I think of knowledge as familiarity with things. Our familiarity with things is a human familiarity and in that generic sense interpretive. Individuals' familiarities with things are subtly unique to each individual, so are therefore even more specifically interpretive.

No knowledge (except God's if there be such) is absolute; or, in other words outside of all interpretive contexts.

The essence of interpretation is creation. All that is created is created within the limits of the creating. — tim wood

What would be key to the Peircean semiotic view I'm expressing is that interpretations actually have to live in the world. So they are not free creations ... in the long run at least. To survive, they must prove themselves useful habits. They must stabilise a working relationship that is then defined as being about a self in a world.

So the self-interested aspect of the epistemology does not have to collapse back towards idealism. Pragmatism presumes that the modelling relation only exists because it makes sense. The world is out there. And that is how it can be a possibility that a selfhood can develop which is taking its own purpose-laden point of view.

I know that 2+2 = (is) 4, and that the stone on my desk just is a stone.

The only way to reconcile this knowledge (that I take as certain) with its essential createdness is to suppose that as knowledge it comes into being - is created - when I think of it. — tim wood

Again, Peirce would stress that thinking in some fashion is not a fresh creation of every encounter with the world but instead the development of a reasonable habit. It is an action-oriented view of epistemology. And it is through our minimisation of accidents or mistakes that we move towards the best possible habits of interpretance.

So yes, every encounter is the chance to make shit up in some random fashion. We need the power to hypothesise to get things started. But mindfulness is a state of established habit. We emerge as a self by building up the steadiness of a habitual point of view.

So recognising stones as stones is the kind of habit that we develop. Now a "stone" is a concept laden with plenty of self-interest. We can do things with stones that we can't do with marshmallows, pebbles or cats. If I want to smash open an oyster, my mind will leap towards the idea of finding something that is enough like a stone. I won't look at a cat or marshmallow and feel I have the solution to the problem in hand.

The whole point of pragmatism would be not to collapse epistemology into either of the usual categories of idealism or realism. Both those presume the knowing self just exists. What is in debate is whether the world also just exists as it is experienced.

Pragmatism instead takes the psychological route of accepting that selves emerge as models of the world. So the world exists - in some concrete sense. And the mind emerges as a collection of interpretive habits. The less appreciated fact that follows is that the mind then exists by virtue of an epistemic cut - its ability to read the world as an unwelt or system of signs. Things do take an idealistic bent by the end as we very much live within our own psychic creation.

Every "stone" I see is a token of some notion of "stone-hood". If I need to crack open an oyster, I will recognise stone-hood in my wife's golf club. She might then see something very different if she catches me messing around with her precious nine iron.

Knowledge of arithmetic is then reflective of semiosis taken to a higher level of abstraction. Ordinary language developed to encode a collective social view of the world and hence a collective social conception of human selfhood. We are socially constructed through the habits of speech. We all lean to think of the world in the same essential way when it comes to stones, golf clubs, cats and marshmallows. Words are the way we structure a generalised human relation to the world and so arrive at a generic selfhood shared at a cultural level.

But as humans, we have moved on to add a mathematico-logical level of semiosis to our sense of selfhood. We invented a language based on numbers - pure generic symbols. So this is a new epistemic game with its own set of rules. Ordinary language is meant to be all about living in the world as a self-interested tribe of humans. Symbolic language is the attempt to step outside that zone of obvious self-interest and talk about the world in a disinterested or objective fashion.

So it is its own game. It relies on a strict separation of the notions of quality and quantity - the generality of some essence and then the particularity of the consequent acts of measurement. The scientific viewpoint, in short. Once I have a notion of stonehood as "a thing in itself, a quality of the world", then I can start counting individual stones.

Of course, the essence of a stone is a hard to define thing. But the trick is that a mathematico-logical level of semiosis is based on an active rejection of any personal interest - golf clubs can't count as my desire to crack oysters is clearly "too subjective". Instead, objective knowledge has to be based on the quantification of the most universal kinds of measureable qualities - like size, shape, weight, density, structure, etc. So the right attitude to classify stones as stones is to establish constraints, like a stone has fall with in some band of weight, solidity, size, translucency, or other generalised "physical" properties.

The obvious idea is that we are giving up our clearly self-interested view of the world to adopt one based on the most abstracted and unselfish possible point of view. Physics can't deny the essential facts of our stone - that is a fragment of rock, worn reasonably smooth, and of a size that is between a pebble and boulder. And from the definition of one stone, we can find other stones. Then we can apply the principle of identity and get right into all the arithmetical and logical operations which shift individuated things about in atomistically-deductive patterns.

So epistemology exists on multiple levels of semiosis. And it is in recognising the self-interest inherent in an epistemic relation with the world that we can in turn construct a formally self-disinterested level of semiosis. Epistemology itself can be extremitised now so that we live with a dramatic contrast between our subjective knowing - as might be expressed through poetry, art, and other cultural forms - and our objective knowing, which is the business of science and maths.

So we have actually constructed a deep conflict in which there are two paths to true knowledge, it appears. But again, the pragmatist will point out that we, as humans, are still having to give priority to actually having to live in the real world. Both the subjectivist and the objectivist have all their pretty rhetoric about their ways of knowing. Yet both are still bound by the fact that knowing is about acting, and all that results from having acted. So both the objective and the subjective extremes are going to be "found out" in practice.

The habits that survive that test are the habits that did in some sense work. The selfhood that resulted was one adapted to "its" world. Knowledge wasn't either found or created in the process. But a state of knowing - a state of interpretance - could be observed to persist in a self-sustaining fashion. It did the job.

what it seems to say: that there is such a thing as interpretive knowledge — tim wood

The depiction of knowledge as 'interpretive' is of a much more modernist or post-modernist attitude. And I'm not saying that to 'drag everything back to Aristotle' as I was said to have done in an earlier post. It's simply that by bringing up the Greek definitions, you're harking back to that, so it might be worth dwelling further on that perspective.

It is true, as you say, that a distinction is made between episteme and pistis/ doxa. You might recall that in the various Socratic dialogues about the nature of knowledge, the distinction was often said between what one believed to be the case, and what one knew for certain, and the importance of distinguishing them. This was characteristic especially of those dialogues where Socrates was trying to arrive at a definition of (for example ) justice or goodness. A frequent theme in these dialogues is that so-and-so says he knows what 'justice' is, but it turns out that he only knows this or that instance of it. What Socrates wants to ascertain, is what justice really is, not simply in terms of an instance of it. (And the same is said for truth, piety, and so on.)

There's an interesting current classics scholar, Katya Vogt, whose book Belief and Truth discusses

a Socratic intuition about the difference between belief and knowledge. Beliefs, doxai, are deficient cognitive attitudes. In believing something, one accepts some content as true without knowing that it is true; one holds something to be true that could turn out to be false. Since our actions reflect what we hold to be true, holding beliefs is potentially harmful for oneself and others. Accordingly, beliefs are ethically worrisome and even, in the words of Plato’s Socrates, “shameful.” As I argue, this is a serious philosophical proposal.

One point about the relationship between knowledge, belief and action becomes clear: the issues that were debated in ancient philosophy tended to have an ethical dimension - that right action required right knowledge, not 'mere belief'. But that was never really discussed in terms of very specific propositions but very broad-brush; it was long before the 'divorce of fact and value' that Hume picked up on.

What would be key to the Peircean semiotic view I'm expressing is that interpretations actually have to live in the world. — apokrisis

But Pierce in turn derived some of that from his readings of Kant, Schelling et al. Knowledge is situated, contextual, and so on; facts themselves are not absolute because they're located in an interpretive framework. It all goes back to Kant, IMO.

But in any case, aside from pragmatism and concern with what works, there's the issue of knowledge of the good, the true, from a perspective other than the pragmatic - something to set the moral compass against.

It all goes back to Kant, IMO. — Wayfarer

Whatever floats your boat.

But in any case, aside from pragmatism and concern with what works, there's the issue of knowledge of the good, the true, from a perspective other than the pragmatic - something to set the moral compass against. — Wayfarer

Is there? Maybe you just define pragmatism in terms of actual selfishness rather than a collective self-interest. I say that morality represents what works for our collectivised selfhood. And what that would be - in terms of our habits of action - is something we collectively would aspire to know

So you are pretending that pragmatism seeks to rule out what it in fact aims to explain.

So you are pretending that pragmatism seeks to rule out what it in fact aims to explain. — apokrisis

You mean, it seeks to explain ethics in terms of the collective good? The CCP sure would like that.

The CCP sure would like that. — Wayfarer

The Chinese Communist Party? What are you smoking today.

Again, you are just wanting to wheel out your standard attack on Scientism. And if a Pragmatist wanders into your sights, you are going to light him up because that's close enough for you.

(What was I saying about how we construct unwelts to legitmate our habits of action?)

What would be key to the Peircean semiotic view I'm expressing is that interpretations actually have to live in the world. So they are not free creations ... in the long run at least. To survive, they must prove themselves useful habits. They must stabilise a working relationship that is then defined as being about a self in a world. — apokrisis

Do you argue that it's the world we live in? Or the created world of reality? The distinction being that if it's reality, then knowledge - interpretations that work in reality - are never quite about the world. That would leave a troublesome gap. I buy Heidegger, in that I think we're already in the world, and that would eliminate the gap. But Heidegger's is the world we're (always already) thrown into and thus neither solves, resolves nor dissolves Kant's gap between the perceived world and the world in itself. Which is fundamental? I think Heidegger's has temporal priority, but Kant's is logical priority. I can say, "this is a hammer!" But Kant's question as to how I know it is a hammer, with the corollary that I can't know, is still there. If I understand your posts, you argue that Peirce does resolve this. Peirce's does indeed seem to be an account that works and makes sense, but the Kantian question seems still to endure. Kant a priori, Peirce a posteriori.

So we have actually constructed a deep conflict in which there are two paths to true knowledge, it appears. But again, the pragmatist will point out that we, as humans, are still having to give priority to actually having to live in the real world.... [k]nowing is about acting, and all that results from having acted. So both the objective and the subjective extremes are going to be "found out" in practice.

The habits that survive that test are the habits that did in some sense work. The selfhood that resulted was one adapted to "its" world. Knowledge wasn't either found or created in the process. But a state of knowing - a state of interpretance - could be observed to persist in a self-sustaining fashion. It did the job. — apokrisis

This moves towards a radical (imo) destruction of "knowledge" as a term meaningful in itself, or at least away from any naive idea of knowledge I might have had.

I cannot rid myself of is the notion of bias in the form of the presuppositions that necessarily are part of the building materials of "interpretance." Or in short, that such is just an obscuring accommodation that happens to work. Or maybe that's why it's called pragmatism!

Do you argue that it's the world we live in? Or the created world of reality? — tim wood

My argument is triadic. So it incorporates all three things of the self, its world, and then the world.

There is no "we" apart from as an emergent aspect of the world we create. Psychologically, sensory experience comes into focus as a felt distinction between what is self and what is other. That attribution is how we arise - within a world we create.

Then this is going on within the actual world to which it is an embodied response. So there is the world out there, and then the us in here. Except the us in here is part of the sensory model. Stones and hands are examples of the model's meaningful distinctions.

So of course there really is a real world. But psychologically, what we need to experience is a world with us in it. So the real world is not yellow or blue. But our psychological models make sense when "we" feel we exist within a world of coherent objects. And having colour is a great way to manufacture that object coherence. We can see a banana because of the way it constantly pops out of cluttered visual landscape.

The distinction being that if it's reality, then knowledge - interpretations that work in reality - are never quite about the world. That would leave a troublesome gap. — tim wood

But that is the point. The gap is not troublesome but functional. It is the symbolism that frees us from the world as it actually is and thus allows "us" to actually exist.

Why should a banana look yellow? The yellowness of yellow is such an arbitrary fact when you think about it. Like sweet being sweet, it is the arbitrary nature of qualia that convinces people of the hard problem of consciousness.

But my approach is saying that the arbitrariness of the symbol is the point. That is why symbolisation can work. Whether we shake hands or kiss cheeks, a friendly greeting is a friendly greeting. What matters is that there is a symbolic gesture to anchor the psychological reality.

What matters in sensory discrimination is that the brain have a dramatic reaction to what counts in terms of making an ecological difference. So if I want to see fruit in a tree, then I want to see yellow and red as a violent contrast to green, even if - physically speaking, in terms of wavelength - they are only fractionally different in energy frequency. To see red as the diametric opposite of green - which is the way colour channel opponency works - is completely untrue of the world as it actually is, and yet hugely psychologically convenient.

And that is the kind of freedom from veracity which is at the base of actual "knowledge". You can't symbolise an understanding if you are tied to simply trying to re-present what actually exists. You need to break the physical connection of the world to start forming a semiotic modelling relation with it.

So the model is always pragmatically about the world - it always has to live in it. But it is always also a model. It is not based on direct truth or faithful recreation. Even at the level of basic perception, it has to be an efficient narration. It is the construction of some interpretable system of sign - of which "we" emerge as the consistent and persisting narrative core.

I buy Heidegger, in that I think we're already in the world, and that would eliminate the gap. — tim wood

As best as I understand Heidegger, he goes with the fact that experience is for us an umwelt. So it is both a psychological construct and also a lived response to an actual world.

That sets up the epistemic dilemma. And the solution is not to worry about the gap but to realise that the epistemic cut is how we could even exist. We only arise because interpretation is what it is all about. Once a system develops some habit or interpretance, then there is an "interpreter" in play. The self emerges as a product of the model - the other to the other that is the world.

But Kant's question as to how I know it is a hammer, with the corollary that I can't know, is still there. — tim wood

Yes. Kant brought the psychological dilemma to the fore. But he left people feeling it was a problem - the bug and not the feature.

Peirce's does indeed seem to be an account that works and makes sense, but the Kantian question seems still to endure. — tim wood

Again, the question is answered if the knowledge gap is not the bug but the feature. And modern psychology would say the semiotic view puts the Kantian concerns safely to bed.

Pragmatism is about being able to accept irreducible uncertainty as part of the game - the game being to minimise uncertainty. If you still yearn for absolute knowledge about anything, you are stuck in olden times. :)

This moves towards a radical (imo) destruction of "knowledge" as a term meaningful in itself, or at least away from any naive idea of knowledge I might have had.

I cannot rid myself of is the notion of bias in the form of the presuppositions that necessarily are part of the building materials of "interpretance." Or in short, that such is just an obscuring accommodation that happens to work — tim wood

So where is your yearning for absolute certainty coming from? Why is relative sureness not enough? Why is the standard human ability to operate on partial and uncertain information not in fact a huge advantage?

A computer, as a logical machine, is only as good as its certainties. Garbage in, garbage out. But organisms swim freely in shifting uncertain worlds and thrive. Mistakes are how they learn. Knowledge is always provisional.

Nature has its epistemology. And it is pragmatic.

You use "psychology" or variant six times. I think of psychology as being an endeavor of observation. I have in another thread acknowledged that some, by now perhaps many, psychologists are scientists that do science, but I still hold the notion that Psychology is an Aristotelian "science" that just is no science in a modern sense, but is rather observation followed by "explanation." I odn't suppose you do this. But I wonder if your philosophy is infected. Pragmatism, as I read your posts, is a model, an explanation. And it works. But at a price. You seem to surrender whatever must be surrendered in favour of pragmatism.

So where is your yearning for absolute certainty coming from? Why is relative sureness not enough? Why is the standard human ability to operate on partial and uncertain information not in fact a huge advantage? — apokrisis

Perhaps you were thinking of "absolute ground." I don't look for absolute ground, but I'm absolutely certain that with respect to certain axioms, that 2+2=4, and more besides. It's all a giant if-then, but within the if-then we can have our certainty.

But in any case, aside from pragmatism and concern with what works, there's the issue of knowledge of the good, the true, from a perspective other than the pragmatic - something to set the moral compass against. — Wayfarer

Your reply to this seem dismissive - maybe it's not. But the implication is that for a pragmatist the end justifies the means. From any moral stand, this just is not true. The end can justify some means - a whole other proposition. Which is yours?

From any moral stand, this just is not true. — tim wood

What is meant by 'any moral stand'? What is a typical instance of 'a moral stand'? How do you escape relativism?

If you were part of a political party which doesn't have intrinsic concern for minority rights - like for instance, the Chinese Communist Party - then you might justify the detention and brainwashing of minority ethnic groups on the basis of the 'cause of social harmony' and appeals to 'the greater good'. Whereas most of us would see that as morally repugnant - I certainly do. But who is right, and why? Where did the notion of 'universal human rights' originate? I think the historical answer to that is that it developed as foundational in Western political philosophy, because of the Judeo-Christian concept of 'the sanctity of the individual. So now we generally assume that this as a 'sacred principle' without necessarily understanding the original rationale on which it was founded (and whilst also the very category of 'the sacred' is called into question in secular culture.)

There is nothing wrong with pragmatism, as far as it goes. But it doesn't, in itself, contain such a principle. We might assume 'the sanctity of human life' in law, but is such a concept defensible in terms of modern analytical philosophy? I suppose you could argue that pragmatically, it is useful to treat all people as equal before the law. Perhaps that might be arguable. Or maybe we can just go with the assumption of the sanctity of the individual which has been bequeathed us by tradition.

They're very tough questions - and just the kinds of questions which, I say. were themes in the Socratic dialogues, which were very much suggested by your deployment of the terms 'episteme' and 'pistis'. So I'm not being at all dismissive - I'm trying to draw out what I think is an underlying issue in your OP with respect to the kind of question you're asking.

The point you raised here:

I know that 2+2 = (is) 4, and that the stone on my desk just is a stone. — tim wood

Seems to me a gesture towards 'foundationalism': I know some things for sure (these being examples) - so why doesn't this apply across the board? Why aren't we always certain in this way? You're wondering why it is you know some things for certain, and yet how it can be that knowledge is still, as you say, 'interpretive' and where 'pistis' enters the story. And I think they're very good and fundamental questions of philosophy. I'm trying to discuss them in the terms in which they've been posed.

Recall the Platonic epistemology specifically this table.

The other point I mentioned in passing, but I think I should spell out, is the importance of Kant. It was Kant who came to understand the 'interpretive' nature of epistemology. Nowadays this is something else that has become part of the culture, as Kant's influence is pervasive. But Kant sought to reconcile empirical fact, a priori reasoning and the integration of all of these with our overall 'search for meaning'.

You use "psychology" or variant six times. — tim wood

Yes, to emphasise that there is a brain involved. So we know experience of the world is indirect in that it involves the kind of cognitive processing that science reveals.

Pragmatism, as I read your posts, is a model, an explanation. And it works. But at a price. You seem to surrender whatever must be surrendered in favour of pragmatism. — tim wood

You say there is a price to pay. But what exactly? What am I having to surrender? Let's see if it is something I actually would value.

Are we talking about absolute certainty? If so, surely not to have to worry about perfection is a form of liberation.

I'm absolutely certain that with respect to certain axioms, that 2+2=4, and more besides. It's all a giant if-then, but within the if-then we can have our certainty. — tim wood

Sure. We can imagine perfect machines that are so constrained in their actions that there are no possible uncertainties in their outcomes. So you can have your absolute certainty about physics-free syntax. If you say the bishop only moves on the diagonal, the bishop only ever moves on the diagonal.

It is the step between your syntactical reality and your physical reality that becomes problematic. Is nature always so linear that 2+2=4 even as a modelling description of some set of natural events? If you measure a coastline with a ruler, don't you get a different result depending on the size of that ruler?

So the realm in which you can claim any absolute knowledge is a highly artificial one - our human inclination to imagine a world of perfect, rule-bound, machines. The lack of uncertainty is precisely what was made axiomatic. It was an input, not an output.

But would you stick your neck out and say physical reality is itself axiomatically certain? Quantum mechanics tells us it is not. The main axiom of an absolutely deterministic mechanics - the principle of locality, or local realism - has had to be abandoned.

I suppose you could argue that pragmatically, it is useful to treat all people as equal before the law. — Wayfarer

What you seem to be ignoring is that there is no disinterestedly rational justification for not treating all people as equal before the law. Coupled with that is the fact that no one who isn't already in a position of power and/or privelege would want to live in a society where all people were not treated as equal before the law.

Well, in the USA, where I currently am, there are plenty of disparities about how various populations are treated before the law. Poor and black get treated vastly differently to rich and white. But the question I'm raising is - why is that bad? You could argue, and people do, that the wealthy contribute more - they create jobs and wealth, they are 'upstanding members of society', they deserve different treatment. I'm not saying I agree with them, but what are the grounds for saying they're wrong?

I'm not saying I agree with them, but what are the grounds for saying they're wrong? — Wayfarer

The wealthy, the powerful the famous and the priveleged do get different treatment, because they are accorded more respect for their socially beneficial accomplishments or scorn for their exploitations. Their wealth and or notoriety just generally buys them more attention, both positive and negative.

But we are talking about equality before the law; an entirely different issue. Equality before the law must be the default, because to claim special status would require an actual argument; and the argument would need to be disinterestedly rational. Do you know of any such argument?

The question I was asking was where does the assumption of universal human rights (of which equality before the law is one aspect) originate? This was in response to Tim Wood invoking 'any moral stand'. I'm trying to show that the moral stand which he's assuming was actually derived from Christian philosophy.

Now you seem to be trying to change the subject. In any case, I don't believe that the notion of human equality is unique to Christianity.The assumption of universal human rights originates from the lack of any disinterestedly rational argument against it. In other words, the only arguments against it issue from the perspectives of those who have a vested interest in denying such universal rights. That all people should have equal rights must be the default position unless a convincing universal (unbiased) argument can be found to refute it. Do you know of any such argument?

I take your point(s). I think you've tossed the baby with the bathwater - a lack of proportion. Not far from where I live the WW2 battleship Massachusetts is moored. There's a quantum possibility it will appear complete in my driveway. Is that the uncertainty that grounds your apparent abandonment of the possibility of any real certainty?

And QM can in turn quantify that actual uncertainty about the battleship’s location to many decimal places.

So as I said early on, uncertainty is nothing to lose sleep over if you have the kind of knowledge that minimises it.

It’s not me that is throwing out the important part of what has been said here.

So, as a pragmatist you acknowledge that there are plenty of things that we can, pragmatically, take as absolutely certain, from a pragmatic standpoint?

Question: I understand "pragmatic" as being very close in meaning to, "as a practical matter." Fair enough?

Another question: about how many decimal places do you reckon it might take to express the quantum uncertainty of a whole battleship's location. I'm thinking a lot.

What is meant by 'any moral stand'? What is a typical instance of 'a moral stand'? How do you escape relativism? — Wayfarer

By being a human being. Do I really have to expand on this?

So is taking something as absolutely certain the same as believing it to be minimally uncertain?

The essence of pragmatism is a willingness to act on beliefs without requiring the absolute absence of doubt. You are doing what is reasonable having applied a process of reasoning. It is the scientific method in a nutshell.

I am absolutely certain the Battleship will remain in Fall River, Massachusetts, at least insofar as quantum movement is concerned. "Minimally uncertain" covers a lot of ground, but because you are not MU, I will trust we're on the same page with this.

Short reply: yes and amen.

This was in response to Tim Wood invoking 'any moral stand'. I'm trying to show that the moral stand which he's assuming was actually derived from Christian philosophy. — Wayfarer

Probably. My relation to Christianity is akin to a fish's to water. The proposition I have in mind is that there are conceivable acts that every person would say was wrong. Given this, relativism disappears. Deny this and everything is right. Can you construct it differently?

By being a human being. Do I really have to expand on this? — tim wood

The proposition I have in mind is that there are conceivable acts that every person would say was wrong. Given this, relativism disappears. Deny this and everything is right. Can you construct it differently? — tim wood

The fact that 'everyone knows [insert heinous act] is wrong' does not constitute an ethical philosophy.

Not far from where I live the WW2 battleship Massachusetts is moored. There's a quantum possibility it will appear complete in my driveway. Is that the uncertainty that grounds your apparent abandonment of the possibility of any real certainty? — tim wood

My reading of 'uncertainty' is NOT that battleships will miraculously teleport, but that when you drill down to the so-called 'fundamental constituents of matter', then they are found to be surprisingly indeterminate. I mean, you would expect them to be concrete entities, as they are, supposedly, that from which everything is constituted; but it hasn't turned out that way.

My reading of 'uncertainty' is NOT that battleships will miraculously teleport, but that when you drill down to the so-called 'fundamental constituents of matter', then they are found to be surprisingly indeterminate. — Wayfarer

Indeed, at that level, but by the time you get up to molecules, much less coffee cups and battleships, pretty much everything behaves. Btw, if the battleship does teleport, it won't be a miracle, just extremely unlikely.

The fact that 'everyone knows [insert heinous act] is wrong' does not constitute an ethical philosophy. — Wayfarer

Not a very elaborate or sophisticated philosophy perhaps, but one in which relativism bites granite.

I'd say knowledge is "Very justified belief" and we added "true" there so we can pretend to know more than others