Gary R, your answer to Jeff’s question is as good or better than anything I could have come up with. I might only add that Mill’s usage of the word “phenomenon” is radically different from the use Peirce would make of it later when he wrote to James in 1904 that “My ‘phenomenon’ for which I must invent a new word is very near your ‘pure experience’ but not quite since I do not exclude time and also speak of only one ‘phenomenon’” (CP 8.301). Peirce on the other hand is already in 1898 practicing what we now call “phenomenology” avant la lettre, in my opinion.
Love, gary f. Coming from the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg From: Gary Richmond <[email protected]> Sent: 11-Dec-25 05:25 To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected]; Jeffrey Brian Downard <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Firstness and sentience Gary F, Jeff, List, Gary, thanks for introducing this intriguing question as to the nature of 1ns. And, Jeff, your introduction of Mills' discussion of 'quality' seems to me to provide a useful contrast to Peirce’s account of qualitative possibility,1ns, in the 1898 Cambridge Lectures. Of course, both reject the old scholastic notion that a quality is some mysterious entity inhabiting an object. And for both of them, the way we encounter qualities is as feelings (sensations). But Mill shrinks 'quality' into a kind of regularity of sensation: to call snow “white” is, in Mill's view, simply to say that when snow is present under normal conditions that we have a certain sensation: the quality, for him, is nothing other than the sensation. Peirce, on the other hand, does not reduce qualities to physio/psychological events. Rather, he examines the issue through phenomenological prescission by abstracting from any subject/object relation to extract, as it were, the pure suchness of a quality -- what it would be 'for itself'. True, this mode of being can only be experienced as feeling. But quality is not a mere feeling in a subject, nor, as mentioned above, some occult causal 'power' in an object but, rather, the irreducible 1ns that any sensation instantiates (but is not limited to). So, Peirce’s claim that “whatever is First is ipso facto sentient” is most certainly not some panpsychist idea that stones and the like have minds. It is a statement about how we can conceive qualitative being. Feeling, in the RLT analysis, is not yet a psychological event. 1ns is, rather, the category under which pure feeling can be presented to thought in phenomenological analysis. Mill never argues anything like this as his 'sensations' presuppose a subject and an object, while Peirce is trying to describe what is prior both to reaction (2ns) and mediation/interpretation (3ns). Thus Mill’s account, as I see it, is nominalist: qualities for him are only names for kinds of sensations. On the other hand, Peirce’s view is grounded in extreme scholastic realism such that qualities are real possible modes of feeling whether or not they are embodied in any particular experience. Actual subjective feeling arises only when certain kinds of complex, semiotic systems emerge (for prime example, biological systems) and, indeed, Peirce initiated an inquiry into how complex semiotic systems emerge. What distinguishes him from Mill in this matter is his insistence that qualities (1nses) are not merely descriptions of sensations but, rather, genuine modes of semeiotic being, prescindible from any particular instance of their appearance. In my view, with this insight Peirce deepens the inquiry into the qualitative aspect of reality as being in its own distinct category, namely, 1ns. Best. Gary R
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