Jim, List:
I cannot accept the notions "direct acquaintance" or "direct experience"
if
those terms mean "unmediated," or generally assume a human sensory system
that is isomorphic with the universe as it exists independently of any
observer.
Electro-chemical events in the system must follow their own system rules.
That is not to say human sensory experience is not veridical. It
obviously
is, or we would have perished. But isomorphism is no more necessary to
veridicality than it is to the analogical relationships between
mathematical
formulae and the physical world.
The most direct experience we have, and it seems to me Peirce supports
this
contention, is a strong affective state. For the baby, it's a hunger
pang,
a physical hurt, or more happily, being fed or swaddled. What is felt is
all there is; stimulus and response are essentially unitive. It takes
awhile for a child to learn to mediate between that systemic relevance and
the identity that is commonly called "objective." Developmental
psychologists have commented upon the beginnings of perception in
relevance.
For example: an urban infant commonly sleeps through all sorts of traffic
noises--sirens, crashes, horns, etc., but wakes up when mother enters the
room. And relevance continues to direct us in our adult, everyday lives
where things and events have the identies and meanings of their personal
relevances--what we use them to do and how we feel about them. The
wonderfully bright and sensitive colleague who stopped by our office to
chat
yesterday is inconsiderate and intrinsically irritating today with his
endless yammering while we are trying to meet a paper deadline.
There is some physiological evidence that meaning precedes
perception--i.e.,
that the relevance of a sensory response is responded to in the brain's
cortex before differentiation of the stimulus identity. Contrary to
experience, we've been brought up and educated to believe we perceive and
identify the object and then have responses--which, if it were so, would
have promptly ended evolution for any species so afflicted. You couldn't
dodge the predator's charge until after you'd named the predator, the
attack
and what to do.
For most of our lives, the subject-object relationship analysis only
enters
when things go wrong, when the ride breaks down and we have to get off to
fix it. The rest of the time the perceptual information/data that we
treat
as "objective" is submerged in our comparatively "mindless" states of
feeling and doing. We write or type instead of moving our fingers and
hands
to produce selected results. We drive three quarters of the way to work
and
"wake up" to realize we've no memory of the prior two miles. Or we come
home angered by someone at work and yell at spouses and kids.
That's the everyday world we live in, and in that world the organic unity
of
the sensory system means responses to environmental impingments
(exteroception) are inherently conditioned by what we are feeling and
doing--by interoception and proprioception.
I understand this primary level of information processing to be
essentially
what Peirce means by "firstness." I don't think we can get to secondness
until there can be some degree of separation in the so-called subjective
and
objective elements of experience can be separated. We may discover,
contrary to our desires, alas, we cannot eat rocks without the pain. But
it
is only in thirdness that we can represent experience to ourselves and
ultimately through communication work out an objective social reality. It
is in thirdness, a secondary level of information processing, that we
mediate between objective reality and how we feel about it. It is this
secondary level of information processing that we (sometimes) fix the
wagon
when the wheels come off. Other times we may just kick and brutalize the
damnably perverse inanimate object.
I'd be delighted to have any errors pointed out in my application of
Peirce.
Cheers,
Bill
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Piat" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 03, 2006 10:50 AM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" metaphor
Dear Ben, Folks--
Thanks for the reassuring clarification, Ben. Here's my thought on the
matter for today.
The distinction between the knowledge we gain from direct acquaintance
with an object verses the knowledge we gain of the same object through a
symbolic sign of that object is that direct aquaintance is mediated by an
actually indexed icon of the object whereas indirect symbolic aquaintance
is mediated by an imputed icon of the object. The meaning of symbols
depends in part upon the reliability of linguistic conventions, customs
and habits. The meaning of icons depends primarily upon the reliability
of direct observation.
Ideally the meanings we assign to our symbols are rooted in aquaintance
with the actual objects to which they refer, but customs take on a life
of their own and are notoriously susceptible to the distorting influence
of such factors as wishful thinking, blind allegiance to authority,
tradition and the like. Science and common sense teach us that it is
useful to periodically compare our actual icons with our theories and
symbolic imputations of them.
Symbols provide indirect aquaintance with objects. Actual observation
of
objects provides direct aquaintance. However in both cases the
aquaintance (in so far as it provides us with a conception of the object)
is mediated by signs. In the case of direct aquaintance the sign is an
icon. In the case of indirect aquaintance the sign is a symbol with an
imputed icon.
Whenever we make comparisons we do so with signs. Mere otherness is
basically dyadic. Comparison is fundamentally triadic. "A is not B" is
not a comparison but merely an indication of otherness from which we gain
no real sense of how A compares to B. On the other hand the analogy that
"A is to B as B is to C" is a comparison which actually tells us
something about the relative characters of the elements involved.
Comparing a collateral object with a symbol for a collateral object is
really a matter of comparing the meaning of an actual icon with the
meaning of an imputed icon. We are never in a position to compare an
actual object with a sign of that object because we have no conception of
objects outside of signs.
Sometime I think, Ben, that you are just blowing off the notion that all
our conceptions of objects are mediated by signs. You say you agree with
this formulation but when it comes to the collateral object you seem to
resort to the position that direct aquaintance with the collateral object
is not "really" mediated by signs but outside of semiosis. But what
Peirce means (as I understand him) is that the collateral object is not
actually iconized in the symbol that stands for it but is merely imputed
to be iconized. To experience the actual icon we must experience the
collateral object itself. That is the sense in which the collateral
object is outside the symbol but not outside semiosis.
One of the recurring problems I personally have in understanding Peirce
is
that I am often unsure in a particular instance whether he is using the
term sign to refer to a symbol, an icon or an index. Morevover when it
comes to icons and indexes I am often unclear as to whether he means them
as signs or as degenerate signs. Maybe this is where I am going astray
in
my present analysis of the role of the collateral object in the
verification of the sign.
In anycase I continue to find this discussion helpful. Best wishes to
all--
Jim Piat
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