Dear Gary, lists In the discussion of this P quote : "If you object that there can be no immediate consciousness of generality, I grant that. If you add that one can have no direct experience of the general, I grant that as well. Generality, Thirdness, pours in upon us in our very perceptual judgments, and all reasoning, so far as it depends on necessary reasoning, that is to say, mathematical reasoning, turns upon the perception of generality and continuity at every step (CP 5.150)
it may be too easy to get the impression that as there is "no immediate consciousness of generality", there must be, instead, perception as immediate consciousness of First- and Secondness from which generatlity is then, later, construed by acts of inference, generalization etc. But that would be to conform Peirce to the schema of logical empiricism which seems to have grown into default schema over the last couple of generations. And that is not, indeed, what Peirce thought. What IS "immediate consciousness" about in Peirce? He uses the term in several connections. Sometimes he says it is a "pure fiction" (1.343), sometimes he says it is identical to the Feeling as the qualitiative aspect of any experience (1.379) but that it is instantaneous and thus does not cover a timespan (hence its fictionality because things not covering a timespan do not exist). But Feelings are Firstnesses and, for that reason, never appear in isolation (all phenomena having both 1-2-3 aspects). So immediate-consciousness-Feelings come in company with existence (2) and generality/continuity (3). That is why what appears in perception is perceptual judgments - so perception as such is NOT "immediate consciousness". It is only the Feeling aspect of perception which is immediate - and that can only be isolated and contemplated retroactively (but then we are already in time/generality/continuity). Immediate consciousness, then, is something accompanying all experience, but graspable only, in itself, as a vanishing limit category. Thus, it is nothing like stable sense data at a distance from later generalizations. Best F
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