Charles Sanders Pierce

Peirce, Charles S. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. New York: Dover, 2011. Print.

Summary:

     The main focus of Peirce’s short piece was on firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Essentially, firstness is the possibility of something and exists alone. Secondness is where something becomes fact when thirdness connects first and secondness. More succinctly, first is quality, second is fact, and third is thought (86). Most of the rest of the chapter further elaborates on each of these concepts, questioning what each one is and is not. He does include one short part about the “three departments of the mind…Feeling [of pleasure and pain], Knowing, and Willing” (94).

Response:

     Even though I’m more familiar with the concepts, I still am not sure that I believe/agree with the concept that Peirce presents. When we discussed it in class, it was alluded to that language is closer to third, to the mediation between firstness and secondness. But I’m still struggling with how firstness, understood as quality would work as an abstraction. I don’t understand how abstract thought would work within his framework. There are things I know as fact that are abstract concepts or secondness, that don’t seem to fit within the firstness as quality. I’m not sure if thirdness is mediating between and I am not aware of it or if he has written something else about this elsewhere.

     I also do not understand what he means when he says that he has “convinced myself that there is nothing in my memory that is in the least like the vision of red” when he closes his eyes (95). While he says some people say they can faintly, this as a proof in relation to his explanation of meditation leaves me still a bit perplexed because I can think of red in different vibrancies, and I’m unclear on how this experiment works as an expedient between memory and sensation. I think that relationship is an interesting one because there are times both when I can relive something in the moment like it is really happening again and other times when my memory is less effective.

Connections/Questions:

     Some of his musings on consciousness connect to Vygotsky’s idea of relationship between inner and outer speech. By this, I don’t mean that the correlate exactly one-to-one, but that interplay is crucial. Vygotsky builds an feedback loop between inner and outer speech. In a similar way, Peirce creates a feedback loop between firstness and secondness by thirdness. At first I thought Peirce’s thirdness was single in its direction, with thirdness connecting secondness to firstness, but then when I thought more about it, I am wondering if it could work both ways. Can secondness (fact) be impacted by firstness (quality) or does firstness always have to come first? Peirce’s concept creation, with both his red example and firstness (etc.) tend to box things in and almost in opposition to the freedom that Heidegger would propose.

Quotations:

“Phaneroscopy [or Phenomenology] is the description of the phaneron; and by the phaneron I mean the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not” (74).

“We have a two-sided consciousness of effort and resistance, which seems to me to come tolerably near to a pure sense of actuality” (76).

“As general, the law, or general fact, concerns the potential world of quality, while as fact, it concerns the actual world of actuality” (78).

“The positive degree of an adjective is first, the superlative second, the comparative third” (80).

“We have already seen clearly that the elements of phenomena are of there categories, quality, fact, and thought. The question we have to consider is how quality shall be defined so as to preserve the truth of that division. In order to ascertain this, we must consider how qualities are apprehended and rom what point of view they become emphatic in thought, and note what it is that will and must be rev elated in that mode of apprehension” (86).

“It seems, then, that the true categories of consciousness are: first, feeling, the consciousness which can be included with an instant of time, passive consciousness of quality, without recognition or analysis; second, consciousness of an interruption into the field of consciousness, sense of resistance, of an external fact, of another something; third, synthetic consciousness, binding time together, sense of learning, thought” (95).