Hello Franklin, Gary F., List, If a person sees smoke billowing in the distance, is the percept the "smoke itself," or is the percept the visual impression of the smoke? Peirce indicates that it is the latter when he provides the following explanation of a percept: "A visual percept obtrudes itself upon me in its entirety. I am not therein conscious of any mental process by which the image has been constructed. The psychologists, however, are able to give some account of the matter. Since 1709, they have been in possession of sufficient proof (as most of them agree,) that, notwithstanding its apparent primitiveness, every percept is the product of mental processes, or at all events of processes for all intents and purposes mental, except that we are not directly aware of them;" CP 7.624
This fits with the definitions he provides in the Century dictionary: 1. Perceive: 1) in general, to become aware of; to gain knowledge of some object or fact. 2) specifically, to come to know by direct experience; in psychology, to come to know by a real action of the object on the mind (commonly upon the senses); though the knowledge may be inferential 2. Perception: 1) cognition (originally, and down through the middle of the 18th century); thought and sense in general, whether the faculty, the operation or the resulting idea. 2) the mental faculty, operation or resulting a construction of the imagination, of gaining knowledge by virtue of a real action of an object upon the mind. 3. Percept: the immediate object in perception, in the sense in which the word is used by modern psychologists. Insofar as the modern psychologists are engaged in a special science that is empirical in origin, then it would appear that Peirce is importing a technical term from the special science into his philosophical logic, and he is trying to articulate what is necessary for the percept to function in the (uncontrolled) process of drawing perceptual judgments as inferential conclusions. One might think that these kinds of inferential processes are only of subsidiary concern if our aim is to understand the divisions Peirce is drawing between different kinds of signs in NDTR. My assumption is that Peirce is generalizing from way in which terms and propositions function in self controlled arguments in order to account for these uncontrolled processes of mind. --Jeff Jeffrey Downard Associate Professor Department of Philosophy Northern Arizona University (o) 928 523-8354 ________________________________________ From: Franklin Ransom [pragmaticist.lo...@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, December 12, 2015 6:41 AM To: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu 1 Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] RE: signs, correlates, and triadic relations Gary F, A perceptual judgment must take the form of a dicisign, so I would say the identification that "that right there is smoke" would be a perceptual judgment, but smoke itself is not a perceptual judgment, but would have to be the percept (supposing the percept has been rightly judged as smoke). Supposing that the percept has been rightly identified as smoke, then it would serve as a sign of fire, which would be another percept, that could be judged in a perceptual judgment as "that right there is fire". That's the way I think of how percept and perceptual judgment are related. -- Franklin ---------------------------------------- On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 11:35 AM, <g...@gnusystems.ca<mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca>> wrote: Franklin, Yes, this excerpt from Peirce’s “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism” demonstrates that according to the purpose of the analysis, a percept can be considered either as an object or a sign. (And of course signs can be objects of other signs, otherwise we could say nothing about semiosis!) Your example does show that maybe it’s not that “hard to say how any phenomenon could be the object of a percept” — although I could argue that smoke is not a percept but a perceptual judgment. But personally I’m going to leave for later (or for others) the consideration of perception in terms of triadic relations. At least until I have a better handle on NDTR and its classification of signs, and how that relates to the phenomenological categories. Gary f. From: Franklin Ransom [mailto:pragmaticist.lo...@gmail.com<mailto:pragmaticist.lo...@gmail.com>] Sent: 9-Dec-15 18:00 Gary F, Jeff, Jon S, Given Gary's comments in this last post, I think it would be worthwhile to quote the passage that is pertinent to some of what Jeff has been discussing, and which I discussed with Jeff in our previous discussion. From Vol. 4 of the Collected Papers: 539. The Immediate Object of all knowledge and all thought is, in the last analysis, the Percept. This doctrine in no wise conflicts with Pragmaticism, which holds that the Immediate Interpretant of all thought proper is Conduct. Nothing is more indispensable to a sound epistemology than a crystal-clear discrimination between the Object and the Interpretant of knowledge; very much as nothing is more indispensable to sound notions of geography than a crystal-clear discrimination between north latitude and south latitude; and the one discrimination is not more rudimentary than the other. That we are conscious of our Percepts is a theory that seems to me to be beyond dispute; but it is not a fact of Immediate Perception. A fact of Immediate Perception is not a Percept, nor any part of a Percept; a Percept is a Seme, while a fact of Immediate Perception or rather the Perceptual Judgment of which such fact is the Immediate Interpretant, is a Pheme that is the direct Dynamical Interpretant of the Percept, and of which the Percept is the Dynamical Object, and is with some considerable difficulty (as the history of psychology shows), distinguished from the Immediate Object, though the distinction is highly significant.†1 But not to interrupt our train of thought, let us go on to note that while the Immediate Object of a Percept is excessively vague, yet natural thought makes up for that lack (as it almost amounts to), as follows. A late Dynamical Interpretant of the whole complex of Percepts is the Seme of a Perceptual Universe that is represented in instinctive thought as determining the original Immediate Object of every Percept.†2 Of course, I must be understood as talking not psychology, but the logic of mental operations. Subsequent Interpretants furnish new Semes of Universes resulting from various adjunctions to the Perceptual Universe. They are, however, all of them, Interpretants of Percepts. Notice that the percept, in one case, is identified by Peirce as a Seme and that does in fact make it a sign. Of course, it is also discussed as immediate object, and dynamical object, so one needs to be careful as to how one interprets this passage when trying to figure out what is going on with the percept, and how it is understood differently depending upon what its role is in the triadic relation. In any case, it would appear that the percept, according to Peirce, can be a sign and classified as a seme (a.k.a., rheme), and can have its own immediate object, and have interpretants. For my part, I would suppose that there can be phenomena which we directly experience (directly perceive), which can nevertheless serves as signs of other perceptual phenomena. I directly perceive smoke. The smoke, while perceived in itself, can also be a sign of fire, which can also be directly perceived. Perhaps I have failed to understand what Gary meant when he said that "it's hard to say how any phenomenon could be the object of a percept"? -- Franklin ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu<mailto:peirce-L@list.iupui.edu> . 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