I am still pleased with the vaguely Gödelian flavor of that conclusion, but the purpose of this whole preamble is to say that in K & P I had made the “-ist” choice, while the objections subsequently brought against me (see section 15.2) were aimed at reconstructing the problem from an “-ologist” point of view.
My starting point was in fact a suggestion made by Armando Fumagalli (1995: ch. 3), who saw in the post-1885 Peirce an almost Kantian return to the immediacy of intuition, antecedent to any inferential activity (the Ground is no longer a predicate but a sensation, and indexicality becomes the kind of experience which takes the form of a shock; it is an impact with an individual, which “strikes” the subject without yet being a representation). In this connection, I attempted to say why precisely Peirce’s Firstness was exactly that, a “firstness” (primità), a sort of auroral moment that gives rise to the perceptual process. Speaking of the Ground, Peirce informs us that it is a Firstness, and if on occasion it has been interpreted as “background” or “basis,” or “foundation,” it is certainly not so in an ontological sense but in a gnoseological one. It is not something that presents itself as a candidate to be a subjectum, it is a possible predicate itself, more like the immediate recognition expressible as “red!” (comparable to the response “ouch!” to a blow that causes pain) than like the judgment expressible as “this is red.” In that phase there is not even something that resists us (this would be the moment of Secondness), and at a certain point Peirce tells us that it is “pure species,” in the sense of appearance, aspect (cf. Fabbrichesi 1981: 471), and he calls it icon, semblance, likeness.1
Peirce says that the idea of the First is “so tender that you cannot touch it without spoiling it” (CP 1.358). The Firstness is a presence “such as it is,” a positive characteristic (CP 5.44), a “quality of feeling,” like a purple color noticed without any sense of the beginning or the end of the experience, it is not an object nor is it initially inherent to any recognizable object, it has no generality (CP 7.530). Only when both Secondness and Thirdness come into play can the interpretive process begin. But Firstness is still “mere maybe” (CP 1.304), “potentiality without existence” (CP 1.328), “mere possibility” (CP 8.329), and in any case the possibility of a perceptual process (CP 5.119), something that cannot be thought in an articulate way or asserted (CP 1.357). Elsewhere, by feeling Peirce means “that kind of consciousness which involves no analysis, comparison or any process whatsoever, nor consists in whole or in part of any act by which one stretch of consciousness is distinguished from another, which has its own positive quality which consists of nothing else, and which is of itself all that it is” (CP 1.306).
I thought I had recognized that, though this Firstness had the character of a nonmediated apprehension, it still could not be assimilated to Kantian intuition: it is not at all an intuition of the manifold offered by experience, but instead something absolutely simple, that I tried to assimilate to the phenomenon of qualia (cf. Dennett 1991).
Apropos of a quale Peirce is still not talking about perceptual judgment but about a mere “tone” of consciousness, which he defines as being resistant to all possible criticism. Peirce is telling us not that the sensation of red is “infallible,” but simply that once it has been, even if it was an illusion of the senses, it is indisputable that it has been. In this connection I gave the example (and it wasn’t meant to be flippant) of the housewife in the commercial, who declares: “I thought my sheet was white, but now that I’ve seen yours …” Seeing the detergent commercial, Peirce would have told us that the housewife initially perceived the whiteness of the first sheet (pure “tone” of awareness); then, once she had moved on to the recognition of the object (Secondness) and set in motion a comparison packed with inferences (Thirdness), she was able to declare that the second sheet was whiter than the first. But she could not cancel out the preceding impression, which as a pure quality has been, and therefore she says: “I was sure [before] I had seen something white, but now I recognize that there are different degrees of whiteness.” Only at this point, reacting to the album (white) of at least two different sheets, has the housewife moved on to the predicate of the albedo (whiteness), that is, to a general which can be named and for which there is an Immediate Object. It is one thing to perceive an object as white, without having become aware as yet that we are dealing with something external to our awareness, and it is another to perform the prescission whereby one predicates of that object the quality of being white.
But how are we to justify the fact that the starting point of all knowledge is not inferential in nature, because it is immediately manifest, without being open to discussion or denial, when Peirce’s entire anti-Cartesian polemic is based on the assumption that all knowledge is always inferential in nature?
15.2. Peirce and the Coffeepot
In his doctoral thesis Claudio Paolucci (2005) maintains with a wealth of arguments that there is no “realistic” turning-point in Peirce that leads him to consider the possibility of intuitions of a Kantian type, and in so doing he is very polemical in his criticism of both Fumagalli (1995) and Murphey (1961), to whom Fumagalli is referring. Let me say at once that I have no intention of contesting this contestation of Paolucci’s. I simply want to point out that in K & P I wrote: “Fumagalli observes that we have a Kantian return here to the immediacy of intuition, prior to all inferential activity. Nevertheless, since this intuition, as we shall see, remains the pure sentiment that I am confronted with something, the intuition would still be devoid of all intellectual content, and therefore (it seems to me) it could withstand the young Peirce’s anti-Cartesian polemic” (p. 99).
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
