Hi Cathy, List, In an earlier post about perception, you concluded with the following question: "So what exactly is the difference between the perceptual judgment and the percipuum??"
Here are some quick remarks in response. First, I should say that my general approach to Peirce's account of perception is informed, in part, by the Bernstein and Hausman essays. If you haven't seen the piece by Hausman (In and out of Peirce's Percepts), I recommend taking a look. Initially, I was not much taken with his distinction between two senses of percept: percept(1) and percept(2). The textual evidence didn't impress. Over time, however, as I've tried to fit his reading with the points Peirce makes about the characteristics of the percept and the percipuum in the piece on Telepathy, I've gained a better sense of what he is trying to sort out and have been more impressed with this approach. Here is a straightforward by overly short response to your question. The percipuum is a general term that has been introduced to talk about perception as a process. It is not the third step that is the result process. Rather, it is a term used to describe the process itself. The transformation of 'perception' into 'percipuum' involves two ideas: first, it treats the conception we're using as a noun (an object of inquiry arrived at by hypostatic abstraction). Second, it may be Peirce's way of stressing the fact that, on his account, the process of perception is being treated as a continuum. The starting points of that continuous process are the percepts. The ending points in the percipuum are the perceptual judgments. The points I made earlier about habitual forms of inference are salient here. Percepts consist in habitual processes of inference that are not self controlled. Most importantly, the elements of the percepts are not *analyzed*. As I've mentioned earlier, here are two forms of unconscious inference: a) Judgments of sensation, emotions, and instinctive motions which are hypotheses whose predicates are unanalyzed in comprehension b) Habits which are Inductions whose subjects are unanalyzed in extension. What is happening in the continuous process of perception as the percepts are brought together and a perceptual judgment is formed? One thing that is happening is that the feelings that were unanalyzed in comprehension are now getting analyzed. Another thing that is happening is that the habits whose subjects were unanalyzed in extension are also getting analyzed. What is more, the two are being brought together. As the elements are being separated more clearly into subject and predicate, we come to see a unity between the two. That is, something in particular is being represented as a relation that holds between the subjects and the predicates. The cognitive grasp of the represented unity is the result of the perceptual judgment. This is one reason that there is such continuity between perceptual judgment and self-controlled abductive inferences. Peirce is pointing out that there is creativity at work in both the un-controlled perceptual judgments and in the self-controlled abductive inferences. The self-controlled inferences involve acts of creativity whereby we are applying rules as we draw the conclusion from the premisses. The inferences are creative because the rules do not fully determine the character of the conclusions that should be drawn. The rules constrain the activity, but the goals of abductive inference (i.e., find unity, bring the parts into totality) do not entirely determine how we ought to go about meeting those aims. How should we apply the semiotic theory to the account of perception? I'm hoping that we can talk about this in more detail. Here are some initial observations. Peirce says the following about percepts: No cognition and no Sign is absolutely precise, not even a Percept. (4.542) Our very percepts are the result of cognitive elaboration. (5.146) I would like to get clearer on the question of when in this continuous process of perception and abductive inference we first have representamens that are functioning as qualisigns. Here is an example that Peirce develops in 1900. "I see an inkstand on the table: that is a percept. Moving my head, I get a different percept of the inkstand. It coalesces with the other. What I call the inkstand is a generalized percept, a quasi-inference from percepts, perhaps I might say a composite-photograph of percepts." (8.144) (Side note: Hausman's interpretation of this passage is quite interesting. See pages 286-7 in his essay if you are interested). I wonder: how are the feelings present in the percepts getting combined with the kinds of token figures and general rules that are needed for a complex to be formed (i.e., something like a composite photograph)? --Jeff Jeff Downard Associate Professor Department of Philosophy NAU (o) 523-8354 ________________________________________ From: Catherine Legg [[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2014 10:33 PM To: Jeffrey Brian Downard; [email protected] Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] de Waal Seminar: Chapter 5, Semeiotics, or the doctrine of signs Hello again, This is a continuation of the thread concerning Peirce's philosophy of perception, which was begun under chapter 4 but I think is equally relevant to chapter 5. Vinicius I apologise for not having responded to your fine initial postings yet. I currently have my head deep in Peirce's philosophy of perception, trying to work it out. I will get there. Jeff wrote: "As a quick response, I think there is some tension between what I've said and the points Peirce makes at 7.19-22. Having said that I think my interpretation fits well with what he says a bit later starting at 7.25. He's trying to hold a number of ideas together and build an account that explains a number of things needed for the sake of the larger logical (i.e., semiotic) theory. As a starting point, I'd want to get clear on the phenomena that need to be explain and the method being used in the analysis. Peirce explicitly says that he's not doing empirical psychology." The questions I currently have, which concern the theory of perception presented in "Telepathy and Perception": (CP 7.597-688) are as follows: - I take it that the percept, perceptual judgement and percipuum are meant to be in the order 1-2-3. But then Peirce says that the percept contains 1ness and 2ness, and the perceptual judgment has a residual kind of 3ness insofar as it purports to represent the percept. So what exactly is the difference between the perceptual judgment and the percipuum?? - Sandra Rosenthal's paper "The Percipuum and the Issue of Foundations", which Ben referred to a while back, which is really excellent, notes that percept and perceptual judgement (and indeed other 'parts' of perception such as the antecept and the ponecept) should not be viewed so much as objects but more as abstractions for the purposes of theoretical analysis. That is fine, but then Peirce says that the relation between percept and perceptual judgment is that the percept causes the perceptual judgment while not being the source of its content. (Am I right about this?) Now my question is how something that is only an abstraction can be a forceful cause - ? Cheers, Cathy
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