[peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" metaphor

[Benjamin Udell]

Gary, Joe, Jim, list, (continued, 3rd part)   >[Gary] Again, you maintain that the "logically determinational role" of "such recognition" cannot be denied and yet I can't even find it! For me it is less a matter of its being denied than my not even missing it (clearly you've fixed your own ideas in this matter quite differently). Your arguments around the interpretant seem absolutely convincing to you, but I have not been able to fully comprehend your argument regarding the logical necessity of this fourth "intuition" of the object as a proxy for the it. Perhaps this originates in my not being able to find it unmediated in my experience (as phenomenologist, as semeiotician, as ordinary "muser" etc.) But you say you cannot see how it is possible to argue logically for anything except a categorial schema which includes this putatively necessary fourth element that is so obvious to you, but a mystery to me.   You're mixing the proxy up with the recognition and misattributing to me the view that experience is unmediated. You seem to have forgotten the difference between "direct" and "unmediated."   The logically determinational role is that of (dis-)confirmatory experience. I look and see that person X is wearing a hat as I expected.   I see X wearing the hat as I expected. Now, it's confirmatory in regard to my interpretive expectation based on signs, confirmatory in logical virtue of what the contents of the sign, interpretant, and object-as-represented were and in logical virtue of what the object now shows itself to be and indeed what the object, sign, and interpretant now all show themselves to be. It is indeed confirmatory of a massive amount of prior semiosis without which I couldn't make enough sense of what I was seeing in order to think or say "looka there, he's wearing a hat!" In that sense, the experience is indeed logically mediated and logically determined. There was even a logically determined need for such a confirmation. My further stream of interpretation and verification will be decisively determined logically by the fact that I have confirmed that X is indeed wearing a hat just as I expected on the basis of earlier signs and interpretants. The confirmation touches not only on the question of whether X is wearing a hat and the ramifications regarding X, but also on the validity and soundness of the whole semiosis leading up to the confirmation, ultimately on the whole mind as an inference process. In sum:  If the experience is formed *_as_* collateral to sign & interpretant in respect of the obect, then object, sign, and interpretant logically determine it in its collaterality. And it in turn logically determines semiosis going forward.   It really should be setting off one's philosophical alarm bells if one finds oneself denying that experience, recognition, verification, have a logically determinational role.  I don't understand how anybody could argue that a claim does not logically determine the character of its verification (in the sense that, e.g., a claim that a horse is on the hill determines a verification consisting in looking for a horse on the hill) or that the claim's verification does not logically determine further inference involving the claim (e.g., a horse was confirmed to be on the hill, and it's good news that a horse is nearby, and it's also good news that the semiosis leading up to the verification was faring quite well, and Joey the horse-spotter was right again, and so forth, and all those items factor determinatively into semiosis going forward, a semiosis which would go _very differently_ if it had been dis-confirmed that a horse was on the hill). I don't understand how anybody could argue such, but I'm willing to examine such an argument if one is offered.   So, the semiosis can't be diagrammed in its logical determination without lines representing relationships of experience to object. You could draw little dots in the line to show that the experiential relationship is, from another viewpoint, interpretively mediated. But that doesn't stop the line from being an experience line, any more than breaking a representation line into atoms and their motions turns the representation line into a mere mechanics or matter line. If you insist on showing the experience line as a mere interpretation line, then you have no way to display experience of the object such that the experience is "outside" the interpretant and sign of the object. That's part of why nobody has sat down and drawn a diagram showing how recognition or verification is merely interpretation. Another seemingly open door gets closed when an intended signhood turns out to be the mind's experience's serving as a sign of some other object than the object of which it is the mind's experience. Of course one experiences things as being signs of still more things.   Now, the following seems simple to me:  __The object does not, of itself, convey experience or even information.  The sign & interpretant convey information but not experience of their object.  Those considerations settle in the negative the question of the adequacy of a triad of interpretant, sign, and object, for verificative purposes. Verification, qua verification, has a determinational role in logic.__ I don't know why any of this doesn't seem simple to others.   Experience is the teacher; by experience we confirm, verify, disconfirm, etc. Verification is a kind of experience of the object, or of something recognized, on an experiential basis, as counting for experiential purposes as the object. All intelligent, inferentially adequate experience is formed as a recognition of object (or of its object-experientially legitimate sign) collaterally to sign and interpretant. The idea that doubt would be reasonably quelled by nothing more than a sufficient amount of interpretation, should be another alarm-bell moment. The logically determinational character of such experience, such recognition, is that of the _reasonable quelling of doubt_, for which no degree of elucidation and interpretation is a substitute.   Into such experience, which is semiosis's entelechy, semiosis settles. It settles into it as a foundation, a basis, for further semiosis. In the past I've described this as "getting handholds in the rockface" and as a hardness that makes semiosis mobile like car rather than immobile like a gelatin. There is a difference between an external force or potential or actual momentum of a system and the structured balance of forces or potential and actual momenta internal to a system. (The energy associated with the former is linear or angular energy. The energy possessed by the system in virtue of the latter down through the fundamental particles is the rest energy of the system, and, expressed as rest mass, is usually considered the quantity of matter.) Now, if one considers what a reasonable quelling of doubt is, one sees that it involves achieving a stabilized structure of references to object, sign, interpretant, and verification, a structure sound and solid enough to serve as a basis for more. I  move here into the question of the "intuitions" or "instincts" that one cultivates in employing a categorial schema. There is the striking brute "secondness" of an onsetting force, then there is the stability of the earth beneath one's feet, and of those established cognitions on which one, so to speak, sits, stands, rides, rides supported and stably balanced.  I've characterized the dynamic force as a first, a leader, an _arche_, in accordance with common ideas, and mistakenly (in my own terms, too) characterized forces in strife with each other as "degenerate firsts" -- I should call them firsts in a degenerate dyad.  In a genuine dyad, there is proportion, measure, rhythm, there is _following the leader_, and the leadership may also be alternated or shared as a maintained tone, a "key," "keeping," "accordance," or "temperament." Through such a relationship between distinct things, one member of the dyad conveys information reliably about the other.  In whatever respect and degree in which it is or is treated as a relationship of independent leader and dependent follower (like independent variable and dependent variable), the follower is considered to convey information about the leader; but now one is no longer supposing a mere dyad, since now one is supposing the involvement of information and interpretability. What comes next yet is not merely yet another follower of the given leader, is that which follows both, representing one as being representative of the other, and thereby clarifying them. This clarification is in terms of narrowed range of conceivably relevant experience. The singled-out experience or set of experiences provides the confirmation. The object is the source and provides determination. The sign provides conveyance of information. The interpretant provides clarity, understanding. The recognition, the verification, provides assurance and is the stage of the reasonable quelling of doubt.   >[Gary] Jim in particular, but others including myself have argued that we *see* objective-experience (which you say needs confirmation, verification, etc.) as thoroughly mediated by signs. It seems to me that we have no direct "intuition" of the objective world because we are the objective world ("the eye cannot see itself" the zen Buddhists say), that is, we are individually and as a race a living, breathing, evolving symbol of it and swimming in it, with body and emotions and an intellect which endure over time, develop over time. How could one confirm or disconfirm that?   I don't know what sort of "direct 'intuition'" you're talking about. You may be mentioning it because I discussed off-list the subject of intuitions, but, as I said subsequently, I meant "intuition" in the contemporary sense of the word, which is closer to that which Peirce called "instinct" than to that which Peirce called "intuition." I was discussing the 'intuitions' or 'instincts' which one cultivates in employing categorial schemata, the guiding "feelings" which one develops about, for instance, quality, reaction, and representation.   Anyway, on list, I've talked about direct _perception_ and direct _experience_, not "direct intuition," and have described them as mediated (often unconsciously) and tetradic. I don't know why you'd try to paint the conception of direct experience as a reduction to angelic non-inferential insight (not merely non-ratiocinative but instead non-inferential, i.e., neither consciously nor unconsciously inferential).  To the contrary, I've said more than once that recognitive experience is the entelechy of semiosis, which also means the entelechy of inference -- hardly a short-cut around inference or semiosis. You won't understand what I'm saying about experience and verification any better if you try to understand it as based on a Kantian or even Scholastic idea of inuition as unmediated insight, than you will if you try to understand it as if I were trying to explain it in terms of a triad of object, sign, and interpretant. If you were to find a way to understand it triadically, that would be a counterargument against me.   >[Gary] When anything is "recognized" by me it seems upon analysis to have expressed itself as an icon of the "composite" experiences I've had of some object, say a rock or Western Philosophy (and such a memory of a history of experience necessarily includes various semeiotical - logical - existential - qualitative associations). There is for me no direct intuition, no need for an unmediated *proxy* of the object to *verify* it, and even the most immediately present experiences seem to me mediated by signs within an *infinite semiosis* within which I seem to swim along with the rest of the cosmos.  Everything, as Jim has repeated argued, seems mediated by signs, and I *experience* all events (excepting certain brutal momentary existential shocks) in this tri-categorial way. Again, I have virtually no experience of a fourth element. [I've appended a recent example of a personal experiment, a phenomenological musement, I made below my signature to illustrate this point, but  I will report that I again did not experience anything except 1ns, 2ns and 3ns and that whatever "collaterally emerged" from my memory immediately joined the semeiotic flow.]   Again, you've confused the proxy with the recognition, and mistakenly attributed to me the view that it is "unmediated."   When you experience an object as matching your already-developed interpretant of it, you are experiencing fourthness and calling it something else. Peirce's views of collateral experience prevent the casting of one's experience of the object as one's sign or interpretant of that same object. Peirce's views of collateral experience arise in consideration of such questions as that of what signs are in the first place. The point is that the sign is not the object but is only "almost" the object (except in the limit case of their being the selfsame thing); hence experience of the sign is not experience of the sign's object, yet gives some information about the object.   When you call a composite of experiences an "icon," you are referring to that composite as a representation of some object, not as an experience of it. That's perfectly possible. For instance, the experiences themselves may have faded so as to count only as signs for the mind. For another instance, one's experience of X may serve as one's icon of Y. In that case, Y may be simply a long-term or generalized version of X.  X may simply be a sample of Y. Or maybe Y is physically quite distinct from X, off on a different continent, etc., but still resembles X. Person Z's experience of X may be person W's mere sign of X.  Person Z says he confirmed X, and person W takes it as a sign but not a confirmation that X is there.   >[Gary] So, as regards 4ns: I seem to have no experience of it and apparently no intellectual need for it. I have never gotten your arguments "intuiting" it as a "recognition" of the object of which it is %proxy*. This, again, seems to me from my experience to be the case because all experience seems triadic and appears to be mediated by signs-this for all facets and aspects of my physical, emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual life including, of course,  philosophical reflection upon what are for me the universes of experience which present themselves to me.   You've gotten the proxy mixed up with the recognition. I've discussed the proxy a number of times in the past as belonging with index, icon, & symbol, while discussing recognition as belonging with object, sign, & interpretant. Mixing proxy up with recognition is like mixing index up with object, and like mixing icon up with sign or sign's ground, and like mixing symbol up with interpretant.   index ~~~ object icon ~~~~ sign symbol ~~ interpretant proxy ~~~ recognizant   As I have not framed any arguments for the irreducibility of recognition, on the basis of appeals to "intuiting," I don't know what you're talking about. It sounds like you're tossing things from diverse places into a potlike icon.   Your experiences are mediated by atoms, photons, etc., too. That doesn't mean that they're nothing but atoms, photons, etc.   I'll try to continue this later. I'm getting all worn out! I wonder whether anybody is even reading any of this. I said I'd go quiet but, instead, I'm like a cross between Yosemite Sam and Foghorn Leghorn, getting both louder and talkier.   Best, Ben http://tetrast.blogspot.com/ --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com