It is singular that, in discussing the nature of the icon (which has always been enlisted in the army of the analogical), one must have recourse to the text that laid the foundations of the future digital calculus, and find oneself translating the concept of the icon in Boolean terms. But in terms of the dialectic between presence and absence the possibility of all steric phenomena can be defined, including the admirable correspondence between a hole and its plug. In defining the least «structured» of experiences, iconic Firstness, we find the structural principle whereby an element can be identified insofar as it is not the other, which, by evoking it, it excludes (see Eco 1968, 2nd ed.: xii).
Naturally, once this presupposition is accepted, we can tackle those situations halfway between natural primary iconism and nonhuman cognitive systems, such as cases of recognition and camouflage among animals, a regular bee in the bonnet—if I may put it that way—for many zoosemioticians.29 All these phenomena, which I was personally reluctant to consider semiosic because they seem to me to belong more to the dyadic reaction (stimulus and response) than to the triadic one (stimulus, series of interpretations, and possible final logic interpretant), now acquire all their importance the moment we need (on seeing the Dynamical Object as a terminus a quo) to find a basis (and a prehistory) for that initial iconic moment of the cognitive process that Peirce is telling us about.
Otherwise we could not even explain in what sense this primary iconism, in Peirce’s view, is connected with the «giveness» of the manifold of the Kantian intuition, which constitutes the «hard core» of the cognitive process; nor could we explain the unswerving confidence that prompted Kant to confirm his «confutation of idealism.»
2.8.3 Perceptual Judgment
Once primary iconism has been recognized, we must ask ourselves how, in Peirce’s view, in the shift from Ground to Immediate Object it is reelaborated and transformed at higher cognitive levels. Having entered the symbolic universe, Peirce’s incontrovertible basic «realism» is called into question, i.e., it is subjected to the activity of interpretation.
The iconic moment establishes that everything starts from an evidence, albeit imprecise, which we have to take account of; and this evidence is the pure Quality that in some way emanates from the object. But the fact that the Quality emanates from the object does not provide any guarantee of its «truth.» Insofar as it is an icon, it is neither true nor false: the «torch of truth» must still pass through many hands. It is the condition whereby we set off on our way to saying something.
On the way, and right from its first instants, even that primary iconism can be subjected to scrutiny, because I could have received the stimulus under conditions (external or internal) capable of «fooling» my nerve ends. But we are already in an advanced phase of elaboration; we no longer have only one Ground to answer to, we have many of them to keep together, and therefore to interpret, one in the light of the other.
In Peirce’s thinking, this primary iconism is still a postulate of his fundamental realism rather than a realistic proof of the existence of the object. Since he denies that intuition possesses any power and asserts that all cognition springs from previous cognitions, not even an unrelated sensation, be it thermic, tactile, or visual, can be recognized without bringing into play an inferential process that, no matter how instantaneous and unconscious, verifies the sensation’s reliability. This is why such a point of departure, which precedes even what Kant would have said was the intuition of the manifold, can be defined in logical terms but not clearly identified in epistemological terms.
The certainty supplied by the Ground is not even proof that we are faced with something real (because it is still pure may-be), but it tells us under what conditions we could accept the assumption that we are faced with something real, and that this something is this and that (see Oehler 1979: 69). In fact, in the New List Peirce had already said that «the Ground is the self abstracted from the concreteness which implies the possibility of an other» (WR 2: 55), and while everybody is free to interpret Peirce’s dreadful English as he sees fit, we should reflect on this point. Firstness lets us know that it is possible that something is there. In order to say that it is, to say that something is resisting me, we must already have entered Secondness.
It is in Secondness that we really run into something. Finally, in moving on to Thirdness, which implies generalization, one arrives at the Immediate Object. But since it has opened the gateway to the universal for me, it no longer offers me any guarantee that the something is there, or that it is not a construction of mine.30 And yet the Ground will remain in the Immediate Object (whose iconic aspect is emphasized by Peirce on several occasions) as a «memory» of that warrant supplied by primary iconism—which is moreover still a Kantian concept, except that in Peirce’s case the guarantee, granted by something that precedes the intuition of the manifold, is nonetheless warranted only by perceptual inference.
And so, in a vague and swampy region between Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, the perceptual process begins. I say process (something in movement), not judgment, which suggests conclusion and rest. Insofar as it is a process, if we are to account for it, we can no longer content ourselves with a stimulus-response schema. It will be necessary to bring into play those mental facts that I had excluded from the attempt to define primary iconism in some way. The fact that for Peirce these can be «quasi mental» facts—in the sense that a theory of interpretation can be established in a formal fashion, without taking account of a mind in which this happens—is another argument. At this point the «contrivance» of something that functions as a mind emerges as indispensable. What explains the perceptual process to us is that by the time I arrive to calm the process, to stop it for a moment, having ascertained that the something I am faced with is a hot (or white, or circular) plate, I shall already have delivered a perceptual judgment.
There is a series of texts from the early twentieth century, in which Peirce reaffirms what he meant by perceptual judgment (CP 7: 615–88). Feeling, pure Firstness, is the awareness of a moment of absolute and atemporal singularity; but from this first moment we already enter Secondness, we attribute the first icon to an object (or at least to something we are faced with), and we have the sensation, an intermediate moment between Firstness and Secondness, between icon and index. The first stimulus, which I am «working» to integrate into a perceptual judgment, is an index of the fact that there is something to perceive. Perhaps something catches my eye, without my being moved by any intention, and something impinges upon my perception.
I see a yellow chair with a green cushion: but mark this, I am already beyond Firstness, I am opposing two qualities, I am moving on to a moment of greater concreteness. What is taking shape before me is what Peirce calls a percept, which is not yet a full perception. Peirce notes that one might call what I see an «image,» but this would be a misnomer, because the word would make me think of a sign that stands for something else, while the percept stands for itself, it simply «knocks at the portal of my soul and stands there in the doorway» (CP 7.619).
I am forced to admit that something appears, but this something is still, precisely, obtuse appearance, it does not make any appeal to reason. It is pure individuality, in itself «dumb.»
Only at this point does perceptual judgment come on the scene, and we are in Thirdness.31 When I say That is a yellow chair, I have already used a hypothesis to construct a judgment of the percept present. This judgment does not «represent» the percept, just as the percept was not even its premise, because the percept was not even a proposition. Any statement regarding the character of the percept is already the responsibility of the perceptual judgment; it is the judgment that warrants the percept, not vice versa. Perceptual judgment is not a copy of the percept (at most, according to Peirce, it is a symptom of it, an index). Perceptual judgment no longer moves on that threshold where the line between Firstness and Secondness is blurred; it is already asserting that what I see is true. Perceptual judgment has an inferential freedom that the percept, stupid and inane, has not.
But that’s not all. It is clear that for Peirce, when I state that the chair is yellow, my perceptual judgment retains a trace of primary iconicity. And yet it desingularizes it:
The perceptual judgment pronounces quite carelessly the chair yellow. What the particular shade, hue, and purity of the yellow may be it does not consider. The percept, on the other hand, is so scrupulously specific that it makes this chair different from any other in the world; or rather, it would do so, if it indulged in any comparisons. (CP 7.633)
It is dramatic to see how already in the perceptual judgment (for which yellow was that yellow) primary iconism shades off into a generic equality (that yellow is like
