All: It seems that a fruitful line of inquiry regarding art and artists would be to consider artistic activity as a species of Peircean self-control. I agree with Edwina that the categories are not linear and, as regards art, I would initially put the order Firstness, Thirdness, Secondness. Habit is implicit in the training of an artist and determines the strength or weakness of Reaction. Breaking habits, making new habits or at least illuminating the habitual requires sensory-motoric-cognitive refinement. Peirce's brief experimental foray (with Jastrow) into the psychophysics of Fechner's law gives a basis for accurate guessing without piercing the consciousness of the guesser and enables an enactive approach the acquisition of craft. Philosopher Alva Noe's new book, Strange Tools, deals with art and the making of art objects in a manner artists can recognize. Art "organizes" and "reorganizes" both the artist and the field of composition through studied engagements with music, material or language by bringing forth and "showing" the heretofore implicit or tacit machinations and concerns of each. So, in considering the domain of art, one path would be to explore the "maker" of art while another path could be to ask what is a "made" object. I would think that researching the indexical and often metonymic elements of one's art is more fundamental than generating metaphors. That is, synecdoche (part/whole) and contiguity yield associations more immediate, more vibrant and lead to novel metaphors.
But, it seems that artists have developed another skill and that is that during the generation of a new or novel "view" they are able to defer differentiation of spatial and temporal elements. Imagine some of the famous visual illusions. Can we see the faces and the vase, the duck and the rabbit, both perspectives of the Necker cube simultaneously and not sequentially? Arnold Ehrenzweig in The Hidden Order of Art describes how his students could be taught to see both at the same time. An artist friend of mine taught me how to do it. If we don't name the elements or sides of the illusion we can see both without fusion or division. Think Paul Valery's quote, "To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees." Not either/or but or/or. Managing the or/or enables artists to create no-thing out of some-thing on the way to something else. Abduction, induction and deduction all have their moments for the maker and the making of the made. Dennis
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