Hi Gary R., Lists, A little while back, you made the following claim about the nature of a percept: "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."
I've been trying to square Peirce's explanations of percepts and perceptual judgments with his classification of different kinds of signs and the relations they bear to objects and interpretants. Thus far, I've not been able to locate any place with his texts where he treats a percept as an iconic qualisign. In his discussion of Universes and Predicaments in the Apology for Pragmatism, he explicitly says that percepts function as immediate objects, and that we then pick out certain qualities in the experience. In doing so, the qualities we pick out by focusing attention on them function as qualisigns. (CP. 4.539) I'd like to reconstruct his argument in this short section of the essay, and my strategy is to start by setting a bit of the stage. What is especially interesting about Peirce's account is that he says that his theory of logic forces him to say that the perceptual judgment is not the immediate interpretant of the percept (as the immediate object) in its relation to the qualisign. His reason stems from a commitment on his part to explaining these processes as logical inferences. A perceptual judgment can't be the interpretant of these two because that would be an invalid inference. The point he is making, I believe, is that the qualisign is only functioning as a rhematic sign (a seme), and the percept, too, is only a seme. From two semes, one cannot make a valid inference to a interpretant like a perceptual judgment, because this judgment is a pheme (a dicent). As such, Peirce needs find a way to to bridge the gap between percepts and perceptual judgments. How do percepts and qualisigns get built up into richer sign relations that can serve as the premisses in an inference (uncontrolled as it may be) to a perceptual judgment? An explanation, I take it, is given in the discussion of telepathy in terms of the antecipuum, percipuum, and ponecipuum as the immediate interpretants of the antecept, percept and ponencept. I've spent some time trying to fit the pieces together, but his discussion of the role that percepts play in the semiotic process in "Universes and Predicaments" is so dense that it is posing something of a challenge. His discussion of the perception of time as a continuous process in the piece on telepathy seems to offer some suggestions for thinking about how this all might work. Does anyone have recommendations for other things Peirce has written that might shed light on the matter, or for secondary sources that might be helpful? I've read the secondary sources I could find on perceptions and percepts, but I'm looking for something that digs through these particular passages in "Universes and Predicaments" and the discussion of the percipuum in the essay on telepathy. --Jeff Jeff Downard Associate Professor Department of Philosophy NAU (o) 523-8354 ________________________________________ From: Gary Richmond [[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, April 26, 2015 9:04 AM To: [email protected] 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 <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> 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:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] Sent: April 25, 2015 2:46 PM To: Peirce-L Cc: <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> 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 <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> 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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