Welcome to the conversation on the Peirce list, Jack! I hope your post will
inspire some of the other “novices” to join in as well.
You may get a reply from Jon when he has the time, but for now I’ll just offer
my own response to one key point in your post:
JC: Isn't it a fact, though, that thirdness is the irreducible mode of
consciousness?
GF: Thirdness is the predominant mode of cognition and of semiosis, but not of
consciousness according to Peirce’s usual employment of the term:
“Consciousness may mean any one of the three categories” (CP 8.256, 1902).
Secondness is felt or sensed as “dyadic consciousness” (R 300, 38) before it is
abstracted and named as a category. As for Firstness,
CSP: Stop to think of it, and it has flown! What the world was to Adam on the
day he opened his eyes to it, before he had drawn any distinctions, or had
become conscious of his own existence — that is first, present, immediate,
fresh, new, initiative, original, spontaneous, free, vivid, conscious, and
evanescent. Only, remember that every description of it must be false to it.
(W6:171, CP 1.357, 1887-8)
GF: Description, being semiosic, is ‘contaminated’ with Thirdness; but the pure
“first” is conscious even for Adam before he had become conscious of his own
existence. This is a broader usage of “consciousness” than we usually find in
cognitive science or psychology, where many virtually identify it with
self-consciousness. But it’s the appropriate usage for phaneroscopy, where
direct “observation” of the phaneron has to come before “generalization.” In
the latter stage, where a “doctrine of categories” emerges, there does seem to
be a kind of “feedback loop” where the investigator has to go back and forth
between theory and observation in order to “test” the theory, as in any
positive science. But preconceptions are not supposed to interfere with
phaneroscopic “observation” proper.
We should also address the questions you raise about time and about the Kantian
thing-in-itself, but since André addresses that one directly in the next slide
(9), I think I’ll wait until that’s been posted.
Gary f.
} This sentence contradicts itself—or rather—well, no, actually it doesn't!
[Hofstadter] {
<https://gnusystems.ca/wp/> https://gnusystems.ca/wp/ }{ living the time
From: peirce-l-requ...@list.iupui.edu <peirce-l-requ...@list.iupui.edu> On
Behalf Of JACK ROBERT KELLY CODY
Sent: 29-Jun-21 17:21
To: g...@gnusystems.ca
Cc: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] [EXTERNAL] RE: André De Tienne: Slow Read slide 8
Gary, list,
GF: That’s why we can prescind Firstness from Secondness (or Thirdness), but we
can’t prescind Secondness from Firstness, because Secondness is not logically
possible without Firstness. And that’s why there must be more to the phaneron
than what we call reality, even though phaneroscopy (unlike mathematics) is a
positive science, and indeed the first of the positive sciences.
Isn't it a fact, though, that thirdness is the irreducible mode of
consciousness? That we can metaphorically arrive at ideas of firstness,
Secondness, and so on, but always from the vantage point of thirdness? I might
have this wrong, but if not it would seem to suggest a kind of feedback loop in
attempts to prescind Secondness from Thirdness or Firstness from Secondness.
Reading Jon Alan Schmidt's article, Temporal Synechism: A Peircean Philosophy
of Time, I was wondering whether it is possible to prescind "time" from
"thought"? I'm thinking of this in synechist terms (i.e., "Time is no
exception; in fact, it is 'the continuum par excellence, through the spectacles
of which we envisage every other continuum'
(Peirce in JAS 2020: 12). The problem being that surely "time" is, in
phenomenological terms, "thought"? Kant makes time the precondition for the
possibility of existence (or something along those lines) which seems to merely
reify its a priori status (along with space). And whilst we can take time and
space as a priori categories, it doesn't seem to me that we can "literally" do
this - that is, time and space are a priori for no one even though we suppose
they must, logically, be a priori for everyone. We know it/each only through
experience so that whilst we can suppose that time/space exist prior to our
experience of it as such, such judgement must still be made from within that
experiential prism.
So, in essence, how can we usefully prescind one from the other when the two
are either mutually constitutive (dialectical) or a kind of monadic firstness
to which we have no real access (except through consciousness which is always
at the level of mediation - of Thirdness)? Also, if we say there is "more to
the phaneron than what we call reality", are we also not moving in the
direction of Kant's "thing as such" or thing in and of itself? Again, absolute
novice here but I do know that Peirce in general seems opposed to traditional
"metaphysics" and "metaphysicians" which an attribution of there being "more to
the phaneron than... reality" would suggest.
This may just be a long-winded way of saying that there may be value in
disregarding too rigidly defined conceptions of temporality.
Thanks
Jack
_____
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Subject: [EXTERNAL] RE: [PEIRCE-L] André De Tienne: Slow Read slide 8
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Helmut, list,
HR: So, in short: Dissociation, prescission, discrimination is imagining,
supposing, representing one thing without the other.
GF: That’s a bit too short, in the case of prescission, which Peirce says is
supposing *a state of things* in which one element is present without the
other, *the one being logically possible without the other*. That’s not the
same as just supposing one thing without the other. When we suppose the
existence of apples without oranges, we’re not supposing a whole state of
things, a whole universe, which is what we’re doing when we prescind Firstness
from the other elements.
If we’re considering an ingredient of the phaneron, we can prescind its
Firstness from the rest of it, or from the rest of the whole phaneron, because
it is logically possible that this quale (First) is all there is, that there is
nothing else for it to be other than. That is not possible in reality because
Secondness and Thirdness are there too, in any real phenomenon. That’s why we
can prescind Firstness from Secondness (or Thirdness), but we can’t prescind
Secondness from Firstness, because Secondness is not logically possible without
Firstness. And that’s why there must be more to the phaneron than what we call
reality, even though phaneroscopy (unlike mathematics) is a positive science,
and indeed the first of the positive sciences.
Gary f.
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