by Umberto Eco
Paolucci still finds this “I am confronted with something” embarrassing, and he writes: “There is no question that Peirce, to describe the formal moment that gives body to the second phenomenological category, describes on several occasions a type of nonmediated relationship between a subject and an individual external object (a haecceitas or thisness). Should this type of relationship turn out to be a cognition (but, as we shall see, it isn’t), it would certainly be correct to speak of a return on the part of Peirce to the immediacy of intuition, since we would be dealing with a cognition not determined by previous cognitions.” Quod est impossibile, if we assume that Peirce always remained anti-Cartesian.
But, in K & P, was I really talking about cognitions?
The position Paolucci has always defended, including in his thesis, is that Peirce’s notion of synechism has to do, not with an amorphous continuum to be segmented (à la Hjelmslev), but with the series of cognitive inferences that, proceeding en abyme, always lead us to make a supposed primum that offers itself to our experience, the point of departure for a subsequent inference (and it is no accident that Paolucci has always appealed in this regard to the principles of infinitesimal analysis). Therefore, every cognitive phenomenon, even the most aurorally primal, must call upon all three categories. Assuredly, there are moments in which Firstness or Secondness seem preeminent, but they are never the exclusive components of the process because any kind of experience always needs to be made up of all three phenomenological categories. How then can we speak of a primary experience?
This is not all, but for Peirce the three categories are not cognitions but formal structures that found the possibility of all cognition (in this sense Peirce was a Kantian), or they are not kinds of experience but pure forms that make up experience. Therefore, if a sensation of redness is an example of Firstness or, in one of the examples I provided at the time, the burning I feel when I touch a hot coffeepot, this Firstness in itself is still nothing from the point of view of my cognitions (a “mere maybe”), and I recognize it as a burn from the coffeepot only if it is immediately placed in relation to Secondness and Thirdness.2
Naturally I agree that, indeed let me remind you that in K & P I made it clear that, even in the face of the immediacy of a quale (a sensation of redness, a burning feeling, the whiteness of a sheet), I can always become aware later, precisely when that Firstness becomes defined as such in the interplay of all three categories, that my first reaction was the result of an error (that I had experienced as red or scorching something that wasn’t), and that I might have received the stimulus in conditions (external or internal) that were such as to “deceive” my nerve terminals. Except that, as Peirce himself made clear, even after recognizing that my senses have been deceived, I cannot say that I have not experienced (let alone “that I have not known”!) a sensation of redness or excessive heat. Going back to the housewife with her sheet, she might say: “A short time ago, after having made my first over-hasty perceptual inference, I entertained the belief [(a cognitive fact)] that I had experienced a sensation of whiteness, upon further reflection however …”
Paolucci’s objection is that, given that Peirce denies all power to intuition and asserts that all cognition arises from a previous cognition, not even a unrelated sensation, be it thermal, tactile, or visual, can be recognized (and therefore known) except by bringing into play an inferential process that, however instantaneous and unconscious it may be, guarantees its reliability.
Nevertheless, the problem that ought to interest a reconstructionist (more “-ologist” than “-ist”) is the following: Is it possible that a sensible person like Peirce should deny that in some fashion the inferential process that leads me to say “I burned myself by touching the coffeepot” arises from a sensation of scorching that compels me (like any other animal) to withdraw the limb from the point of stimulus, even before recognizing it as something other than myself that opposes resistance? Furthermore, Peirce could not deny it because his realism, whether Scotist or otherwise, was based on the fact that all knowledge refers to a Dynamical Object that lies outside of myself and my cognitive acts, and precedes every possible inference—even if by chance this Dynamical Object were to remain forever unattainable, multiplying itself into an infinite series of Immediate Objects. Peirce could not deny that the perceptual process seems to begin in a vague and marshy zone between Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, and the knot of inferences that leads it to perfect itself in perceptual judgment appears to situate itself after the apparition of something, not before—which is tantamount to saying that in order to interpret there must be something there to interpret, otherwise we would not be Peirceans but Deconstructionists or Nietzscheans (see K & P, sect. 1.9).
How can we, then, from an anti-intuitionist standpoint, according to which all experience is always of an inferential nature, how can we speak of a point where inference begins? Is this primum a primum in absolute terms or it is a primum for me, at that moment, and (to use a Peircean expression) is it such only in some respect or capacity?
The problem, quintessentially Peircean, of the respect or capacity that makes something a sign, licenses me to introduce a distinction between molecular pertinentization and molar pertinentization.
15.3. Peirce vs. The Phantom Blot
In January 2006 I engaged in a debate in Rome with Achille Varzi, inspired by his 2005 essay “Teoria e pratica dei confini,” (“The Theory and Practice of Boundaries”).3 Taking the notion of “boundary” as his starting point, Varzi proceeded to discuss the evident difference between purely de dicto demarcations (like the boundaries between two states) and demarcations we might be tempted to consider de re (like the boundary that separates the inside of an apple from its outside, a human body from what surrounds it, or even life from nonlife or life from death, as is the case in discussions about abortion, stem cells, or euthanasia). Varzi recognized that:
it is not clear what the relationship is between a boundary and the entity of which it is the boundary.… We never encounter points, lines and surfaces in complete isolation. We cannot eat all the three-dimensional parts of an apple and keep only its surface, if by surface we mean, not the peel (which is a solid part), but the perfectly two-dimensional entity that circumscribes the peel on the outside, just as we cannot display in a museum the boundary of our town or the point of intersection between the equator and the Greenwich meridian. Still, this relationship of dependency is reciprocal: neither can we think of an apple without a surface, or a town without boundaries.… Certain entities commence their existence only when a boundary is drawn.4
And, after referring to the uncertain boundary between the water of the sea and the air of the sky remarked on by Leonardo, Varzi got to Peirce (The Logic of Quantity) and to the edge of a black spot on a white surface—a problem that seemed similar to him to the Aristotelian question whether at the precise moment when a body begins to move we should say that the body is at rest or in motion (Physics VI, 234a et seq.).
Varzi remarked, citing Jackendoff (1987), that we might be dealing with asymmetrical configurations in which one of the two entities is a figure in relation to the other which is the background: thus the spot is imposed on the sheet of paper that acts as the background, and so the line of demarcation that Peirce was looking for belongs to the spot not to the paper. The water wins out over the air that acts as the background, and hence the line of demarcation Leonardo was concerned with belongs to the sea. We never have two solid bodies in contact with each other, but always a body inserted into a certain background context, and it is therefore to the body itself that the boundary is to be assigned. Nevertheless, Varzi did not find the idea very convincing:
But what happens when two figures collide? We throw a stone into the sea. The stone is “closed,” and so is the water. How does the stone manage to enter, if two closed bodies cannot even touch each other? And granted that it manages to enter, which of them does the boundary line between stone and water belong to? Are we to
say that upon entering the stone opened? That the sea is closed on the outside (toward the air) but open on the inside (toward the stone)? Or let us think of the white cliffs of Dover: it is hard to think of them as a topologically open background against which the waters of the English Channel stand out. This is also because the cliffs stand out in their turn against the sky. Are we to say then that that the cliffs are open along the zone that separates them from the water, but closed for that part of their surface that separates them from the air? And what are we to say of the line along which water, air and rock meet? If we grant that the water continues to win out, how do the air and the rock manage to touch if they are both open? Obviously something is wrong. The topology of the continuous excludes the possibility of two closed bodies touching, but it also that of two open bodies touching.… The gradual process of dematerialization of matter that has marked the development of modern and contemporary physical theories presents us with a world in which even objects that to us appear perfectly rigid and compact are, if we look closely, swarms of microscopic particles frenetically in motion in the wide open spaces that surround them (the volume of an apple, if by this we mean the material part of the fruit, is less than a thousandth of what we are accustomed to calculate), and the surfaces of these systems of particles are no more smooth and continuous than a fakir’s bed of nails. If this is how things are, it makes no sense to speak of contiguous objects separated by a common boundary line. It makes no sense to ask ourselves to which of them the boundary between two objects belongs. There are only dancing particles, and if we really insist on insisting, we will say that each of them must have its own boundary that separates it from the void: there is nothing else that can claim its possession. Put in another way, if we look closely, the spatial boundaries of common physical objects are imaginary entities whose form and localization involve the same degree of arbitrariness as the lines of a graph based on a limited amount of data, the same degree of idealization as a drawing obtained by “following the dots” on the page of a puzzle book, the same degree of abstraction as the outlines of the figures in an Impressionist painting. To ask ourselves who or what these lines belong to makes no sense, or it makes sense only if we conceive of them as abstract boundaries drawn by our unifying action, de dicto boundaries which, as such, may well be undetermined, as we have seen.
Varzi seemed to me to be tending toward an overconventional vision of the notion of boundary, going so far indeed as to extend the de dictu modalities to cover all those that were presumably de re.5 Still, in the course of the discussion that ensued, I accepted the idea that “even what are for us the most salient events and actions, that seem to be defined by de re boundaries, emerge upon further consideration from an intricate system of underlying processes that we select and unify according to laws that reflect our cognitive biases.” The problem of cognitive biases seems to bring us back to the difference between molecular and molar.
It is certainly difficult to define the boundaries of a black spot on a white sheet of paper, just as it is difficult to define the boundaries of a hole. Granted, it is usually the body that is topographically closed while the background remains open. But who decides which is the body and which the background? As a collector of rare books, I know that, when I come across a wormhole in the page of an incunabulum, I am concerned, not with the boundaries of the hole, but with the boundaries of the page, because it is on the page that a letter may be eaten away or even cancelled by the hole. And when I write in my catalogue “with the partial loss of a letter on leaf A6 recto,” it is with the margins of the page and not of the hole that I am concerned.
This might mean that the definition of the limits (and of the relationship of figure to background) is merely a question of negotiation: it is a question of negotiation if I think like a collector and not like an informal artist who wishes to pantograph the hole (or the spot) and would be interested in that case in defining its edges with microscopic exactness. For a theorist of fractals, the edges of the hole could be analyzed en abyme so as to identify their curves and folds beyond any limit conceivable in terms of our normal perceptual habits. But, from my standpoint as collector and bibliophile, I respect the limits of my perceptual abilities, and I consider as undivided something that is, cosmologically speaking, susceptible in posse to further division.
This is also true of the boundary that separates an apple from its outside. Clearly, in terms of subatomic physics, what we have along that borderline, and before it and after it, is a host of dancing particles and not a line. But I was once guilty of an error in this connection. In La struttura assente, arguing against ingenuous conceptions of iconism, I said that a line drawing of a horse in profile, which ought to imitate the properties of a horse, exhibits the one property that a horse does not have, namely, a solid black line that separates the inside of the horse from the outside. I was forced to recant, following the lead of Gombrich (1982), who, correcting a conventionalist position he had taken earlier, observed that if it had once been affirmed that there are no lines in nature and that outlines are a human artifice, psychologists today tend to see them as a perceptual “surrogate” and as “indicators of discontinuity.” In fact “the outlines may serve as an anticipation of the motion parallax effect, because objects within our reach always stand out from their background, but will retain an intrinsic coherence however slightly we move our heads” (Gombrich 1985: 233).
This does not mean that the outline belongs to the horse, because, depending on whether I look up at the horse from a lying position or down from a balcony, I will see different aspects of the horse, and therefore the outline will shift with my point of view; and yet, even though it does depend on my point of view, at the moment when I look, the outline is an objective datum that I cannot ignore. The horse may display an infinite number of outlines, but in that particular respect or capacity it has only one.
Once I have decided to consider the leaf of the book from the collector’s point of view, if I write that there is a hole with the loss of one or two letters or half a letter, it is objectively true that one or two letters or half a letter is missing, and the difference between one or two letters is not a question of negotiation or of infinitely subdivisible borders. Either the letter is missing or it isn’t.
Once the level of pertinence has been decided—or the level of interest with which I focus on things (and in my case I have chosen a molar rather than a molecular level)—not only do nonnegotiable objective impossibilities become evident, but also starting points from which my inferential activity begins.
Let us talk, not about the borderline case of the holes, but about the normal case of the absence of holes. There can be no doubt that if I take a fresh sheet of standard 8.5 x 11 typing paper there are no holes in it. Similarly, if I were to attempt to walk from one room to another without using the door but by going through the wall (or going through the looking glass like Alice), I would come up against the fact that there are no holes (or ways through of any kind) in the paper or the wall or the looking glass. And yet—as one would have to admit from a molecular, if not a molar, point of view—using an extremely powerful microscope I would see in both the paper and the wall an infinite number of holes or empty spaces, just as I am aware that the crystal atoms of the mirror are miniature solar systems with empty interstellar spaces.
The point is that from my own point of view, or in some respect or capacity, those empty spaces are of no interest, and therefore as far as I am concerned do not exist.
15.4. Peirce and the Brain
Whether we call it primary iconism or use some other name, there is something we cannot get around as soon as we introduce an interpreting subject into the process of semiosis. In other words, if primary iconism does not exist cosmologically, it exists for the subject.
Let us take another look at the Peircean concepts. In CP 5.213 it is specified that “the term intuition will be taken as signifying a cognition not determined by a previous cognition of the same object, and
therefore so determined by something out of the consciousness.”6 If denying all intuition, however, meant denying that everything that happens in our minds is not determined by something outside of our consciousness, we might be tempted to believe that Peirce was opting for a magical idealism à la Novalis. But Peirce does not say “everything that happens outside of our minds”; instead he speaks of cognitions. If someone kicks me and I cry out (and feel pain) can we speak of cognition? I would speak simply of stimulus-response, which is nonetheless something that involves our neuronal processes. Now, Peirce never said that stimulus-response processes are cognitions, or that the stimulus that I feel when kicked does not come from something outside of our minds (or our brain). Can we reasonably speak, without being accused of not thinking ad mentem divi Caroli, of the sensation of pain I would feel if (for example and per absurdum) Paolucci were to kick me in the shins?
Faced with this stimulus, my brain would probably perform processes of whose complexity I have no inkling, as it does when it inverts (as if there were nothing to it!) the retinal image. We can say therefore that processes occur in my neuronal circuit that we may define as inferential or in any case interpretive. But about these processes I know nothing and, just as it seems natural to see Paolucci walking with his feet on the ground and his head in the air, it seems natural to react with a cry of pain to his kick in the shins, even if to invite me to emit it my brain has performed who knows what labor. And that the brain labors to interpret, often making mistakes in interpretation, is proven by the fact that the brains of amputees cause them to suffer painful sensations that appear to come from the limb they have lost. This does not exclude the possibility that the sensation of pain itself (once involved in the triadic process that transforms it into cognition) may take on a semiosic character: it becomes a sign, to be specific a sign of the fact that someone (who through subsequent inferences I will discover was Paolucci) has given me a kick. But as soon as I become aware of pain and cry out, I assume that pain as a point of departure in an upward direction, to find out what it is and what caused it, and not in a downward direction, to understand how my brain processed the external stimulus. I consider that quale beneath a molar respect and capacity.
