This might mean that the definition of the limits (and of the relationship of figure to background) is merely a question of negotiation: it is a question of negotiation if I think like a collector and not like an informal artist who wishes to pantograph the hole (or the spot) and would be interested in that case in defining its edges with microscopic exactness. For a theorist of fractals, the edges of the hole could be analyzed en abyme so as to identify their curves and folds beyond any limit conceivable in terms of our normal perceptual habits. But, from my standpoint as collector and bibliophile, I respect the limits of my perceptual abilities, and I consider as undivided something that is, cosmologically speaking, susceptible in posse to further division.
This is also true of the boundary that separates an apple from its outside. Clearly, in terms of subatomic physics, what we have along that borderline, and before it and after it, is a host of dancing particles and not a line. But I was once guilty of an error in this connection. In La struttura assente, arguing against ingenuous conceptions of iconism, I said that a line drawing of a horse in profile, which ought to imitate the properties of a horse, exhibits the one property that a horse does not have, namely, a solid black line that separates the inside of the horse from the outside. I was forced to recant, following the lead of Gombrich (1982), who, correcting a conventionalist position he had taken earlier, observed that if it had once been affirmed that there are no lines in nature and that outlines are a human artifice, psychologists today tend to see them as a perceptual “surrogate” and as “indicators of discontinuity.” In fact “the outlines may serve as an anticipation of the motion parallax effect, because objects within our reach always stand out from their background, but will retain an intrinsic coherence however slightly we move our heads” (Gombrich 1985: 233).
This does not mean that the outline belongs to the horse, because, depending on whether I look up at the horse from a lying position or down from a balcony, I will see different aspects of the horse, and therefore the outline will shift with my point of view; and yet, even though it does depend on my point of view, at the moment when I look, the outline is an objective datum that I cannot ignore. The horse may display an infinite number of outlines, but in that particular respect or capacity it has only one.
Once I have decided to consider the leaf of the book from the collector’s point of view, if I write that there is a hole with the loss of one or two letters or half a letter, it is objectively true that one or two letters or half a letter is missing, and the difference between one or two letters is not a question of negotiation or of infinitely subdivisible borders. Either the letter is missing or it isn’t.
Once the level of pertinence has been decided—or the level of interest with which I focus on things (and in my case I have chosen a molar rather than a molecular level)—not only do nonnegotiable objective impossibilities become evident, but also starting points from which my inferential activity begins.
Let us talk, not about the borderline case of the holes, but about the normal case of the absence of holes. There can be no doubt that if I take a fresh sheet of standard 8.5 x 11 typing paper there are no holes in it. Similarly, if I were to attempt to walk from one room to another without using the door but by going through the wall (or going through the looking glass like Alice), I would come up against the fact that there are no holes (or ways through of any kind) in the paper or the wall or the looking glass. And yet—as one would have to admit from a molecular, if not a molar, point of view—using an extremely powerful microscope I would see in both the paper and the wall an infinite number of holes or empty spaces, just as I am aware that the crystal atoms of the mirror are miniature solar systems with empty interstellar spaces.
The point is that from my own point of view, or in some respect or capacity, those empty spaces are of no interest, and therefore as far as I am concerned do not exist.
15.4. Peirce and the Brain
Whether we call it primary iconism or use some other name, there is something we cannot get around as soon as we introduce an interpreting subject into the process of semiosis. In other words, if primary iconism does not exist cosmologically, it exists for the subject.
Let us take another look at the Peircean concepts. In CP 5.213 it is specified that “the term intuition will be taken as signifying a cognition not determined by a previous cognition of the same object, and therefore so determined by something out of the consciousness.”6 If denying all intuition, however, meant denying that everything that happens in our minds is not determined by something outside of our consciousness, we might be tempted to believe that Peirce was opting for a magical idealism à la Novalis. But Peirce does not say “everything that happens outside of our minds”; instead he speaks of cognitions. If someone kicks me and I cry out (and feel pain) can we speak of cognition? I would speak simply of stimulus-response, which is nonetheless something that involves our neuronal processes. Now, Peirce never said that stimulus-response processes are cognitions, or that the stimulus that I feel when kicked does not come from something outside of our minds (or our brain). Can we reasonably speak, without being accused of not thinking ad mentem divi Caroli, of the sensation of pain I would feel if (for example and per absurdum) Paolucci were to kick me in the shins?
Faced with this stimulus, my brain would probably perform processes of whose complexity I have no inkling, as it does when it inverts (as if there were nothing to it!) the retinal image. We can say therefore that processes occur in my neuronal circuit that we may define as inferential or in any case interpretive. But about these processes I know nothing and, just as it seems natural to see Paolucci walking with his feet on the ground and his head in the air, it seems natural to react with a cry of pain to his kick in the shins, even if to invite me to emit it my brain has performed who knows what labor. And that the brain labors to interpret, often making mistakes in interpretation, is proven by the fact that the brains of amputees cause them to suffer painful sensations that appear to come from the limb they have lost.
This does not exclude the possibility that the sensation of pain itself (once involved in the triadic process that transforms it into cognition) may take on a semiosic character: it becomes a sign, to be specific a sign of the fact that someone (who through subsequent inferences I will discover was Paolucci) has given me a kick. But as soon as I become aware of pain and cry out, I assume that pain as a point of departure in an upward direction, to find out what it is and what caused it, and not in a downward direction, to understand how my brain processed the external stimulus. I consider that quale beneath a molar respect and capacity.
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
