Neither Conceptual Nor Empirical
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Wittgenstein made the factual (or empirical) - conceptual (or grammatical) distinction in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He doubled down on this distinction with his later philosophy of the Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty, where he cemented the difference between philosophy and science, where the former was solely grammatical, and the latter was empirical.
But I think something is missing from this dichotomy. For example, religion, poetry, art, music, etc. are neither empirical nor grammatical - they cannot be tackled either by philosophy or by science. These are necessarily questions of value.
Questions of value cannot be tackled by analyzing our experience and looking for causes. Neither can they be tackled by analyzing our concepts. Everything that concerns life and the living is neither empirical nor conceptual.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Wittgenstein made the factual (or empirical) - conceptual (or grammatical) distinction in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He doubled down on this distinction with his later philosophy of the Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty, where he cemented the difference between philosophy and science, where the former was solely grammatical, and the latter was empirical.
But I think something is missing from this dichotomy. For example, religion, poetry, art, music, etc. are neither empirical nor grammatical - they cannot be tackled either by philosophy or by science. These are necessarily questions of value.
Wittgenstein in Culture and Value:There are problems I never get anywhere near ... Problems of the intellectual world of the West that beethoven (and perhaps Goethe to a certain extent) tackled and wrestled with, but which no philosopher has ever confronted (perhaps Nietzsche passed them by). And perhaps they are lost as far as western philosophy is concerned, i.e. no one will be there capable of experiencing, and hence describing, the progress of this culture as an epic. Or more precisely, it just no longer is an epic, or is so only for someone looking at it from outside, which is perhaps what Beethoven did with prevision (as Spengler hints somewhere). It might be that civilization can only have its epic poets in advance. Just as a man cannot report his own death when it happens, but only foresee it and describe it as something lying in the future. So it might be said: If you want to see an epic description of a whole culture, you will have to look at the works of its greatest figures, hence at works composed when the end of this culture could only be foreseen, because later on there will be nobody left to describe it. So it's not to be wondered at that it should be only written in the obscure language of prophesy, comprehensible to few indeed.
Questions of value cannot be tackled by analyzing our experience and looking for causes. Neither can they be tackled by analyzing our concepts. Everything that concerns life and the living is neither empirical nor conceptual.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Comments (76)
I think Wittgenstein proved quite definitely that the idea of an isomorphism between language and reality, or that language can act as a picture for reality is nonsensical, and one of the prime sources for metaphysical confusion. There always is some non-discursive element of practice to the use of language. If I point you to a red apple trying to teach you what red is, I might say "This is red". But how will you know if by that I refer to the color, the shape, the fruit, etc.? Language never refers outside of itself, it is a tool, like a computer desktop, that makes the practical navigation of the world easier. There's nothing particularly interesting about it.
Pierce... the fly trapped in the bottle :P
Quoting Marchesk
Value has to do with one's whole being it seems. It does not stem from experience, for it lies in the very attitude we have towards experience. And it does not stem from conceptual analysis since that cannot yield anything new, anything beyond itself. So experience tells us about the world, and conceptual analysis tells us about our language and thought. But neither can tell us about value.
"In the world, everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists - and if it did, it would have no value"
Quoting Wayfarer
And Nietzsche was right. It was Christianity that first brought the scientific attitude into the world and justified it as understanding God's laws. It was Christianity that extolled reason and its supremacy over the passions - man the rational animal, most like God, who is rational. Christianity was responsible for the eradication of superstition, sacrifices, violence, and the whole plethora of means of keeping the world enchanted. Violence played a foundational role in human societies, and Christianity rendered this foundational mechanism impossible or worse - ineffective. Nihilism is now the unavoidable conclusion for those who reject the Kingdom of God that Jesus offered.
Violence allowed meaning to be injected into the world from the outside. When one slayed one's enemies and founded a kingdom upon their corpses, it was meaningful - meaningful for everyone else. Now such meaning is impossible - the only meaning can come from inside now, not from outside. God is no longer out there, throwing lightning bolts and slaying our enemies, completely external of us. Such has been revealed to be a superstition - by Christianity itself.
And he was correct too.
But then how do anthropologists go about learning an unknown language from some tribe in New Guinea upon first contact? Wouldn't the equivalent of pointing out objects and saying "red" occur? You can point to apple and say "apple", then point to something red and say "red", then back to apple and say "red". Given a few examples, the person will probably catch on that you're talking about the color versus the name of the object.
They already know the grammar of (any) language. Not grammar in the common understanding - I was actually talking to someone about this last night - but grammar in Wittgenstein's understanding - ie the possibilities and rules governing the sense of the particular concept or class of concepts.
Quoting Marchesk
That wouldn't work because red could again mean a thousand and one things. For example, red could refer to the group of things made by apple and whatever else you point to. It could refer to any object. For example, how would you teach the concept of "object" compared to the concept of "red"? If you tried to teach them both concepts and you only had red objects around, what would you do?
So it would take a lot of experiments to learn. And the person who is trying to learn would be punished for failures to use the word adequately. And those failures would inform future use, until it molded into the use that corresponds to what the concept actually means. Hence why Wittgenstein argues that no private language is possible, since this practical and social correction in use needs to be possible for words to have meaning.
Yes, why does that surprise you? Did I ever suggest it wouldn't be possible?
"red" in English is the same as "rouge" in French. The grammar of the two concepts is virtually identical, even though the languages are different. For example, you can't have "red jealousy" or "jalousie rouge" in French. That's part of the grammar of the words.
So once I understand the grammar of - say - English, it's much easier to learn French by pointing me to stuff.
Yeah, but you're not going to know the grammar for an unknown language.
No, you misunderstand what grammar means. Grammar doesn't mean what you've been taught it means in school in this case. It has nothing to do with linguistic grammar. We're talking about conceptual grammar here. Conceptual grammar can be the same even though linguistic grammar is different.
Quoting Marchesk
So take this one. The grammar of the concept of "name". For you to easily understand that when I point at myself and say "Agustino" and then point at you I mean that "My name is Agustino, what is yours?" you must already have understood the grammar of name (ie how names are used, what kind of things they refer to, etc.). You must already have understood that name - whatever you call it in your language - is used in such and such a way.
So languages even if they are different often have the same concepts. The concept of red is the same as the concept of rouge in French. The language, however, is different. So in other words, the language is irrelevant, whether it's known or it's unknown. What is relevant is whether I have learned to use the concept, not the word. Concepts are across languages. Both English and French have the same concepts (by and large). The words, of course, differ. What we're talking about here is learning the conceptual grammar - which you learn only once, when you learn your very first language. All other future languages don't involve you learning conceptual grammar at all, since you already know it from the first language you learned.
So that's why most of the Anglo world misunderstands Wittgenstein, as if Wittgenstein was talking about some petty linguistic things that are actually of no interest to philosophers at all.
But we weren't talking about feral children. I brought up anthropologists and different language speakers meeting for the first time, like the Europeans in the new world.
Somehow they still manage to learn to speak each other's languages. I'm guessing the don't start off with grammar.
Sure, I'm going to understand that all human beings have names (unless they're feral), and when they point to themselves and say something, odds are they're saying their name. That or a pronoun.
Do they both speak one different language before meeting? Yes or no?
Like Hopi and English?
Sure. So that means they have both already learned conceptual grammar. When they learn each other's language, they merely learn new words that will be assigned to the concepts that they already know.
And since none of our concepts can be adequately explained in terms of rules divorced from their contextual use, our employment of them is intrinsically tied to our aesthetic intuition. Grammar, empirical fact and value aren't three independent things. The later Wittgenstein had long since abandoned the mirror-of-nature view of science and philosophy.
Empirical is the domain of experience, feeling, thought, belief, idea, etc. We use concept to share experience. In this regards, art and religion are also Empirical. Religion deals with a belief you experience for example. We use painting/concept to convey an idea for example.
What does this mean?
This is false, since language is social and collective, not individual.
Empirical is perception only.
Yeah, empirical is anything that can be scientifically perceived to be even more accurate.
Is there perception that can't be scientifically perceived? What does that mean?
No. But I said that to clarify a possible objection from people who would take emotions, feelings, etc. to be perceived for example.
I'm not sure why this is the case? I'm not sure what our language is doing other than, at least in some sense, accurately depicting the world around us. It might be the case that there are certain expressions in language that are not just mere ostensive definitions, but the fact that language has meaning, seems to indicate to me its meaningful in virute of something about our experiences -- and these experiences are given content by the world (considering they are not in a vacuum).
I'm perplexed by an idea that takes there to be anything outside of the "empirical, conceptual"
(which I take to be taken together: experience.)
Quoting Agustino
I am saying that they are not dichotomous domains, but inseparable aspects of a single cognition or application of language, for Wittgenstein did not accept the analytic-synthetic distinction, and he drew attention to grammar, i.e. his personal thinking process, only by way of empirical examples, and stressed how the meaning of empirical propositions depends upon regularities in acts of measurement, agreements in human judgement and normative principles pertaining to human behaviour within a custom.
Quoting Agustino
You can [I]define[/I] language that way if you wish, but you miss Wittgenstein's aim of philosophical investigations, which was to demolish Cartesian phenomenology and dissolve mind-body problems, as opposed to giving any supposed 'factual content' pertaining to linguistics, or even indeed to philosophy. His remarks are [I]logical[/I] remarks pertaining to [I]his[/I] definitions, not [I]factual[/I] remarks.
Wittgenstein's remarks concerning language were just a special case of more general considerations of what it means to say that one is "following a rule", which for Wittgenstein boil down to external criteria of assertion such that it only makes [I]logical[/I] sense to speak of "following a "rule" when there are independent means of checking whether or not one is following the rule independent of one's definition of it within an appropriately normative context where talk of obeying or breaking rules is motivated. Hence Wittgenstein preempts Searle's Chinese Room Argument attack on functionalist metaphysical approaches to AI that presume it is meaningful to speak of following rules in an Cartesian and cultural-independent context.
In the supposed "private language argument" passages Wittgenstein did not say that "one cannot invent a private terminology for expressing one's immediate sensations and use it meaningfully without public guidance" for that would contradict PI $109 you just quoted and constitute a substantial philosophical thesis, and not to mention fly in the face of what we intuitively do ubiquitously in our aesthetic lives, when we express ourselves.
Rather Wittgenstein merely implied that a speaker's utterances cannot be understood as "following a rule", "conveying a message" and so forth, until the speaker's utterances are correlated to external states of affairs within a normative context that motivates talk of "obeying and disobeying rules".
In the "sensation diary" passages Wittgenstein's chief preoccupation was to understand
what it means to "name" particulars by acquaintance, to which he concludes that it is meaningless to speak of someone as [I]referring to [/I] or [I]representing[/I] a particular by way of a universal , unless it is meaningful to speak of correct and incorrect application of one's 'naming rule', which in turn demands that criteria for correct naming is independent of the intuition of the person defining the naming rule.
See for example his manometer passage, where the "private-linguist" believes he is 'naming' a novel private sensation with the letter 'S' , and then later discovers that his use of 'S' predicts whether his blood pressure is rising. So 'S' can now be said to mean that "his blood pressure is rising", and we can now understand what the private-linguist is saying by 'S', i.e. he can now be said to infer something public.
Hence Wittgenstein had nothing against what "private linguists" i.e. philosophers, [I]express[/I] when they colloquially speak of inventing and using language in reference to their own sensations, rather Wittgenstein's point is that one cannot speak of [I]inferring[/I] anything from or [I]conveying[/I] anything with verbal expressions precipitated by immediate sensations, unless that is to say, a correlation of verbal behaviour to external matters of fact can be established and confirmed independently of the immediate mental contents in the minds of the speakers.
So... what does this have to do with anything? :s And why are you bringing the analytic-synthetic distinction in discussion? This has nothing to do with it.
Wittgenstein would disagree that the empirical - conceptual is not a real distinction. He, at length, including in §109 which I've quoted, stresses that philosophy, unlike science, is NOT an empirical investigation (ie trying to find the causes of real things which happen in the world) but rather a conceptual undertaking (ie understanding the grammar of our concepts). This distinction is so important that it's probably the absolute cornerstone of Wittgenstein's late philosophy.
Quoting sime
Right, so you're agreeing with me that there is no private language based on aesthetic intuitions or whatever of that kind. The "independent means of checking" are by nature social.
Quoting sime
This means that the private linguist is actually not a private linguist at all, since he's using a public sign to convey the meaning of his utterance (blood pressure rising).
What a petty aim - I would most certainly hope that wasn't his aim. No, his aim was to introduce a new way of doing philosophy. That it dismantled whatever - that's secondary, and ultimately really irrelevant. Also, he very likely undertook all this to clear the way for what truly matters, which were matters of value - which he almost never spoke of. Everything else is formed of petty matters that aren't of great relevance or importance - except in the minds of some academics who came after him and inherited his philosophy.
Wittgenstein would say that this is the fundamental metaphysical illusion - the bewitchment of our intelligence by language.
Language isn't meant just to depict (or represent) the world around you, but rather to allow you to act in the world around you in certain ways. "Give me the brick", "pass me the apple", "it costs $5", "I'll be at your place after 5:00" etc. Those aren't descriptions or depictions of anything, they are ways of interacting with the world. You learn these concepts by using them to get things done in the world. It is the common practice that gives them meaning.
Sure, language can also be used to describe something for a certain purpose to someone. But that's just one of its purposes, and not the only one, contrary to the metaphysical representationalist account.
So it's wrong to go from the usefulness of language, to the idea that it therefore reflects some other underlying reality.
Quoting Marty
Refer to this post and further replies.
You'll make Nietzsche write another book from beyond the grave.
For Nietzsche, nihilism is denial of the relevance of the world, the denial of metaphysic and value of the world in favour of a transcendent force which does the work. In this respect, Christianity is just a bad as the traditions which replaced it. While Christianity might have removed a plethora of traditions which held the scapegoating of the world, it still posits a similar denial of the world as found in various traditions with where a force in some other world is seen as the definition of the world.
Nihilism is not a conclusion drawn from the rise of Christianity, it's the feature of transcendent metaphysics which has locked man out of understanding the world as responsible and meaningful in itself. Rather than an unavoidable conclusion, it is a grave mistake made many, many years ago, in the definition of a metaphysics which held meaning and value have to enter he world by a transcendent force. Nihilism wasn't a new world made by the abandonment of old traditions, whether it be in the shift from older traditions to Christianity or in the shift from Christianity to secularism, but rather those transcendent metaphysics traditions is themselves (the secular version being consumerism), which hold that meaning and value is defined by some other than with world.
Quoting Agustino
You folk must be thinking of the dyadic semiosis of Saussure and not the triadic relation of Peirce. Big difference.
Value would be instantiated in the Peircean sign relation as the very purpose embodied by a relation. It would be the reason for the relation to even be. Hence ... pragmatism.
For example, seeing red - the ability to make a sharp discrimination of hue in this particular part of the visible light spectrum - is of ecological value to a primate. Clearly so, as colour vision was first lost (in a nocturnal ancestor) and then re-evolved (as later primates became diurnal foragers again).
For linguistic humans, red can come to be a higher level cultural symbol of something. It can come to stand for blood, or danger, or arousal. So the sight of redness then mediates for a cultural value. We see something further in the presence of a daub of red lipstick or a red warning light.
The dichotomy of factual vs conceptual, or empirical vs grammatical, is about "cold rationality". So it is about the learnt human habit of excluding subjective feeling so as to maximise the advantage of objective, disembodied, reasoning.
There is pragmatic value in going up another level in terms of semiosis, leaving biology and individual psychology behind and becoming more purely the creatures of a rationalising or scientific culture.
So value is still embodied in the relation. It is the whole point of the deal. It is the taking of a view which yields some advantage. But the rational ideal is one that is "dispassionate" in leaving behind the subjectiveness of our biological selves, and even our traditional social selves, so as to rise to become this "totally objective" self who now values some new set of ideal things .... like beauty, good and truth. :)
Value never disappeared from the equation. It was just culturally reimagined in a way that feels pretty damn elusive to us biological creatures.
I would have said these occurred prior to Christianity, with the ancient Greeks. The gospels (which I count as the essence of Christianity) say nothing about the scientific attitude or the supremacy of reason.
Quoting Agustino
In the West, maybe. The progressive disenchantment of the world has been an ongoing project within Western civilization. This civilization has been predominately Christian, it is true, but it does not follow from that that the eradications you mention were brought about solely by Christianity. It surely played a part, but it has its own superstitions, sacrifices, violences and enchantments.
Quoting Agustino
That's right and Michel Henry gives a phenomenological account of this primal dimension as the affective, It is also, according to Henry, the invisible.
The value stems from feeling.
As I understand it Wittgenstein's 'picture theory' of meaning posits that the conceptual grammar (I use this term you used earlier, I think correctly, to distinguish from the merely formal grammar of linguistics) inherent in language is isomorphic with the conceptual grammar of experience, that is, reality.
Quoting Janus
I think many don't understand how value cashes out in relation to the other sides of life. This "blindness" to the centrality of value to life, such as what your work is, how you live, what you pursue etc. is often obscured. People don't understand that this attitude towards the world comes before experience and not after. Changing this attitude, that's the job of spiritual experience, meditation, prayer, poetry, art, etc. Without this, there seems to me to be no energy available for doing other things. You may want to paint, but if you lack the motivation, you can't do it, regardless of how much you want to and how necessary it is seen to be. Life without value is dead - it's a machine, a mere mechanism. And yet it puzzles me to no end that some people just cannot become aware of this.
Representionalism in the sense of having a word which means something and an object it refers to is just a primitive form of both conceptualism and representionalism. That's isn't a sufficent characterization of that type of concept.
I agree, life without value is not life at all. And no one who is alive lives a life without value, whether positive or negative. Even a negative value, a disdain for life on account of its purported lack of meaning, is still a value (although it is not a valuable one ;) ).
Hume said you cannot get an "ought" from an "is". but this is pure bullshit; all our ises are replete with, and sometimes fraught with, oughts.
I realise you need to make this come out right for transcendent Christian metaphysics. But that's your loss. Wake me up when you are tired of being a historical curiosity.
I was only correcting your poor understanding of Peirce anyway.
Quoting Agustino
Nice.
Quoting Agustino
I'm not convinced that this is presented as a dichotomy by Wittgenstein. Science is surely not solely empirical, but rather has the form of a grammar for dealing with empirical language.
This touches on my own concerns regarding the incommensurability of conceptual schemes (paradigms, world views, language games... what have you). This has been an ongoing, unproductive discussion with @StreetlightX
I agree with what you said to @Marchesk about the difference between acquiring a new language and acquiring a language for the first time. Anthropologists immerse themselves in novel cultures in order to learn how the language is used to get mundane things done.
Language has meaning insofar as it is used to do things. Science is not only descriptive, but predictive; as an engineer Wittgenstein was well aware of how one takes talk of how things are and makes use of it. Hence his repeated mechanical metaphors: disengaged gears spinning, knobs that are not part of the mechanism and so on.
Quoting sime
So philosophy is language with the clutch disengaged.
While what cannot be said ought be passed over in silence, it remains that one can show what can not be said. Perhaps that is what Beethoven and Goethe could do.
Haven't you read Cheryl Misak yet? Peirce (via Ramsey) was the one who showed Witti the way out of the bottle of logical atomism.
Really, you guys just keep cracking me up! :)
I can see the temptation in this.
Yet aren't we obligated to introduce analysis and conceptualisation and empiricism in order to value? Otherwise wouldn't our values "drop out of consideration as irrelevant"?
Is the word "dichotomy" present in the part that you quoted from me? :P In the bit you quoted I referred to it as a distinction. That's how Wittgenstein treated it. I've referred to it as a dichotomy only when I meant to say that empirical & conceptual do not cover everything there is.
Quoting Banno
Of course, since science relies on language and conceptual grammar for its theories. But it is empirical in the sense that science deals with causes of real things or events in the world. Philosophy doesn't.
Quoting Banno
I don't think so - I think values show themselves in the attitude we have towards the world, which comes prior to conceptualisation and empiricism. First I find myself having certain values, and those values determine what I want to do in the world, which determines how I engage with it and what is of significance to me. I cannot find what is of significance by analysing concepts or by studying physics.
Quoting Banno
The other interesting issue is why is it that value cannot be said? Is it because value is subjective, and cannot be intersubjectively (or objectively) verified - and there is no private language that can hold meaning?
No, this actually has nothing to do in particular with Christian metaphysics, anymore than it does with Buddhist metaphysics, or pretty much any other religion or spiritual practice out there. Here's a fragment from Osho that treats many of the same points as me:
So it is useless that you blabber on about more and more technical refinements of some Pierceian theory or whatever, since theories do not change life - they do not make life more beautiful, they do not remove anxiety, etc. In other words, theories are irrelevant to value - we do not find value by means of theories.
One might add here, just like Peirce's life was poor, despite his great intellect. So of what use that intellect, if all his theories couldn't bring him peace?
And this Osho ... have you been a fan of him long? Doesn’t really seem to be your usual sort. You think his life was some kind of shining example, eh? Tell us more. :D
Quoting apokrisis
Done X-)
Quoting apokrisis
I first read Osho when I was 12-14, so yes. Not a "fan" as such, I disagree with him on a lot of things too. But not on the bit that I've quoted.
Quoting apokrisis
Yeah, of course it doesn't seem like it to you cause you never understood my position to begin with.
Quoting apokrisis
Well his life certainly does seem to have been better than that of a lot of Western philosophers for that matter. But that's an aesthetic judgement. For example, Peirce was frequently depressed, easily irritated, angry, drank a lot, etc. doesn't sound like a great life to me.
But I am not obligated to read such stuff, nor have I been motivated to do so by what I have read from you - things like that odd approach to mountain sizes and to modern logic leave me doubting its usefulness.
Nor is it central to this thread; Peirce was mentioned in a post attributing some particularly fly-ish ideas to him. The quip I quoted was an amusing response. End of story. Back to the thread.
Hmm. I don't really see even the distinction as of central importance to Wittgenstein's approach. At the least I would like to see it argued for, rather than assumed.
Here perhaps we have some real fat to chew on - good reply.
If our attitudes are only prior to our conceptualisation, how is it that our conceptualisations can change our values?
Quoting Agustino
Well, I do. What I value has changed over time as a result of both changes in my conceptualisation of things and what I have experienced.
I find it difficult to suppose that others find their values somehow fixed; I would feel quite sad for them.
at the mention of labels being perceived.
Words are not just labels; that is implicit in their not being just signs, and a large part of why the Peirce treatment falls short. But having read the rest of the article I think this was a turn of phrase rather than a claim about the nature of words. What counts is the interaction with the world - "And when you make the right sound, the food arrives" - that's the way words work, not as labels.
That whole dialogue reminds me awfully of Alva Noe's book 'Out of our Heads - Why You are not your Brain' - which I bought way back and never got around to reading, so adding it to the list.
It seems to me that values are something that can stand in the logical space of reason. That is, we can reasonably change our values in lieu of new evidence, if we have reasons given to us. They seem to be intelligible, structured most of the time, and not just an emotional sensation - whatever that would mean.
Maybe.
Do I just see that I ought give the beggar a fiver? Perhaps. It's not out of the question.
I'm merely commenting on the notion that if we're defining empiricism in an old fashion sense then no such values appear to us in daily observation such that they are provided by external content. Values become a projection of our own mental capacities if we view the external world as being mere physical extended images. But such a view is untenable.
I enjoyed that interview, thanks. It doesn't seem to be the kind of article you would favour, though. Are you breaking out? 8-)
Sorry, Banno, because you replied to Wayfarer re the article, and I found the article via your reply, I incorrectly addressed my thanks and comment to you (and now corrected). I'm very glad to hear you're always breaking out, though. :)
It's a good series, because it is not too far out of left field, but enough to make one think. New thread?
Yes, I agree, and I want to read the other articles in the series. Re "new thread" I would say that judging from what I have read so far, they would make a good subject for discussion.
Where does Peirce say this? You are thinking of Saussure again.
Ain't the sociology of philosophy amusing. AP has to demonise pragmatism/semiotics to secure its prestige. It can't afford for folk to realise that it is simply repeating what has already been worked out.
If you don't read Peirce, then somehow you can't be blamed for not knowing better. You can think that a dispositional theory of truth leads automatically to metaphysical quietism - philosophy's Behaviourist phase! :D
Quoting Banno
Uh huh. The dispositional theory of truth. The way Peirce fixed Kant's cognitive representationalism. The theme Ramsey might have really made something of. The theme that Wittgenstein then ran off the other side of the road to great acclaim.
Nothing like a pendulum that swings from its one extreme to its other, eh? "We couldn't get logical atomism to work, so now we will believe its exact opposite."
Quoting Marty
It's more subtle than that. Values condition our conceptions and perceptions. They are the purposes or dispositions that give shape to inquiry. So how we think of the world, and what we accept as its facts - ie: the truths we can measure - are informed by what we hope to get out of that way of looking at it.
These values are at first implicit. They are the ground on which we stand to make a start. Then we turn around and see that they are what we had to inject into the process of inquiry to get it going. We "perceive" our values like we see a chair in forming a meta-belief about the "us" that is the self at the centre of a process of inquiry.
So the OP was striving after a triadic relational view. The stool needs three legs to sit steady. But the relation has to be understood in terms of a developing or evolving process, not one that starts from any definite existence.
The total sign relation has its three parts. There is the "self" that emerges - some habit of interpretation that is "us with our evolving dispositions or collection of values and purposes". Then there is the world - the good old thing-in-itself. And mediating the relation is the signs we form of the noumenal - our phenomenal experience.
So buried in there, you have the essential Kantian insight. The mind has get started by making some abductive guess. But the Peircean approach recognises that purposes or goals are intrinsic to this getting started. The conceptual a-prioris are much deeper than some merely physical intuitions.
And thus it is the self itself that is being developed in the forming of a sign relation with the world. It is not about a mind that already exists making sense of a world that is some unknowable state of affairs. Both self and world emerge from the more basic thing which is the attempt to relate in a fruitful or pragmatic fashion.
Quoting Marty
So it looks like we agree. The difference may be that the Peircean approach is grounded in phenomenology and then sees "the self", "the mind", as part of what emerges via a semiotic relation. Nothing exists in some brute fashion. Truth is intimately tied to the "self that has a reason to be asking that form of question". There is no truth beyond that. Truth-aptness depends on a self coming into being with its reasons. The "world" only exists as the empirical observations that would make these truths true.
Thus it is all internalism. Almost idealism. Yet it is based on the ontic commitment of there being something "out there" worth modelling. It doesn't disbelieve reality. It just doesn't think that knowledge of reality can transcend the selfhood that has to be developed for there even to be "a view of reality".
Kant's cognitive representationalism showed that "the mind" could not know reality directly. Peirce's dispositional relationism shows that even the mind is part of the construction. An image of the world wouldn't be possible unless a purposeful self, laden with values, was something that could develop due to the existence of a sign relation.