(Changing the subject to deal with the tangental discussion) I was searching through some of my old notes and found that Joe Ransdell had discussed this on the list more than a decade ago. Allow me to quote from his post. (This is from Feb 13, 20015)
The quote on quality -- firstness as quality -- is superb, isn't it? It comes from the MS in the Collected Papers called "The Logic of Mathematics: An Attempt to Develop My Categories from Within" (CP 1.417-520; c. 1896), and I was just now reading further in it, where he next takes up fact -- secondness as fact -- and that is equally good. I haven't gotten into the next part yet, which is on law -- thirdness as law -- so I have no comment on that. But I don't know of any better discussion of quality than that. As it happened I was at the same time reading a fugitive passage from MS 318, on quality as feeling, which is also excellent though much more brief: it reads as follows: A feeling is a cross-slice, or lamina, out of the current of consciousness, taken in itself, without any analysis and tearing apart, any comparison (since comparisons consist in the community of elements, and feeling is not cut up into elements.) Only"feeling" is to be understood in the sense of a QUALITY not in that of an EVENT, which would be existential. Every feeling, being a lamina of life, is sui generis, like the personal consciousness. But [since] no man can summon up the super-human effort that would be required quite to inhibit the processes of mental elaboration in reproducing that instantaneous state, it follows that we have to put up with generalized feelings in place of the very feelings themselves; and in these substitutes we only find remnants of the sui generis character. Thus red is constituent of consciousness of the nature of feeling; but it is impossible to isolate any variety of red except in a general idea in which feeling takes a large place. We can come near enough to doing so, however, to be able to reproduce, not a pure red feeling, but a pretty accurate general notion of each kind of red. In doing so we necessarily conceive different pairs of reds as related to one another in hue, luminosity, and chroma. It is only so that we can get accurate notions of them. Yet we know that in a pure feeling of red there is no relation, and no abstract hue, luminosity, and color. Those are products of comparison. It is quite true that red has these three modes of variation: I would not be supposed for one instant to doubt that. Only, in saying "This is a high-toned red" or "This is a luminous red", we state in the form of characters of red what are really effects of comparing two reds, and are not in the separate feelings themselves. In addition to the above from Joe I found the following from Kelly Parker’s The Continuity of Peirce’s Thought (pg 123) Peirce moved away from the problematic concept of consciousness in his last period, at about the same time James published his pivotal essay "Does Consciousness Exist?" Before that time, Peirce endeavored to restructure the concept so as to exclude the erroneous assumptions. While I might be wrong, I suspect it is this problematic of consciousness in Peirce that is perhaps complicating things. An other relevant quote is MS 609 Feeling of light without any attribution to it of extension or position exemplifies [...] a First Impression of Sense. One need not necessarily suppose that we are conscious of it at all. I think, myself, that one is not conscious of it as an Object before one, (or, as we say, ‘ before one’s mind’), since it is pure Feeling, and as such involves no idea of Relation, while what we mean by an Object seems to be something over against the person (or the Soul, or the ‘mind’, or the ‘ego’), for whom it is an Object. But no more is one conscious of grief as an Object, though [one] may be only too intensely consciousofit.” (MS 609:5-6 [1908] To Edwina’s point the following should be quoted. This is by Ben Udell, the current list master (who unfortunately is too busy to chime in). I found it quite helpful trying to figure all this out. Plus it was comforting to see Ben struggle with the terminology too. <grin> (Everything below this is from Ben) —— A lot of this post consists of Peirce quotes and comments on the quotes. I'm not sure that people will want to read all of it. Consider them my notes all in one place. Then I get back to what Søren said. I've had a chance to review a bit more of Peirce's discussion of "firstness of secondness" and so forth, which I've contradicted in talking about the reality of firstness as a kind of thirdness of firstness; Peirce says that there is no thirdness of firstness. This also pertains to Clark's remark, The problem of firstness of objects and mind is interesting. It can't be of both for obvious reasons (two entities and thus at minimum it must be secondness). Yet objects in their firstness is logically by definition unthinkable. That's just what Peirce thinks is thinkable - objects of themselves as firsts, and objects in a collectivity of itself as a first - firstness of secondness. (I'm not sure how much weight the English "of" can support without starting to sound ambiguous here. The "object of itself" in the sense here could be called the "object as itself". I mean that we don't mean in this context something that is the object of its own operation, an operation by it on itself-qua-other, etc.) On the other hand Peirce denies any secondness to firstness. Peirce CP 1.536: [....] An object cannot be a second of itself. If it is a second, it has an element of being what another makes it to be. That is, the being a second involves Secondness. The reaction still more manifestly involves the being what another makes a subject to be. Thus, while Secondness is a fact of complexity, it is not a compound of two facts. It is a single fact about two objects. Similar remarks apply to Thirdness. Note that in general by "object" Peirce means simply a thing, anything that we can think or talk about, and not necessarily a concrete singular reactive thing. Now, Peirce thinks, that a _first_ can have secondness but _firstness_ has no secondness. Peirce CP 1.537: [....] The Secondness of the second, whichever of the two objects be called the second, is different from the Secondness of the first. That is to say it generally is so. To kill and to be killed are different. In case there is one of the two which there is good reason for calling the first, while the other remains the second, it is that the Secondness is more accidental to the former than to the latter [....] And the case where the Secondness is more accidental is that of a quality concretely embodied. The blue of a blue material thing is a first that has secondness in virtue of its material embodiment, but its Firstness has no Secondness. There the quality is a first, the matter is a second, but the quality is what it is irrespectively of its embodiment in matter, while the matter would be nothing if it had no quality. Now one could argue, why would a quality be something even if no matter embodies it while a material thing would be nothing if it embodied no quality? One should think back to Peirce's discussion of prescission in "On a New List of Categories". The idea is, that a quality can be prescinded (or, loosely speaking, abstracted) from matter but not vice versa and that this is not merely because of a psychological idioscyncrasy of _homo sapiens_. To exist, to be a material thing, is, says Peirce, to be really subject to qualities. A material thing without qualities would not exist. Insofar as qualities are possibilities, a material thing without qualities would be a material thing without so much as a possibility, it would be, as it were, less than nothing. Well, Peirce doesn't actually go so far as to call it less than nothing; instead he says that such a material object would lack any definite positive quality and would be nothing at all. Peirce CP 1.528: Thus we have a division of seconds into those whose very being, or Firstness, it is to be seconds, and those whose Secondness is only an accretion. [....] There we see that Peirce equates being with Firstness. One thinks of his trichotomies (1) being, (2) existence/actuality, (3) reality and (1) possibility, (2) actuality, (3) necessity. Peirce CP 1.530: But now I wish to call your attention to a kind of distinction which affects Firstness more than it does Secondness, and Secondness more than it does Thirdness. This distinction arises from the circumstance that where you have a triplet you have three pairs; and where you have a pair, you have two units. Thus, Secondness is an essential part of Thirdness though not of Firstness, and Firstness is an essential element of both Secondness and Thirdness. Hence there is such a thing as the Firstness of Secondness and such a thing as the Firstness of Thirdness; and there is such a thing as the Secondness of Thirdness. But there is no Secondness of pure Firstness and no Thirdness of pure Firstness or Secondness. When you strive to get the purest conceptions you can of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, thinking of quality, reaction, and mediation -- what you are striving to apprehend is pure Firstness, the Firstness of Secondness -- that is what Secondness is, of itself -- and the Firstness of Thirdness. He goes on to say that "possibility" is a good word for Firstness except insofar as "possibility" implies a relation to that which exists, and that a logical necessitation is a Secondness of Thirdness. He adds that insofar as actuality or existence is the Firstness of Secondness, we have a Firstness which is not a quality or mode of feeling, and that in casting existence as an abstract possiblity (firstness), one makes existence seem nothing. Peirce CP 1.534: To express the Firstness of Thirdness, the peculiar flavor or color of mediation, we have no really good word. Mentality is, perhaps, as good as any, poor and inadequate as it is. Here, then, are three kinds of Firstness, qualitative possibility, existence, mentality, resulting from applying Firstness to the three categories. We might strike new words for them: primity, secundity, tertiality. Peirce CP 1.535: There are also three other kinds of Firstness which arise in a somewhat similar way; namely, the idea of a simple original quality, the idea of a quality essentially relative, such as that of being "an inch long"; and the idea of a quality that consists in the way something is thought or represented, such as the quality of being manifest. Peirce goes on to describe the Firstness or flavor of Thirdness as being "mentality" - he doesn't think it a _mot juste_, but makes do with it. Those quotes were all from the Lowell lectures of 1903 (Topics of Logic). So where does that leave that which I said in an earlier post about Firstness's _reality_ as being Firstness's Thirdness? I don't know. I had meant it as my extrapolation of what Peirce would say. Firstness is not realness in Peirce's sense; a first is not automatically real. But are we really left with a purportedly Scholastic realism that says that qualities are not real? Peirce also talks of an unabstractible presentness of the present in a quality of feeling. Still, we need for qualities to be real if we are to regard them in some sense such that, as you said, "in principle we can in endless time come to know all about it!?" In an MS c1905, "Pragmaticism, Prag.", appearing in CP under the title "Consequences of Critical Common-Sensism", Section 3 "The Generality of the Possible": Peirce CP 5.527: In 3.527ff the objectivity of possibility was asserted; and the hypothesis defended in vol. 6, Bk. I, chs. 1 and 2 supposes possibility to be real.†2 It was, indeed, implied in the scholastic realism maintained in the N.A. Rev., Vol. CXIII (pp. 454 et seq.) [vol. 9]. But the paper of January 1878 evidently endeavors to avoid asking the reader to admit a real possibility. The theory of modality is far too great a question to be treated incidentally to any other.†1 But the distinct recognition of real possibility is certainly indispensable to pragmaticism. Well, maybe Peirce would take "real possibility" as a way of talking about the reality of a possible, the Thirdness of a First but not the Thirdness of a Firstness. I don't know quite what to make of these issues and am feeling somewhat hamstrung in my attempt to work out what Peirce would think. Meanwhile, as to the cognitive importance of comparison of qualities, I can't find the passage of which I was thinking, but Peirce does say (CP1.566, from a fragment c. 1899) that "Dissimilarity is a relation between characters consisting in otherness of all the subjects of those characters. Consequently, being an otherness, it is a dynamo-logical relation, existing only so far as the characters are, or are liable to be, brought into comparison by something besides those characters in themselves.". He goes on in CP 1.567 to say that the first category of relation includes only similarity, all other (dyadic) relations are dynamical, divided three ways into logical, hemilogical, and alogical. He appears to classify dissimilarity as a hemilogical relation: By logical relations, I mean those in respect to which all pairs [of] objects in the universe are alike; by hemilogical relations those in respect to which there is in reference to each object in the universe only one object (perhaps itself) or some definite multitude of objects which are different from others; while the alogical relations include all other cases. So there is _some_ kind of secondness involved in learning about qualities, but I haven't found a remark about the experience of a "clash" of qualities themselves, brought together to the attention. What I'm trying to save here is the idea that it is not only in thirdness but in thirdness, secondness (and indeed firstness), that we can come to answer any questions about qualities. (More after quote of Søren) Søren wrote, I AGREE THAT A MANIFEST QUALISIGN HAS TO BE A THIRDNESS. A Qualisign is a quality which is a Sign. It cannot actually act as a sign until it is embodied; but the embodiment has nothing to do with its character as a sign. The Qualisign is, by its nature, only a possibility, while the Sinsign refers to the concrete reality of an object. Qualisign cannot actually act as a sign until it is embodied in a concrete form; but the embodiment has nothing to do with its character as a sign. An essential feature of the Qualisign is its generality. Thus it does not stand for a given object but for a class of objects, which it signifies independently of its concrete form. Peirce writes: Firstness is the mode of being which consists in its subject¹s being positively such as it is regardless of aught else. That can only be a possibility. For as long as things do not act upon one another there is no sense or meaning in saying that they have any being, unless it be that they are such in themselves that they may perhaps come into relation with others. The mode of being a redness, before anything in the universe was yet red, was nevertheless a positive qualitative possibility. And redness in itself, even if it be embodied, is something positive and sui generis. That I call Firstness. We naturally attribute Firstness to outward objects, that is we suppose they have capacities in themselves which may or may not be already actualized, which may or may not ever be actualized, although we can know nothing of such possibilities [except] so far as they are actualized. (Peirce CP 1.23-26, 1903) Thus in real Firstness there is not even a contrast between subject and object. This is why I think Peirce imagined Firstness a kind of mystical unity state of consciousness. The firstness of Firstness is very vague as it contains no Secondness. Thus the qualities are partly unmanifest and can only manifest through sign action and thereby becoming Thirdness? It will deviate from Kant’s thing in itself in that we can endlessly manifest is latent qualities through the creation of signs!? Thus in principle we can in endless time come to know all about it!? As you said, the qualisign's embodiment in a sinsign does not affect the qualisign's character as a sign. Likewise a quality's being a qualisign, does not affect the quality's character as a quality. So, as regards the quality itself, secondness and thirdness are in the same boat, so to speak. Yet, only by actual embodiments and sign action - both secondness and thirdness which firstness lacks - can we learn more about a quality than what we get in simple consciousness of one. If quality, possibility, and Firstness are real, then in principle questions about them can be answered if investigation is pushed far enough. We can know more and more about them. Yet, in doing so, we're mixing things in with the quality; on the Peircean view, qualities are themselves, and their variety is something "brought in," in some sense, by comparison, comparison is sort of a condition of possibility for variety. In a similar sense, the semiotic characters of qualities are "brought in" by semiosis. Knowing _all_ about them -- all that could be learned about them in unlimited circumstances -- seems a decidedly _infinite_ project, such that we would not expect to come into coincidence with the corresponding final interpretant after any finite length of time. The kind of final interpretant which we usually discuss is a final interpretant (A) which involves the idea of an indefinitely large or infinite community of investigators and (B) regarding which we think that one can come into coincidence with it (that final interpretant) in a _finite_- time, i.e., that one actually does reach the truth sometimes, indeed continually, since it involves what we regard as one or another _particular line of inquiry_ involving some particular conceivable practical context or set of contexts, not a sum of all conceivable contexts with conceivable practical bearing. Hence the final interpretant of an inquiry which _starts off_ as a prospectively infinite project would seem to involve the idea of a higher-order infinity of investigators. Now, if the difference between Kant's for-us and in-itself is a subjective or subject-dependent difference and if, as Clark says, it's also the difference between finite and infinite, then it seems like in my previous paragraph I was making Peirce's dynamic object (as discovered by the final interpretant) sound at least sometimes like Kant's in-itself. I doubt that Peirce, by "dynamic object", means the sum of everything that a thing could or would do in unlimited circumstances. Peirce says in "Kaina Stoicheia" http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/bycsp/stoicheia/stoicheia.htm <http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/bycsp/stoicheia/stoicheia.htm> The totality of the predicates of a sign, and also the totality of the characters it signifies, are indifferently each called its logical depth. but the idea of actually specifying every predicate in that totality seems to involve the idea of a finite universe. The more that infinity gets involved, the further that we seem to get from knowing it all, though we can still say that some things are deeper than others. Well, I've got to stop somewhere. Best, Ben ----- Original Message ----- From: Benjamin Udell <mailto:[email protected]> To: Peirce Discussion Forum <mailto:[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2009 5:03 PM Subject: Re: [peirce-l] Presuppositions of logic Resend. Dear Søren, Definitely Peirce's thing "of itself" differs greatly from Kant's thing-in-itself (Gnox pointed out http://csp3.blogspot.com/2009/04/what-is-meant-by-in-mind-part-3.html <http://csp3.blogspot.com/2009/04/what-is-meant-by-in-mind-part-3.html> that Peirce, in a 1903 Lowell lecture CP 6.95, calls into question whether Kant himself held with the idea ascribed to him of the unknowable thing-in-itself - that was news to me). Anyway Peirce's thing-of-itself can give itself to you, Kant's thing-in-itself hides itself away. What I say is that I need to review what Peirce says about comparison of qualities against each other (I have to dig it up, wherever it is). I remember that he says that comparison is necessary in order to - well, in order to cognize them in some way or other, I don't remember precisely. Anyway, in a "clash" of qualities, maybe there's a kind of secondness which does pertain to the qualities' characters as qualities, and anyway something about those qualities is manifesting itself that wasn't manifesting itself before the comparison. Then, as you say, in the thirdness of qualisigns and resemblances, there's an endless amount to learn about qualities. It would be like Peirce to have firstness, secondness, and thirdness working together in any piece or act of knowledge, just as chance, efficient causation, and final causation work together in any effect. However, I've also been reading more of the lecture from which I quoted where Peirce discusses the firstness of secondness and so forth, and he places definite limits on how many such combinations there are, e.g., no "secondness of firstness" or "thirdness of firstness," so I have to go over some of the things which I've said and delay further response till tomorrow.
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