(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
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 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.
