Gary R., John, Lists, Here is what Peirce says in his essay on Telepathy (CP 7.604) as he tries to clarify the division he is drawing between percept and perceptual judgment:
Analysis of the experience of the chair as it appears before me now. a. The chair I appear to see makes no professions of any kind. b. It essentially embodies no intentions of any kind. c. It does not stand for anything. d. It obtrudes itself upon my gaze, but not as a deputy of something else, not as anything. e. It is very insistent, for all its silence. f. It would be useless for me to say “I don’t believe in the chair.” g. It disturbs be, more less. h. I can’t dismiss is, as I would a fancy i. I can only get rid of it by an exertion of physical force. j. It is a forceful thing. Yet it offers no reason, defence, or excuse for its presence (in my experience, in its existence). k. It does not pretend to any right to be there. l. It silently forces itself upon me (no further brute cause of which this seems to be the effect). m. Such is the precept. Key question: now, what is its logical bearing upon knowledge and belief? This can be summed up in three precepts: 1. It contributes something positive (the chair has four legs, a back, a yellow color, a green cushion. Each of these things is a predicate of the subject “this thing.” To learn that the subject actually has these predicates is a contribution to our belief and knowledge). 2. It compels the perceiver to acknowledge it. 3. It neither offers any reason for such acknowledgement nor makes any pretension to reasonableness. Taking these points together, it appears to me that the first part consists in an analysis of what appears to us when we see something like a pillow sitting on a chair. The analysis seems to be guided by the phenomenological account of the elemental categories. The second part, where he formulates the three precepts, looks to me like a hypothesis about the nature of the percept. Gary claims that the percept is a rhematic iconic qualisign, but Peirce claims in (c) that percepts do not stand for anything else. As such, they are not representations. Later in this essay, however, Peirce characterizes the percipuum as an interpretation of the percept. In order for the percipuum to be an interpretation of the percept, doesn't the percept have to function as some kind of representamen? How can we reconcile the apparent tension between claims that Peirce is making about the nature of the percept and its relation to the percipuum and the perceptual judgment? --Jeff Jeff Downard Associate Professor Department of Philosophy NAU (o) 523-8354 ________________________________________ From: John Collier [colli...@ukzn.ac.za] Sent: Sunday, April 26, 2015 9:37 AM To: Gary Richmond; biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee Cc: Peirce-L Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8454] Re: Natural Propositions, Gary, I would say it is an abstraction from the perceptual judgment, where abstraction is understood as Locke’s partial consideration. At least that is the way I seem to experience things myself. Perhaps others are different. John From: Gary Richmond [mailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com] Sent: April 26, 2015 1:05 PM To: biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee Cc: Peirce-L Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8454] Re: Natural Propositions, John, The percept within the perceptual judgment--as I noted Nathan Houser as saying--is a firstness. The percept is not an abstraction. As a sign its a rhematic iconic qualisign. Best, Gary [Gary Richmond] Gary Richmond Philosophy and Critical Thinking Communication Studies LaGuardia College of the City University of New York C 745 718 482-5690 On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 8:41 AM, John Collier <colli...@ukzn.ac.za<mailto:colli...@ukzn.ac.za>> wrote: I find this discussion very interesting. In it deals with some issues that I have raised in the past about the experience of firstness. I maintained there is no such thing in itself (except as an abstraction). These passages and discussion seem to me to confirm that view in a way that I have no problem with. What we work with, when we work with perceptions, are judgments. Furthermore, this is also in line with what I have said about abduction coming first. In order to deal with sensations we must classify them, which requires and abduction. We can’t do other kinds of reasoning without this first classification (right or wrong, as it may turn out). John From: Gary Richmond [mailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com<mailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com>] Sent: April 25, 2015 2:46 PM To: Peirce-L Cc: <biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee<mailto:biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee>> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Fwd: [biosemiotics:8438] Re: Natural Propositions, Ch. Frederik, lists, Frederik, thank you for these very helpful remarks. Coincidentally. on the recommendation of Torkild Thellefsen I've recently read Nathan Houser's paper "The Scent of Truth" (Semiotica 153 - 1/4 (2005), 455 - 466). I recommended the paper to Ben Udell, so he may sound in on this as well. Nathan writes: The importance of perception is that in what Peirce calls ‘‘the perceptual judgment’’ it attaches the equivalent of text, at the propositional level, to sensations, and, in so doing, introduces an intellectual component into consciousness. We know nothing about the percept otherwise than by testimony of the perceptual judgment, excepting that we feel the blow of it, the reaction of it against us, and we see the contents of it arranged into an object, in its totality . . . (CP 7.643) We might say that sensations, composed of elements of firstness and secondness, are apprehended on a higher plane, where the feeling component is recognized as characteristic of (a sign of ) something else (the ‘other’ that is indexically indicated by the element of secondness). Perception adds a symbolical component to consciousness and in so doing introduces the mediatory element constitutive of thirdness. What is the essential ingredient or element in the elevation of sensations to perceptions or, in other words, in the movement from the second level of consciousness to the third level? The clue is in Peirce’s use of the word ‘judgment’ to distinguish the perceptual element that serves as the starting point of knowledge from its pre-intellectual antecedents. A judgment involves an act of inference or, at any rate, nearly so, and in what else could we expect to find the source of intellect? Of the three kinds of inference identified by Peirce, it is only abduction that can operate at this primitive level of thought. Strictly speaking, according to Peirce, perceptual judgments are the result of a process that is too uncontrolled to be regarded as fully rational, so one cannot say unequivocally that perceptual judgments arise from sensations (or percepts, as the sensory component in perception is called) by an act of abductive inference, but Peirce insisted that ‘abductive inference shades into perceptual judgment without any sharp line of demarcation between them’ and that ‘our first premisses, the perceptual judgments, are to be regarded as an extreme case of abductive inferences’ (CP 5.181). This helps explain Peirce’s commitment (somewhat reconceived) to the maxim: ‘Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu.’ (CP 5.181). (The scent of truth, 461-2) These passages seem to support what you just wrote. Do you agree? Btw, Cathy Legg wrote that in the Q&A of a paper she presented at APA recently she was asked exactly what is a percept in the perceptual judgment. She thought it was "a good question." I think Nathan's parenthetical remark in the paragraph just above provides a neat answer: it is "the sensory component in perception"). Best, Gary [Gary Richmond] Gary Richmond Philosophy and Critical Thinking Communication Studies LaGuardia College of the City University of New York C 745 718 482-5690<tel:718%20482-5690> On Sat, Apr 25, 2015 at 1:19 PM, Frederik Stjernfelt <stj...@hum.ku.dk<mailto:stj...@hum.ku.dk>> wrote: 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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