RE: [PEIRCE-L] André De Tienne: Slow Read slide 50

[gnox]

John, thanks for your continued interest in ADT’s talk! It was originally
given as a Zoom webinar, and the recording of it can be played from the
University of Milan website: André De Tienne: The Role and Relevance of
Phaneroscopy for inquiry | Dipartimento di Filosofia - DIPAFILO (unimi.it)
<http://www.dipafilo.unimi.it/ecm/home/aggiornamenti-e-archivi/tutte-le-noti
zie/content/andre-de-tienne-the-role-and-relevance-of-phaneroscopy-for-inqui
ry.0000.UNIMIDIRE-90701> . I must say it is not easy listening, given
André’s vocal style and accent, and I think it assumes a graduate-level
acquaintance with Peirce’s writings. But it does explain the content of the
slides more fully.

 

I’m attaching a text file (UTF encoding, so it includes some non-ASCII
characters, but no italic or bold formatting) of all the transcriptions I
did from the slides; at the top of it is the link to the IUPUI page where
the slides can be viewed in order (forward or reverse). I guess a single
HTML file putting it together with the slide images would be possible, but
not sure whether it would be worth the time it would take, and I would want
to ask André’s permission first.

 

About the questions that you say are important issues to discuss, I don’t
have anything much to say at the moment, but I’m open to hearing what you or
other list members might say about them. 

 

Gary f.

 

} For the clarity we are aiming at is indeed *complete* clarity. But this
simply means that the philosophical problems should *completely* disappear.
[Wittgenstein] {

https://gnusystems.ca/wp/ }{ living the time

 

From: sowa @bestweb.net <s...@bestweb.net> 
Sent: 19-Sep-21 21:02
To: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu; g...@gnusystems.ca
Subject: re: [PEIRCE-L] André De Tienne: Slow Read slide 50

 

Gary F,

 

Thank you for doing the work of extracting all the slides and transcribing
them to text that can be copied and discussed.

 

Now that each slide has been discussed separately, it would be useful to
scroll forward and backward through them and discuss their relationships to
one another, to Peirce's writings, and to writings by other  authors during
the century after Peirce.  It would be useful to have an HTML file with each
slide followed by the transcription.

 

But it would also be useful to have a pointer following each slide to a
recording of  De Tienne's presentation.  After reading a slide, it would be
good to jump to the recording to hear what he said to the audience at the
presentation.

 

Do you have any thoughts or plans about that?

 

I admit that I have criticized some of his comments.  I certainly admit that
he has a very strong background in his long-term study of Peirce's writings
and the years of publications during the past century.  But his final
comments about the science egg raise serious questions:

 

1. Does Peirce mean that phaneroscopy is only nascent as a science,
and not yet a full-blown one?  But clearly phaneroscopy is no ordinary
science.  And yet he is sure that it is at once necessary and
fundamental ...

 

2. Is it a call for a community of phaneroscopists to gather and start
institutionalizing the theory and practice of phaneroscopy?

 

3. Is it because phaneroscopy is the first positive science that it is

a science-egg and will always be a science-egg?

 

4. Is it because the ever-streaming Phaneron encloses EVERY
possibility, every actuality, every generality as firsts?

 

5. Is it because it originates any inquiry in any domain?  Is it the

egg from which all sciences get hatched?  Does it need to be
fertilized?  By what?

 

6. Can we break that egg?  Is it good?  Does it have a sunny side or
is it hopelessly scrambled?

 

These are important issues to discuss.

 

John


https://peirce.iupui.edu/publications.html#presentations

Title slide [1]:  The Role and Relevance of Phaneroscopy for Inquiry
André De Tienne, IUPUI
Seminar presentation (University of Milan, Italy)
Philosophy as a Method of Thinking Practices: Phenomenology, Hermeneutics and 
Post-Structuralism in the Light of Pragmatism
8 April 2021


[2] Plan of talk
• 1. Phaneroscopy may be mystifying but is no mystery
• 2. Reminders about Peirce's theory of three categories
• 3. The place of phaneroscopy in Peirce's mature classification of sciences
• 4. From mathematics to phaneroscopy
• 5. Phaneroscopy as Inquiry into the positiveness of experience
• 6. The Phaneron and its ingredients
• 7. How to scope the phaneron and why
• 8. Phaneroscopy's role and relevance for any inquiry
• Conclusion: Phaneroscopy as a science-egg


[3] Phaneroscopy is a sort of white elephant in Peirce studies. 

Most scholars are familiar with Peirce's seminal theory of categories and its 
association with multiple research areas in his philosophy, logic, semiotics, 
and evolutionary metaphysics. 

They are also familiar with that theory's association with what Peirce ended up 
calling “phaneroscopy.” But as to what phaneroscopy is, the kind of 
activity it consists in, its status as a “science,” its practice, its 
purpose, its usefulness: all of it raises a cloud of questions.


[4] Phaneroscopy is mystifying …

“Phaneroscopy”? What a strange word! Can it possibly mean anything? 
Is it really a science? How come I have never heard of it before?
Can I get a Ph.D. in phaneroscopy? In what university?
Are phaneroscopists well paid? Is their job useful and interesting? Does it 
help save lives? 
Some say that Peirce did everything that needed to be done in phaneroscopy, and 
that everything else is semiotics. Is that right? 
Is it true that phaneroscopists never assert anything true and yet never lie? 
Are they post-truthists? [No! They are pre-truthists!]


[5] It did not help that Peirce phrased it this way: 
“[The] ultimate analysis of all experiences ... is a most difficult, perhaps 
the most difficult, of philosophy's tasks, demanding very peculiar powers of 
thought, the ability to seize clouds, vast and intangible, to set them in 
orderly array, to put them through their exercises.” (CP 1.280, 1902) 

Yet, although the way Peirce put it above is as right as it is disquieting, 
that should not discourage us. Difficult as any phenomenological practice may 
be, it is within our reach. All of us have actually long been busy scoping the 
phaneron, without realizing it. We have simply not been trained to recognize 
it. Let’s remove the veil of mystery.


[6] Necessary assumption for the purposes of this talk: 
You are already minimally familiar with Peirce's three categories of firstness, 
secondness, and thirdness. 

• 1864-1867: Initial search for a new conception of the logical role a set of 
genuinely universal categories should fulfill
- Discovery that this set is small and gradually ordered.
- Each category is a distinct and indispensable stage in the process of turning 
a cloudy manifold into a clarified unifying intellection.
- Each category is found inductively and confirmed through the test of 
PRESCISSION, a powerful kind of heuristic abstraction.


[7] Precisions about prescission (1)

•     The procession of the categories is regulated through their prescission.
•     Prescission is a heuristic act of abstractive analysis that seeks to 
identify the non-reciprocal logical order of dependence that governs the 
relations between logically distinct components of anything that may come to 
mind.
•     Each such component must have a logical form (and if so, likely also a 
metaphysical form) that radically differs from the others.
•     Each, if not the initial stage, cannot arise without the active 
determination received from its predecessor.
•     Each, if not the ultimate stage, must exercise its own distinct power 
of determination to bring about its successor, the next logical component or 
stage.
•     Prescission is never a fully severing cut: it “stops short of 
scission:” It reveals the inner dynamic and directional structure of distinct 
real parts, displays the formal power peculiar to each hinge, and shows that 
all are indispensable to the whole.


[8] Precisions about prescission (2)

As a result, prescission is the most powerful tool of analysis a philosopher 
can wield. (Too bad analytical philosophers neglected to analyze their own 
tools.)

When well conducted, prescission yields processual distinctions that are 
verifiable and non-arbitrary. They ought to resist criticisms.

When combined with an inductive inquiry that identifies possibly distinct 
universal conceptual parts, prescission ascertains their logical role, their 
non­redundancy, their non-reciprocality, the reatity of their gradation, their 
indispensability, and the limits of their transformative effect throughout the 
chain of logical modifications. 

Read Marc Champagne's book on Philosophy of Signs and Consciousness 
(2018) to witness the incredible power of prescission when it comes to 
defending the reality of qualia against obdurate analytical nominalists.

Prescission has multiple applications, ESPECIALLY WITHIN PHANEROSCOPY.


[9] WHAT CATEGORIES ARE NOT

>From the start, Peirce's categories are NOT the result of any sort of 
>transcendental deduction à la Kant. They are not a priori. They are not 
>general concepts, not classes of predicates, and they do not form a list of 
>general questions to ask about some object. 

WHAT CATEGORIES ARE

They constitute the *structuring agency* that generates, notably, predication, 
representation, signification and, more generally, explanation: the *stages* 
through which, eventually, any synthetic judgment of any form in any modality 
gets expressed out of an experiential encounter of (or logical reaction to) 
something's indeterminacy. 

*Indeterminacy* is a dynamic metaphysical and logical condition that calls for 
its own cancellation. It is not a static inert state but a process that 
energizes its own determination. Any form of indeterminacy can occasion its own 
chain of transformation. Peirce's three categories structure that process – 
for instance, from the unpredicated or unexplained to the predicated or 
explained. 


[10] 1885-88: Peirce extends the effectual role of the categories *from thought 
to nature*, thus also *from logic and epistemology to all the sciences*. 

The categories are not only structuring perception and intellection. Their 
early “new list” is only a specialization of a far more general process, 
made more manifest to Peirce through his mathematical and scientific work, 
enhanced by his study of the logic of scientific methods.

The very same categorial structure is at work in psychological processes, 
biological processes, and even physical processes. That structure is *by no 
means confined to the human mind*. 


[11] Peirce's search for the categories ultimately yielded a triple hypostatic 
abstractive quasi-ordinal generalization: 

*Firstness* is the mode of being which consists in something being positively 
such as it is regardless of aught else. That can only be a *possibility* [ ... 
] which may or may not be already actualized, which may or may not ever be 
actualized, although we can know nothing of it except so far as it is 
actualized. A First is a *Quality of Feeling*, or *Quale*, or any form of 
appearance. There is a First to every component of a manifestation, including 
Seconds and Thirds. 


[12] Secondness is the mode of being which consists in something being Second 
to some First, regardless of anything else, and in particular regardless of any 
Law, although if may conform to a law. It is Reaction as an element of the 
Phenomenon. It is the mark of whatever exists or “obsists” in its 
actuality. 


[13] Thirdness is the mode of being which consists in something being a Third, 
or Medium, between a Second and its First. It is Representation as an element 
of the Phenomenon. It is the fact that future facts of Secondness will take on 
a determinate general character. 
It is fundamentally a synechistic and teleological agency that combines or 
pairs things together (com-pares) to fulfill an intelligible purpose or realize 
a general rule. 


[14] From the 1890s on: 
Peirce will be developing his mature theory of the three categories (and their 
“degeneracies”) extensively throughout numerous writings, from many 
standpoints, including the logic of relations, the logic of evolution, the 
logic of inferences, the logic of semiotics, metaphysics, and even the 
classification of sciences. 
One cannot discuss Peirces phaneroscopy without looking briefly at his 
classification of the sciences.


[15] This is not the place to discuss the long history of the development of 
Peirce's classification of the sciences. Be it known, however, that in its 
mature form it was subtended by two major principles. 


[16] 1. The principle of principle-dependency
Any heuristic science discovers and expresses a number of general fundamental 
principles that find applications not only across its whole range but also in 
other sciences or fields of research. 
Any science that would make use of general principles originating in another 
science is said to depend on that other science and thus to follow it as a 
matter of prescissive classification. 
This order of subsequence therefore moves from the more abstract or theoretical 
science to the more concrete or applied science in phylogenetic fashion. 


[17] 2. The principle of critical inductive validation and correction 
The order of logical dependency implies that a science that happens to make use 
of a principle formulated in a more abstract science, 
either by manifesting instantiations of such principles,
or by putting the clouds of possibilities, freely played with in the more 
abstract sciences, “through their exercises,” thus through the test of 
real-world actualizations, 
may provide that prior science with corrective feedback, reasons to revise 
generalizations, and reasons to redesign formal possibilities. 
Thus, a science may also be said to precede another science if the latter 
provides such a critical and validating feedback in return. 


[18] From Peirce's “Perennial” Classification of Sciences: Sciences of 
Discovery
1.      Mathematics
2.      Philosophy/Cenoscopy
2.1 Phaneroscopy 
2.2 Normative Sciences 
2.2.1 Esthetics 
2.2.2 Ethics 
2.2.3 Logic
2.3 Metaphysics 
Idioscopy (Special Sciences) 


[19] Peirce's classification provides a general schema of research stages. It 
has been often remarked that this schema, as far as its top part is concerned, 
is also driven by a tricategorial distinction. Trichotomies abound in Peirces 
classifications, but not all are categorial, and not all are born from acts of 
prescission: simple “discrimination” may be at work. 

What matters is that phaneroscopy is a fundamental activity within that schema. 
That alone tells us that, as far as Peirce is concerned, phaneroscopy is, after 
mathematics, the activity that drives not only every other subfield of 
theoretical philosophy, but also any number of the more special idioscopic 
sciences, those that have recourse to phaneroscopic findings, knowingly or 
unknowingly. 


[20] Paradox

Few scholars are aware that they ought to study, or even practice phaneroscopy 
in order to conduct their specialized observations. 
The likelihood is that they do practice it, but not knowingly, and therefore 
not with sufficiently appropriate skill. 

The time has come to seize and order the clouds – without dissipating them!


[21] 4. From Mathematics to Phaneroscopy

Significant light can be thrown onto phaneroscopy by contrasting it with 
mathematics. 
Indeed, the schema's structure tells us that 
        (1) mathematics comes up with fundamental principles essential to 
phaneroscopy; 
        (2) phaneroscopy may help mathematicians through corrective 
suggestions, observational clues, theoretical validation; 
        (3) unlike phaneroscopy, mathematics is not part of cenoscopy: its 
object is not part of “common, familiar experience” – still, it is part 
of the experience common to mathematicians, hence their specialized gift for a 
certain kind of phaneroscopy ...


[22] Shocking news!
Mathematicians are phaneroscopists, too! 
They must be, somehow. 
After all, before they come up with fundamental theorems of all sorts, they 
have to conduct a ton of observations based on diagrams and imaginative 
constructions. They contemplate ideal forms. They are looking for patterns and 
patterns of patterns, which they need to manifest one way or another – but 
artificially (though not arbitrarily). 
Yet, phaneroscopy as such does not and cannot provide mathematics with any 
fundamental principle. 
WHY? 


[23] BECAUSE mathematics, in principle, is not concerned with anything but 
itself. The world could stop existing, but to pure mathematicians that would at 
most be an inconvenience. 
“Mathematics is only busied about purely hypothetical questions, tracing out 
the consequences of hypotheses. As for what the truth of existence may be the 
mathematician does not (qua mathematician) care a straw.” (CP 1.53) 
Archimedes was killed while contemplating a diagram and not caring a straw for 
the Roman soldier too full of his own existence ...
“The eternal is for him a real potential world, a cosmos, in which the 
universe of actual existence is nothing but an arbitrary locus.” (CP 1.646) 
“Mathematics is the only science which can be said to stand in no need of 
philosophy, excepting, of course, some branches of philosophy itself.” (CP 
1.249) 


[24] 
•     What mathematicians observe (and construct and manipulate) are pure 
hypotheses, possibilia that get represented in diagrams.
•     The significance and truth-value of such constructs depends only on 
their internal inferential coherence, not on the world of experience.
•     Mathematics seeks to derive consequences that are true in every 
possible configuration, and not merely what is true of the actual world.
•     In that regard, pure mathematics plays freely with forms, unconcerned 
with whether they play any part in experience.


[25]  The Urge to Transition out of Mathematics
•     Given mathematics' unbounded search for formal necessities, we cannot 
count on mathematicians to help figure out what goes on in experience.
•     Yet we cannot ignore the natural urge that pushes the rest of us to 
figure out the all-too-real world that holds us under its bondage. We want to 
sort out its laws, its structures, its composition, its guises and disguises.
•     As a point of method, however, given that mathematics is the 
“first” stage of research in the heuristic schema, how do we transition out 
of it into a concern no longer detached from but attached to the conditions 
sustaining the cosmos, the world, nature, life in general, our life?



[26]  No worries: the transition conforms to nature's logic! 
The principle of the self-cancellation of indeterminacies comes to our rescue. 
As Peirce says, “The logic of freedom, or potentiality, is that it shall 
annul itself. For if it does not annul itself, it remains a completely idle and 
do-nothing potentiality; and a completely idle potentiality is annulled by its 
complete idleness.” 
No matter how beautiful the mathematicians' possibilia are, many of them are 
not merely artificial fictions of the imagination but the direct suggestions of 
evocative forms encountered in experience. Their detachment from reality was 
only relative. They were not all created out of the mathematical tabula rasa. 

It stands to reason that the possible is actually actualizable, otherwise why 
call it “possible”? All it takes is a clash, or contrast of Firsts. 


[27] Toward Positiveness
•     The actualization of firsts or possibilia includes the actualization of 
a special form, which can be rendered into the term positiveness, an 
abstraction resulting from positivization.
•     THEREFORE, what follows mathematics in the order of the classification 
of the sciences is a scientific activity that will explore that resulting 
positiveness (or secondization).
•     One way of putting it is by wondering very simply “How do some of the 
non-arbitrary forms that mathematics has made out actually MANIFEST themselves 
within ‘experience’ in general?”
•     More fundamentally: how do certain mathematical forms manage to 
structure the dough, not of this or that in experience, but of
“experiencing” itself (the experiencing of experience)?


[28]  Phaneroscopy as Inquiry into the positiveness of experience
Peirce's first use of the term Phenomenology occurred in an early 1894 
classification (R 1345) where he married it with the word 
“Empirics” to distinguish it from “Mathematics” and from 
“Pragmatics”, together forming the three largest classes of sciences. 
Empirics or Phenomenology included Philosophy, Nomology (Physics and Psychics), 
and Episcopy (description of individual things). Pragmatics included Ethics, 
Arts, and Policy. 
It was only toward 1899 that Peirce began to grapple more seriously with the 
need to integrate “phenomenology” meaningfully and more specifically into 
his evolving classification of the sciences. 
At first he used the phrase high philosophy to characterize it (also prima 
philosophia). 


[29]  In CP 7.526, he has High Philosophy precede the two main branches of 
Philosophy (Logic and Metaphysics): 
Still more general than these [two] is High Philosophy which brings to light 
certain truths applicable alike to logic and to metaphysics. It is with this 
high philosophy that we have at first to deal. 
So Peirce feels “prescissively” that one cannot transition directly from 
mathematics to logic or metaphysics. Some fundamental step is missing, 
something that must ground both logic and metaphysics. 


[30]  And that MISSING LINK has to do with EXPERIENCE: 
CP 7.527: What is the experience upon which high philosophy is based? For any 
one of the special sciences, experience is that which the observational art of 
that science directly reveals. This is connected with and assimilated to 
knowledge already in our possession and otherwise derived, and thereby receives 
an interpretation, or theory. 
But in philosophy there is no SPECIAL observational art, and there is no 
knowledge antecedently acquired in the light of which experience is to be 
interpreted. The interpretation itself is experience. [ ... ] In high 
philosophy, experience is the entire cognitive result of living, and illusion 
is, for its purposes, just as much experience as is real perception. 


[31]  Note that this understanding of experience is not equivalent to what will 
become the phaneron. But importantly Peirce has the clear idea that such 
experience is disconnected from previously assimilated knowledge. It is 
experience uninterpreted, and thus the very unfolding of the initial 
interpretation – the interpretation of unconditional living, the very reality 
of it detached from prior inquiry.


[32]  •       From 1902 to 1904, Phenomenology became Peirce's working term
(after Hegel, not Husserl), including for instance in the Harvard Lectures of 
1903, preceding the three normative sciences and metaphysics within Philosophy. 
In July 1904 Peirce used the term phenoscopy in a letter to Charles Augustus 
Strong (RL 427).
•     The term phaneron was coined in late October 1904 after an exchange 
with William James. Soon thereafter Peirce coined the term phaneroscopy.
•     One also finds phanerochemy (the chemistry of appearance, R 1338 ISP 
23, 1905) and protoscopy (R 1334 ISP 37) in a context where Peirce 
distinguished categorially between three branches of Cenoscopy: protoscopy, 
deuteroscopy, and tritoscopy.


[33]  Phenomenology's business 
Phenomenology ascertains and studies the kinds of elements universally present 
in the phenomenon; meaning by the phenomenon, whatever is present at any time 
to the mind in any way. (1902) 
Phenomenology, or the Doctrine of the Categories, whose business it is to 
unrovel the tangled skein of all that in any sense appears and wind it into 
distinct forms; or in other words, to make the ultimate analysis of all 
experiences the first task to which philosophy has to apply itself. (CP 1.280, 
1902) 
I will not restrict [Phenomenology] to the observation and analysis of 
experience but extend it to describing all the features that are common to 
whatever is experienced or might conceivably be experienced or become an object 
of study in any way direct or indirect. (CP 5.37, 1903) 
Phenomenology treats of the universal Qualities of Phenomena in their immediate 
phenomenal character, in themselves as phenomena. It, thus, treats of Phenomena 
in their Firstness. (1903) 
Phenomenology is that branch of philosophy which endeavors to describe in a 
general way the features of whatever may come before the mind in any way. (R 
693:46, 1904) 


[34]  Etymological definition 
The word φανερόν is next to the simplest expression in Greek for 
manifest. ... There can be no question that φανερός means primarily 
brought to light, open to public inspection throughout ... 
I desire to have the privilege of creating an English word, phaneron, to denote 
whatever is throughout its entirety open to assured observation. No external 
object is throughout its entirety open to observation. 


[35]  This is a good place to discuss how manifest the phaneron is ...
Seeming vs. appearance: are they the same?
Manifestation: manifesting or manifested?
Is the manifest obscure?
Is the manifest an indeterminate manifold?
What about the continuous stream of manifestation (or presencing)?


[36]  General definition 
I use the word phaneron to mean or denote an ens or object of no matter what 
kind, a thing in the widest sense of that word, in short, whatever is present 
to or can come before the mind directly, at any time and in any sense or in any 
way whatsoever, without caring whether it be regarded as real or not, as fact 
or fiction, whether it be a tinge of feeling, or be imagined, or thought or 
desired, and whether it be objectified or not. [Blend of multiple sources] 


[37]  Collective definition
•     My ‘phenomenon’ ... is very near your ‘pure experience’ but not 
quite since I do not exclude time and also speak of only one
‘phenomenon’. (CP 8.301; letter sent to William James in early October 1904)
•     I propose to use the word Phaneron as a proper name to denote the total 
content of any one consciousness … the sum of all we have in mind in any way 
whatever, regardless of its cognitive value. (R 908:4, 1905) 
•     By the Phaneron, I mean the single entirety, or total, or whole, of 
that which the reader has in mind in any sense. (R 338:2, c.1904)


[38]  The collective Phaneron is streaming unstoppably and escapes description. 
But not its component parts. Hence Peirce's solution: 
“Ingredients of the Phaneron” or “phanera” or even ... 
By Phaneroscopy I mean the study of whatever consciousness puts into one's 
Immediate and Complete possession, or in other words, the study of whatever one 
becomes directly aware of in itself. For such direct Objects of Consciousness, 
I venture to coin the term ‘Prebits.’ ... Once I do become aware of the 
Prebit, I am aware not merely before a Sign of it, or Substitute for it, or any 
sort of proxy, vicar, attorney, succedaneum, dummy, or representative of it, 
but am put facie ad faciem (πρόσωπον πρὁς πρόσωπον) before 
the very Prebit itself. (R 645, 1909 December 22)


[39]  •       Prebit comes from *praebitum* < *praebere* in Latin, which is a 
contraction of *praehabere* (and of course *habere* gives *habitum*, whence 
“habit”).
•     Praebere means to give, gront fumish, supply; to occasion, exhibit. A 
praebitum or prebit is something like the datum, a term Peirce mentioned but 
did not want to use because it was already too loaded with undesired meanings.
•     He thought prebit was superior to phaneron (in the particular sense) 
because he came to realize that there were certain elements of experience that 
could not be said to be manifest in any legitimate way (such as certain 
mathematical entities) even though they were part and parcel of what experience 
supplied.
•     Once could also reason that prebit is a pre-habitum: the datum one has 
not become used to yet, before it has turned into, or been submitted to, a 
filtering habit.
IMPORTANTLY: 
The Prebit is NOT A SIGN! 
The Phaneron is NOT A SIGN! 
Yet, … Signs are phaneral!


[40]  Part 7: How to scope the phaneron and why
The Phaneron as living stream of manifestation is not observable, only 
experienceable as a whole without parts. Only prebits are assiduously 
inspectable. 
A few matters worth discussing in this regard: 
•     Observation, inspection of selected parts or prebits
•     Analysis, especially leading to prescission and hypostatic abstraction, 
especially of “elements”
•     Attention to the monadic, dyadic, and triadic relations
•     Attention to genuine and degenerate categorial manifestations
•     Description vs. assertion
PURPOSES: Providing insightful definitions and descriptions; discovering new 
forms, patterns, and paradigms; increasing terminological aptness; capturing 
inner transformational structures and logics; improving aesthetic appreciation 
and normative alertness; competing with Sherlock Holmes; and so on. 


[41]  How does a phaneroscopist observe a cook preparing an omelette? 
Some time ago I received the following wonderful question: 
“Has anyone to your knowledge done an actual phaneroscopic analysis of 
anything (anything from a poem to a dog show) and published a report on what he 
or she discovered using this method? The method, as far as I can understand, 
appears to have practical potential but it is hard to see how one actually 
applies it in a concrete situation. As you know, watching someone actually make 
an omelette is a lot more instructive than just being told about it.”
Explain how one could begin to answer that practical query, remembering that, 
unlike the phaneron, “no external object is throughout its entirety open to 
observation.” 

[note by GF: Since ADT has said in the previous slide that “The Phaneron as 
living stream of manifestation is not observable,” that last sentence might 
better say: 
‘… remembering that, unlike a prebit, “no external object is throughout 
its entirety open to observation.”’ See R 645 x14 [link]


[42]  8. Phaneroscopy's role and relevance for any inquiry
•     As Vincent Colapietro repeats tirelessly, the categories “guide and 
goad inquiry.” They guide and goad every philosophical science, but 
especially phaneroscopy because phaneroscopy actually initiates, knowingly or 
unknowingly, the very process of inquiry itself.
•     All it takes to engage in phaneroscopy is for us to start looking anew 
or afresh at anything, puzzling or not, as though one had never seen it before, 
as though one had never adopted any habit of looking at it, as though we were a 
naïve but enormously inquisitive and curious child.


[43]  How does one become a phaneroscopist? How to train oneself?
There are a myriad ways of learning the trade.
•     Study how oenologists train themselves to taste and describe wines. 
Study how perfume makers describe scents.
•     Observe abstract paintings and create for each of them a list of titles 
plausible to you.
•     Bring yourself to perceive new qualia and to isolate (prescind} them.
•     Draw, paint, write poetry: don't pretend to be an artist, just a mere 
phaneroscopist - though an extraordinarily assiduous one.


[44-47 not transcribed]  


[48]  •       Train yourself in the logical and observational art of 
abstractive PRESCISSION.
•     Look for non-reciprocal dependencies among phaneral prebits.
•     Forget about the noumenon/phenomenon ad-hoc dual distinction!
•     Learn to forget you are an inquiring subject: be the inquiry itself, 
merge yourself with the phaneron, lose your self into it, stop being aware that 
you are observing, merely float in awareness, where the manifesting and the 
manifested are one.
•     Yet, be attentive, persistent, and direct. Don't talk, don't 
hypothesize, don't assume. Don't question the reality of what seems. Let the 
“phaneral” surprise you. Welcome all of its forms. Let it guide you.
•     Identify categorial patterns, predict seemings accordingly, test.


[49]  Conclusion: Phaneroscopy as a “science-egg”
Phaneroscopy is still in the condition of a science-egg, hardly any details of 
it being as yet distinguishable, though enough to assure the student of it that 
... it surely will in the future become a strong and beneficent science. (R 
645:2, 1909) 
We need to remember that, for Peirce, sciences are living activities conducted 
by living communities of inquirers. Sciences get born and die. Their 
classification is actually akin to a natural classification. In many ways 
Peirces classification is phylogenetic in character. 


[50]  1. Does Peirce mean that phaneroscopy is only nascent as a science, and 
not yet a full-blown one? But clearly phaneroscopy is no ordinary science. And 
yet he is sure that it is at once necessary and fundamental ... 
2.      Is it a call for a community of phaneroscopists to gather and start 
institutionalizing the theory and practice of phaneroscopy?
3.      Is it because phaneroscopy is the first positive science that it is a 
science-egg and will always be a science-egg?
4.      Is it because the ever-streaming Phaneron encloses EVERY possibility, 
every actuality, every generality as firsts?
5.      Is it because it originates any inquiry in any domain? Is it the egg 
from which all sciences get hatched? Does it need to be fertilized? By what?
6.      Can we break that egg? Is it good? Does it have a sunny side or is it 
hopelessly scrambled?


[51: no transcription]

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
► PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON 
PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . 
► To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message NOT to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu 
with UNSUBSCRIBE PEIRCE-L in the SUBJECT LINE of the message and nothing in the 
body.  More at https://list.iupui.edu/sympa/help/user-signoff.html .
► PEIRCE-L is owned by THE PEIRCE GROUP;  moderated by Gary Richmond;  and 
co-managed by him and Ben Udell.