Cathy, this is itself a beautiful, clear explanation of the relations between percept and perceptual judgment in Peirce. Thank you!
I think its implications also help to explain Peirce's remark to James that "Percepts are signs for psychology; but they are not so for phenomenology" (CP 8.300). Which in turn helps to explain the difference between psychology and phenomenology, which seems to be hard for some folks to see. gary f. From: Catherine Legg [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 2-Apr-14 6:00 AM To: Vinicius Romanini; [email protected] Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] de Waal Seminar: Chapter 5, Semeiotics, or the doctrine of signs Vinicius, This is such a beautiful, clear explanation of Peirce's theory of perception. Thank you so much! In return, I attach some material from what I have now written on the matter, in case it is of interest to anyone. Cheers, Cathy 4.1. The Percept The percept comprises a felt quality and the vividness with which it is presented. Neither of these is what nowadays would be called "cognitive". Peirce notes that one might call the percept an "image", except that an image is often taken to represent something other than itself, and the percept does not do that (CP 7.619). Nevertheless it has insistency: it makes a real impact on my consciousness. Peirce explicates the insistency of the percept along three dimensions. The first is that the percept contributes something positive to my thinking. If for instance I have a percept of a cat, I do not just perceive some abstract state of affairs such as the absence of any dog in that spatiotemporal region. I perceive something that possesses qualities of its own, such as colours, shapes, sounds. Secondly, the percept compels my thinking insofar as I cannot pretend that it is not present in my consciousness. Thirdly, the percept is not reasonable. By this Peirce does not mean that the percept is ir- so much as a-rational. He states, ".it does not address the reason, nor appeal to anything for support" (CP 7.622). For one thing, the percept does not have sufficient structure to be rationally evaluable, or for itself to be a rational evaluation. It does not have any parts, or more strictly, "It has parts, in the sense that in thought it can be separated, but it does not represent itself to have parts" (CP 7.625). Attentive Peirce scholars will recognise that in this explication he is making use of his three fundamental philosophical categories. He is affirming that Firstness and Secondness - and denying that Thirdness - pertain to the percept. The percept in its directness bears some similarity to a Humean impression, but it cannot be a Humean idea insofar as it cannot be used to make truth-claims, nor is it the subject of belief or disbelief (7.626). Peirce writes that it: .does not stand for anything. It obtrudes itself upon my gaze; but not as a deputy for anything else, not 'as' anything. It simply knocks at the portal of my soul and stands there in the doorway (CP, 7.619). If the percept is really so mute, we might ask what is the point of positing it, epistemologically? Here we might look to the two roles that (it was noted) ideas have been said to play in British Empiricism: resembling and being caused by the world. We might ask whether the role of Peirce's percept is to resemble the world in the positive qualities that we have noted that it possesses. This is not the case, however. In Locke the claim that our ideas resemble objects entirely external to those ideas was a hypothesis empty of the very empirical consequences so beloved by empiricists - an insight decisively seized upon by Berkeley - and Peirce does not make it. Perhaps, then, the percept might play a causal role in philosophy of mind, and related epistemology - perhaps analogous to the causal role Hume gives to impressions in producing ideas? There is some truth to this, insofar as Peirce claims that percepts are related to perceptual judgments by "forceful connections". Only, this forcefulness should not be understood as the cause of a copy, where that copy is a particular. Rather, it is a trigger for (general) habits. This claim will be explained further below. http://www.modenus.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/chesterfield-wing-cha ir-yellow-leather.gif4.2. The Perceptual Judgement Fig 3.The perceptual judgement cannot be a copy of the percept, as they are too unlike one another. Peirce describes them as ".as unlike... as the printed letters in a book, where a Madonna of Murillo is described, are unlike the picture itself" (CP, 5.54. 1903 Harvard lectures, p. 160). Why is this? First of all the percept has an integration which cannot be possessed by the perceptual judgement, which qua judgement requires subject and predicate. Peirce offers as an example his perceiving a yellow chair (Fig. 3): The judgement, 'This chair appears yellow', separates the color from the chair, making the one predicate and the other subject. The percept, on the other hand, presents the chair in its entirety and makes no analysis whatever (CP, 7.631). The percept also has a definiteness which conflicts with the general predication which a judgment must contain. Peirce analyses this definiteness into two dimensions. The first is that it is individual: the percept pertains to some particular chair and no other. The second is that the percept is perfectly explicit: all of its determinables are determinate (CP, 7.625). Thus the yellowness of the chair-percept will be some perfectly specific colour, such as a dark lemon yellow, whereas our predicate 'yellow', due to its wide usage, must perforce be more general. It's worth noting that the generality of the yellow predicate is a kind of specifically sensory generality, which Peirce refers to a number of times using the metaphor of a 'composite photograph', a technology popular in his time which involved exposing the same negative to different objects in order to achieve a kind of 'visual average'[1]: Let us consider, first, the predicate, 'yellow' in the judgment that 'this chair appears yellow.' This predicate is not the sensation involved in the percept, because it is general. It does not even refer particularly to this percept but to a sort of composite photograph of all the yellows that have been seen (CP, 7. 634). A further dimension of the perfect explicitness of the percept is that whereas the perceptual judgment with its chosen colour-predicate makes no comment on other 'chair-determinables', such as shape, these will be discernible in the percept too. Since the perceptual judgement is composed of subject and general predicate, thereby expressing a truth-apt proposition, its interpretation opens out to the community of inquiry. As Forster puts it, "While the content of a percept is inherent in it apart from everything else, the content of a sign is not" (Forster, 2011, p. 114). Rather, the perceptual judgment takes its (logical) place in ".an endless series of judgments, each member of which is logically related to prior members" (Forster, 2011, p. 120). Thus in our example above, inquirers may develop the meaning of yellow and chair in unanticipated ways: for example, by determining the wavelength of light which typically produces yellow experiences in humans, or by inventing a chair which lacks some feature previously thought essential, such as legs. Despite its pathways into public discourse, however, the perceptual judgement compels assent as much as the percept. It is equally insistent. As much as if I open my eyes in front of a yellow chair I cannot avoid having certain sensory experiences, neither can I avoid judging "This is a yellow chair", if I have the appropriate concepts. But how is it possible that the perceptual judgment produce such compulsive belief? Doesn't this endow it with a form of de facto infallibility? We have just noted that the perceptual judgment opens out logically into the community of inquiry, for which it is well known that Peirce makes thorough fallibilism the guiding principle. Surely it cannot be both fallible and infallible at the same time? This is an important objection. A superficial initial answer might point out a temporal dimension to the belief-forming process, and note that the perceptual judgment's apparent infallibility holds at the time, but it might be corrected subsequently in the light of further perceptions. ("For an instant I saw a yellow chair in the corner. But when I blinked and looked again I only saw floorboards. Therefore I infer that what previously appeared to me as a perception of a yellow chair was in fact a hallucination, and I choose to ignore it.") But shortly we will see that in Peirce's philosophy the temporal mediation of what we perceive applies on a yet profounder level. Finally, despite the fundamental differences between the perceptual judgement and the percept that have been noted, the former nevertheless "professes to represent" the latter. In this representing function it embodies the Thirdness that is missing from the percept (CP, 7.360). But one might wonder: how on earth is it possible for the perceptual judgment to represent the percept, if they are so different? We have just made clear that the perceptual judgment is not a copy of the percept. Peirce adds that neither does it represent the percept logically, since this would require that the percept serve as some kind of premise from which the perceptual judgment is inferred. As the percept is not itself in propositional form, it cannot serve as a premise for the perceptual judgment; nor can it be described in such a way that it could so serve, without recapitulating the perceptual judgment and begging the question (CP, 7.628). The issue of the true relationship between percept and perceptual judgment will be resolved in the next section. 4.3. The Relationship between Percept and Perceptual Judgement: The Percipuum Now it might seem that Peirce has so convincingly separated the Firstness / Secondness of the percept from the Thirdness of the perceptual judgement that one might wonder: how are we to bridge the two? In particular, how are we to bridge the uncontrollable in perception to the controllable in thought? Don't we now have a great mystery at the heart of perception? Isn't Peirce deeply entrenching the Experience-Truth Gap, rather than giving us any theoretical means to resolve it? The answer is that the British empiricists (and their downstream followers) are too unimaginative in assuming that the only possible relation between percept and perceptual judgment (or in Humean terms: impression and idea) is that the latter copies the former. But how can the idea convey the same information as the impression, other than by copying it? Otherwise surely we would be engaged in some mere blind, causal transaction between our minds and the world? Peirce claims ".there is no relation between the predicate of the perceptual judgment and the sensational element of the percept, except forceful connections" (CP, 7.634). The previously unanticipated third possibility for the relation between perceptual judgment and percept is that the former is an index of the latter - a "true symptom, just as a weather-cock indicates the direction of the wind or a thermometer the temperature" (CP 7.628). How does this work? The human mind is organised such that each percept produces "direct and uncontrollable interpretations" (CP 7.648) which lead the mind to form various perceptual judgments. These interpretations are sometimes referred to by Peirce via a third term: the percipuum. Insofar as the percipuum consists in an interpretative welding of percept to perceptual judgment, it may be understood to manifest full-blooded Thirdness. So we may ask: with the percipuum have we finally bridged perception into the controllable in thought? Alas, no - Peirce notes that the percipuum is equally insistent! The percipuum.is what forces itself upon your acknowledgment, without any why or wherefore, so that if anybody asks you why you should regard it as appearing so and so, all you can say is, 'I can't help it. That is how I see it.' (CP 7.643) However although this interpretative process cannot be willed, it can be (indeed must be) trained and perfected by cultivating appropriate mental habits.[2] For example, parents spend considerable time training children to correctly apply predicates that are useful in their daily lives ("food", "bath", "red", "one", "two", "three"). Over time, those children learn how to produce appropriate judgments about the objects around them with the help of whatever perceptual experiences they notice reliably correlate with those judgments. But the exact nature of the experiences themselves - in Wittgenstein's famous phrase - may be 'divided through' as irrelevant. This process is broadly known as 'education'.
<<image001.jpg>>
<<image002.png>>
----------------------------- 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] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
