activity and an experience that transcends the gulf between subject and object and thus overcomes that diremption of matter from spirit to which I have referred. The redemption of science presupposes the redemption of thinking itself. But Goethe refused to think about the “objective thinking” he applied so effectively.”
“Steiner on the other hand did precisely that and in his earliest writings, for example Truth and Science and Philosophy of Freedom, succeeded in transcending the crucial dichotomy epistemologically too. The thinking of others, such as Hegel and the Nature Philosophers in Germany and Coleridge in England, had taken the same direction, but none of them had achieved their aim so authoritatively or so completely. Coleridge could write of “organs of spirit,” with a latent function analogous to that of our more readily available organs of sense, and Goethe could apply his objective thinking to supplement causality with metamorphosis. But neither of them could carry cognition of spirit beyond spirit-as-phenomenally-apparent in external nature; it was in Steiner that western mind and western method first achieved cognition of pure spirit. The others were all apostles of Imagination in its best sense, Steiner alone of those profounder levels he himself termed Inspiration and Intuition, but which may together be conceived of as Revelation — as Revelation in the form appropriate to this age — as a mode of cognition, to which the noumenal ground of existence is accessible directly, and not only through its phenomenal manifestation, to which therefore even the remote past can become an open book.
“It seems that at any point of time when human consciousness is called on to take an entirely new direction, to effect a real transition, a seed surviving from the past is needed to shelter the tender germ of the future. Aristotle, the father of modern science carried within him his twenty years under Plato in order to turn effectively away from them. In the early years of Christianity it was those in whom something of the old spiritual perception still lingered, who were best adapted to understand the cosmic significance of the life and death of Christ. Gnosticism had done its work before it was rejected by the Church. Steiner himself as a child brought with him into the world a vestigial relic of the old clairvoyance, the old “original” participation. Biographies and his own autobiography bear witness to it. And it is credibly reported of him that he took deliberate steps to eliminate it, not even rejecting the help of alcohol, in order to clear the decks for the new clairvoyance it was his destiny both to predict and to develop.”
“Rudolf Steiner was in fact not merely a phenomenally educated and articulate philosopher but also a Man of Destiny; and I believe it is this fact that is so grievously delaying his recognition. By comparison, not only with his contemporaries but with the general history of the western mind, his stature is almost too excessive to be borne.
Why should we accept that one man was capable of all these revelations, however meaningful they may be? But there is also the other side of the coin. If those revelations are accepted, they entail a burden of responsibility on humanity which is itself almost beyond description. It is easy to talk of macrocosm and microcosm, but for man the microcosm not only to believe but to realize himself as such, implies a greatness of spirit, a capacity of mind and heart, which we can only think of as superhuman rather than merely human. The mental capacities which Steiner’s lifework reveals even to those who reject his findings, and the qualities of heart and will to which all those testify who had personally to deal with him may reassure us, by exemplifying, that the stature of microcosm is not, or may at least not be in the future, out of reach of man as we know him. In him we observe, actually beginning to occur, the transition from homo sapiens to homo imaginans et amans.”
Excellent pieces. Keep posting such kind of information on your page.
Im really impressed bby it.
Hi there, You’ve performed a great job. I will definitely digg it and
in my opinion suggest to my friends. I am confident
they’ll be benefited from this site.