And in fact Peirce says that the same percept arouses in the mind an «imagination» that involves «elements of the senses.» Therefore «it is clear that the perceptual judgment is not a copy, icon, or diagram of the percept, no matter how crude» (CP 7. 637).
This is puzzling. Because we might be tempted to say that this perceptual judgment so permeated by Thirdness is identified with the Immediate Object. And yet Peirce has repeatedly emphasized the iconic character of the Immediate Object. But the iconism of the Immediate Object certainly cannot be the primary iconism of Feeling; it is already dominated by calculations of similarity, by ratios of proportion, it is already diagrammatic or hypoiconic.
Therefore must we suppose that when Peirce talks of the Immediate Object, he is not talking about perceptual judgment, and when he is talking about perceptual judgment, he is not talking about the Immediate Object? But it is equally clear that the second should be none other than the completed fulfillment of the first.
I think we have to distinguish the function of the Immediate Object, and its relation with perceptual judgment, according to whether it is constructed, so to speak, ex novo (but not in the absence of previous cognitions) when faced with a new experience (e.g., the platypus) or in the process of recognizing something already known (e.g., the plate). In the first case, the Immediate Object will still be imperfect, tentative, in fieri; it will come to coincide with the first hypothetical perceptual judgment (perhaps this thing is like this or like that). In the second case, I have recourse to an Immediate Object, which has already deposited itself in my memory, as if to a preformed schema that orients the formation of the perceptual judgment, and is a parameter of it at the same time. Having perceived the plate therefore means having recognized it as a token of an already known type, and at that point the Immediate Object would perform the same function that—in the cognitive process—is performed by the Kantian schema. The upshot is that in that phase I shall not only know that what I have perceived is a white plate but also know (before having touched it) that it should have a certain weight, because the schema already formed also contained that information.
The perceptual process was tentative, still private, while the Immediate Object, insofar as it is interpretable (and therefore transmissible), is on its way to becoming public. It can even, as a cognitive schema already consigned to me by the community, act not to encourage but to block the process of perceiving something new (as was the case with Marco Polo and the rhinoceros). Indeed it too must be subjected to continuous scrutiny, revision, and reconstruction.32
This is why it has been possible to maintain (see, e.g., Eco 1979: 2.3) that, from a certain point of view, Ground, Immediate Object, and Meaning are the same thing. From the point of view of the knowledge that has provisionally subsided into a first outline, the original iconic elements, the information I already possessed, and the first attempts at inference have composed themselves into a single schema. On the other hand, it is certain that if we consider the temporal scansion of the perceptual process (even though the process is sometimes almost instantaneous—but for Kant, too, temporality was a constituent of the schema), the Ground and the Immediate Object are respectively the point of departure and the first stop on a journey that could continue for a long time as it runs along the tracks of potentially infinite interpretation.
Only in this sense can the Ground, the moment it is consciously inserted into the process of interpretation, be considered as a «filter,» a selector, on the part of the perceptual signal, of those properties of the Dynamical Object destined to be made pertinent by the Immediate Object. And the hitherto uninterpreted Ground represents the presemiosic moment, pure possibility of segmentation traced out in the hitherto unsegmented continuum,33
In this phase one could also reintroduce icons to the Immediate Object, as a phenomenon of visual correspondence. After all, Kant too used to say that in order to perceive the plate, I have to bring the concept of the circle into play. But I should like to keep this Peircean reading out of the extremely lively debate, within modern cognitive sciences, between iconophiles and iconophobes (Dennett 1978: 10). It could always be said that the schema that is the Immediate Object does not necessarily have to be a «photo in your head,» it might be more like the description of a scene than its «portrayal» (see, e.g., Pylyshin 1973). Without involving Peirce in the debate regarding a «computational» theory of knowledge, we could always
Figure 2.3
say that the circle by which a plate is perceived is not a visible geometrical form but the precept, the rule for drawing the circle. As far as the dog is concerned, seeing that in order to identify its morphological characteristics (coat, four legs, the shape of the nose) I have not so much pure geometrical concepts at my disposal but (as we have said) a 3-D model, it is hard to think of the dog’s Immediate Object without having to presume mental images. I am not sure how Peirce would have taken part in current debates within the cognitive sciences.
Also because there can be an Immediate Object that corresponds to a term that is not intended to take account of a perceivable object, such as cousin or square root.
When Peirce conceives a diagram (which he says is a «pure icon») not for objects but for propositions—since like Kant he is thinking of a schema that also mediates between categories and sense data through experientially based judgments that assume proportional form, and also through propositions that assert some thing about objects not known through perceptions—the diagram assumes the aspect of a «program» that is only occasionally represented visually. I am thinking in general of the theory of graphs, and in particular of a diagram that appears in the Grand Logic, where Peirce wonders how to «put into shape» the proposition that «every mother loves some child of hers.»34 I am surprised by the analogies between this «program» and some present-day representations of cognitive processes, and, even without following the long and detailed reading that Peirce gives of it, I feel it is enough to reproduce it (see fig. 2.3).
Peirce makes it clear that the diagram, precisely because it is a pure icon, shows a state of things and nothing else: it does not assert in a distinct fashion that which is understood by the proposition, but limits itself to showing some relations of inherence. It is in fact a schema and a prelude to subsequent interpretations. But it is clear that this schema could today be supplied to a machine as an instruction expressed in nonvisual language, and the relations it expresses would be retained. Independently of whether one presumes, as its container or active producer, a mind.
This schema, abundantly imbued with symbolic (and therefore conceptual) elements—which does not tend to account for any perceptual experience—is the Immediate Object that regulates the understanding of the situation in question. It is also a schema of its meaning.
Therefore, from a primary iconism and through a perceptual process already imbued with inferences, we come to an identity (if not final, at least temporarily established) between perceptual judgment and Immediate Object, and between Immediate Object and the first nucleus of meaning associated with a representamen. And the complete meaning as an all-inclusive set of markers, definitions, and interpretants? It vanishes, in a certain sense, and one can agree with Nesher (1984), that it cannot be collocated in any of the phases of the cognitive process but that it distributes itself through every phase (including the most advanced ones, but certainly starting from the most elementary ones) of the process.
In this case the Immediate Object is something more than the Kantian schema: it is less «empty»; it does not mediate between concept and intuition but is in itself the first conceptual nucleus and at the same time (insofar as its iconic nature is always reiterated) does not only put into shape, does not translate, but reelaborates by conserving, and in a certain sense it «captures» and «memorizes» something of the sensations from which it started. Or, at least, when it is the Immediate Object that realizes perceptual situations and not abstract terms. Unlike the schema—or at least the version of it given in the first Critique—it is tentative, revisable, ready to grow by virtue of interpretation. And yet it certainly represents the way in which Peirce settles the inheritance of schematism in a non-transcendental vein.
But Peirce had already said as much: if Kant had had to deduce all the consequences of the advent of the schemata, his system would have been thrown into confusion.
2.9 The Grain
The time has
