List,
Peirce's account of Firstness in this lecture was similar to those he gave on other occasions, including this important sentence: "We attribute to outward things something analogous to our qualities of feeling." This is an experiential observation which you can make for yourself. If you see something purple in the external world, you see that thing as being purple, although that quality is a quality of your experience. It is the quality, not the feeling, that you attribute to the "outward thing": you don't feel that it feels itself to be purple. The feeling of its existing as an "outward thing" (rather than something you merely imagine) also has its quality, which Peirce will later call the Firstness of Secondness. The quality of hardness is another example. "Everything you can possibly think of has its firstness" - even a purple cow. "It must be conceived to be something in itself in order to be in relation to other things." It must have the quality of purple-cowness before you can even think of it as a figment of your imagination, or compare it with a cow of another color. The key word in this account of Firstness is quality. In the account of Secondness that preceded it, the key words were existence, reaction and other. In the account of Thirdness which follows, the key word is meaning. But if we think we understand these elements of the Phenomenon by merely associating these words with them, we are deluding ourselves. The only way to understand these core concepts, and the only way to do phenomenology as Peirce conceived it, is to look for what is most categorically elementary in our own experience, and to abstract from this actually ongoing experience the elements of any possible experiencing, or any possible appearing (phenomenon). If we can do that, and then consider this account of Thirdness in the context of Peirce's whole philosophy, I think we can recognize it as the very soul of pragmaticism. Gary f. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 6-Dec-17 15:43 To: 'Peirce List' <[email protected]> Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Lowell Lecture 3.2 Lowell Lecture 3 continued from 3.1 https://fromthepage.com/jeffdown1/c-s-peirce-manuscripts/ms-464-465-1903-low ell-lecture-iii-3rd-draught/display/13877 But now there are elements of what is before the mind which do not depend upon others, each of them being such as it is positively, in itself, regardless of anything else. Such, for example, is the quality of purple. Contrast may cause it to strike us more; but however little it strikes us, the quality of the purple remains the same, peculiar and positive; and we can only say of it that it is such as it is. We attribute to outward things something analogous to our qualities of feeling. We conceive that a hard body, that is to say a body not readily scratched with a knife, is hard just the same when nothing sharp presses upon it, or even if nothing sharp ever presses upon it. Its hardness, in that case, is nothing but an unrealized possibility. Now what is that? It is certainly no subject of reaction. It does not belong, then, to the category of Secondness. I call this element of thought, the conceived being such as it is positively, regardless of ought else, the element of Firstness. Everything you can possibly think of has its firstness. It is just what it is thought to be[,] or otherwise is regardless of other things. It must be conceived to be something in itself in order to be in relation to other things. But it is impossible to resolve everything in our thoughts into those two elements. We may say that the bulk of what is actually done consists of Secondness,- or better, Secondness is the predominant character of what has been done. The immediate present, could we seize it, would have no character but its Firstness. Not that I mean to say that immediate consciousness (a pure fiction, by the way), would be Firstness, but that the Quality of what we are immediately conscious of, which is no fiction, is Firstness. But we constantly predict what is to be. Now what is to be, according to our conception of it, can never become wholly past. In general, we may say that meanings are inexhaustible. We are too apt to think that what one means to do and the meaning of a word are quite unrelated meanings of the word "meaning," or that they are only connected by both referring to some actual operation of the mind. Prof. Royce especially in his great work The World and the Individual has done much to break up this mistake. In truth the only difference is that when a person means to do anything he is in some state in consequence of which the brute reactions between things will be moulded to conformity to the form to which the man's mind is itself moulded, while the meaning of a word really lies in the way in which it might, in a proper position in a proposition believed, tend to mould the conduct of a person to conformity to that to which it is itself moulded. Not only will meaning always, more or less, in the long run, mould reactions to itself, but it is only in doing so that its own being consists. For this reason I call this element of the phenomenon or object of thought the element of Thirdness. It is that which is what it is by virtue of imparting a quality to reactions in the future. http://gnusystems.ca/Lowell3.htm }{ Peirce's Lowell Lectures of 1903
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