The Aristotelian shipwreck, buried in Kantian sand dunes, reappears unexpectedly here and there. Some weeks ago, Harry Procter sent me Mats Bergman's paper “Representationism and Presentationism (2007), which is a valuable account of Peirce’s struggle to unite his semiotic understanding of the consciousness with the doctrine of immediate perception. The article, again, shows how useful is a careful developmental approach that compares and contrasts Peirce’s early and mature views of perception.
In my reading of the article, Peirce did not manage to reach his aim for two reasons. His early theoretical maxim that everything in the consciousness is semiotic presupposes a unified conception of sign that unites the elementary modes of perception with the “higher” processes in consciousness, such as remembering, imagining, and thinking. Peirce never reached such a conception, although he experimented with different versions of the triadic conception of object, representamen, and interpretant. His later solution of categorising signs according to the ontological categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness blurred the picture and created problems of analysing consciousness in terms of the relationships between iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs.
The other problem that I sensed when reading Bergman concerns Peirce’s way of approaching perception from the traditional Aristotelian angle. The following citation that Bergman quotes in full illustrates it very well:
. . .the object of a sign, that to which it, virtually at least,
professes to be applicable, can itself be only a sign. For example, the object
of an ordinary proposition is [a] generalization from a group of perceptual facts.
It represents those facts. These perceptual facts are themselves abstract
representatives, though we know not precisely what intermediaries, of the
percepts themselves; and these are themselves viewed, and are,—if the judgment
has any truth,—representations, primarily of impressions of sense, ultimately
of a dark underlying something, which cannot be specified without its
manifesting itself as a sign of something below. There is, we think, and
reasonably think, a limit to this, an ultimate reality like a zero of
temperature. But in the nature of things, it can only be approached, it can
only be represented. The immediate object which any sign seeks to represent is
itself a sign. (MS 599:36–37 [c. 1902]; cf. NEM 4:309–310 [c. 1894?])
The receptive understanding of perception that Aristotle cemented seems here to be modified by a Kantian cautiousness that prevents Peirce to name “the thing in itself” as the starting point. Instead, he refers to “a dark underlying something”. Nevertheless, the following steps seem to come close to the Medieval debates on abstractive cognition, or Roger Bacon’s doctrine of De multiplication specierum. The path from “impressions of sense”, “percepts”, and “perceptual facts” to “ordinary propositions” is a faithful reproduction of the Aristotelian theory of cognition.
The inherent dynamics of this account brings about problems that lead to “a multiplication” of the steps that seem to be needed. Bergman’s paper illustrates this nicely by Peirce’s conceptual division between “percept” and “percipuum”. As instances of secondness, percepts only convey the “brute force” of their instigators. Percipuums are a bit like Fodor’s symbolic representations. Still within the perceptual domain, they involve a kind of identifying judgments that make them appearances of something. “But the moment we fix our minds upon it and think the least thing about the percept, it is the perceptual judgment that tells us what we so ‘perceive’.” (CP 7.643 [c. 1903])
The recent commentaries that try to bring some coherence in Peirce’s prolific and contradictory thought seem, unwittingly, to reproduce the tendency of introducing more steps and substages in order to cope with the Aristotelian fallacy. Bergman presents Carl Hausman’s suggestion to distinguish between percept1 and percept2 . The former denotes the dynamic object, or the immediate impact of the brute force, while the second incorporates a cognitive generalization that prepares the percept suitable for becoming the immediate object of thought, or the percipuum.
At this stage, I cannot help concluding that Peirce was, as we still mostly are, too closely tied to the Aristotelian understanding of cognition in order to unite his semiotic maxim of the consciousness with his accounts of perception. Jerry Fodor’s much more recent attempt to fill the rift between propositional attitudes and immediate sense impressions is another reproduction of the ancient problem that remains unsolved despite terminological modifications.
