[peirce-l] Re: "reduction of the manifold to unity"

[Jim Piat]

Dear Joe,   Thanks for your informal and very helpful response.  I think I was misunderstanding the introductory passage in the New List. So I have a few more questions.  First some background.  My understanding is that signs refer to and stand for the meaning of objects.   In standing for objects signs can be useful tools for communicating about objects as well as for conducting thought experiments about objects.  But it is their function of referring to objects that I want to focus upon and ask you about. It seems to me that in defining signs as referring to objects part of what this definition implies is that the sign user is in the position of standing outside (or perhaps above and beyond) the mere reactive world of the object being referred to and observed.  IOWs the sign user has a POV with respect to the object that is beyond a mere indexical relationship.  That being an "observor" or spectator requires a level or dimension of detachment that goes beyond the level or dimension of attachment that is involved in "participation with" or reacting to an object.  And so I'm thinking that an indexical representation is more than just a tool for indexing an object or giving voice to one's sub or pre-representational understanding of an object.  I'm thinking that representation is also (and perhaps most importantly) the process by which one achieves the observational stance.  Or, to put it another way, that the capacity to step back from the world of objects and observe them as existing is one and the same as the capacity to represent objects.  That, in effect,  the ability to represent is the foundation of being an observor in a world of existing objects as opposed to being merely a reactive participant in existence. .   Actually, as I think about this a bit more,  maybe it is not simply the sign's function of "referring"  but also the signs function of "standing for" that creates, presumes or makes possible  the "observor" POV.  But however one cuts it I don't see how a sign can represent without there being an observor role which is  functionally distinct from the role of mere participant.  So anyway that's my question  -- is Peirce's theory of representation and the sign meant to imply or address this issue of an observor or am I just misreading something into it that is not there.  I will be greatly dissapointed if such a notion or something akin to it is not part of what is intended by the idea of a triadic relation as being above and beyond that of a mere dyadic relation.  But then there are those Peirce comments about consciousness being a mere quality or firstness so I'm not so sure.    OK  -- I hope I have made clear the nature of my concern and look forward to any comments you might have.  I realize I'm drifting a bit from the initial question that started this exchnage but I for me the questions are very much related. I'm trying to get at and understand the relation of the sign as carrier of meaning and as that which gives rise to the feeling we have of being not simply participants in a world (like colliding billiard balls) but of also being observors of this participation   -- aware of our nakedness and so on.  The notion that in the beginning (of awareness) was the word.    Thanks again  -- I look forward to any comments, advice and suggestions you or others might have.  I am very eager to get clear on this point.  So drop whatever you are doing ...   Best wishes, Jim Piat       ----- Original Message ----- From: Joseph Ransdell To: Peirce Discussion Forum Sent: Saturday, September 09, 2006 12:23 AM Subject: [peirce-l] "reduction of the manifold to unity" Jim and list:   This is just a repeat of my previous message, spell-checked and punctuated correctly, with a couple of interpolated clarifications, and minus the unphilosophical paragraphs at the beginning and end:  (I will try to state it better in a later message.)   As regards your question: I will try to respond to it, but I can only talk about it loosely and suggestively here, in order to say enough to convey anything at all that might be helpful, and you will have to tolerate a lot of vagueness as well as sloppiness in what I am saying. If I bear down on it enough to put it into decently rigorous form it will not get said at all [because of the length], I'm afraid. But then this is just a conversation, not a candidate for a published paper.   Okay, that self-defense being given in advance, I will go on to say that I think that one of the things that is likely to be misleading about the New List is that it is easy to make the mistake of thinking of the Kantian phrase "reduction of the sensuous manifold to unity" which Peirce uses at the very beginning of the New List to be talking about a unification of sense-data in the technical sense of "sense-datum" developed by philosophers somewhere around the beginning of the 20th Century, stressed especially by the positivists, especially since Peirce takes as his example the proposition "The stove is black". But regardless of what Kant might have had in mind in talking about the "manifold of intuitions" in the Critique, there is no reason to think that Peirce ever held to the view that a theory of cognition is supposed to begin by explaining how sense-data such as color patches and the like, regarded as meaningless atoms of quality, are what is primitively given, then named by fiat, to provide a primitive level of cognition constituted by sense-data plus interpretation.   I take it that the point to the denial of intuition in the 1868 papers that follow immediately upon the New List (and are clearly of a piece with it) shows that the reason Peirce started with an example like that was to be able to make the point that, even in cases that might seem to us to be cases of a simple perceptual given involving no interpretation at all, it is in reality the interpretation of a product of an unspecifiable number of levels of prior interpretation. (See his argumentation towards the very beginning of the "Questions" article about things like the unnoticed blind spot on the retina, the example of tactile sensation, the tricks of the stage magicians, and so forth, which all underscore that even what seems like it must be utterly simple sensation is actually the result of unconscious interpretation. So, the point is that the items in the "sensuous manifold" of perception that mind is required to synthesize (to reduce to unity through application of a unifying conception) are always already meaningful and the "reduction" -- which is to say, the successful predication -- is always just further interpretation of disparate materials which are already results of prior interpretation.   Why must they be unified? Why are they disparate? What is it that is driving the need to unify the "manifold" by the formation of a proposition bearing the force of an assertion, which is to say, by the application of an explanatory predicate? The answer is contradiction: the unification process -- which is the thought process generally -- begins from the tension of unresolved contradiction, itself constituted by what must be assumed to be (from the logical point of view) the conflict of "repugnant" propositions (as he says in the Fixation article) -- felt experiential incoherence -- which is the incipient beginning of all doubt and questioning. Bear in mind that most conscious cognitive perception is not of simple occurrence of color properties, tingles of feeling, and so forth, but of macrocopic objects, such as the ordinary "furniture of the earth" that makes up our perceived and recognized environment -- people and things in our environment, both local and remote, that come to our conscious attention for some special reason, the idea being that if you were to analyze any particular instance of ordinary conscious perception of something you would find, at the bottom of that analysis, as it were, what would always be something which first came to our attention because of some oppositional factor that our perception functioned to overcome by a reconciliation of the opposition in some sort of unity. No opposition, no need for attention being paid to it.   So the beginning of cognition of which we are conscious, then, is always in an as-yet-unresolved conflict of some sort perceived as such because in our "processing" of it we had to make the effort of a unification of oppositional entities of some sort, the awareness of each of which at a preconscious or unconscious level is due to the funded result of prior unification, i.e. prior learning. The important point here is that this holds true regardless of whether we are talking about the relationship of a theory like, say, particle theory in physics, to the experimental data which it is required to explain, or talking about the subtle judgments of flavor [taste] made by a wine-taster, or just talking about the ordinary perceptions of things such as are occurring to us constantly in our waking moments. These are, all of them, "reductions of a sensuous manifold to unity". That [sort of comprehensive account] is the ambition of this theory of cognition, at any rate, and is clearly importantly different from the sense-date reductionism of the positivists.   The implication of this, then, is that thinking begins from the awareness of disparateness, but the [initially given] disparate non-unified elements of the manifold are themselves unities resulting from prior synthesize of more primitive disparate entities, and these in turn, . . . and so on ad infinitum. The unification of the manifold is always something happening in media res -- in the middlle of things -- in the midst, in other words, of an ongoing process, the analysis of which will always reveal the same structure of units which are the product of prior unification. The always more-of-the-same, regardless of the level of resolution, which is so marvelously exemplified in the graphics of fractal geometry is the perfect metaphor for this. I'm not sure, for that reason, that Steven is right in opting for one of the two options he mentions: it seems to me that Peirce is going to come out in favor of both, though there may perhaps be good reason in this or that context of application to regard one of the two as being most profitably regarded as the starting point for that particular purpose. Joe   [EMAIL PROTECTED]   --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com