21 V. Mathieu, Introduction to the Opus Fostumum 41–42. The most interesting aspect of this matter is that, the more Kant assigns constructive power to the intellect, the more he does it because he seems persuaded that the continuum has (as we said in the first essay in this book) a grain; that is, he wants all the more to account for the fact (if I may express myself with a Peircean formula) that general laws are operative in nature, and naturally, therefore, that there is an objective reality of the species. It would also be interesting to show that the closer Peirce got to this realist conception, the farther he got from Kant’s earlier work. In this regard see Hookway 1988: 103–12.
22 That is, as Paci (1957: 185) says, they are founded not on necessity but on possibility.
23 See Apel 1995. The transcendental subject of knowledge becomes the community, which in a quasi «evolutionist» sense approximates that which could become cognizable in the long run through processes of trial and error. See also Apel 1975. This induces us to reinterpret the anti-Cartesian polemic and the refusal to admit incognizable data, which could also be defined as a cautious and preventive disassociation from the Kantian idea of the thing-in-itself. The Dynamical Object starts off as a thing-in-itself, but in the process of interpretation it is adjusted more and more—even if only potentially.
24 In this sense Popper (1969,1,1, v) says that when Kant stated that our intellect does not draw its own laws from nature but imposes them upon it, he was right; but he was wrong in maintaining that the said laws are necessarily true, or that we certainly succeed in imposing them on nature. Nature often obliges us to abandon our laws insofar as they have been confuted. And so Popper opts for a reformulation of the Kantian principle, namely, that the intellect does not draw its own laws from nature but seeks to impose them upon it—with a varying possibility of success.
25 Or again: «By a feeling I mean an instance of that type of consciousness which involves no analysis, comparison, or any process whatsoever, nor consists in whole or in part of any act by which one stretch of consciousness is distinguished from another, which has its own positive quality which consists in nothing else, and which is of itself all that it is…» (CP 1306).
26 Habermas (1995) stressed the criticism of the psychologism that Peirce embarked upon from the Harvard Lectures. The process of interpretation itself is «anonymized,» «depersonalized»: the mind can be seen as a relation between signs. This led Habermas to see in Peirce a lack of interest in the process of communication as an intersubjective event, which permitted Oehler (in Kettner 1995) to reply to him by emphasizing, on the contrary, the moments in which Peirce shows himself to be sensible of communication between subjects. But it’s well known that you can make Peirce say anything you want, according to how you approach him. I think it is possible to explain the process of primary iconism without having recourse to mental events or representations—without betraying the spirit of Peirce.
27 Note that at this stage it cannot even be stated that the sensation presents some likeness with something that was in the object or the stimulating field (in the case of a sensation of red we know very well that there is no red in the object, there is at most a pigment, or a phenomenon of light, to which we respond with the sensation of red). We might even have two subjects, one color-blind (who mistakes green for red) and the other not, so that the sensation in the first subject is different from that in the second, but both still have a constant response to the stimulus, and both have been taught to reply red to that stimulus. What we mean to say is that for each there would always be a constant relation between stimulus and sensation (and by a cultural accident the two can easily interact by their both always calling fire red and grass green).
28 See Mameli (1997, 4): «Given that Peirce thinks and shows that intelligibility is not an accidental characteristic of the universe, that it is not a simple epiphenomenon of how things are, but is a characteristic that ‘shapes’ the universe, it follows that a theory of intelligibility is also a metaphysical theory of the structure of the universe.»
29 In this regard, see Sebeok 1972, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1991, 1994.
30 In this sense Ransdell (1979: 61) can maintain that given the two theoretical possibilities of knowledge (knowledge is a representation of the object, and knowledge is the immediate perception of that which the object is in itself), Peirce’s proposal presents itself as a dynamic synthesis of the two positions.
31 Fumagalli (1995: 167) notes, «The theory of perceptual judgment is one of the last pieces of Peirce’s philosophy to see the light,» and he emphasizes all its novelty. He also makes it clear that Peirce’s percept is not a sense datum, a quale, but «is already the result of a non conscious cognitive elaboration, which synthesizes the data in a structured form,» or «a construct resulting from psychological operations on data from the pure senses, on nervous stimuli» (1995: 169).
32 It strikes me that one of the more fruitful attempts to interpret the shift from process to perceptual judgment is that made by Innis (1994: 2), where the author outlines convincing parallels between Peirce, Dewey, Biihler, Merleau-Ponty, and Polany.
33 For these suggestions I am grateful to Perri 1996 (1.11.3) and to Nesher 1984.
34 MS 410, quoted in Roberts (1973: 23–24). In CP 2.277, Peirce makes it clear that, given the category of icons, the ones that contain simple qualities are images, those that represent dyadic relations are diagrams, those that represent a parallelism between the characteristics of two objects are metaphors (and it seems to me that the term is used in the broad sense of «conceptual simile»).
35 For a concept of the motivation of signs, which does not exclude their conventionality, and the presence of alternative representations both of which are motivated, see A Theory of Semiotics 3.5.
Chapter Three / Cognitive Types and Nuclear Content
1 Sometimes the connection is explicitly, albeit rapidly, cited (see, among many, Johnson 1989: 116) and sometimes discussed critically (see Marconi 1997: 145–48—but it is no accident that here we are dealing with an author who, despite everything, is «continental»).
2 «Of course, in Kant’s thinking, the logical categorial functions play a very important role but he does not arrive at the fundamental extension of concepts of perception and intuition to the categorial field … It is for this reason that he does not even distinguish between concepts as general meanings of words and concepts as a species of direct general representation and finally as general objects, i.e., as intentional correlates of general representations» (Logical Investigations VI, § 66).
3 I would not have thought of asking myself many of these questions if I had not read Violi (1997) in the manuscript stage and—in what was by then the final stage of this work of mine—Marconi 1997, to whom I shall often refer the reader. I am almost completely in agreement with Violi; with regard to Marconi, when the case arises, I shall emphasize some points in which our approach strikes me as different.
4 In A Theory of Semiotics I stated that perceptual semiosis is a postulate of semiotics. In that book, and in the phase that semiotic debate had reached at that point, it seemed important to emphasize the sociocultural nature of systems of signs. The effort to find a definition of content in terms of interpretants, all publicly exhibited by the «public» repertory of the encyclopedia, was intended to prevent meaning from running aground on the shoals of mentalism, or at least to avoid having recourse to the subject that was then identified (in a risky fashion, according to me) in the depths of the unconscious. A Theory of Semiotics in fact wound up with the observation that the problem of the signifying subject (very important at that time in the Lacanian milieu of poststructuralist French semiology) was doubtless important, but for the moment it had to be excluded from semiotics understood as a logic of culture.
I have always been embarrassed about this exclusion, and made amends for it by introducing into the part of the French version of A Theory of Semiotics that dealt with the production of signs: «Today I would correct the statement according to which our capacity to recognize an object as a token, or an occurrence of a general type, is a postulate of semiotics. If there is semiosis even in the perceptual processes, my capacity to consider the sheet of paper upon which I write as the double of other sheets of paper, and to recognize a word pronounced as the replica of a lexical type, or to identify in the Jean Dupont that I see today the same Jean Dupont I met a year ago are processes in which semiosis intervenes on an elementary level. And therefore the possibility to discriminate between token and type cannot be defined as a postulate if not within the framework of the present discourse on the production of signs, in the same sense in which in order to explain a nautical instrument that is used to measure latitude, it is
