Jeff, responses interleaved again …
Gary f. -----Original Message----- From: Jeffrey Brian Downard [mailto:jeffrey.down...@nau.edu] Sent: 8-Dec-15 14:10 Hello Jon S., Gary F., List, Jon, given what you say in 1&2 below, then we do have a question. Gary F. says that qualisigns are always icons, while you say that the icons are always based on the relation of the sign to the dynamical interpretant. GF: There you go again, Jeff, writing “interpretant” when you mean “object”. Anyway, the icon is one of a trichotomy which is based on the relation of the sign to its object, and it is First in that trichotomy. That relation cannot be more complex than the sign in itself is, and that’s why any sign which is a qualisign (First in its own trichotomy) is necessarily an icon, which is First in the second trichotomy (based on the S-O relation). What, then, should we say about the following kind of case that Peirce explicitly considers in his writings on perception. In seeing a yellow chair with a green cushion, the awareness of the chair and pillow is a percept that serves as the immediate object. GF: I can only assume that you are referring to CP 7.619, and observe that Peirce does not say explicitly that the percept serves as immediate object. That proposition seems at best dubious to me, because the percept is precisely the point where the dynamic/immediate object distinction does not apply. In fact it’s difficult to apply the sign/object distinction to the percept. Moreover, Peirce has almost nothing to say about signs in that entire long essay, and the little he does say is in reference to the perceptual judgment considered as a kind of natural proposition: 633. The other mode of definiteness of the percept consists in its being perfectly explicit. The perceptual judgment carelessly pronounces the chair yellow. What the particular shade, hue, and purity of the yellow may be it does not consider. The percept, on the other hand, is so scrupulously specific that it makes this chair different from every other in the world; or rather, it would do so if it indulged in any comparisons. 634. It may be objected that the terms of the judgment resemble the percept. 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. If it resembles the sensational element of the percept, this resemblance consists only in the fact that a new judgment will predicate it of the percept, just as this judgment does. It also awakens in the mind an imagination involving a sensational element. But taking all these facts together, we find that there is no relation between the predicate of the perceptual judgment and the sensational element of the percept, except forceful connections. 635. As for the subject of the perceptual judgment, as subject it is a sign. But it belongs to a considerable class of mental signs of which introspection can give hardly any account. It ought not to be expected that it should do so, since the qualities of these signs as objects have no relevancy to their significative character; for these signs merely play the part of demonstrative and relative pronouns, like “that,” or like the A, B, C, of which a lawyer or a mathematician avails himself in making complicated statements. In fact, the perceptual judgment which I have translated into “that chair is yellow” would be more accurately represented thus: “ is yellow,” a pointing index-finger taking the place of the subject. On the whole, it is plain enough that the perceptual judgment is not a copy, icon, or diagram of the percept, however rough. It may be reckoned as a higher grade of the operation of perception. On that basis, I don’t think we can extract from this passage any good information about what a qualisign is or how it works. What it does make clear is that the perceptual judgment is not iconic. So at this point I’m going to jump down to your concluding paragraph. JD: The percept does not represent the chair. Rather, it is a vague awareness that is largely characterized in following terms: "it appears to me," "makes no professions of any kind," "It does not stand for anything," "I can’t dismiss is, as I would a fancy." Peirce asks: what logical bearing does the percept have upon knowledge and belief? He says that it can be summed up in three precepts: a. It contributes something positive. b. It compels the perceiver to acknowledge it. c. It neither offers any reason for such acknowledgement nor makes any pretension to reasonableness. If the person perceiving the chair attends to the feeling of yellow, then this quality of feeling can stand as a qualisign so long as it bears the right kind of relationship to an interpretant. In this case, the immediate interpretant is something like a schema in the imagination, which he describes as having the form of a skeleton of a set, which is a formal set of relations that can serve as a diagram of sorts. To put things in quite simple terms: the quality of the feeling of "yellow" can be thought of as a dot (a monadic kind of thing), that stands in a relation to the quality of feeling of "color," which is also pictured by Peirce as a dot on a page, and the relation of containment between yellow and color is pictured as a line between the dots. So, what is the qualisign? It is not the quality of the feeling of yellow considered in isolation. In order for such a quality to serve as a qualisign, Peirce claims that it must be considered in its relation to other qualities of the feeling--such as the various shades of yellow, the color green or the quality of color itself. What is the immediate interpretant? It is a possible diagram consisting of a skeleton of a set that can be constructed of the formal relations between these colors. He calls the immediate interpretant the percipuum. When he lays out what the percipuum is, it turns out that this interpretant is quite rich in its relation to past and future anticipated feelings--all of which are ordered in terms of such things are relative intensity, time, being spread in space, etc. What then, is the character of the relation between the qualisign (the quality of the feeling of yellow) and the immediate object (the vague awareness of the yellow chair with the green cushion as a percept)? Jon suggest that this relationship is not one of iconicity. Such a term does not apply because this is an internal relation. I suspect that this language of internal relation may prove to be quite helpful, because it is a general way of describing an important distinction between kinds of relations. In "On a New List of Categories," Peirce draws on the scholastic distinction between relations of equiparance and disquiparance. The former can fruitfully be thought of as internal relations of similarity. How does this help us understand the opening moves in NDTR? Peirce later found it necessary to modify the account of what relations of equiparance consist in: In my paper of 1867, I committed the error of identifying those relations constituted by non-relative characters with relations of equiparance, that is, with necessarily mutual relations, and the dynamical relations with relations of disquiparance, or possibly non-mutual relations. Subsequently, falling out of one error into another, I identified the two classes respectively with relations of reason and relations in re. (CP 1.567) My hunch is that Peirce's examination genuinely triadic sign relations in NDTR is guided by his evolving understanding of what is necessary for establishing the kinds of ordered relations between the vague qualities of feelings in our percepts that are necessary for making comparisons between such things as the hue of a yellow chair and the hue of a green pillow. In fact, I think he is attributing to the qualisign the features that are necessary to explain how such comparisons are possible (e.g., in the relatively uncontrolled inferences that give rise to our perceptual judgments). GF: There is no vagueness in a percept; it’s a singular. So I don’t see how the concept of qualisign can serve the purpose you suggest here. I think the qualisign is simply a necessary result of Peirce’s introduction of the trichotomy of signs based on the sign’s mode of being in itself. It has to be First in that trichotomy. --Jeff Jeffrey Downard Associate Professor Department of Philosophy Northern Arizona University (o) 928 523-8354
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