[peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" metaphor

[Benjamin Udell]

Gary, Joe, Jim, List, I'm back! >[Gary] I've begun to reread and in some cases read for the first time Christopher Hookway's papers as he is to be an invited speaker at ICCS07 at Sheffield University where he is a member of the faculty. There's an interesting and valuable paper of his in the Winter/Spring 2002 Transactions titled " '. . . a sort of composite photograph': Pragmatism, Ideas, and Schematism." Hookway argues that the metaphor of an idea being a kind of  "composite photograph" (which has a general character since composed of many particulars) is an important one which Peirce seems to value. He uses it many times and in various ways ways over lengthy period beginning in the 90's and extending into the 20th century. I won't attempt to summarize his complex argument and will only now comment that the metaphor suggests the way in which an idea is something like a photographic iteration of the many subjective experiences of the object of any idea (perhaps the ground?). Hookway argues that fully comprehended the metaphor is both integral to Peirce's architectonic science (as, for example, outlined in his classification of the sciences) as well as possibly proving key to a coherentist defense of his pragmatism. >[Gary] The composite image is a kind of "stereotype" (Hookway's _expression_) of all the particular images so that it somehow captures their common feature. This seems to me a notion which also relates to the formation of "collateral knowledge," but not  as a semeiotic or logical element (in effect, a fourth category), but as a psychological event which impacts the logical only in a given moment of semiosis. This is also why, I believe, that Peirce can say that collateral observation is not a part of any given sign, but that this composite representation of the object (held in memory I would hold--again pointing to its psychological structuring across time) is a precondition to recognizing a given sign at all. This occurs out of the depth of an interlocutor's collateral associations concerning an _expression_, say since I've just returned from  Denmark, "viking", stimulating a composite notion which is the idea of "viking" for him, so that a conversation, for example,  may proceed as both parties enter into a commens, or commind concerning the "viking" concept. There is no mystery here, and no need for a fourth category or fourth semiotic element as I see it.   If nobody wanted to do more than study people's common conceptions and stereotypes about the Viking, then the relevance of collateral experience and observation would be less prominent, though the question of verifying claims _about_ people's conceptions _qua_ conceptions would remain, unless the inquiry were to lapse even at that level into the kind of seminarianism which Peirce opposed in his pragmaticism. But sometimes some people want to learn about the Vikings themselves, and this involves forming interpretations, deducing consequences, and seeking and examining evidence against which the interpretations themselves will be tested. (The predictions are the potential recognitions, the potential (dis-)confirmations.) I haven't read Hookway, but the reference to the composite of many signs as a "stereotype" is quite telling. A kind of coherentism is in fact the pitfall of Peircean semiotics and is a shoe too small for Peircean pragmaticism, which has only a coherentist aspect (the importance of the validity/cogency of inference) and which certainly emphasizes the importance of combining, distinguishing, abstracting, generalizing, etc., but which is ultimately experimentalist rather than coherentist in the usual sense.   There is no basis for saying that the formation of such a kinetic composite sign relates to -- in the sense of underlying -- the formation of collateral knowledge, in such a way as to suggest that that's all that the formation of collateral knowledge really is. Peirce repeatedly gives examples of actual experience with the object of the signs & interpretants in question. Furthermore Peirce said not that collateral observation is "not part of _any given sign_" but instead that it is not part of the sign and is collateral to the sign and _to the given system of signs_, which means also to a kinetic composite sign . There is also no basis for a case that collateral observation is collateral to "signs in general" as opposed to being collateral to particular signs, and Peirce's own examples point this out quite clearly. This also is the ordinary meaning of the word "collateral" in regard to information and confirmation; one speaks of collateral information about a specific object, collateral confirmation of specific claims about a specific object, etc. Furthermore, such a case would reduce the Pragmatic Maxim to nonsense. Any conceivable experience with conceivable practical bearing would be just as good for the clarification of a given conception as any other conceivable experience with conceivable practical bearing. Such a case would amount to where alternatives among conceptions implied no differences in possible experiences, or, at best, to where any experience would be as good as any other for distinguishing a true sign from a false one; this would be a coherentist next-best-thing-to-heaven but is quite unlike the world. Checking or remembering how many fingers I have on each hand will not tell me whether the Empire State Building is at 34th Street or whether it is possible to build a hundred-mile high wooden building. One cannot have one's cake and eat it too; one cannot both assert the singularness of experience and deny its capacity to refer, be correlated, to particular objects, particular signs, particular interpretants, etc.   There is no basis for the assertion that an experience and recognition of the sign's truth is some sort of transitory psychological event with no basic or lasting logical role. An experience cannot be formed as collateral to sign and interpretant unless it is logically determined by them and by the object in respect to which the experience is collateral to the sign & interpretant; and such an experience, in its (dis-)corroboratory outcome, soever definite or vague, logically determines semiosis going forward. That is the argued scenario, and it needs to be addressed; a movie-like sign with many authors is no way around it. If none of those authors of the movie-like sign have the requisite experience, then the outcome may easily be nothing more than a popular delusion.   Peirce's purpose in the conception of collateral experience was to account for how the mind knows, indeed as a precondition, to what the signs refer; but even his own example of the word "soleil" is one of somebody's gaining collateral experience regarding an object (the word "soleil") about which the person has already had signs (the teacher's definition of the word "soleil"). This is not a light example, and it is a dramatization of that which teachers and large dictionaries do systematically; it is a normal order of learning. These learning experiences about signs & objects already acquired are not limited to cases where the teacher is a human professional teacher of French. Experience itself is the great teacher. These learning experiences, testing, as they do, the sign & interpretant systems themselves, are decision points in the _evolution_ of the given semiosis and of the given mind. Moreover, the conception of such learning experience is how one accounts for semiosis' capacity to correct itself and learn the difference between sense & nonsense, both in hopeful-monster interpretants and in typical interpretants under changing conditions. One learns from experience. Otherwise the picture of semiosis depends on a radical coherentist faith, probably not observed or espoused anywhere, that the process, along with its assumptions and premisses, is already perfected, i.e., infallible. > Of course this is yet very complex as every proposition (let alone a book or a court case!) involves not one index but a whole set of them. 2.439 In order properly to exhibit the relation between premisses and conclusion of mathematical reasonings, it is necessary to recognize that in most cases the subject-index is compound, and consists of a set of indices. Thus, in the proposition, "A sells B to C for the price D," A, B, C, D form a set of four indices. The symbol "--sells--to--for the price--" refers to a mental icon, or idea of the act of sale, and declares that this image represents the set A, B, C, D, considered as attached to that icon, A as seller, C as buyer, B as object sold, and D as price. If we call A, B, C, D four subjects of the proposition and "--sells--to--for the price--" a predicate, we represent the logical relation well enough, but we abandon the Aryan syntax. >[Gary] Hookway argues (although I will only present the conclusions here) that there are "some features of ideas that are to be explained by the metaphor" and although he does not explicitly do so, I would further associate these three "features" a, b, c with the categories, with firstness, secondness, and thirdness respectively. > a) Ideas are iconic signs (their content can by "judged") > |> c) Ideas are general (so they can be applied to new, unfamiliar cases) > b) Ideas are composed from cases experienced (or through testimony) > (cf p. 35 op cit) >[Gary] Peirce applies this notion not just to sensory experience, but also to disciplines as varied as mathematics on the one hand and ethics on the other. >[Gary] Finally, there are two directions, two "vectors" possible here. Moving one way (towards the formation of collateral knowledge), a number of particular experiential representations (each one formed semiotically) are "fused" into a single representation. Moving the other way (that is, in consideration of the need to confirm, etc.), the single representation calls up what Hookway calls "a sequence of shades, a sequence of particular images."   >[Gary] This proves crucial to the final portion of his argument, connecting the metaphor to schema and, ultimately, the pragmatic maxim: >[Gary quoting Hookway] "[T]he idea generates particular representations in the imagination or in the form of images; and the logical sequence of the idea is displayed in time in a sequence of magus. . . The idea that infuses perceptual experience provides a sort of iconic representation of how experience will develop, or how experience will be if its objects are of the kinds we take them to be. Composite photographs provide one exemplar or something that might do this sort of job without bringing to experience any contents we can think of as a priori." [Hookway, p. 41]   That to which Hookway is pointing is, apart from whatever he intended, arguably the iconicism of probability and statistical pattern. The actual experience of the embodiment of a scenario, and even the mere imaginative picturing of it, render the scenario likelier, to the mind, to occur/recur (although, still, the actually experienced embodiment has more corroborative power along with its indexicality and iconity about future behaviors than the sheer imagining has).   1. index -- extremality, force, shortest distance, etc. ~ ~ ~ 3. symbol -- information, coding, importance, etc. 2. icon -- probability, likelihood, etc. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 4. proxy -- logic, substantiation, legitimacy, etc.   That which we can't picture tends to seem less likely to us, as in, "I can't picture her doing that." That it can be dramatic or cinematic, and be combined out of many images, contributed by many people, while enhancing probability or plausibility, doesn't stop it from being a mere representation, and it seems the more probable partly on the basis of a kind of collaterality assumed to arise in virtue of the involvement of many highly distinct minds; this conception still exploits some sort of assurance that arises on the basis of an intuited involvement of collateral experience.   >[Gary] As Hookway suggests, this turns out to be more like a "composite film" (which, btw, may be related but to me seems not to be the same as Peirce's logical notion of EGs as a "moving picture of thought") than a simple composite photograph. > The implications of  this for pragmatism are, I think, intriguing, while for collateral knowledge and collateral observation the metaphor seems simply to suggest that "I recognize a specimen of this kind when the idea generates an iconic representation which fits the experience."   But this recognition and this fitting involve testing by object-experience by the mind doing the recognizing. So it is not said mind's interpretant or sign of said object (unless we're talking about the limit case where object & sign are one; then it's hard to see any except a formal difference among object, sign, interpretant, and recognition). And I don't see how the logically determinational role of such recognition can be arguably denied, though you seem to be asserting such a denial. You seem to be claiming that verification, (dis-)confirmation, etc., have only a psychological role, not a logically, semiotically determinational role.   > Now this can occur acritically or critically, and the need for critical common sense in our inquiries begins to seem indispensable for the future of philosophy (and perhaps much else). As I wrote in my recently delivered ICCS conference paper, "The truth of any matter important to a community--if one can even speak of the fallible, tentative, and asymptotic approach to agreement in any significant matter as "truth", will certainly be our truth, not mine or yours. . ." Gary more recently sent me off-list some quotes from Peirce on the Grammatical Theory of Judgment and Inference. That would take the discussion to much greater length. For the time being, I'll say that Peirce therein is often discussing experientially established interpretants. Yet an interpretant, apart from the experience which establishes it, is less like a judgment drawn from judgments, than like a conception drawn from conceptions, even when it takes the form of a proposition drawn from propositions. Aristotle saw only conception, judgment, and reasoning -- ratiocination, but no corresponding "conceptiocination." But I think that Aristotle would, in the face of modern algebra, information theory deductive & inductive, and biology, have gladly embraced the idea both as reflecting reality and as correlating to a deep, broad way to distinguish inference processing by the rational animal from information processing by merely instinctive animals and by vegetables, for which creatures the test of a novel interpretant or of an old interpretant under novel conditions is not deliberate or careful but instead quite possibly a test to destruction of the creature (and even the object) involving punishment of the creature's genes by removal from the gene pool.   Best, Ben --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com