In other words, our perception is not mathematical but ingenuous, just as our perception of the supposed movement of the sun is ingenuous and not astronomical. Zellini (1980: 44) reminds us that the existence of a threshold of observability is a postulate both of physics and of the psychology of perception.
Zellini also appeals to Hume: our imagination must be capable of reaching a minimum beyond which we cannot conceive of further subdivisions. We can speak of the thousandth or ten-thousandth part of a grain of sand, but (apart from the fact that we cannot see it—which from the point of view of perception is no small matter) we can’t even imagine it except with the same dimensions as the grain of sand itself: “The idea of a grain of sand is not distinguishable, nor separable into twenty, much less into a thousand, ten thousand, or an infinite number of different ideas.”
“Put,” said Hume, “a spot of ink upon paper, fix your eyes upon that spot, and retire to such a distance, that at last you lose sight of it; ’tis plain, that the moment before it vanish’d the image or impression was perfectly indivisible” (Treatise of Human Nature, I, 2, 27) At a certain point, the spot will become invisible, because it is too far away, but when it is on the point of disappearing, it will still be visible as a punctual and indivisible minimum. As is the case for the ideas of the imagination, an ultimate conceivable term is given for our sense impressions, whereby we go directly from nothing to a minimal perceivable reality not resolvable into smaller parts.
Hume might have added that—while it may be true that under the microscope the same ink blot would reveal a universe of bacteria that made it look like a painting by Kandinsky—from the point of view of our perceptual abilities, it is a black spot, nothing more or less.
If it can be granted that for Peirce the Ground is what I referred to as primary iconism, let us bear in mind that the Ground is an element, a marker, a quality that is (for whatever reason) being isolated and considered in itself. By whom is it isolated? Potentially isolable, it becomes isolated when a subject isolates it, from a certain point of view, and at that point it becomes the terminus a quo of an inferential process, in an upward and not a downward direction—toward the series of relationships, in other words, that bind that spot to me and to my perceptual interests, not toward the series of the infinite possible decompositions of the spot itself.
This, it seems to me, is exactly what happens when Peirce tells us that we feel the blackness of the ink as Firstness. It is possible that—to be able to recognize that what strikes our senses is a quality of blackness—the brain deep down performs an immense number of successive operations. I also agree with Paolucci (2005) that, for the empirical concept of dog as well, the Kantian intellect may make use, not of images, but of a flowchart. But, aside from the fact that the brain too, as a computational machine, must come to a stop at a certain point in order to be able to transmit “blackness,” at the level of conscious perception we are not aware of that additional fractalization. There is a threshold on this side of which we perceive or sense “black” as Firstness, primary iconism (or whatever you choose to call it), and that is the starting point for our all subsequent inferences.
Commenting on Hume, William James (1987: 1061) declared: “Either your experience is of no content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of content or change. Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception. Intellectually and on reflection you can divide these into components, but as immediately given they come totally or not at all.”
Zellini also cites Wittgenstein (Notebooks, 18, 6, 15):
If the complexity of an object is definitive of the sense of the proposition, then it must be portrayed in the proposition to the extent that it does determine the sense. And to the extent that its composition is not definitive of this sense, to this extent the objects of this proposition are simple. THEY cannot be further divided.…
What I mean is: if, e.g. I say that this watch is not in the drawer, there is absolutely no need for it to FOLLOW LOGICALLY that a wheel that is in the watch is not in the drawer, for perhaps I had not the least knowledge that the wheel was in the watch, and hence could not have meant by “this watch” the complex in which the wheel occurs. And it is certain—moreover—that I do not see all the parts of my theoretical visual field. Who knows whether I see infinitely many points?
Let us suppose that we were to see a circular patch: is the circular form its property? Certainly not. It seems to be a “structural” property. And if I notice that a spot is round, am I not noticing an infinitely complicated structural property?…
A proposition can, however, quite well treat of infinitely many points without being infinitely complex in a particular sense.8
Let us attempt a paraphrasis in terms of perception. The complexity of a quale, if it is definitive of the meaning of a perception or a perceptual judgment, must be present and recognized as pertinent to the perception insofar as it determines the meaning of the perception. And to the extent to which the further segmentability of the quale is not definitive for this perception, to the same extent that quale is simple or primary. It is valid as Firstness and there are no pertinent inferential processes below its threshold.
To conclude (seeing that I began with Saint Thomas), I would like to quote Nicholas of Cusa: “Only in a finite fashion is the infinite form received,” Of Learned Ignorance, II, 11).
Originally written for the miscellany Studi di semiotica interpretativa (Paolucci 2007), which collected the contributions presented at the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici of the University of Bologna during the academic years 2004–2005 and 2005–2006. [Translator’s note: Quotations from Kant and the Platypus are from the translation by Alastair McEwen (Eco 2000).]
- See Peirce, Collected Papers (1931–1958)(hereinafter “CP”) 1:307: “any feeling must be identical with any exact duplicate of it,” and therefore the icon is a likeness, not in the sense that is like something else, but because it is the phenomenon that founds any possible judgment of similarity, without being able to be founded by it. This also explains my choice of the perhaps misleading term, “primary iconism.”
- Claudio Paolucci recently suggested (in a private communication) that “obviously the burning sensation produced by the coffeepot is a Firstness for Peirce too, i.e., ‘the emergence of something new.’ Except that in Peirce Firstnesses ‘do not spring up isolated; for if they did, nothing could unite them. They spring up in reaction upon one another, and thus in a kind of existence’ ” (CP 6.199). The emergence of the Firstnesses through their being opposed to one another (Secondness) starting from the regularity of the habit (Thirdness) for Peirce is an event (CP 6.200), i.e., a singularity, a point at which something occurs.… In this way the spontaneity of Firstness, whose irregular and singular nature Peirce underlines (CP 6.54), turns out to be nothing other than an infinitesimal deviation from the law and from the regularity on whose basis it is produced (CP 6.59). Peirce calls habit, or Thirdness, this very regularity starting from which it is possible to generate the singular spontaneity of the Firstnesses in their opposition to one another (Secondness).…
In other words, somehow, the very spontaneity of the event, of the emergence of something new (Firstness) is nothing but the habit of a regular series (Thirdness) which differentiates itself at certain given points: the singular emerges from the regular from which it detaches itself as a consequence of an instability effect.… In this way, since, as Peirce says, Firstnesses do not occur in isolation, the feeling of pain that emerges in the example of my morning coffee (Firstness) is a quality that emerges from a background of experiential habits (getting up in the morning, picking up the coffeepot, putting it on the burner, not turning the gas up too high, placing the coffeepot in just the right place: a whole syntax of habits and regularities of everyday experience). So the sensation of pain (Firstness) arises against a background of habits (Thirdness) that did not imply it (it is not regular to encounter pain in the breakfast scenario) and pain can only arise in opposition (Secondness) to this background of habits. So, even on the cognitive level, we find the pattern of the Logic of Relatives: on the basis of a series of regularities and habits that define the laws of my morning breakfast (Thirdness), a tendency to be distinguished from it may be created, out of which something new emerges, something for which the regularity of the local system does not make allowance. Firstness is an event of this kind, which arises in opposition (Secondness) to a regular background of Thirdness.”
- Varzi (2005) returns to themes previously discussed in Smith and Varzi (2000: 401–420). [Translator’s note: The Phantom Blot is a Walt Disney character (Macchia Nera in Italian). He is an archenemy of Mickey Mouse and first appeared in the comic strip
