I know that I understand a theory if I can rewrite or explain it in formal but generic language. In other words, if I truly understand a concept, I can replace one set of unfamiliar signifiers with a familiar set. If I cannot do this then I obviously have only a very partial mental image, or interpretant, with which to work. (I like to mix up Ferdinand Saussure’s terms with Peirce’s, because by use of the term ‘signifier’ I am clearly talking about language rather than another sign system and I do not have to clarify whether my signifier is an icon, index or symbol). My process of translation allows the first set of signifiers to become more powerful representations, as their indexicity and iconness grow to allow the signified to function as an effective symbol for me. But more of this later.
As a test of my understanding of Peirce’s concept. I attempt a translation of Peirce’s theory into words I know better. This understanding is only entry level, of course. Keeping in mind that Peirce’s theory of trichotomy can become very complex and layered and that it is not elucidated in one overarching work, I have read a selection of writings that apply the trichotomy to different systems or epistemologies. This essay presents understanding gleaned from the following works: “On a New List of Categories” and “What is a Sign?”, published in The Essential Pierce, Selected Philosophical Writings, published by Indiana University Press.
Peirce’s theory of trichotomy is a metaphysics, as well as ontology, phenomenology and epistemology, for the theory defines being and knowledge, can be applied to different types and categories of phenomenon and explains the role experience plays in knowledge. Indeed it is a belief system because it is a guide for understanding.
Throughout his writings, Peirce clarified and refined his trichotomial theory and offered varying definitions and examples for his categories of symbol, index and icon. Some of these definitions and examples I find easier to conceive, or comprehend, than others. The definitions I use here are from the essay “On a New List of Categories".
In order for me to make sense of Peirce’s conception of being (writing this talk is an exercise in tautology: Peirce’s essay explains what conception and being are, yet I must use the terms before they can be explained because there are no other words that evoke the same concept.) So, to begin again, in order to make sense of Peirce’s conception of being, I have had to separate the idea of existence and being as understandings of consciousness rather than as concepts of existence outside the human’s ability to perceive. A tree may exist without a human’s conception of it, but I believe that is a completely different matter to what Peirce is discussing. He is solely discussing existence and being as a perception of the human mind. He may not believe that existence does exist beyond the human mind.
Peirce begins “On a New List of Categories” by explaining a few concepts that the reader must understand and accept as metaphysical givens in order to make sense of and believe in his theory. At the outset these givens raise questions. In addition, I find that these givens cannot be fully understood without an understanding of Peirce’s theory and its terms in general. Therefore, my explanation is a paraphrase and translation of Peirce’s specific words on the given concept and the words I have found to represent my larger understanding of its meaning based on further reading within the same text.
Given 1: We think in order for specific things to exist in our consciousness. Without thinking, or conception, we would only be conscious of everything in existence as an undifferentiated mass of possibilities in the present. Thinking differentiates a thing from this mass of existence, or “manifold of sense”, to existence as a particular thing defined and differentiated from those possibilities. This thingness is called “unity”.
I like to use the word “thing” because it seems to me to be, in an ironic way, an icon (a word representing through likeness) for the concept of “manifold of sense”. The word “thing” in one usage is a symbol representing the idea of anything—it can be all possibilities of the present. The concept that this word represents is an icon of “manifold of sense” because they are alike concepts of possibility, or of similar meaning to each other. Yet by being an icon of the concept of “manifold of sense”, the concept “thing” would cease being similar, because once it is a sign, it is like a differentiated, existing thing rather than an infinity of possibilities. I wonder if a sign can be a sign of not-signness. But that, for the moment, is by the by. (Oh, dear, plain language or not, I feel I am getting as complicated as Pierce himself!).
Given 3: Sense is not a conception.
Given 4: Attention is an action without conception. Attention as a Piercian concept is the mind’s power directed to something, a thing. Attention does not know what that thing is. If you couple attention with conception, you have thinking, understanding of a thing. Thinking is the next step after attention—to describe, understand, contextualise a thing.
With these givens, we can now discuss the process of conception, which uses the tools of representation to bring something into existence, from the manifold of sense. This defined thing that the mind conceives can be material or immaterial, concrete or abstract, thought or physicality. The process of conception begins with recognition, and this recognition is what Peirce terms the “universal conception”.
The universal conception is the recognition of the state of existence, every possibility of the present. Pierce calls the state of existence “what is present, in general”. “What is present, in general” is a state because it is only sensed, it receives the mind’s attention, but is not a thought or a thing because it is not conceived. What is conceived is that there is a state of existence to be sensed. Peirce uses the term “recognition”. Recognition is attention with conception.
The universal conception is a priori, or a condition of humanity, and therefore I call it “the first”. It is the original conception because there is no conception before the understanding that the present exists. It is the only conception that exists without the process of conception as mediated by signs. It is outside the conceptual system of trichotomy, as it is not a conception in relation to any other conception and it is the only conception that arises purely from sense (sensation, perception). All other conceptions are concrete separations out of this awareness of “the present, in general”, so that being is the state of being recognised as existing within, as part of, but defined from, “the present, in general”.
The first conception is true only because everyone has it. This, I believe, is an epistemological argument. We cannot know the cause or beginning of the first, or universal, conception because it exists before being does. It cannot be proven – it is only true because it is so.
I think a clearer way of expressing the universal concept is to say that human consciousness begins with the inherent understanding that there is existence. Because there is no direction or differentiation in this understanding, nor is it itself differentiated from existence per se, it is not a thing. Only things can exist, be differentiated from the possibilities of the present. Only things can be signs. Therefore, the universal conception is not a sign. However, it has a sign, and this sign is the word “substance”. So, “substance”, in Peirce’s theory, means the first conception, the recognition of “the present, in general”.
“Substance and being are the beginning and end of all conception,” writes Peirce. Since there is a beginning and an end, there is a middle, or at least a process of getting from beginning to end. This process involves further orders of conception beyond the conception of being. From this first conception of existence, or the substance, the mind brings other things into existence, or thingness, or unity, through the process of conception, utilising the tools of recognition. The process of conception is the movement from the manifold (all possible existence) to the unity (one example of existence). A thing exists, is differentiated from the manifold substance, through the mind’s attention to three aspects of existing: the thing itself, or subject (which can be actual or potential), the verb or action word, which is recognition that there is a thing (beingness), called the “copula” or “the function of the expression of being” and its predicate(s), the quality(ies) of the thing itself (something/s that distinguishe or differentiate the subject through comparison to other things).
Predicates describe qualities of objects, and objects become things because their qualities are different or similar to other things. Ie, I know a horse is a horse because it shares qualities with zebras and leopards, but has different qualities than cars and silverware.
I think that predicates are the way we understand abstract concepts such as colour or personality—we understand them by repeated recognition of the same qualities in similar objects, for example the redness or blueness of red or blue things, or the anxiousness of anxious people. The fact of being becomes a function, because it has a performative role to conjoin the qualities to the thing itself, thereby differentiating this particular thing from the totality of substance. The statement of something’s existence is called a proposition, and Peirce’s example of a proposition is the sentence, “The stove is black”. The stove is the thing, blackness is its quality and the conception of being (“is”) bestows the blackness onto the kettle.
Peirce writes that, “The conception of being arises on the formation of a proposition”. I am unsure if the conception of being is the same as the conception of “the present, in general”, in which case I would think there is an epistemological problem because the conception of being seems the foundation upon which a proposition would form (rather than the other way around), or if it is another, next, universal conception. I suspect the latter, because it seems to me “the present, in general” is recognition of the possibility of being, whereas being itself fulfils the possibility. Nevertheless, the conception of being seems to both result from and create the recognition of particular existence.
A proposition alone does not bring something into full existence. A thing has become distinct from the manifold, but without other things having been distinguished, this distinction is irrelevant. Peirce identifies five conceptions required for a thing to pass into substance from being. To understand the full concept of the term “substance” we have to understand that “substance” refers to both to the “present, in general” and the present, in specific (or the subject). Or, put another way, thingness. Or as Peirce calls thingness, “it” or “it, in general”. There is reasoning behind the equivalence of the substance of the manifold and the substance of the it. Before differentiation, or abstraction, can separate things into existence—or distinguish them in the present—from the substance that exists in the present, the substance has to have been recognised to exist (which it has, through the first conception). Because the substance is an “it” before everything else can be an “it”, it “cannot be made a predicate”. In other words, it cannot bestow quality or definiteness on something in order to give it thingness because it has no qualities because qualities can only be defined in relations through differentiation, and the present, in general has no differentiation—it is everything possible all at once. Thus, Peirce writes, “This it is thus neither predicated of a subject (no qualities defined by likeness define “it”), nor in a subject (nothing consists of its qualities since it has none), and accordingly is identical with the conception of substance. That is why “it” needs to be borne from a proposition.”
“Being” is the first of the five conceptions towards existence; “Quality”, which I have described, is the second, but I have not talked about the existence of the quality so that it is an available concept to be joined in the proposition. In order for a quality to be joined to a subject by the conception of being, it must be a distinct conception itself: blackness must be a concept first and then it can be applied to “kettle”. However, it is an abstract concept. An abstract concept is one that can be applied to other subjects but still be the same concept—indeed this ability to apply the abstract concept to other subjects is what makes it a quality, or a conception that can be used to distinguish other conceptions through comparison. Pure abstractions are given the term “ground”. So the definition of the category “Quality” is “reference to a ground”.
The third conception is Relation, or “reference to a correlate”. This category arises out of Quality, because a Ground is only a Ground in comparison to other Grounds (its correlates), ie, black is only understood as black because it is not red, blue, green, etc.
The fourth conception is called Representation, and this is defined as “reference to an interpretant”. Just as Grounds are already conceptualised abstractions, inerpretents have already achieved substance as well. An interpretent is an idea that is used to give understanding to what the Grounds mean to the Subject, and it is also an act of comparison. An example would be that you recognise a crying child in the middle of the supermarket as a child who has lost her parent because you have seen other children crying in open spaces when they have lost their parent, or indeed you remember it from your own childhood. So the interpretant is an already defined existence that is use to explain something coming into existence. A linguistic example would be if I don’t know the meaning of phenomenology, but I do know the meaning of the words “study”, “of”, and “experience”. So my concept of studying experience is the interpretant for me of phenomenology.
Substance itself is the final, fifth category.
It is hopefully clear from my explanation that a ground, reference and correlate serve different functions that work together to create being or “what is”.
The ground is of the subject, the correlate is of a different subject and the interpretant is already a subject and puts the ground and correlate into relation with each other. So you see this is a familiar pattern, just like the subject, predicate and copula. This pattern is the key to Peirce’s phenomenology and the idea of “thirdness” – or the necessity for an interpretant – is his key idea.
There are three terms needed to propose that something exists, three terms that create that existence and three terms that enable other things to help create existence. These three terms that define existence are Quale, Relate and Representamen and they are categories of thingness, now called objects. Objects, once they exist, can be used to conceptualise new things. A Quale is a thing that is used as a descriptive to give a subject a quality (“reference to a ground”); a Relate is a thing that is used to define quality through another like thing (“refers to ground and correlate”); and a Representamen is a thing that is used to define another thing by being similar to a third or many other things with similar qualities (“refers to ground, correlate and interpretent”).
In my understanding of this trichotomy, an example of the three categories of objects would be as such: I am walking down the street full of parked cars and pass a boy laying sprawled on the street and, next to him, a blue bicycle on its side with one wheel spinning and the other bent. The entire tableau is the Representamen, because it causes me to generate a mental image of the boy riding his bike, which is how I know the meaning of the Representamen is a bicycle stack. My internal image is the interpretant. The parked cars help generate my interpretent because one way I know the bike is a bike is because it is not a car, so the parked cars are acting as one of the Relates I use to construct my interpretant. The blueness of the bicycle is a Quale, as well as the bentness of its wheel, because these aspects of the bike let me know that this particular bike got into this particular crash. It is not anyone’s bike – it is this boy’s blue bike. What has just come into existence is my knowledge that a boy had a stack on his blue bike.
Lest you think we have been through the basic trichotomies – of conception and of objecthood – which join together to create understanding of objecthood, or the direction of attention to something specific—there is still another level of trichotomy needed to complete how existence is represented to the mind: that of representation. Which, of course, makes yet another trinomy for consciousness: conception (which requires quality, relation and representation), objecthood (which is composed of quale, relate and representamen) and representation (which is composed of likenesses, signs and symbols). All three of these processes rely in turn on the trinomial of ground, correlate and interpretant. If we think back to the first trinomial of proposition (subject, predicate and copula), we see that representation is an action, it is a verb, the copula. Representation is what allows us to use an object as a Relation to create an interpretant. So you can see that representation is thirdness, it is a third step of any bringing into being that brings the other two steps into relation with each other and also requires another process of three steps to indicate how that third step already exists, which appears to make thought an infinite chain of understandings preceding out of each other.
A representation is something that creates the connection among ground, relate and correlate, or how we know what qualities a thing has in relation to everything else. This is the most complicated aspect of the trinomial theory. Peirce asserts that there are three kinds of Relates, or a thing that puts the subject’s qualities in relation to other subjects’ qualities. The first type is an internal relation, whereby the ground, or defining characteristic of the object, can be considered distinctly from that object (is prescindible) and the second is a relative relationship, whereby the relation of the defining characteristics (determined by reference to a ground) cannot be understood in separation from the subject. An example of the first relation is the black kettle. Blackness is a concept separate from kettle. The Relate (concept of blackness) is the same as the correlate (the blackness of a different object). An example of the relative relationship would be adultery. The Relate would be having a sexual relationship and the Correlate defines the Relate as a sexual relationship with a person who is not one’s spouse. A kettle still makes sense without it being black, but adultery doesn’t make sense without a husband.
An internal Relate is based on sameness or harmony between relate and correlate – the blackness of the kettle, the blackness of a tyre. But the relative relate requires there to be a “correspondence of fact” between the relate and correlate or relate and interpretent. My husband’s sex with another woman corresponds to my understanding of my best friend’s sex with a man not her husband, and thereby I understand my husband is committing adultery.
Internal and relative relations are between ground and correlate. There is another type of relation between ground and interpretant. In this type of relation a thing cannot exist without an interpretant. An example of this type of sign is a stoplight. The yellow, red and green lights would not mean anything to a driver who did not already have a conception that red means stop, green means go and yellow means slow down. The stoplight would not exist to a person who does not have access to this interpretent – that person would merely see a pole with coloured lights on it. These three types of Representations are Likenesses, Indices (or Signs) and Symbols.
This is the last key trinomial, a process of representation, in addition to the development of understanding and qualities of objecthood. All three are necessary to think, for representation allows us to give meaning to objects that we have directed our attention to.
Peirce considers the trinomies to be numerical, there is firstness, secondness and thirdness, or singleness, duality and plurality. This should make sense in relation to the forumulas elucidated above: firstness is unrelated existence, secondness is that existence related to itself through abstraction and thirdness is a thing defined by its abstractions and given meaning through relation to yet another thing. He defines firstness as beginning and freedom, secondness as determined, object and reactivity, and thirdness as becoming.
Thinking is made of nested trinomies and Peirce continues the nest, expanding his thirdness through modes of thinking and expression. These modes involve signs, which Peirce defines as “a third mediating between object and consciousness”. A sign mediates by being a representation of an interpretant, either through use as a Likeness, Indice or Symbol. In his essay “What is a Sign?”, Peirce delves into another trinomy of thought. Thought does not only involve being able to conceptualise through signs, but it also involves being able to relate our experience to our conceptions. There are three states of mind that interact in a linear or numerical process to take the mind from ignorance to knowledge: Feeling, Reaction and Thinking. Feeling is equivalent to substance in that it is the awareness of a particular emotion defined from the mass of all possible emotions. But pure feeling is a state of oneness because the feeling bears no relation to anything outside itself. Reaction is a twoness because it involves “two things acting upon another”, which Peirce examples as both “the breaking of one feeling by another feeling” and the sense of “acting and being acted upon”. Thinking is the awareness of learning. What has been learnt is how reaction relates to and brings about results of action and it requires thirdness because this learning—discovering the rule or process of a phenomenon that brings about a result—requires mediation, the help of conception. Peirce calls learning “a means to an end” and is “the means by which we pass from ignorance to knowledge”. This is similar to how the interpretent is the means by which we move from consciousness to awareness. Peirce says this mental state of mediation “involves three states of Feeling”.
Having got that explanation out of the way, Peirce moves right on to the three types of sign and gives us an important explanation with which to work for our understanding of his semiology. He writes that we have three types of interest in things. The first interest is for the thing in and of itself. The second is in the thing because of the way it reacts with other things. The third is interest in the thing as a mediator in conveying an idea about a thing to the mind, or in enabling a mental image. Only things used in this way are signs. This is important because it indicates that things are only signs if they are used as such. I can notice a bag on a hook. The bag is just a bag. But if the bag on the hook reminds me that I have forgotten to put my wallet in my purse, the bag has acted as a sign for the functionality of a container.
The three types of signs—icons, indexes and symbols—have been described above. In relation to consciousness as awareness of objects, the signs acted as representatives of interpretants so that meaning can be attached to an object. In relation to consciousness as aware of thought, signs act as references to ideas. In this case the symbol is thirdness. The icon is first because it is not directly connected to the thing it represents. The Index is second because it bears a direct relation to its object, that to which it indicates. The symbol is third because it requires the “symbol-using” mind to make the connection between the sign and its object. So the symbol acts as interpretent between the symbol and the mind’s idea. Peirce believes we “think only in signs” and describes thought-symbols as concepts. His examples of concepts include marriage and law. These are symbols because as a concept they refer to a set of ideas that together create understanding. Understanding of the concepts of marriage and law do not come from their likeness with a relate (what qualities do the concept of marriage share with another thing?), though I would argue that they could be indices as well as symbols. Marriage as an indice would point to the idea of two people sharing their lives together, while the law indicates your relation to the government.
Feeling becomes thinking through reaction and ignorance becomes knowledge through reasoning. Reasoning is the process of using signs (for which Peirce feels the use of the word symbol is appropriate because symbols are the key signs used in reasoning) to discover truth. Indices can point to contexts and mental diagrams can be icons for the structure of the problem being reasoned through, but most of the work of reasoning is done through signs – or things that cause us to think of the ideas we know.
Peirce has expanded this theory of trinomy beyond philosophy and semiotics to other fields, including logic, psychology, physics. One example is expression:
Expression is a thirdness because it functions as a sign to bring a mind in relation to an object. Expression, in turn, works as a sign in three ways of association. The first is language, the second is action and the third is art. Art is an icon because it refers directly to its object through likeness and it allows the mind to live in an “ideal” world where the reality of the object represented isn’t relevant. Action is an index because it points to the real. For example, a shout points to my feeling of pain. Language acts as a symbol because it requires purely a mental association between words and the reality they represent.
I may present other systems of thirdness if I have the time, but this little essay here has taken me as many hours as I can spare at the moment. I wonder if anyone has made it through to here?
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