I wanted to change gears, but only slightly. I think there is perhaps a bit of miscommunication due to rather different approaches to the problem of epistemology. I tend to see epistemology through a lens of semiotics and hermeneutics. That is, in terms of how we draw inferences from tokens as part of a sign process. Since hermeneutics and semiotics isn't really focused on typically among most philosophy cores and since I find it a rather interesting topic, I thought I'd write a bit on it.
Allow me to begin with a quote from Peirce that I think sets things up rather well.
The being of a symbol consists in the real fact that something surely will be experienced if certain conditions be satisfied. Namely, it will influence the thought and conduct of its interpreter. Every word is a symbol. Every sentence is a symbol. Every book is a symbol. Every representamen depending upon conventions is a symbol. Just as a photograph is an index having an icon incorporated into it, that is, excited in the mind by its force, so a symbol may have an icon or an index incorporated into it, that is, the active law that it is may require its interpretation to involve the calling up of an image, or a composite photograph of many images of past experiences, as ordinary common nouns and verbs do; or it may require its interpretation to refer to the actual surrounding circumstances of the occasion of its embodiment, like such words as that, this, I, you, which, here, now, yonder, etc. Or it may be pure symbol, neither iconic nor indicative, like the words and, or, of, etc. (Peirce, CP 4.447).
Within semiotics one of the main tasks is to figure out the relationship between what we call intuition and interpretation. That is when we encounter many phenomena we don't consciously interpret them. So when I see the word "cat" on a blackboard I don't consciously think what it means. Rather part of my "perception" (or what is given to my consciousness) includes the content of cat as a meaning of the marks on the board. (The tokens) But how does this happen? Thus semiotics is wrapped up with cognitive science in many ways.
While I don't agree with some things he has written, Umberto Eco has done a lot of work in this regard. His studies have been on the borders of semiotics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, literary criticism and cognitive science. A book well worth reading is Eco's 
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language which covers a lot of the interesting ground on the border of these movements. Eco, largely following Peirce, argues that the art of interpretation is much like the art of detective work in the stereotypical crime novels. This detective logic ends up being what Peirce calls abduction.
Abduction is one of Peirce's three kinds of logic and arguably the most important. It roughly is the process of hypothesis forming such as one finds in science. Peirce calls it a "guessing instinct." The logic is roughly why we make reasonable guesses rather than random ones and is wrapped up in how Peirce conceived of Darwinian evolution. The details don't concern us, but roughly this is a logic of making good guesses. Obviously we find this in the sciences, for instance. However many have taken abduction to be the ground of hermeneutics. Thus, for example, Chomsky applies abduction not just to scientific discovery but to linguistic acquisition. Our very ability to learn language is thus wrapped up in this logic. And not just the formal sense of language as one finds in our natural languages but our social development and our ability to successfully interact with our environment.
What is key in abduction is the fact our guesses aren't arbitrary or random. Rather we have the skill (which obviously varies from person to person and situation to situation) to make reasonably successful guesses. This is important because most of what we "know" is rather vague. By vague I mean undeveloped. We know but in part. Clearly scientific knowledge is like this (say the question of what an electron is as one moves from the late 19th century through the modern era) but Peirce believes everything is vague. As the universe evolves the consciousnesses in it develop knowledge. Thus we move from vagueness to more determinate understanding. Of course this process can be through a series of steps forward and backwards. It need not be a process of continuing convergence as in say scientific realism.
What is key is that once we've formed these educated guesses is that we continue a process of interpretation. This is sometimes called the hermeneutic circle. That's because the process of moving towards a determinate and correct interpretation always involves a return to ones starting point, only with more knowledge. We make a guess and work out the implications. Then we test the guess to see if it and its implications line up with the facts as known. We create new tests to add to our knowledge. We then may decide it has passed these tests, that it needs some refinement, or needs to be discarded entirely. We then start that same process of testing and implication working again. And of course as we do this we don't stick just with a single interpretation. Rather we see that this interpretation rests upon dozens or more other interpretations, each of which needs to be worked out in the same manner. And as we modify those interpretations we may need to reformulate more early interpretations that rest upon it.
So hermeneutics is this spiral of interpretation as guess, interpretation as a working out of meanings, and an interpretation as testing.
An other quote from Peirce might be in order to demonstrate how this hermeneutic circle is an ongoing practical process.
Looking out of my window this lovely spring morning I see an azalea in full bloom. No, no! I do not see that; though that is the only way I can describe what I see. That is a proposition, a sentence, a fact; but what I perceive is not proposition, sentence, fact, but only an image, which I make intelligible in part by means of a statement of fact. This statement is abstract; but what I see is concrete. I perform an abduction when I do so much as express in a sentence anything I see. The truth is that the whole fabric of our knowledge is one matted felt of pure hypothesis that is confirmed and refined by induction. Not the smallest advance in knowledge can be made beyond the stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at every step. (MS 692)
This is part of a series of post relating issues of epistemology to LDS thought. I'm primarily taking a fairly Peircean approach but will hopefully touch on many issues. There are several posts related to this topic, listed below.
Mormon Epistemology: An introduction of the problem and why it is a problem.
Mormon Epistemology 2: A brief overview of the typical critique of the LDS position. In the comments I get at checks and balances and why I think "burning in a bosom" is largely irrelevant to the question at hand.
Reasoning and Reasons Giving: An important distinction to understand for the debate.
Fixation of Belief: I introduce the Peircean approach to the problem of epistemology.
Book of Mormon Evidence: The evidence for and against including spiritual experience. A rather involve and diverse set of discussions in the comments.
What Makes a Sign?: More discussion of Peirce and why I think it undermines the argument from emotion.
Hermeneutics and Semiotics 1?: Slight aside to explain hermeneutics, semiotics and abduction. I see these as key to understanding religious knowing.
Failure of Religious Experiences: When do religious experiences fail and how do we tell?
Alma 32: Discussion of what Alma's seed analogy is discussing.
This excerpt from the CP is probably worth reading for those interested. It is "Abduction and Perceptual Judgments" and goes into a little more depth on the issue.
I should note that I've not dealt with hermeneutics in Continental thought. Obviously hermeneutics is of central importance with say Heidegger or Derrida as well.
Although I may only be on the fringes of understanding
what is said here, I find all of this so interesting.
I sometimes contemplate how trying to articulate what
we see obscures the actual experience. Also, I think
there are those who may see life and its textures more rich
richly than I and are not able to put things into words
in an intelligble way.
I do know that if I try to actively describe a scene
in a poetic sense that I become more aware of things
that I do not normaly take note of in a scene. I
think that I have impairments in my right brain that
make me less visual than the average person in what
I take in from stimuli from the environment. Also,
my brain damage makes it such that I have very little
of a mental map. But stuff that is verbal like this,
I can sort of wrap my mind around.
I took a class that had the main premise about how
having a lack of consciousness of abstracting or in
other words being unaware that the meanings of words
are arbitary causes neurosis or worse in the
population. The father of this file of semantics
would go so far to say that our structe of language
and the use of is in our declarative sentences in such
a way that we are not aware adds to these problems.
For example, we say this is a chair when the meaning
is in us of the word chair and the object in nature
is not actually a chair. It was very far out there,
but it made me think.
Well, I do appreciate your work here although having
never taken a course in philosphy, it is often hard to
follow a lot of what you have to say. I have not
checked in for quite some time so maybe if I did I
would eventually gain some background.
I can read things and have all sorts of intuitive
insights into things that I barely understand. So
maybe I will add my two cents here and there and
it might actually make sense to somebody.
This is like having a social life for me. :)
Clark [Piercean abduction] We make a guess and work out the implications. Then we test the guess to see if it and its implications line up with the facts as known. We create new tests to add to our knowledge. We then may decide it has passed these tests, that it needs some refinement, or needs to be discarded entirely. We then start that same process of testing and implication working again.
Antonio Demasio describes a test that is designed to indicate the workings of somatic markers to solve problems. It describes where the ‘guess’ that Pierce describes comes from.
In the basic experiment, the subject, known as the “Player” sits in front of four decks of cards labeled A, B, C, D. The player is given a loan of $2,000 (play money but looking like the real thing) and told the goal of the game he is about to play in to lose as little as possible. Play consists of turning cards, one at a time, from any of the four decks, until the experimenter says stop. The Player thus does not know the total number of turns required to end the game. The Player is also told that turning any and every card will result in earning a sum of money, and that every now and then turning some cards will result in both earning money and having to pay a sum of money to the experimenter. Neither the amount of gain or loss in any card, nor the cards’ connection to a specific deck, nor the order of their appearance is disclosed at the outset. The amount to be earned or paid with a given card is disclosed only after the card is turned. No other instruction is provided. The tally of how much has been earned or lost at any point is not disclosed, and the subject is not allowed to keep written notes
The turning of any card in deck A and B pays a handsome $100, while the turning of any card in decks C and D only pays $50. Cards keep being turned on any deck, and quite unpredictably, certain cards in deck A and B (the $100-paying decks) require the Player to make a sudden high payment, some times as much as $1,200. Likewise, certain cards in decks C and D (the $50-paying decks) also require a payment, but the sums are much smaller, less than $100 on the average. These undisclosed rulels are never changed. Unbeknownst to the Player, the game will be terminated after 100 plays. There is now way for the Player to predict, as the outset, what will happen, and no way to keep in mind a precise tally of gains and losses as the game proceeds.
What normal people usually do is to sample from the decks looking for patterns and clues. Then they shift to A and B decks (high gain, high risk decks). Then after about 30 turns they shift to the C and D decks and remain there for the rest of the game. They are then hooked up to a polygraph and two parallel sets of data were collected. The choices the subjects were making and the skin conductance they generated as play progressed.
At the beginning of play all the polygraph collected was responses to wins and losses and their magnitude. Some time after play had been underway, the polygraph began to pick up changes in skin conductance just prior or at the time a card was picked up. As play continued the skin conductance reading increased in intensity. As I mentioned elsewhere, the emotional implanting is done in the rhinal cortex just prior to the entrice of the experience of winning and losing enters the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus process not only the event and it’s somatic markers but also the spatial component of the event. Thus the hippocampus is recording the wins and loses and their somatic markers but also which deck the cards were drawn from. So in a sense the brain is conducting a risk factor analysis that we are completely unaware of. At some point in the intensity we become aware results of the calculation. It comes to us as a hunch or as Pierce would say a guess. It is at this point that Pierces abductive reasoning comes into play.
It seems to me, however, that this is the result when the need to solve a problem is the issue. This analysis of somatic markers goes on all the time as the brain scans memory. Even when a problem isn’t identified. This we can build up as sense of reality without including abduction or any other reasoning process. When the intensity becomes strong enough it can makes its way into consciousness. We now have the feeling of knowledge but we aren’t sure where that knowledge came from. This would explain why we say “I know it is real but I can’t tell you how I know.” This should not be confused with ‘truth’. This is making real to the individual. The process is one of events and emotional imprinting and not of abduction or any other method of reasoning. The processing is done in the non-conscious and makes the result conscious by intensity.
Rich
That's quite interesting Rich. I have a feeling abduction is tied to multiple cognitive processes - perhaps some working in differing contexts. But I tend to agree that we shouldn't confuse these issues with truth or knowledge.
Interestingly a couple of days ago I was reading an essay by Peirce where he was criticizing the then popular epistemological position where one "feels truth." That is there is a kind of intuition of certainty. Peirce was pretty critical of this position, which was found among some of the German idealists of the late 19th century. Peirce's critique is multifold but I suppose can be seen as due to his belief in fallibilism and his belief in continuing inquiry.
Very interesting Clark. I hope at some point you'll compare and contrast Pierce's hermeneutics to a more Heideggerian approach (a la Derrida, or better yet, Gadamer or Ricoeur). I'll be reading your other recent posts, but if you have older posts on this I'd be very interested.
By the way, I think there are interesting parallels to be made between Alma 32 and this dialectical-type hermeneutic of Pierce's you're describing, not just for reading but as a truth-discovery process....
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