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===6.18. Practical Intuitions===
===6.18. Practical Intuitions===
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I use the word "intuition" in a pragmatic sense, at least, in a sense that is available to the word after the critique of pragmatism has purged it of certain vacuities that occasionally affect its use, especially the illusions of "incorrigibility" that place it beyond practical competence. In essence and etymology, and thus rehabilitated to its practical senses, an "intuition" is just an "awareness", perhaps with a certain wariness, but certainly with no aura of infallibility. Thus, when I use the word "intuition" without further qualifications, it is intended to refer to a "practical intuition" of this kind, the only kind that has a recurring usefulness, and it ought to suggest the kinds of "casual intuitions" and "fallible insights" that intelligent agents ordinarily have, and that constitute their unformalized approximate knowledge of a given domain.
The concept of "intuition" I am using here is a pragmatic one, referring to the kinds of "casual intuitions" and "fallible insights" that go to make up an agent's incompletely formalized and approximate knowledge of an object or domain. This sense of "intuition" differs from its technical meaning in various other philosophies, where it refers to a supposed modality of knowledge that involves an immediate cognition of an object, for instance, a direct perception of a fact about an object or an infallible apprehension of a fundamental truth about the world. Whatever the case, this makes an "intuition" a piece of knowledge about an object that is determined solely by something that exists outside the knower, and this can only be the "object in itself", or what is called the "transcendental object".
This involves a particular notion of what constitutes an "intuition", not any direct perception, immediate cognition, or otherwise infallible piece of knowledge that an agent might be supposed to have about an object or domain but only the modality of unformalized approximate knowledge that an agent actually has at the beginning of inquiry, with all the risks of "casual intuition" and "fallible insight" that go into it.
The pragmatic concept of intuition is at odds with its technical meaning in certain other philosophies, where an "intuition" is supposed to be an "immediate cognition" of an object, perhaps a direct perception of a fact about an object or a state of affairs, perhaps an assured apprehension of a fundamental truth about the entire world of possible experience. The inference from this "immediacy" is supposed to be that an intuition is unmediated, therefore pure, therefore infallible.
This candidate for an argument is a bit too quick, I think, so let me review its qualifications at a pettier pace. According to the way of thinking under examination, intuition is knowledge of an object that is not determined by previous knowledge of the same object. That is, an "intuition" is a piece of knowledge about an object that is determined solely by something that exists outside the knower, and this can only be the "object in itself", or what is called the "transcendental object". Accordingly, if the process that plants a bit of information in an agent's mind is not mediated by anything else under the agent's control, or by any previous step that the agent can help to determine, then the data in question is beyond correction, and thus acquires a status that is literally "incorrigible".
There is a reason why the issue of immediacy has come up at this point. If there is a truth in the idea that "all thought takes place in signs", as signs are understood in their pragmatic theory, then it means that thought, in general, and inquiry, in particular, is mediated by a process of interpretation that advances through the connotative components of one or many sign relations in the orbits of their denotative objects. Depending partly on the other assumptions that one makes about the nature of physical processes in the world, this constrains the models of embodied reasoning that one can entertain as being available to inquiry. One way of reading the implications of this "mediation" leads to the conclusion that thought is mediated by a potentially continuous process of interpretation, whose formal study requires the contemplation of potentially continuous sign relations.
Under common assumptions about the nature of causal processes, the possibility of continuity in sign relations becomes a logical necessity. This forces the distinction of "immediacy" to be recognized as a purely interpretive value, one that is attributed to a sign by a particular interpreter, and it renders the character of an "intuition" relative to the interpreter that is so impressed by it. The decision to interpret a datum of experience as an "immediate" sign is itself the result of a process of inference that says it is OK to do so, but it can be simply indicative of one interpreter's lack of interest or lack of capacity for pursuing the matter further.
The decision by an interpreter to treat a fact as "immediate", often in spite of every indication to the contrary, can still be respected as such, but there need be nothing in the fact of the matter that makes it so. Nothing about their interpretive designation affects the logical status of axioms and primitives to be regarded as unproven truths and undefined meanings, respectively, but it does mark these entitlements as privileges that can be enjoyed uncontested only within a circumscribed system of reasoning, the whole of which system remains subject to being judged in competition with contending systems.
In contrast, uncommon assumptions about causality can lead to the consideration of discrete sign relations as complete entities in and of themselves. It is on these grounds, where the conceptual possibility of continuous sign relations meets the practical necessity of discrete sign relations, that the broader philosophy of pragmatism must come to terms with the narrower constraints of computing, indeed, where both this theory and this practice must begin to reckon with the forms of bounded rationality that are available to finite information creatures.
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===6.19. Examples of Self Reference===
===6.19. Examples of Self Reference===
