List, While working on my transcription of Lowell Lecture 6 from the manuscript on the SPIN site (https://www.fromthepage.com/jeffdown1/c-s-peirce-manuscripts/ms-472-1903-lowell-lecture-vi), I came across what strikes me as a key passage in it, and what struck me as a key term in it: “direct experience”. To get a more exact sense of what Peirce meant by that term, I collected several passages where Peirce had used it in other contexts and arranged them in chronological order (they date from 1893 to 1903). I found the resulting collection so interesting that I’ve now included it in the Peirce resources on my website: http://www.gnusystems.ca/Peirce.htm#dirxp. It throws a direct light, so to speak, on Peirce’s phenomenology.
Coincidentally (or providentially), I’ve also been reading Frederik Stjernfelt’s article responding to some critical reviews of his Natural Propositions, http://frederikstjernfelt.dk/Peirce/Answer%20to%20Critics%20of%20Natural%20Propositions%202016.pdf. This includes some remarks about the nature of the immediate object, which was the subject of a discussion on the list awhile back, which got bogged down partly for lack of specific examples of IOs, especially examples that do not involve human mentality. Stjernfelt includes two very specific examples, which I will quote below (though I’d recommend reading the whole section where he discusses the matter, which starts about halfway through the article.) It’s important to note that Stjernfelt’s definition of the immediate object is a functional one — the immediate object plays an indexical role within the functioning of a Dicisign — so I’ll begin with that. The words in double brackets below are Stjernfelt’s: [[ I claim that the immediate object (IO) is a concept addressing the way the sign is connected to the object (or is claimed by the sign to be so connected), while the opposed category, the dynamic object (DO) is the object of the sign as existing independently of the particular sign relation. That is, IO refers to the identity and the reference to the object - not to any description of the object, because the task of description is fulfilled by the no less than three concepts of interpretant (immediate, dynamic, final, respectively). ]] [[ To take an example: a guy points while exlaiming: “Look at that car over there!” “Which of them?” “The red, not the blue one!” The initial pointing gesture combined with the reference "over there" constitutes the Immediate Object - but is subsequently supplied with descriptive material in order to make precise the object of the pointing (hereafter, some predicative description may follow: "That car is a German car".) Thus, descriptive features may indeed enter the Immediate Object to the extent that it serves the identification of the object - but the defining function of it remains object identification, not description. ]] [[ … in bacteria sign use … The object of the bacterium is the sugar detected by its sensors - and the Immediate Object, again, is the index which purports to put the sign in contact with that object - that is, the weak interaction of the sensors of the bacterium and the active spot on the periphery of the carbohydrate molecule. This leads, in turn, the organism to swim in the direction of higher concentration of the Dynamic Object so detected. ]] I think the role of the immediate object can be clearly visualized using the conventions of Existential Graphs. A line of identity on the sheet of assertion asserts that “something exists.” When one end of a line of identity is attached to a “spot” (marked on the sheet by a verbal label of some kind), the spot furnishes a description (predicate, attribute) of it, and thus tells us what kind of thing it is. The spot together with the line of identity represents a proposition (or more generally, a Dicisign). Now, suppose the other end of that line of identity is a “loose end”, not attached to anything. We can read that end as the Secondness or unqualified existence of the dynamic Object of the proposition. Then we can read the other end of the line of identity, the point attached to the “hook” or “blank” of the “spot” or “rhema”, as the immediate Object of the proposition. That attachment is the Subject of the proposition, the part of the sign which represents the sign as referring to the dynamic Object. In other words it represents the object within the sign as identical to an Object existing independently of the sign relation. The defining characteristic of the Dicisign is that it represents itself to represent its Object in this way. But whether this visualization helps to clarify the concept of “immediate object” or not, I think the two examples given by Stjernfelt should be helpful. Especially in connection with the concept of direct experience. Gary f.
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