Ep. 396: Peirce on Knowledge (Part Two)
episode
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
55 min
4 speakers
7 chapters
transcribed 14 hours ago
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What is the opening announcement about the new fall philosophy of mind course?
Pleased to announce my new fall course, Key Ideas in the Philosophy of Mind. It'll be kicking off the end of August. Enrollment will open soon. You'll want to reserve your spot right now. Take a look at partially examined life.com slash class.
The partially examined life, episode three hundred and ninety-six, part two. You've been discussing some essays by Charles Sanders Peirce. Questions concerning certain faculties and some consequences of the the four incapacities, which is sort of a continuation of that. So we had ended by saying that all mental processing on Purs account takes place via reasoning, via symbolic reasoning. Even if it's not symbols that we can understand as symbols, right? If when the rods and cones in the eye send particular signals, they're sending information, but it's not like an English sentence that we but somehow he wants to say that the data that is received becomes part of a premise in an argument. And the results of that, the inference from the various premises to what we experience is.
Is an inference. And you might say, well, why bring even if you say fine, they're not all deductive inferences, some of them are inductive inferences or an abduction reference to the best explanation, the best making a hypothesis about something. You still might say, but you know, doesn't logic, doesn't the idea of argumentation imply validity, right? Whereas people, right, if you're dream logic. That does not follow, oh, there's I have this premise and the conclusion falls from it. But he actually says in this second essay, Questions Concerning Certain Faculties, that even this is page seven, an apparent obstacle to the reduction of all mental action to the type of valid inferences is the existence of fallacious reasoning.
But he wants to say, look, we're not talking about sound arguments where all the premises are true. We're just talking about getting to conclusion from premises. So when something appears to be an irrational leap, it's because there's some premise that is being held unconsciously, whatever, that makes that make sense. So if you're talking about dream logic and I see one of uh Freud's examples. There was something about a donkey and my father. I can't rem Maybe maybe In any case, if I make some sort of what seems like an irrational leap between I see a donkey and then this donkey becomes my father, well, there is some underlying belief, something that has put itself in there as a premise of that particular cognition that is pushing me logically toward the second image from the first one.
So all these associations of images, they're not just random. Random, you know, as you might think if you just looked at the conscious phenomena, but on Purse's account, they have to be backed up by some sort of underlyingly held additional premises.
Yeah. I mean it's unclear how you ground an associationist psychology in the case. They're not premises. But in the strictest sense. And he doesn't try to tell us at length how you would ground or at all how you might ground associationist. Right. So for Locke or Hume, what are the three associations? Resemblance. Contiguity. I think he talks about those in here.
How do Peirce’s essays connect mental processing to symbolic inference?
Well he does, yeah. But where does he talk about it? Causality is the third one. So it's page sixteen. Right. So let's just read that a little bit. If this be the case, what goes by the name of the association of images is in reality an association of judgments, right? So he is trying to reduce association to inference, right? Because Mark, what you were giving is a, you know, prime example in Freud of association. I just uh Have some kind of free association from one image to another and it's completely it's illogical except that the horse comes to represent my father, my fear of horses is represented with my fear of my father, something like the affect just jumps from one thing to another because of some contingent event in my life.
All right. But here he's gonna say, but it would be equally true to say that signs denote what they do on the three principles of resemblance, contiguity and causality.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the opening announcement about the new fall philosophy of mind course?
0:00–3:31
2
How do Peirce’s essays connect mental processing to symbolic inference?
3:31–15:08
3
Why does Peirce reduce association of ideas to inference and signs?
15:08–21:57
4
Do we have an intuitive self‑consciousness according to Peirce?
21:57–31:29
5
Is our knowledge of the internal world derived from external observation?
31:29–40:07
6
How does Peirce explain volition as a form of focused attention?
40:07–50:02
7
Can we think without signs, and what does that imply for idealism?
50:02–55:17
Speakers
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