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Charles S. Peirce. Some Consequences of Four Incapacities. Cartesian Philosophy. 4 problems with Descartes’ philosophy ( 1) Universal doubt (2) Certainty is found in individual consciousness (3) Single thread of inference vs. multiform argumentation (4) Explanatory scope narrow.
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Charles S. Peirce Some Consequences of Four Incapacities
Cartesian Philosophy 4 problems with Descartes’ philosophy (1) Universal doubt (2) Certainty is found in individual consciousness (3) Single thread of inference vs. multiform argumentation (4) Explanatory scope narrow
New Platform 1 WE CANNOT BEGIN WITH UNIVERSAL DOUBT We should not begin by doubting everything. Rather we should begin from our natural standpoint, believing what we really believe and doubting what we really doubt. “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”
New Platform 2 WE, INDIVIDUALLY, CANNOT REASONABLY HOPE TO ATTAIN THE ULTIMATE PHILOSOPHY WHICH WE PURSUE The idea that we can arrive at absolute certain truths about the world within each individual’s conscience is absurd. This could never provide a method for deriving objective truths or settling opinions. What we need is not individual truths but truths that a community of philosophers agree on.
New Platform 3 WE SHOULD NOT REASON THROUGH SINGLE THREAD OF INFERENCE “Its [philosophical] reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided that they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected.” Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its method. This form of inductive reasoning is much stronger and more reliable than deductive reasoning.
New Platform 4 EXPLANATORY SCOPE Philosophical theories ought to be architectonic insofar as they provide an explanation for all created things.
4 Denials No power of introspection No power of intuition No power of thinking without signs No conception of incognizable.
No power of introspection The power of introspection means that our minds can grasp certain things that are ONLY mental (i.e. purely mental) and have not been infected by the external world. This presupposes a clean-cut divide between the external and internal worlds. Peirce denies this and argues that all knowledge about the internal world is derived from external facts, and we simply cannot have access to anything purely mental.
No power of intuition The power of insight into a standing and isolated thought or idea, unconnected and underived from any other. Peirce believed that this sense of intuition is impossible because all ideas are derived from other ideas. The continuity of mental objects is such that insight into individual ideas or concepts, independent of other thoughts, is simply impossible.
No power of thinking without signs “When we think we have present to the consciousness some feeling, image, conception, or other representation, which serves as a sign.” Everything present to us is a manifestation of ourselves. “When we think, then, we ourselves, as we are at that moment appear as a sign.”
Sign: 3 references Sign to: Interpreter Sign for: Object Sign in: Some quality which brings it in connection with its object.
Thought: Continuous Train of thought There are no intuitions, i.e., instantaneous thought. All thought is derived from a previous thought. It is a continuous process in time that gives meaning to thought.
What does the Thought-sign stand for? Suppositum The outward thing. The previous thought. A thought is a sign of the previous thought. We cannot compare one thought to another except through immediate perception. Such conclusions are hypothetical (a hypothesis)
Material Qualities of Signs Signs are not identical with the thing they signify. First, the physical properties of a sign For instance, the word sign “man” has 3 letter word. Second, the “being really connected” with the thing signified (“the pure demonstrative application of the sign.”) The representative function of a sign is different. It belongs to thought.
Conception A state of mind is a conception because it has meaning. A conception has meaning because it has logical comprehension. The logical comprehension of a thought consist in the thoughts contained in it. No thought can contain other thoughts.
A thought A thought can only exists in the mind. A thought must be unique and simple. “But it is plain that the knowledge that one thought is similar to or in any way truly representative of another, cannot be derived from immediate perception, but must be an hypothesis…”
Thoughts are simple mental events “What we must mean, therefore, by saying that one concept is contained in another, is that we normally represent one to be in the other; that is that we form a particular kind of judgment, of which the subject signifies one concept and the predicate the other.”
Thought are simple mental events “No thought in itself, then, no feeling in itself, contains any other, but is absolutely simply and unanalyzable.” “Every thought, however, artificial and complex, is, so far as it is immediately present, a mere sensation without parts, and therefore, in itself, without similarity to any other, but incomparable with any other and absolutely sui generis.”
The Meaning of Thought The meaning of thought comes from the representation of a series of thoughts. “The Immediate (and therefore in itself unsusceptible of mediation- the Unanalyzable, the In Explicable, the Unintellectual) runs in a continuous stream through our lives; it is the sum total of consciousness, whose mediation, which is the continuity of it, is brought about by a real effective force behind consciousness.”
Thought (1) The representative function (2) the pure denotative application. (3) the material quality
Attention-Habit- Induction Every formation of a habit is an induction, and is therefore necessarily connected with attention or abstraction.
