Ben, Lists, Here are paraphrases from three definitions that Peirce wrote for the century dictionary.
Sensation (n): 1. The action, faculty, or immediate mental result of receiving a mental impression from any affection of the bodily organism; sensitive apprehension; corporeal feeling; any feeling; also, the elements of feeling or immediate consciousness and of consciousness of reaction in perception; the subjective element of perception. 2. A state of interest or of feeling; especially, a state of excited interest or feeling. 3. That which produces sensation or excited interest or feeling: as, the greatest sensation of the day. Feeling (n): 1. The act of sensing or perceiving by sensation 2. A sensation 3. The immediate quality of what is present to consciousness in sensation, desire or emotion, considered apart from all activity of thought; the pure sense element in consciousness. Think (v): 1. To judge; to form as a judgment or conception 2. To form a mental image of; to recollect, recall, reconsider 3. To cognize, apprehend; grasp intellectually The contrast between feeling and thinking seems instructive. --Jeff Jeff Downard Associate Professor Department of Philosophy NAU (o) 523-8354 ________________________________________ From: Benjamin Udell [[email protected]] Sent: Monday, December 01, 2014 7:39 AM To: Peirce-L Cc: [email protected] Subject: [biosemiotics:7619] Re: Peirce categories Gary R., Joseph, Peirce did not regard pleasure, pain, and other kinds of affectivity mainly as qualities of feeling. By "feeling" Peirce seems to mean something more like sensation, although across his work it has seemed to me that he doesn't mean only sensation. 1. Feeling, sensation (feeling of red, etc.). Pleasure and pain are, at most, feelings of states of volition (1905) or secondary feelings, feelings of attraction and repulsion which in turn are actions (1906) 2. Sense of reaction (including will and, more or less, pain and, in 1905, pleasure). 3. General conception (he tends to put or correlate pleasure with this in 1903). In particular, Peirce doesn't think that there is any feeling-quality common to all pleasurable experience or to all painful experience. Lectures on Pragmatism (1903), Lecture 4, "The Reality of Thirdness", Peirce start a paragraph (CP 5.112) saying "It is a great mistake to suppose that the phenomena of pleasure and pain are mainly phenomena of feeling." In CP 5.113, he goes on to say about pleasure and pain, that [Peirce quote] [...] these phenomena themselves do not mainly consist in any common Feeling-quality of Pleasure and any common Feeling-quality of Pain, even if there are such Qualities of Feeling; but they mainly consist [in a] Pain [which lies] in a Struggle to give a state of mind its _quietus_, and [in a] Pleasure in a peculiar mode of consciousness allied to the consciousness of _making a generalization_, in which not Feeling, but rather Cognition is the principal constituent. [....] In that view of the matter, the objection to the doctrine that the distinction Moral approval and disapproval is ultimately only a species of the distinction Esthetic approval and disapproval seems to be answered. [End quote] Section 6 "Ego and Non-Ego" in "Phaneroscopy or the Natural History of Concepts," c. 1905, CP 1.333. [Peirce quote] As for pleasure and pain, which Kant and others have represented to be of the essence of feeling, whether it be merely because they and the section of the psychological world for which at this moment I have the presumption to speak apply the word feeling to different modifications of awareness, or whether there be a faulty analysis on the one part or the other, we certainly do not think that unadulterated feeling, if that element could be isolated, would have any relation to pain or to pleasure, For in our opinion if there be any quality of feeling common to all pleasurable experiences or components of experience, and another one quality of feeling common to all that is painful (which we are inclined to doubt, to say the least), then we hold the opinion that the one is the feeling of being attracted, the other that of being repelled, by the present state of experience. If there be two such feelings, they are feelings of states of volition. But perhaps pleasure and pain are nothing more than names for the state of being attracted and that of being repelled by present experience. Of course, feelings accompany them, but under the latter hypothesis no feeling would be common to all pleasures , and none to all pains, If we are right, the position of the hedonists is preposterous, in that they make mere feelings to be active agencies, instead of being merely conscious indications of real determinations of our subconscious volitional beings. [I may mention that their _talk_ (however it may be with their thought) is further preposterous as seeming to make pain a mere privation of pleasure, although it is plain that it is pain that indicates an active, and pleasure only a passive, determination of our volitional being.] [End quote, brackets in text in the original] CP 5.552, from "The Basis of Pragmaticism" (1906). Here he ties the ideally mature person's pleasure and pain to esthetic good and evil, but still regards pleasure and pain as secondary feelings or generalizations of such feelings and as really pertaining to action. [Quote Peirce] Esthetic good and evil are closely akin to pleasure and pain. They are what would be pleasure or pain to the fully developed superman. What, then, are pleasure and pain? The question has been sufficiently discussed, and the answer ought by this time to be ready. They are secondary feelings or generalizations of such feelings; that is, of feelings attaching themselves to, and excited by, other feelings. A toothache is painful. It is not pain, but pain _accompanies_ it; and if you choose to say that pain is an ingredient of it, that is not far wrong. However, the quality of the feeling of toothache is a simple, positive feeling, distinct from pain; though pain accompanies it. To use the old consecrated terms, pleasure is the feeling that a feeling is "sympathetical," pain that it is "antipathetical." The feeling of pain is a symptom of a feeling which repels us; the feeling of pleasure is the symptom of an attractive feeling. Attraction and repulsion are kinds of action. Feelings are pleasurable or painful according to the kind of action which they stimulate. In general, the good is the attractive — not to everybody, but to the sufficiently matured agent; and the evil is the repulsive to the same. Mr. Ferdinand C.S. Schiller informs us that he and James have made up their minds that the true is simply the satisfactory. No doubt; but to say "satisfactory" is not to complete any predicate whatever. Satisfactory to what end? [End quote] Best, Ben On 11/30/2014 5:40 PM, Gary Richmond wrote: Joseph wrote: Firstness is a happy land . . . Not at all! The following are also all qualities of feeling (or complexes of them): suffering, pain (physical, say, toothache, or emotional, say, heartache), agony, distress, anxiety, fear, despair, fatigue, worry, etc. Good or bad, painful or pleasurable, it is the "living" character of the feeling which matters. Yet the feeling must be present (even if it presents itself in, say, an intense memory of a feeling which comes to consciousness). Best, Gary R Gary Richmond Philosophy and Critical Thinking Communication Studies LaGuardia College of the City University of New York C 745 718 482-5690 On Sun, Nov 30, 2014 at 4:14 PM, Joseph Brenner <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>: Gary R., Thank you for this note which helps me understand what is embodied in Firstness. Firstness is a happy land in which there is no absence, delay, staleness, wear, slavery, vagueness, dullness, repetition, unconsiousness and permanence. Happy, then, the biosemiotician or any scientist who can live and work in that land. Joseph B.
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