Peirce’s proposal seems almost to describe Marco Polo’s clumsy attempts with the rhinoceros. Polo had no «Platonic» intuition of the unknown animal, nor did he try to construct its image and notion ex novo, but cobbled together previous notions, thus creating a new entity starting from some ideas about entities already known. All things considered, the recognition of the rhinoceros appears to be a far more complex abduction than the canonical ones: first of all, faced with a curious and inexplicable result, Polo guessed that it might constitute the case of a rule and concluded that the animal was a unicorn; then, on the basis of successive experiences, he proceeded to reformulate the rule (the list of properties that characterizes unicorns was changed). I should call this an interrupted abduction.
What did Marco Polo see before saying he saw unicorns? Did he see something that nonetheless had to be an animal? Note that we are opposing a primary «see» to a «say.» Of course, «to see» is a rhetorical figure, it stands for any other tactile, thermic, or auditory response. But the problem is that, on the one hand, it seems that the fullness of the perception (as the assignation of meaning to the unknown) has been attained by starting from a sketch, a skeleton plan, an outline, an «idea,» if you like; on the other hand, after having brought into play the idea of the unicorn, Marco Polo had to admit that that unicorn was not white but black. This obliged him to correct his first hypothesis. What happened when he said this is black} And did he say it before or after hypothesizing that the animal was a unicorn? And if he said it before, why did he nevertheless insist on the hypothesis that it was a unicorn? And when he realized that the animal did not coincide with his idea of the unicorn, did he simply admit that what he saw was not a unicorn, or did he correct his idea of unicorns, deciding that the world also contained ill-favored black unicorns?
Marco Polo was not a philosopher. And so let us get back to Peirce. In passing from the contact with the Dynamical Object, through the representamen, to the formation of an Immediate Object (which then becomes the starting point of the chain of interpretants), Peirce posits the Ground as an instance that seems to constitute the initial moment of the cognitive process. The Ground makes its first appearances in Peirce’s youthful writings, where the interest is eminently logical.2 Between the concept of substance (the present in general, a subject still devoid of intension, to which properties will later be attributed, pure Something on which our attention fixes, a yet-to-be-determined «it») and the concept of being (pure conjunction of subject and predicate) we find (as accidents) the reference to the Ground, the reference to a correlate, and the reference to an interpretant.
The Ground, insofar as it is a Quality, is a predicate. And while the reference to the correlate regards denotation and extension, reference to the Ground regards comprehension and connotation (in the logical sense of the term): the Ground has to do with «internal» qualities, the properties of the object. In The ink is black the quality «black» or, rather, blackness, embodied by the ink, is abstracted from it, through a process of abstraction, or prescision. Nonetheless, even from a logical standpoint, the Ground is not the totality of markers that make up the intension of a term (such a totality can be ideally realized only in the process of interpretation): in prescinding, attention is paid to one element by neglecting another. In the Ground the object is seen in a certain respect, the attention isolates one feature.
In purely logical terms, it is evident that if I predicate the blackness of ink, I do not predicate its liquidity. But if we were to cleave to the logical value of the Ground, we would not get very far. At most we would find ourselves once more among examples that seem to confuse our ideas rather than clarify them, prisoners of compulsive Peircean triadism.3 Moreover, the choice of the term Ground is not one of the happiest: it suggests a background against which something is set, while Peirce’s view was that it was probably a something set against a background that was still indistinct.
But we must not underestimate the fact that these youthful writings were explicitly influenced by Kant. In them Peirce basically wanted to explain how our concepts serve to unify the manifold of sense impressions. He makes it clear that the first impressions on our senses are not representations of certain things unknown in themselves, but that these very first impressions are something unknown until the mind manages to wrap them up in predicates. Like the post-Kantian he was on his way to becoming, Peirce was later to say that this process of conceptualization proceeds only by hypothetical inferences therefore: it happens not only in the process of conceptualization but even in the recognition of sensations. In a certain sense (in fact, in all of them) Peirce does not give a satisfactory explanation of the shift from impression to concept, seeing that for both he proposes, by way of example, the hypothetical workings of one who recognizes, from a series of sounds, a sonata by Beethoven and recognizes it as beautiful.
But all things considered, Peirce distinguishes the two moments: both are identified with the naming of that which is experienced, and to name is always to make a hypothesis (just think of Marco Polo’s efforts in this regard). But the names given to recognize sensations (such as the sensation of redness) are casual, not truly motivated; they serve only to distinguish (as if by sticking a label on them) a certain sensation from others: I say that I sense redness to exclude other possible chromatic sensations, but the sensation is still subjective, temporary, and contingent, and the name is attributed to it as a signifier whose meaning is still unknown. Instead, with the concept we move on to the signified.
It might be said that here Peirce is thinking of the Kantian distinction between perceptual judgments and judgments on the basis of experience (see 2.4 below), even though, like Kant, he does not manage to give a precise definition of the former. As a matter of fact, naming the quality «black» no longer characterizes the moment of an impression, otherwise the Ground would not be a category, and Peirce insists that the blackness predicated is already pure species or abstraction.
Nonetheless he sees the name given to the Ground as a term, not as a proposition or as an argument. The term still precedes every assertion of existence or truth, and, even before referring to something still to be identified, it refers inferentially to an aspect of that something.
This takes us from a logical problem to an epistemological one. The Ground is Firstness not by virtue of triadic symmetry but because it lies at the roots of the origin of conceptual understanding. It is an «initial» way of considering the object from a certain point of view. I could consider ink as a liquid, but in the example put forward I consider it immediately under the profile of blackness. As if to say: I don’t know yet that the something I am confronted with is ink, but I grasp it as something black, I grasp it from the point of view of blackness.
My use of the word profile is not only metaphorical. Insofar as it is a Quality, the Ground is a Firstness and therefore an Icon or a Likeness.
After that, it appears that Peirce abandoned the idea of the Ground for about thirty years, and we shall see in 2.8 how he picked it up again. Even thirty years afterward, he was talking about it as «a sort of idea,» in the «Platonic» sense, in which it is said that someone grasps another’s idea, just as by remembering what one was thinking of before one recollects the same idea (CP 2.228). In the meantime, he had better elaborated what he meant by perceptual judgment, which in 1903 is defined as «a judgment asserting in propositional form what a character of a percept directly present to the mind is. The percept of course is not itself a judgment, nor can a judgment in any degree resemble a percept. It is as unlike it as the printed letters in a book, where a Madonna of Murillo is described, are unlike the picture itself» (CP 5.54).
Perceptual judgment already appears as an inference, a hypothesis starting from those sense data that appear to be «percepts,» and it already belongs to Thirdness, at least as the premise of a subsequent chain of interpretations (CP 5.116). At this point where should the Ground be? On the side of the percept that is not yet judgment?
On the one hand, Peirce tells us that perceptual judgment already contains or prefigures general elements, that universal propositions are deducible from perceptual judgments, that abductive inference shades off into perceptual judgment, without a clear line of
