Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man

Seven questions in the scholastic manner, every one of them answered no, starting with whether anybody can tell an intuition from an inference.

by Charles Sanders Peirce25 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1868(aged 29)
Original language: English

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Overview

William Torrey Harris, who ran a philosophy journal out of St. Louis, had been arguing that the formal laws of logic hold no universal validity. Peirce's answer ran to three articles. This is the first, and it does not look like an answer at all: it is a set of seven questions of his own, each put in the medieval form — whether we have such and such a faculty — and each answered in the negative. Can we tell, by simply looking at a thought, whether it came from the world or from another thought? A conjuror can leave an alert witness ready to swear he saw two solid rings pushed together. Do we see a continuous field, as we suppose? Peirce tells the reader to lay a copy of the journal flat, cover one eye and move a coin across the page until it disappears into the blind spot; what we take for a smooth oval of vision is a ring the intellect quietly fills in. Is a child self-conscious before it has ever been wrong? It learns to say I, he argues, because testimony contradicts it and something has to be the thing in error. Can we think without signs? No — and since every thought is a sign that must be interpreted in a later thought, there is no first cognition to be found. Harris printed the piece in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for 1868. The sequel came in the next number; the article that finally answered Harris followed in 1869.

Key concepts

Peirce denies we have intuition — does he mean we have no hunches?

No. Intuition is a technical term here: a cognition not determined by any previous cognition, a premiss owing nothing to an earlier thought. The question the paper puts is whether we can tell, by inspecting a thought, that it is one of these. Peirce says we cannot, and offers the conjuror's rings and the blind spot as evidence.

What does Peirce mean by denying we have a power of introspection?

That there is no direct inward look. Whatever we know of our own minds we know by inference from external facts, the same way we know anything else. An emotion is read off the object that provokes it; the will is known by what it does. The inner world is a conclusion rather than a window.

What is 'the incognizable', and why deny we can conceive it?

It is whatever is supposed to lie behind cognition and be unknowable in principle. Peirce argues the phrase is empty: every conception we have arose within a cognition, so a conception of something absolutely outside cognition cannot be formed. The unknowable thing-in-itself is not refuted, it is shown to be a word with no idea behind it.

Why does he say there can be no first cognition?

Because every cognition is determined by a previous one, with no floor to stand on. A thought is a sign, and a sign means something only by being interpreted in a later thought; run the series backwards and it never reaches a start. Peirce accepts the regress rather than posting a foundation, and the Cartesian beginning goes with it.

If nothing is intuitive, do we know anything of the world directly?

Peirce is not denying perception, only the mark by which perception was supposed to announce itself. We do have cognitions caused by things outside us. What we lack is any faculty that inspects a thought and certifies that it came from the world rather than from another thought, and that certificate is what the seven questions withhold.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Nothing in the Mind Is Self-Evident

Can a thought be inspected directly to see whether it came from the world or from another thought? Seven times Peirce asks a version of that question and seven times answers no.

The conjuror's trick and the blind spot are evidence rather than decoration: perception already contains inference nobody catches being performed. A child learns to say "I" because testimony convicts it of error, so self-consciousness is something concluded from being wrong rather than a place to start. And since every thought is a sign that a later thought must interpret, no first cognition can be found — the regress runs back without a floor, and the Cartesian foundations go with it.

intuition
introspection
self-consciousness
cognition
perception
inference
infinite regress
child development
testimony
epistemology
sensation
certainty

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 25
distinct concepts: 64
by passages held, corpus-wide: #757

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “epistemology” and “intuition”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 6 concepts, joined by 15 pairings. 23 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
epistemology	intuition	5
cognition	epistemology	3
inference	perception	3
intuition	self-consciousness	3
cognition	intuition	2
cognition	perception	2
epistemology	inference	2
epistemology	perception	2
epistemology	self-consciousness	2
perception	self-consciousness	2
cognition	inference	1
cognition	self-consciousness	1
inference	intuition	1
inference	self-consciousness	1
intuition	perception	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1867 On a New List of Categories
The earliest item on this shelf, and the root of everything after it: the three-part scheme of quality, relation and representation reappears in the logic papers of 1877–78 and again in the evolutionary cosmology of the 1890s.
EN
1868 Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man you are here EN
1868 Some Consequences of Four Incapacities
The sequel, and where the argument arrives. The preceding article asked whether we have certain faculties; this one takes its four denials as premisses and follows them out to a theory of reality and of the self.
EN
1877 The Fixation of Belief
Written for readers with no philosophy behind them: the first instalment of a six-part course in the logic of science, serialised in a general-interest monthly. Everything the other 1877–78 papers do rests on the account of doubt, belief and inquiry set out here.
EN
1878 Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis
The paper that ends the series. Its central idea — guessing, treated as an inference with rules of its own rather than as a lack of them — is what Peirce kept working at for the rest of his life.
EN
1878 How to Make Our Ideas Clear
The second instalment of the 1877–78 series, nominally about a dead distinction in the logic textbooks. Two decades after it was printed, the American pragmatists took it as their charter.
EN
1878 The Doctrine of Chances
Third in the series, and the point where the account of inquiry acquires a price. Half of it is arithmetic — card packs, whist hands, insurance offices — and the other half asks whether a creature who never lives to complete a run of trials may reason from probabilities at all.
EN
1878 The Order of Nature
The religious instalment of the 1877–78 series. It reaches forward to the essay Peirce published at the end of his life: both ask what a scientific habit of mind is entitled to say about God, and they give different answers.
EN
1878 The Probability of Induction
A general magazine's readers are asked here to check a table of black and white balls for themselves. It is the most technical stretch of the 1877–78 series, and the one that takes on the probability textbooks directly.
EN
1891 The Architecture of Theories
A prospectus rather than a treatise, and the first of the five articles of Peirce's metaphysical series in Paul Carus's Monist, 1891–93 — the run in which the cosmology it sketches was built.
EN
1892 Man's Glassy Essence
Three things that do not obviously belong together — the constitution of matter, the chemistry of living tissue, and the question whether a church or a crowd can think — joined by the argument that mind and matter differ only in which side you look from.
EN
1892 The Doctrine of Necessity Examined
It stands second in the series, and it is the one that started a quarrel: Carus attacked it twice in his own journal and Peirce defended it once, so that the argument about chance occupied The Monist for fifteen months.
EN
1892 The Law of Mind
Where tychism acquires its partner. The chance of the April paper needed continuity to work in, and continuity gets its name and its defence here — the idea Peirce came to regard as the one his philosophy could least do without.
EN
1893 Evolutionary Love
Here the cosmology turns into an argument about how people ought to live: chance, necessity and love applied to the history of ideas, and to the ethics of a commercial century. It closed the Monist series.
EN
1893 What is Christian Faith?
Addressed past the theologians to two audiences at once — churchmen keeping their membership narrow, and the scientifically educated, shut out of the churches, who were talking about founding one of their own.
EN
1899 Leibniz Rewritten
The one book review on this shelf, from the years after the Coast Survey when Peirce lived partly by notices and dictionary work. It is the only piece here in which he is weighing someone else's system rather than building his own.
EN
1908 A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God
Thirty years after the logic papers and fifteen after the cosmology, Peirce turns the machinery of hypothesis on the question the 1878 series had left open.
EN

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