by Umberto Eco
It is true (see Proni 1990: sect. 1.5.2.3.1, n. 6) that Peirce remains very ambiguous on the definition of sensation, and at times what I am calling the sensation of a quale is for him an impression (in the sense of a nonorganized aggregate of sensorial data), but there is no call (with a thinker who changed his terminology so often) to split hairs over lexical issues. In CP 1.374 it is said that the three categories, though they are imposed by logic and have a metaphysical valency, nevertheless have their origin in the nature of the mind and are “constant ingredients of our knowledge.” Of course, this could be simply meant to confirm that they are transcendental forms in the Kantian sense, and in fact Peirce makes it clear that they are not sensations. But in CP 1.381 he says that “feelings, in the sense in which alone they can be admitted as a great branch of mental phenomena, form the warp and woof of cognition” (emphasis mine), while in CP 1.386 he speaks of feeling as “immediate consciousness,” and something that “arises in a active state of nerve-cells” (emphasis mine). Nor can we forget that from CP 1.374 to 1.394 he speaks of the triads in psychology and physiology.
In short, if Peirce does not speak of sensations, and if he is vague when he speaks of impressions, he nonetheless alludes to states of immediate consciousness (see also CP 1.306). In CP 1.317 he says that “the whole content of consciousness is made up of qualities of feeling, as truly as the whole of space is made up of points or the whole of time of instants,” and in CP 1.318 he writes that these qualities of feeling are “a pure priman.”
I believe (when I read CP 5.291 carefully) that a sensation, insofar as it is recognized as such in an interpretive process, is already a semiosic phenomenon and functions as a hypothesis; but, as pure feeling, “a mere feeling of a particular sort, it is determined only by an inexplicable, occult power; and so far, it is not a representation, but only the material quality of a representation” (emphasis mine). “A feeling, therefore, as a feeling, is merely the material quality of a mental sign” (emphasis in original). What does the material quality of a mental sign mean? It means, I believe, that if I do not consider the word dog as a sign (and therefore, we would argue today, as a composite of expression and content, or signifier and signified), but consider only the phonation dog as it can be physically recorded and played back by someone who does not know English, I find myself faced with the material quality of the sign (the substance of the expression, so to speak), but not yet with the semiotic phenomenon developed and concluded in a representation and an act of cognition. The feeling, then, is not yet a hypothesis but the material occasion offered me or offered to my brain as a stimulus provided to allow it to proceed to the inference. “The hypothetic inference of the sensation is two-thirds written (the premises) by the nature of our sensorial system: it is a hypothesis, but our conscious intervention is limited simply to drawing the conclusion, which is obtained in an automatic manner.… The laws of logic construct the form of the sensation, but its content, that which arrives from without, is not part of it: the feeling is the material quality of the perceptual sign” (Proni 1990: 106).
I believe it is possible to reconcile this idea of the sensation as priman with a nonintuitionist theory of all knowledge as inference. Provided that what I assume to be the initial sensation or stimulus is recognized as such, at the molar level, in the respect and capacity of something that interests me at that moment, independently of all cosmological considerations.
15.5. Peirce and the Tortoise
When reading Peirce, we must not confuse cosmology and gnoseology. As I already remarked in K & P, two different but mutually interdependent perspectives are interwoven in Peirce’s thought: the metaphysical-cosmological and the cognitive. Unless we read them in a semiotic key, Peirce’s metaphysics and cosmology remain incomprehensible. But we would have to say the same thing of his semiotics with respect to his cosmology. Categories such as Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness, and the concept of interpretation itself not only define modi significandi, that is, the ways in which the world can be known: they are also modi essendi, ways in which the world behaves, procedures through which the world, in the course of evolution, interprets itself. In K & P, I cited Mameli (1997: 4): “Given that Peirce thinks and demonstrates that intelligibility is not an accidental characteristic of the universe, that it is not, that is, a mere epiphenomenon of how things are, but a characteristic that ‘shapes’ the universe, it follows that a theory of intelligibility is also a metaphysical theory of the structure of the universe” (K & P, p. 399, n. 28). The theory of intelligibility and metaphysical theory, however, must sometimes be kept separate.
Kant said that the fact that we believe we know things on the basis of the mere evidence of our senses depends on a vitium subreptionis or subreption: we are so accustomed from childhood to grasp things as if they appeared to us already given in intuition that we have never thematized the role played by the intellect in this process. Therefore even what were for him empirical intuitions were already the result of a work of inference.
We can construct a semiotics without a subject or (what amounts to the same thing) in which the subject is everywhere. In this semiotics there will never be a priman because interpretation will proceed by mise en abyme. But, if from the cosmological point of view the inferential process is infinite, because there are no intuitions, we cannot ignore the cognitive instance, that is, that edge of the semiosis that is formed when a subject (any instance capable of saying I that somehow enters into the semiosis from the material and corporal outside—what I am speaking about is a brain) installs itself and touches off a chain of inferences under the stimulus of something that, from its own point of view and only in this precise spatiotemporal segment, attracts its attention.7 The I in this case stands on that edge where on the one hand there stands, let’s say, the dog—the thing that interests him at that moment—and on the other hand, everything else—which does not interest him.
In this phase Firstness, as we saw, is a presence “such as it is,” nothing but a positive characteristic, like a purple color perceived without any sense of the beginning or the end of the experience, without any self-awareness separate from the sensation of the color; it is a potentiality without existence, the simple possibility of a perceptual process. In order to contest these qualia that precede any inference, we must take as our point of departure the principle that they constitute an intuitive moment, without our being able to conceive of further inferential processes behind it, in a sort of infinite fractalization. But I would like to remind the reader that the infinite fractalization of a sea coast does not prevent a human subject, who has a molar view compared with the molecular view of an ant, from covering in a single step what would be for the ant an extremely long and tortuous trajectory.
We are back, if you will, to the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, in which we must take into account the distinction between potential infinity and infinity in act, already present in Aristotle.
In the paradox Achilles must first cover half the distance, but before that he must cover a quarter, and before that an eighth, and so on ad infinitum, so that he will never succeed in catching up with the tortoise. It has been observed, however, that, although this process of fractalization can continue infinitely, its result will never be greater than one—as occurs in any case with irrational numbers, so that 3.14, however successful we may be in analyzing it, will never be 4.
If we apply this argument to the fractal length of a coast, where the potential process of division could be infinite, at least insofar as we can always postulate smaller and smaller microbes, this does not prevent Achilles in practice covering this space with a single stride. Achilles will cover a unit of distance appropriate to him in a unit of time appropriate to him.
Already Aristotle (Physics III, 8, 206) objected to Zeno that, among magnitudes, there exists infinity by addition (I can always find an even number greater than the preceding one) but not by division, insofar as the infinity of the subintervals into which a unit of length is di
visible is always contained in a limited totality (never greater than one) which may constitute the object of an empirical intuition.
In other words, if, cosmologically speaking, there is never perhaps a Firstness that is not the result of a previous Thirdness, cognitively speaking there is a limit to our perceptive abilities, which experience as undivided something that, cosmologically speaking, is in posse capable of being further divided. What is in posse belongs to cosmology. What is in actu belongs to the agent subject.
What happens when we put ourselves in the place of a perceiving subject? Zellini (2003: 26–27) reminds us that:
Adolf Grünbaum [(1969)] recently demonstrated that the measured structure of physical time justifies applying the arithmetical theory of limits to the solution of the paradox. Human awareness of time has a base limit of perceptibility, that is, a minimal threshold beyond which temporal intervals vanish into inconceivable smallness. If we consciously tried to contemplate ‘all’ the intervals of the series (a), it would be realized concretely as a countable infinity of mental acts, and the duration of each of these would be larger than the minimal threshold that time allows. But this insuperable ‘minimum’ is an Archimedean quantity: when added to itself infinite times, it yields an infinite result. Consequently, the mental contemplation of the entire series would result in an impossibly unlimited period of time. This would happen, for example, if one ‘counted’ the intervals of (a) one by one, assigning to each of them an ordinal number. This would take more time than the necessary minimum just to conceive or pronounce them. (But it is absurd, Aristotle objected [Physics 8, 8, 263a–263b], to maintain that whatever moves, moves while counting.) In reality, by raising doubts about the possibility of traversing the interval (0–1), Zeno exploits the unacceptable delay that is implied by reducing the series (a) to the corresponding mental acts of the counting process, but he fails to make clear that this process does not reproduce exactly the measurement of the physical time involved in the actual traversal.
Thus, Grünbaum finds Zeno’s argument illegitimate because it uses what is basically an inevitable confusion between two incompatible forms of thought. He explains that we do not experience the intervals into which we subdivide the traversal in any measure that corresponds to their actual nature. Rather, we derive our impression of their duration from the time needed for our acts of mental contemplation, which for each fraction of the distance must perforce exceed our minimal threshold or limit.
In other words, our perception is not mathematical but ingenuous, just as our perception of the supposed movement of the sun is ingenuous and not astronomical. Zellini (1980: 44) reminds us that the existence of a threshold of observability is a postulate both of physics and of the psychology of perception.
Zellini also appeals to Hume: our imagination must be capable of reaching a minimum beyond which we cannot conceive of further subdivisions. We can speak of the thousandth or ten-thousandth part of a grain of sand, but (apart from the fact that we cannot see it—which from the point of view of perception is no small matter) we can’t even imagine it except with the same dimensions as the grain of sand itself: “The idea of a grain of sand is not distinguishable, nor separable into twenty, much less into a thousand, ten thousand, or an infinite number of different ideas.”
“Put,” said Hume, “a spot of ink upon paper, fix your eyes upon that spot, and retire to such a distance, that at last you lose sight of it; ’tis plain, that the moment before it vanish’d the image or impression was perfectly indivisible” (Treatise of Human Nature, I, 2, 27) At a certain point, the spot will become invisible, because it is too far away, but when it is on the point of disappearing, it will still be visible as a punctual and indivisible minimum. As is the case for the ideas of the imagination, an ultimate conceivable term is given for our sense impressions, whereby we go directly from nothing to a minimal perceivable reality not resolvable into smaller parts.
Hume might have added that—while it may be true that under the microscope the same ink blot would reveal a universe of bacteria that made it look like a painting by Kandinsky—from the point of view of our perceptual abilities, it is a black spot, nothing more or less.
If it can be granted that for Peirce the Ground is what I referred to as primary iconism, let us bear in mind that the Ground is an element, a marker, a quality that is (for whatever reason) being isolated and considered in itself. By whom is it isolated? Potentially isolable, it becomes isolated when a subject isolates it, from a certain point of view, and at that point it becomes the terminus a quo of an inferential process, in an upward and not a downward direction—toward the series of relationships, in other words, that bind that spot to me and to my perceptual interests, not toward the series of the infinite possible decompositions of the spot itself.
This, it seems to me, is exactly what happens when Peirce tells us that we feel the blackness of the ink as Firstness. It is possible that—to be able to recognize that what strikes our senses is a quality of blackness—the brain deep down performs an immense number of successive operations. I also agree with Paolucci (2005) that, for the empirical concept of dog as well, the Kantian intellect may make use, not of images, but of a flowchart. But, aside from the fact that the brain too, as a computational machine, must come to a stop at a certain point in order to be able to transmit “blackness,” at the level of conscious perception we are not aware of that additional fractalization. There is a threshold on this side of which we perceive or sense “black” as Firstness, primary iconism (or whatever you choose to call it), and that is the starting point for our all subsequent inferences.
Commenting on Hume, William James (1987: 1061) declared: “Either your experience is of no content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of content or change. Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception. Intellectually and on reflection you can divide these into components, but as immediately given they come totally or not at all.”
Zellini also cites Wittgenstein (Notebooks, 18, 6, 15):
If the complexity of an object is definitive of the sense of the proposition, then it must be portrayed in the proposition to the extent that it does determine the sense. And to the extent that its composition is not definitive of this sense, to this extent the objects of this proposition are simple. THEY cannot be further divided.…
What I mean is: if, e.g. I say that this watch is not in the drawer, there is absolutely no need for it to FOLLOW LOGICALLY that a wheel that is in the watch is not in the drawer, for perhaps I had not the least knowledge that the wheel was in the watch, and hence could not have meant by “this watch” the complex in which the wheel occurs. And it is certain—moreover—that I do not see all the parts of my theoretical visual field. Who knows whether I see infinitely many points?
Let us suppose that we were to see a circular patch: is the circular form its property? Certainly not. It seems to be a “structural” property. And if I notice that a spot is round, am I not noticing an infinitely complicated structural property?…
A proposition can, however, quite well treat of infinitely many points without being infinitely complex in a particular sense.8
Let us attempt a paraphrasis in terms of perception. The complexity of a quale, if it is definitive of the meaning of a perception or a perceptual judgment, must be present and recognized as pertinent to the perception insofar as it determines the meaning of the perception. And to the extent to which the further segmentability of the quale is not definitive for this perception, to the same extent that quale is simple or primary. It is valid as Firstness and there are no pertinent inferential processes below its threshold.
To conclude (seeing that I began with Saint Thomas), I would like to quote Nicholas of Cusa: “Only in a finite fashion is the infinite form received,” Of Learned Ignorance, II, 11).
Originally written for the miscellany Studi di semiotica interpretativa (Paolucci 2007), which collected the contributions presented at the Scuola Superiore d
i Studi Umanistici of the University of Bologna during the academic years 2004–2005 and 2005–2006. [Translator’s note: Quotations from Kant and the Platypus are from the translation by Alastair McEwen (Eco 2000).]
1. See Peirce, Collected Papers (1931–1958)(hereinafter “CP”) 1:307: “any feeling must be identical with any exact duplicate of it,” and therefore the icon is a likeness, not in the sense that is like something else, but because it is the phenomenon that founds any possible judgment of similarity, without being able to be founded by it. This also explains my choice of the perhaps misleading term, “primary iconism.”
2. Claudio Paolucci recently suggested (in a private communication) that “obviously the burning sensation produced by the coffeepot is a Firstness for Peirce too, i.e., ‘the emergence of something new.’ Except that in Peirce Firstnesses ‘do not spring up isolated; for if they did, nothing could unite them. They spring up in reaction upon one another, and thus in a kind of existence’ ” (CP 6.199). The emergence of the Firstnesses through their being opposed to one another (Secondness) starting from the regularity of the habit (Thirdness) for Peirce is an event (CP 6.200), i.e., a singularity, a point at which something occurs.… In this way the spontaneity of Firstness, whose irregular and singular nature Peirce underlines (CP 6.54), turns out to be nothing other than an infinitesimal deviation from the law and from the regularity on whose basis it is produced (CP 6.59). Peirce calls habit, or Thirdness, this very regularity starting from which it is possible to generate the singular spontaneity of the Firstnesses in their opposition to one another (Secondness).… In other words, somehow, the very spontaneity of the event, of the emergence of something new (Firstness) is nothing but the habit of a regular series (Thirdness) which differentiates itself at certain given points: the singular emerges from the regular from which it detaches itself as a consequence of an instability effect.… In this way, since, as Peirce says, Firstnesses do not occur in isolation, the feeling of pain that emerges in the example of my morning coffee (Firstness) is a quality that emerges from a background of experiential habits (getting up in the morning, picking up the coffeepot, putting it on the burner, not turning the gas up too high, placing the coffeepot in just the right place: a whole syntax of habits and regularities of everyday experience). So the sensation of pain (Firstness) arises against a background of habits (Thirdness) that did not imply it (it is not regular to encounter pain in the breakfast scenario) and pain can only arise in opposition (Secondness) to this background of habits. So, even on the cognitive level, we find the pattern of the Logic of Relatives: on the basis of a series of regularities and habits that define the laws of my morning breakfast (Thirdness), a tendency to be distinguished from it may be created, out of which something new emerges, something for which the regularity of the local system does not make allowance. Firstness is an event of this kind, which arises in opposition (Secondness) to a regular background of Thirdness.”
