Gary F, Gary R, Ivar, Edwina, List, My earlier note to Gary F zoomed in on one strand in Lecture 3 of RLT: Peirce’s work reads especially well when we see him arguing against--and sometimes with--contemporaries like Mill who are also wrestling with logic—especially the question of how signs (icons, indices, symbols) relate to qualities, and how those relations can be made intelligible without reducing them to mere mechanics. By Lectures 7–8, however, Peirce is largely doing cosmological metaphysics. He is trying to say something substantive about how law could emerge—how “natural laws” might be understood as the gradual formation and hardening of habits—and he recruits multiple notions of continuity to push the inquiries forward, including mathematical conceptions of continuity (e.g., topological/projective conceptions) alongside logical continuity (methodeutic, habits of inquiry, and the growth of intelligibility). That brings me to Gary’s original question—whether it makes sense to say that a rock might be sentient. The following passage from Lecture 8 seems to put the issue as sharply as anywhere: “But there is another class of objectors for whom I have more respect. They are shocked at the atheism of Lucretius and his great master. They do not perceive that that which offends them is not the Firstness in the swerving atoms, because they themselves are just as much advocates of Firstness as the ancient Atomists were. But what they cannot accept is the attribution of this firstness to things perfectly dead and material. Now I am quite with them there. I think too that whatever is First is ipso facto sentient. If I make atoms swerve, — as I do, — I make them swerve but very very little, because I conceive they are not absolutely dead. And by that I do not mean exactly that I hold them to be physically such as the materialists hold them to be[,] only with a small dose of sentiency superadded. For that, I grant, would be feeble enough. But what I mean is, that all that there is is First, Feelings; Second, Efforts; Third, Habits; — all of which are more familiar to us on their psychical side than on their physical side; and that dead matter would be merely the final result of the complete induration of habit reducing the free play of feeling and the brute irrationality of effort to complete death. Now I would suppose that that result of evolution is not quite complete even in our beakers and crucibles.” (RLT, 260–261) If we set aside—just for the moment—the narrower task of textual interpretation and ask how one might translate the cosmological suggestion into 21st-century terms, I think the question shifts. “Is a rock sentient?” is easy to hear as a category mistake, because “rock” names a macroscopic, late-formed, highly stabilized object—precisely the kind of thing Peirce is tempted to describe as “indurated habit.” A chunk of malpaís in my yard (lava that flowed millions of years ago) looks about as inert as anything could look; and yet, on Peirce’s picture, that inertness is itself an achievement of habit—a near “end-state” of stabilization, not the primordial baseline. So I’m inclined to reframe the issue at a different level of description. In contemporary physics, the rock is an organized pattern of fields and interactions. In the Standard Model idiom, protons and neutrons are composite; quarks interact via gluons; and what we call “particles” are, in many presentations, excitations of underlying fields. (If it’s useful as a shared visual reference, here’s a simple animation of the strong interaction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_interaction#/media/File:Nuclear_Force_anim_smaller.gif .) From a Peircean perspective, what matters is not whether the rock has a mindlike interior, but whether the more basic levels of reality involve (i) qualitative possibilities (Firstness), (ii) constraints/compulsions or “brute suchness” (Secondness), and (iii) the formation of stable regularities (Thirdness as habit/law). If one takes a continuous field ontology seriously, then the primitives are not little billiard balls, but loci of qualitative character (charge, spin, etc.) standing in relations of mutual susceptibility—what Peirce calls the peculiar relation of affectability. And if one further takes seriously the idea that law is not merely “written into” the cosmos from the outset but becomes increasingly definite—then the growth of regularity begins to look like the growth of a kind of memory: not memory as personal recollection, but memory as the persistence of constraints, the consolidation of tendencies, the sedimentation of habits across time—all involving the growth and flow of information. On that way of putting it, the sharper question becomes something like: Is a primordial field of potentiality the kind of thing to which Peirce’s “whatever is First is ipso facto sentient” could intelligibly apply? That is: are the qualitative aspects and couplings of the most basic reality better thought of as utterly mindless “dead matter,” or as something whose most primitive mode is closer, in kind and not just in degree, to feeling/possibility—with “dead matter” emerging as the highly constrained limit where habit has hardened and the range of qualitative “free play” has been drastically narrowed? I’m not claiming this settles the textual question, and I’m certainly not claiming that quantum field theory proves Peirce is right. My more modest suggestion is that Peirce’s provocative line—“whatever is First is ipso facto sentient”—sounds least absurd when we do not start with a rock, atom or proton, but with the metaphysical role he assigns to Firstness and continuity: a world whose earliest mode is possibility/quality, whose constraints and collisions are secondary, and whose laws are habits that grow, stabilize, and in the limit can “indurate” into what looks like dead, inert stuff. If this is even directionally right, it gives a different angle on Gary’s worry. The claim wouldn’t be “rocks are sentient” in any ordinary sense; it would be that the metaphysical roots of law and order are not best modeled as perfectly dead. Rocks would then be products of habit-taking: late-stage regularities that tend to conceal rather than display the primordial qualitative loci in continuous fields of potentiality that are, on this account, more fundamental. I’d be very interested in pushback on two points in particular: (1) whether this reframing of the questions is faithful to what Peirce is doing in Lecture 8, and (2) whether the “field, habit and information” translation does any genuine explanatory work, or merely redescribes the mystery in prettier terms. Yours, Jeff
________________________________ From: Gary Richmond <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, December 13, 2025 11:34 PM To: [email protected] <[email protected]>; Ivar Borensved <[email protected]> Cc: Gary Fuhrman <[email protected]>; Jeffrey Brian Downard <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Firstness and sentience Ivar, Gary F, Jeff, List, Ivar, your question as to whether stones can be seen as sentient seems to me to go to the heart of what Peirce is attempting in his phenomenology. In my view, the question of sentience in non-living things looks paradoxical only if we consider it from a psychological or biological sense. What I am more and more coming to imagine is that the key to understanding this perplexing question is seeing that Peirce’s phenomenology is not an inquiry into minds, organisms, or into any 'thing' but, rather, an inquiry into the formal modes of appearance within the phaneron. As I remarked in an earlier post, Peirce’s phenomenology does not begin with lived experience but, rather, with the phaneron: that is, to whatever is present to a mind in any way. The categories are not meant to express the 'contents' of some individual, personal experience; rather, they are the formal modes under which something can appear. In my view, Peirce is not claiming that a stone feels in the ordinary sense in which we think of feeling (since that presupposes 2ns and 3ns). For him 1ns is a suchness: the immediacy of a quality which is prior to any relation. So when Peirce says that whatever is "First" (i.e.,1ns) is sentient, he does this in a truly radically non-psychological, non-existential sense: 1ns is not something that has a feeling; it is feeling as such before it is realized, embodied. Your suggestion that sentience ought require an “internal drive” toward something external doesn't, in my view, seem to apply to Peirce's phenomenology because drive, will, purpose, etc. refer to organized, temporal systems. These systems are existential and relational so that they necessarily bring in the categories of 2ns and 3ns. Phenomenology offers only the formal categorial elements which may be present in a possible appearance (as they have been seen to be present in, say, a particular phaneroscopic observation). As Jon Alan Schmidt has argued, before something can be actualized, it must be possible. Phenomenology is all about what qualities, what characters may possibly manifest themselves. When Peirce defines the phaneron as the total content of consciousness he is, I'm pretty sure, not claiming that everything in the phaneron is itself conscious. Rather, a phenomena's appearance, say as a particular diamond buried deep in the earth -- its hardness, size, shape, color, etc. -- belongs (so to speak) to the phaneron. What is categorial 1ns is neither the diamond’s 'consciousness' as we think of it (certainly an absurdity) but, rather, a mode of appearance abstracted from any subject-object relation whatsoever. Seen in this light, the claim that a 1st is sentient is not a matter of projecting our human experience onto inanimate things. Indeed, Peirce rejects all that would psychologize quality. His point is that there is no such 'thing' as a 'quality' that is not of the nature of feeling, even though that feeling is not experienced by a subject. It is simply what immediacy is like (formally) prior to any embodiment. But embodied, it may be experienced as a quality in the ordinary sense: as hard, red, cold, sharp, etc. You may recall that Peirce's “would-be” account of a diamond hidden deep in the earth -- and perhaps never to be seen -- saves realism by locating reality not in hidden, actual properties but, rather, in law-like tendencies that govern how things would behave under definite conditions. The buried diamond (in his later revision of his earlier view) is real insofar as it conforms to certain habits -- such as resisting pressure, brilliance, etc. -- which would manifest themselves in a suitable interaction, even if no such interaction ever occurs. Reality, therefore, is fundamentally a continuous, law-governed order of tendencies some of which are actualized. Actualities, as Jon Alan Schmidt has shown, are discontinuities in the cosmic semiosic continuum. (Thank goodness for those discontinuities or we earthlings wouldn't be here at all!) So, to cut to the chase: diamonds and other 'stones' and such are obviously not sentient in the ordinary sense. As I commented in an earlier post, Peirce is most certainly not offering some form of proto-panpsychism. Rather, he is insisting on the irreducibility of 1ns within the logical architecture of appearance itself. In my view, the language of sentience that Peirce employs is meant to, shall we say, constrain our descriptions of 'that which is'. It is meant to suggest that before reaction (2ns), even before the evolution of the laws inherent in our cosmos (3ns), that there is qualitative possibility (1ns). Perhaps one might conclude that quality can only be understood as feeling in a maximally abstract and formal sense. In his classification of the discovery (theoretic) sciences, Peirce put phenomenology just above the normative sciences (so, offering principles to them), and just after First Science, mathematics (from which it garners its own abstract principles). As I see it, Peirce's phenomenology is far from being fully developed. Best, Gary R On Sat, Dec 13, 2025 at 10:37 AM Ivar Borensved <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Gary F, Gary R, List, Gary R: Peirce’s phenomenology is normative. I’m not sure I fully agree that it is normative, but when I look closer I have begun doubting myself. As I understand Peirce, his phenomenology is primarily an observational science and should avoid making any normative claims or prescriptions. But, in a sense it comes into play if we consider the method of phenomenology. Following Richard K. Atkins in Charles S. Peirce’s Phenomenology (2018), one can argue that Peirce has a fourfold method of doing phenomenology: “First, she observes the phaneron. Second, she describes the phaneron. Third, she analyzes the phaneron. Fourth, she evaluates the accuracy and adequacy of her descriptions and analyses.” (p. 106, see also EP2:147-8). The fourth step, Atkins argues, is something Peirce made use of, even if he rarely discussed it. In the step of evaluation we do make judgments on how accurate a description is of a phenomenon, the result should be a normative claim in the sense that we and others should make use of the description that seems to fit best with the observation. So perhaps Peirce’s phenomenology is indeed normative, in the evaluation and critique of descriptions of phenomena inside the phaneron? Or did you have anything else in mind Gary R? Maybe you mostly thought of it in comparison to James? And I have to say I like your summation that “Peirce's phenomenology initiates an inquiry into the logical architecture of appearance itself.” very much! Gary F: Can stones be sentient? I enjoy the question, as it is something I have been pondering myself! But I have great difficulty in understanding Peirce’s claim that “whatever is First is ipso facto sentient”. Is it that the First of a stone, is that of being in the feeling of a stone (or stonyness)? Is not sentience tied to at least some other object, introducing secondness? The problem is exacerbated by me not having access to RLT or CP 6 at the moment… To at least answer your first question over at Turning Point, I believe that we usually attribute feelings to object that we somehow believe have some will or want. A chat bot might seem to want to make us happy or hurt us. An organism might search for food or mates for reproduction. Stones do not seem to exhibit this behavior. I think that the dividing line between sentient objects and non-sentient ones hinges on the condition of whether the object has some sort of “internal drive” towards something external. Gravity could explain the moments of a stone, such that the stone on its own does not have an internal will or power. This is a very crude sketch of an undeveloped idea. But then we return to your question Gary F, when does something feel sentient? Or from my perspective, have an internal drive? Also, is not the stone or the feeling of the stone part of phaneron, which is the collective total of consciousness? “I propose to use the word Phaneron as a proper name to denote the total content of any one consciousness (for any one is substantially any other), the sum of all we have in mind in any way whatever, regardless of its cognitive value.” (EP2: 362, 1905). Thus, the stone is content of a consciousness. Is it also consciousness then? Or is it not a “content” of a consciousness, but rather as a whole, the entirety of a consciousness? This part of Peirce’s philosophy has always puzzled me. So I would happily hear what you all think it means that a First is sentient. Is sentience here the pure feeling as presented in the mode of thought? Does it not mean that we only talk about ourselves when we say that a stone has sentience? Best regards Ivar Le samedi 13 décembre 2025 à 08:19, Gary Richmond <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> a écrit : Gary F. Jeff, List, Gary, I'm glad you brought up the difference between James' and Peirce's views of what constitutes a 'phenomenon' which, I believe, diverges both in scope and method. Peirce’s phenomenology is, of course, classificatory in the sense of distinguishing three categories, but it is also in my view, and I think more importantly, methodological. In the 'blackboard' lecture it appears to me to initiate a systematic analysis of the 'phaneron', one which isn't intrinsically physical or psychological (or metaphysical in James' sense, although it most certainly will find its role in Peirce's metaphysics). His phenomenology doesn't begin with what one finds in some actual or, even, possible occurrence (2ns), but with those formal elements one can discover in any and every phenomenon. In short, Peirce's formal categorial 'modes' -- 1ns, 2ns, and 3ns -- are not contents of some existential experience but, rather, three universal ways of phenomena appearing within the phaneron. In later work he will characterize these categories as irreducible, mutually independent, that is, the three always appearing together (except, of course, for the purpose of analysis). This is to say, for example, that to explore 1ns as such is to consider that category in the abstract, prescinding from the fullness of tricategoriality where no one category ever appears independent of the other two. While James (and Husserl, for that matter) seems to see phenomena as a kind of temporal stream of pure existential experience, Peirce treats the phaneron as having essential modes (the categories) which can be studied and classified without necessarily referring to time, ego, or the existential world. Further down in the classification of sciences they will, naturally, find an important role in providing principles to especially semeiotics and metaphysics and, eventually, even the special and applied sciences. So, in a word, James’s phenomenon remains experiential and concrete while Peirce’s is formal, structural and, perhaps, normative (although I'd like to hear yours and others ideas regarding this last point as the normative sciences, of course, follow phenomenology in Peirce's classification of the theoretic sciences). One might say that Peirce is introducing a modal classificatory phenomenology not oriented directly toward lived experience (it is, after all, a theoretic science which, however, will find an important role in providing principles to the normative sciences, to metaphysics and, eventually, even the special and applied sciences). In my view, Peirce's phenomenology initiates an inquiry into the logical architecture of appearance itself. Best, Gary R On Thu, Dec 11, 2025 at 8:22 AM <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: 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]<mailto:[email protected]>> Sent: 11-Dec-25 05:25 To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Cc: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>; Jeffrey Brian Downard <[email protected]<mailto:[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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ► PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> . ► <a href="mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>">UNSUBSCRIBE FROM PEIRCE-L</a> . But, if your subscribed email account is not your default email account, then go to https://list.iu.edu/sympa/signoff/peirce-l . ► PEIRCE-L is owned by THE PEIRCE GROUP; moderated by Gary Richmond; and co-managed by him and Ben Udell. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ► PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> . ► <a href="mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>">UNSUBSCRIBE FROM PEIRCE-L</a> . But, if your subscribed email account is not your default email account, then go to https://list.iu.edu/sympa/signoff/peirce-l . ► PEIRCE-L is owned by THE PEIRCE GROUP; moderated by Gary Richmond; and co-managed by him and Ben Udell.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ► PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . ► <a href="mailto:[email protected]";>UNSUBSCRIBE FROM PEIRCE-L</a> . But, if your subscribed email account is not your default email account, then go to https://list.iu.edu/sympa/signoff/peirce-l . ► PEIRCE-L is owned by THE PEIRCE GROUP; moderated by Gary Richmond; and co-managed by him and Ben Udell.
