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Dear Martin,
Thanks for these comments. You may well be
right that I am introducing an unnecessary psychological overlay to my
account of representation. What follows are some of my
initial thoughts as I begin the process
of studying your very interesting and helpful
comments.
Could it be that, although it is not necessary
to be conscious in order to interpret a symbol, it is,
nevertheless, the triadic nature of symbols (or thirdness in general) that
makes observation possible? I'm thinking about the distinction
between reacting and interpreting. Reaction, it seems to me, affects
both the acting and reacting participants in equal but opposite ways. OTOH
interpretation is asymetrical in that it affects the interpretant without
any corresponding affect on the symbol or the object. Interpretation is
more like what we call observation and reaction is more like what we call
participation. I am not offering the notions of participation and
observation as psychological explanations or causes of dyadic and triadic
relations but rather the opposite. I'm saying that a dyadic relation
is at the root of what we call the everyday experience of raw (ie
un-observed) participation and that a triadic relation is at the
root of of observation. So often the act of
observation is mis-taken as something that is independent of the
object and its sign (or measurement), but as quantum physics teaches
they are an irreducible triad and can not be built from or reduced to any
combination of participations in dyadic reactions.
That said I'm still very unsure of myself on this
and you may be right that I am mostly just putting unneccessary psychological
clothes on the naked truth. (Not your words I know but I couldn't resist
once they popped into my head). But still, there is something
about a concern for modesty that physics and logic lack in a way that
psychology as the study of humans' being can not.
What I take Peirce (a notable psychologist in his
own right) to have rejected about the some of the psychologizing of his day was
the tendency of some to suppose that labeling a puzzling
phenomena with a familiar psychological name somehow provided an
adequate explanation. But I am not trying to give a psychological
account of representation. On the contrary I am trying to give a semiotic
account of the psychological experience of observation.
Ah, a quick aside on consciousness as
awareness of interpretation. It seems to me that there is something
fundamentally faulty about the sorts of explanations that attempt to account for
consciousness by a series of reactions to reactions (responding to responding,
knowledge of knowledge etc). Off hand I can't think of a term for this
sort of analysis but it smacks of an infinite regress and I don't find it
persausive as an argument either for or against some explanation. The
point is a triadic relation is the basis for all these supposed infinite
regressions and triads only go three levels deep before they cycle back and
repeat the same process. Not as an infinite regression but as a cycle
completed. I say three levels deep on a intuitive hunch. There are
only three elements involved and the analysis can only take three POV. If
a phenomenon is triadic that is enough said about its recursive nature.
Talk of an infinite regression neither adds nor detracts from the analysis.
But these comments are just an speculative aside. Ha,
who am I kidding, my whole post is just a speculative aside!
In any case, Martin, thanks very much for
your comments. I'm will continue to ponder them. And
I look forward to Joe's take as well. I'm wondering in particular how
this issue might relate to the distinction between the act of assertion
and that which is asserted. Seems to me a mere fact is dyadic whereas
an asserted fact is triadic. The problem is we assume that what we observe
are "mere" facts but we have no access to mere givens without
representation/observation. We are trying to build the explanation of a
phenomena using building blocks that include the phenomena itself.
Which is why I am so often talking in circles. On a good day.
Best wishes,
Jim Piat
Jim,
At first glance, your comment gives me the impression that you are
"psychologizing" semiosis by introducing the sign user (and his consciousness)
into the equation. (Something Charles Morris will do). I don't have ready
access to the CP right now, but I recall that Peirce later criticized the fact
that NL can lead to a psychological understanding, though this was not his
intent at the time. Considering that sign processes take place in nature (the
Universe's growth being the unfolding of an Argument) we cannot reduce
semiosis to psychology (though psychological facts are semeiotic) which
concerns only the human mind, not Mind in general. What would it mean,
therefore, to say that nature "observes the object" when it carries out
qualities of feeling that have grown into laws (laws being habits that have
lost practically all plasticity in becoming inaffected by chance), through the
working of the law of mind.
Having said this, it may be possible to distinguish aspects of the human
use of signs, what some (like John Deely) call anthroposemiosis, from other
manifestations of semiosis (say, in the world of animals, or that of plants --
recall Peirce's famous sunflower example). When we use signs, like language,
we are aware (to some extent) of doing so, and therefore represent (to
ourselves) the signs we use and their processes through other signs. When I
speak I typically have an understanding of what it is I'm trying to say
-- that is, of the aboutness of my speech (the object) -- and of some, if not
all, of the consequences or outcomes (the interpretants) of my words as chosen
to stand for the object in just the way that they do (unless, of course, I
happen to be a Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalyst...). In an important piece
written in 1906 (ms. 283, published in EPII) Peirce writes that "A sign [...]
just in so far as it fulfills the function of a sign, and none other,
perfectly conforms to the definition of a medium of communication. It is
determined by the object, but in no other respect than goes to enable it to
act upon the interpreting quasi-mind; and the more perfectly it fulfills its
function as a sign, the less effect it has upon that quasi-mind other than
that of determining it as if the object itself had acted upon it".
(emphasis mine). Symbols are signs that perfectly fulfill their function as
signs in that they necessarily determine oher signs. Symbols, unlike icons and
indices, are signs whose very being is to be interpreted (see "New Elements",
also in EP II). Of course, all signs, in order to act as signs must be
interpreted -- but, symbols, unlike icons and indices, are nothing if
there not interpretable. Whenever we set out to use signs whether we use
them iconically, indexically or symbolically --, that is, when we are
conscious of using something to stand for something else, we are (necessarily)
aware of their interpretability: here, semiosis, the action of the sign,
becomes itself an object of our thought. In this case our
"consciousness" is merely a further interpretant of the initial sign and of
its triadic relation to the object and the interpretant. Could it be, then,
that this what you're after?
Martin Lefebvre
Dear
Joe,
Thanks for your
informal and very helpful response. I think I was misunderstanding the
introductory passage in the New List. So I have a few more
questions. First some background. My understanding is that
signs refer to and stand for the meaning of objects. In standing
for objects signs can be useful tools for communicating about
objects as well as for conducting thought experiments about objects.
But it is their function of referring to objects that I want to focus upon
and ask you about. It seems to me that in defining signs as
referring to objects part of what this definition implies is that the
sign user is in the position of standing outside (or perhaps above and
beyond) the mere reactive world of the object being referred to and
observed. IOWs the sign user has a POV with respect to the object that
is beyond a mere indexical relationship. That being an "observor"
or spectator requires a level or dimension of detachment that goes beyond
the level or dimension of attachment that is involved in "participation
with" or reacting to an object. And so I'm thinking that an indexical
representation is more than just a tool for indexing an object or giving
voice to one's sub or pre-representational understanding of an
object. I'm thinking that representation is also (and perhaps most
importantly) the process by which one achieves the observational
stance. Or, to put it another way, that the capacity to step back from
the world of objects and observe them as existing is one and the same as the
capacity to represent objects. That, in effect, the ability to
represent is the foundation of being an observor in a world of
existing objects as opposed to being merely a reactive participant in
existence. . Actually, as I think about this a bit more,
maybe it is not simply the sign's function of "referring"
but also the signs function of "standing for" that creates,
presumes or makes possible the "observor" POV. But however one
cuts it I don't see how a sign can represent without there being an observor
role which is functionally distinct from the role of mere
participant. So anyway that's my question -- is Peirce's theory
of representation and the sign meant to imply or address this issue of an
observor or am I just misreading something into it that is not there.
I will be greatly dissapointed if such a notion or something akin to it is
not part of what is intended by the idea of a triadic relation as being
above and beyond that of a mere dyadic relation. But then there are
those Peirce comments about consciousness being a mere quality or firstness
so I'm not so sure. OK -- I hope I have made clear
the nature of my concern and look forward to any comments you might
have. I realize I'm drifting a bit from the initial question that
started this exchnage but I for me the questions are very much related.
I'm trying to get at and understand the relation of the sign as carrier of
meaning and as that which gives rise to the feeling we have of being
not simply participants in a world (like colliding billiard balls) but of
also being observors of this participation -- aware of our nakedness and so on. The
notion that in the beginning (of awareness) was the
word.
Thanks again
-- I look forward to any comments, advice and suggestions you or others
might have. I am very eager to get clear on this point. So drop
whatever you are doing ...
Best
wishes,
Jim
Piat
----- Original Message -----
From: Joseph
Ransdell
To: Peirce
Discussion Forum
Sent: Saturday, September 09, 2006 12:23 AM
Subject: [peirce-l] "reduction of the manifold to
unity"
Jim and list:
This is just a repeat of my previous
message, spell-checked and punctuated correctly, with a couple of
interpolated clarifications, and minus the unphilosophical
paragraphs at the beginning and end: (I will try to state it
better in a later message.)
As regards your question: I will try to respond to it, but I
can only talk about it loosely and suggestively here, in order to say
enough to convey anything at all that might be helpful, and you will have
to tolerate a lot of vagueness as well as sloppiness in what I am saying.
If I bear down on it enough to put it into decently rigorous form it will
not get said at all [because of the length], I'm afraid. But then this is
just a conversation, not a candidate for a published paper.
Okay, that self-defense being given in advance, I will go on
to say that I think that one of the things that is likely to be misleading
about the New List is that it is easy to make the mistake of thinking of
the Kantian phrase "reduction of the sensuous manifold to unity" which
Peirce uses at the very beginning of the New List to be talking about a
unification of sense-data in the technical sense of "sense-datum"
developed by philosophers somewhere around the beginning of the 20th
Century, stressed especially by the positivists, especially since Peirce
takes as his example the proposition "The stove is black". But regardless
of what Kant might have had in mind in talking about the "manifold of
intuitions" in the Critique, there is no reason to think that Peirce ever
held to the view that a theory of cognition is supposed to begin by
explaining how sense-data such as color patches and the like, regarded as
meaningless atoms of quality, are what is primitively given, then named by
fiat, to provide a primitive level of cognition constituted by sense-data
plus interpretation.
I take it that the point to the denial of intuition in the
1868 papers that follow immediately upon the New List (and are clearly of
a piece with it) shows that the reason Peirce started with an example like
that was to be able to make the point that, even in cases that might seem
to us to be cases of a simple perceptual given involving no interpretation
at all, it is in reality the interpretation of a product of an
unspecifiable number of levels of prior interpretation. (See his
argumentation towards the very beginning of the "Questions" article about
things like the unnoticed blind spot on the retina, the example of tactile
sensation, the tricks of the stage magicians, and so forth, which all
underscore that even what seems like it must be utterly simple sensation
is actually the result of unconscious interpretation. So, the point is
that the items in the "sensuous manifold" of perception that mind is
required to synthesize (to reduce to unity through application of a
unifying conception) are always already meaningful and the "reduction" --
which is to say, the successful predication -- is always just further
interpretation of disparate materials which are already results of prior
interpretation.
Why must they be unified? Why are they disparate? What is it
that is driving the need to unify the "manifold" by the formation of a
proposition bearing the force of an assertion, which is to say, by the
application of an explanatory predicate? The answer is contradiction: the
unification process -- which is the thought process generally -- begins
from the tension of unresolved contradiction, itself constituted by what
must be assumed to be (from the logical point of view) the conflict of
"repugnant" propositions (as he says in the Fixation article) -- felt
experiential incoherence -- which is the incipient beginning of all doubt
and questioning. Bear in mind that most conscious cognitive perception is
not of simple occurrence of color properties, tingles of feeling, and so
forth, but of macrocopic objects, such as the ordinary "furniture of the
earth" that makes up our perceived and recognized environment -- people
and things in our environment, both local and remote, that come to our
conscious attention for some special reason, the idea being that if you
were to analyze any particular instance of ordinary conscious perception
of something you would find, at the bottom of that analysis, as it were,
what would always be something which first came to our attention because
of some oppositional factor that our perception functioned to overcome by
a reconciliation of the opposition in some sort of unity. No opposition,
no need for attention being paid to it.
So the beginning of cognition of which we are conscious, then,
is always in an as-yet-unresolved conflict of some sort perceived as such
because in our "processing" of it we had to make the effort of a
unification of oppositional entities of some sort, the awareness of each
of which at a preconscious or unconscious level is due to the funded
result of prior unification, i.e. prior learning. The important point here
is that this holds true regardless of whether we are talking about the
relationship of a theory like, say, particle theory in physics, to the
experimental data which it is required to explain, or talking about the
subtle judgments of flavor [taste] made by a wine-taster, or just talking
about the ordinary perceptions of things such as are occurring to us
constantly in our waking moments. These are, all of them, "reductions of a
sensuous manifold to unity". That [sort of comprehensive account] is the
ambition of this theory of cognition, at any rate, and is clearly
importantly different from the sense-date reductionism of the
positivists.
The implication of this, then, is that thinking begins from
the awareness of disparateness, but the [initially given] disparate
non-unified elements of the manifold are themselves unities resulting from
prior synthesize of more primitive disparate entities, and these in turn,
. . . and so on ad infinitum. The unification of the manifold is always
something happening in media res -- in the middlle of things -- in the
midst, in other words, of an ongoing process, the analysis of which will
always reveal the same structure of units which are the product of prior
unification. The always more-of-the-same, regardless of the level of
resolution, which is so marvelously exemplified in the graphics of fractal
geometry is the perfect metaphor for this. I'm not sure, for that reason,
that Steven is right in opting for one of the two options he mentions: it
seems to me that Peirce is going to come out in favor of both, though
there may perhaps be good reason in this or that context of application to
regard one of the two as being most profitably regarded as the starting
point for that particular purpose.
Joe
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