Franklin,
Yes, this excerpt from Peirce’s “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism” demonstrates that according to the purpose of the analysis, a percept can be considered either as an object or a sign. (And of course signs can be objects of other signs, otherwise we could say nothing about semiosis!) Your example does show that maybe it’s not that “hard to say how any phenomenon could be the object of a percept” — although I could argue that smoke is not a percept but a perceptual judgment. But personally I’m going to leave for later (or for others) the consideration of perception in terms of triadic relations. At least until I have a better handle on NDTR and its classification of signs, and how that relates to the phenomenological categories. Gary f. From: Franklin Ransom [mailto:pragmaticist.lo...@gmail.com] Sent: 9-Dec-15 18:00 Gary F, Jeff, Jon S, Given Gary's comments in this last post, I think it would be worthwhile to quote the passage that is pertinent to some of what Jeff has been discussing, and which I discussed with Jeff in our previous discussion. From Vol. 4 of the Collected Papers: 539. The Immediate Object of all knowledge and all thought is, in the last analysis, the Percept. This doctrine in no wise conflicts with Pragmaticism, which holds that the Immediate Interpretant of all thought proper is Conduct. Nothing is more indispensable to a sound epistemology than a crystal-clear discrimination between the Object and the Interpretant of knowledge; very much as nothing is more indispensable to sound notions of geography than a crystal-clear discrimination between north latitude and south latitude; and the one discrimination is not more rudimentary than the other. That we are conscious of our Percepts is a theory that seems to me to be beyond dispute; but it is not a fact of Immediate Perception. A fact of Immediate Perception is not a Percept, nor any part of a Percept; a Percept is a Seme, while a fact of Immediate Perception or rather the Perceptual Judgment of which such fact is the Immediate Interpretant, is a Pheme that is the direct Dynamical Interpretant of the Percept, and of which the Percept is the Dynamical Object, and is with some considerable difficulty (as the history of psychology shows), distinguished from the Immediate Object, though the distinction is highly significant.†1 But not to interrupt our train of thought, let us go on to note that while the Immediate Object of a Percept is excessively vague, yet natural thought makes up for that lack (as it almost amounts to), as follows. A late Dynamical Interpretant of the whole complex of Percepts is the Seme of a Perceptual Universe that is represented in instinctive thought as determining the original Immediate Object of every Percept.†2 Of course, I must be understood as talking not psychology, but the logic of mental operations. Subsequent Interpretants furnish new Semes of Universes resulting from various adjunctions to the Perceptual Universe. They are, however, all of them, Interpretants of Percepts. Notice that the percept, in one case, is identified by Peirce as a Seme and that does in fact make it a sign. Of course, it is also discussed as immediate object, and dynamical object, so one needs to be careful as to how one interprets this passage when trying to figure out what is going on with the percept, and how it is understood differently depending upon what its role is in the triadic relation. In any case, it would appear that the percept, according to Peirce, can be a sign and classified as a seme (a.k.a., rheme), and can have its own immediate object, and have interpretants. For my part, I would suppose that there can be phenomena which we directly experience (directly perceive), which can nevertheless serves as signs of other perceptual phenomena. I directly perceive smoke. The smoke, while perceived in itself, can also be a sign of fire, which can also be directly perceived. Perhaps I have failed to understand what Gary meant when he said that "it's hard to say how any phenomenon could be the object of a percept"? -- Franklin
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