What Can CS Peirce Illuminate about Paul Ricoeur?

It may be helpful to map some Peircean semiotic concepts onto Ricoeur’s hermeneutics to see how they illuminate each other. Ricoeur doesn’t use Peirce in this way himself, but he certainly used much of the semiotic work that built upon CS Peirce’s initial contributions to the field. Peirce adumbrates three types of signs: the icon, which relates the sign to the signifier via resemblance, the index via material causality, and the symbol via convention, each of which contains various degrees of freedom relative to the degrees of determination of each’s Peircean “Interpretant.” Peirce formulated the relation of the sign to its signified as a triad that included what he called the “Interpretant,” which was the intermediation of semantic meaning within the semiotic relation of seeing one thing (the signified) in terms of another (the sign). The sign did not directly present the signified in an unmediated way but through a concept, which for Peirce was the Interpretant in the intention of the interpreter.  

Paul Ricoeur also formulated semantic meaning in terms of the relative degrees of freedom given to the intention of the interpretant, which for Ricouer was the hermeneutic circle of interpretation itself. The signifier determines its signified incompletely, which leaves room for possible interpretations in the gap between them. The irreducible ambiguity of this gap is generative because new semantics and new concepts can be formed in the clash of interpretations within the conceptual mediation of the intention of the interpretant, which mirrors Ricoeur’s depiction of a metaphor as a clash of meanings that poetically renewed and increased being within the degrees of freedom given by the virtuality of the imagination. 

The more distantiated the relation between the signifier and its signified, which was the relative level of abstraction of the interpretant, the more degrees of freedom contained in the possibility space actuated by the relation. Even semantic possibility spaces that seemed mostly determined, such as the indexical relation of cause and effect, can be reopened to reinterpretation, or reimagination, through the clash of possible interpretations given by the interpretant of the metaphor. One of Ricoeur’s favorite examples is GM Hopkins’ metaphorical predication, “The mind contains mountains,” which clearly contains sublime degrees of freedom for the poetic imaginations of a community of interpreters. For Ricoeur, as for Giles Deleuze, imaginal virtuality was actual and as ontologically real as a physically actualized possibility space, just as a conceptual realization in this actual possibility space was as ontologically real as a physical realization. Finally, CS Peirce’s “Hypostatic Abstract” has many illuminating overlaps with Ricoeur’s notion of semantic realization in the poetic imagination to be covered in the next episode. 

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Transcript

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Welcome back to Failure is Freedom.

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Today we're going to be thinking about the thought of Paul Riccour via the thought of Charles Sanders Pierce, which is a useful mapping, maybe only for me, but I think it will be for others as well, because I tend to understand everything through Pierce when I'm thinking about semiotics. So just to kind of map out where we are again, we're talking about a shift from phenomenology, in particular Husserlian phenomenology, to the hermeneutic techniques of Paul Record. One way to think about this shift is that what Husserl was seeking after was what he called an idetic reduction, so that you reduce all your presuppositions for whatever observation you're undertaking, so that whatever the object of your observation is, it can show itself from itself, so that it can appear from its own ground, so to speak, and not appear according to the projections of your intentions or according to your ideas or concepts or theories about things. In science, this is called the theory ladeness problem of observation or the observer effect. These are all things where we get in the way of our own observation so that we're kind of just seeing a projection of our own uh intention, of our own self uh onto some you know screen, um, but we're not seeing, you know, something that is truly other than ourselves. We're not uh in actual dialogue with uh the other. We are simply in um dialogue with ourselves, so to speak. Kant was really the first one to break this down in terms of the distinction between uh phenomena, which are a projection of our a priori intuitive uh categories, so that the world that we see is organized according to the perceptual categories by which we have to see it. So uh even our most basic percepts are not like the raw numeral things in themselves, as Kant would put it, uh, but rather they are mediated through the uh perceptual apparatuses uh of our sensory um organs, our sensory systems, bodily sensory systems, according to the categories necessary for any sort of perception. So not just particular to our perceptual bodies, but to any possible perception, so that you need to have a category of quantity, a category of quality, a category of relation, and a category of modality uh in any possible perceptual uh apparatus, which would sort of bar access to whatever it was uh that was before our perceiving it. Um, so that you kind of have to start, at least for us, for the first person observer, which is our only access to whatever there is, uh, with a percept uh joined to another percept uh via a category or via a rule like quantity. And the most important of all the categories is relationality, because we have to see the world as having causes and effects, because that is how we see uh related events, related objects. And as Kant is showing, we can't see anything without a sense of how relations disclose uh what there is. Uh without putting into relation, without relatedness, there is no perception, and nothing can uh appear on the phenomenological screen of first person subjectivity. So seeing something as it is in itself makes no sense. I mean, this is the beginning of the end of substance ontology or you know, essentialist uh understandings uh of things in themselves altogether. Whether or not the numeral world exists before the observation of it or before the perception of it has to be bracketed because we can't actually prove its independent existence, which is the thing that leads to idealism, but not necessarily so. Cotton was very aware of that problem and denied idealism and said there was something out there that we are making contact with. We just can't know what that is uh prior to our contacting it or prior to our making it uh something perceivable to us, putting it in relation of some kind to us. So that's that whole idea where relationality becomes everything that eventually leads to process thinkers like AN Whitehead and uh process uh rather than substance ontology. But um Edmund Housserl, uh, his idea behind the idetic reduction was that we are gonna bracket the question of what's before our perception. So he's kind of taking um the a priori categories and this transcendental uh subjectivity that it outlines, or uh is kind of like the formal cause, the form that any possible perception has to take. Um he's gonna just start with perception, but he would like to see if it's possible to eliminate uh concepts. So all the presuppositions, the theories, the ideas. That's why it's called the idetic reduction, because idea in Greek is idea. Uh it's also uh ideo, like that would be first person to see. So um, in order to see, in order to have a perception, so kind of metaphorical seeing, but also literal seeing, also literal seeing, in order to see anything, uh, we need to already have this transcendental subjectivity underlying any perception, as it's uh invisible or hidden uh formal cause. Everything's relation. A formal cause is how a form relates to or causes something, in this case, an observation or a perception or the phenomenological intention. All causes are hidden. As David Hume pointed out, you can't directly see them, they they have to be inferred. Uh so if you're able to perceive, then uh you know something has caused the possibility of that perception or made that perception possible. So, whatever other intentions the intention may contain, uh the underlying intention that unifies it into a one. In phenomenology, there's the intentional uh projection and screen are the same, and they are unified into a one. And what unifies uh it into a one is this relational intention, an intention to be in relation. Uh, and then you can see again this total overlap between seeing, uh knowing, uh, and ideas. Uh, idea also uh comes from the same root as uh to have, interestingly, to grasp or to hold, and that's what ideas are for. They're to grasp uh the objects of the world around us, but in this dual action of the intention, the intention uh makes the objects that we grasp. Um so the problem is, is like when we see the phenomenology uh that we see uh of the world all around us. So for Heidegger, we are worlding beings, we make worlds, we make these objects, we objectify the world as phenomena and as concepts. Uh but when we do this, uh we're doing it according to our intention. Uh, and so the question was: is there any way to uh purify the intention so that you can see uh without um your specific intentions uh or your specific ideas getting in the way, which is a motivated intention. And the problem of first-person observation uh uh of the empiricism of sciences um uh by itself uh is that it is motivated. And so the the question is uh how do you verify such a thing? Well, you have to have a correspondence of some kind. Uh and so the way correspondence theory of truth works, again, correspondence is a relation. Uh, what you have is a true statement. So a statement's gonna be full of uh concepts. Um, and how do you know those concepts are accurate or they map onto uh reality correctly? Well, you can do that by an empirical observation. So the most famous and banal example, of course, is the cat is on the mat. Uh those that's full of all kinds of concepts and predications, and these are all ideas, and you know, these are all things that are not like in the world uh as it is without us putting things into relation or without us grouping things together in our intention according to you know our purpose of relatedness, which is what you know predication or the copulation of percepts to concepts is, we're putting things into relation. And so if you want to see if that predication uh is correct, is true, uh, then you're going to have to get some verification empirically. So you go look, if you observe a cat on a mat, then your statement is true. That's um, you know, basically how science works. It's I have an idea, uh, a theory, and then I go test to see if it's true. It's true if I can observe it as an independently verifiable uh phenomenon that you know anybody can perform the same experiment, experiment and see. Uh the problem is is that um what we observe, our um observations are not neutral. There are no uh view from nowhere observations, there's no third-person omniscience, there's no you know perfect objectifiability because uh the observer, uh however um neutral and however uh much they reduce their priors, they reduce their uh you know pre-conceptions about um things, um they reduce their uh presuppositions, uh, they try to get rid of all theory before you know hand that is going to taint how they see things, um, they are um still going to have to use uh concepts, theories, ideas in order to see anything at all. Uh, and this has always been the problem. No uh ideas, no seeing, uh, at least for um you know language users. So there is this built-in subjectivity uh of ambiguity um in any objective uh observation because we are in our own observations uh as the projection uh of our intention uh that allows the observation to take place in the first place. The reason why scientific observations take place uh is in order to test uh theories. And so you can't show up for an observation without a theory to direct your gaze uh to see whatever it is you're trying to find out. And whatever then is counter to your theory, um, in whatever way um you know your theory can't account for whatever you see. Um that gap between your theory and the result that you intended by that theory is what we call the real, uh, or what Lacan calls the real. So it's it's this gap of um stuff that doesn't fit or can't be unified uh into the oneness uh of a theory. Uh and it can't be accounted for. So it's this uh outside multiplicity, this outside otherness uh that is other than uh your theory that puts pressure on your theory, as in Thomas Kuhn's uh scientific um uh paradigm shifts and scientific um revolutions. The idea is that you know, the more things that don't fit your theory that are outside your uh theory, eventually you have to get a new theory uh so that you know you have a theory, it you know, works for some things, not for others. Eventually the otherness that it doesn't work out for is what's gonna put a pressure on your theory to either get rid of that theory or figure out how you know that theory uh can fit those um extraneous outside things, or uh you're also gonna have to maybe just scrap it and start with some some new theory. But there is no scientific observation, at any rate, and there really is no observation without some kind of theory, without some kind of conceptual framing by which uh whatever appears uh is able to appear uh to us. Knowing is motivated by its limit, which is what you don't know. Um, however, that motivation is the ground upon which uh the experiment is performed. So it cannot be um eliminated, uh, otherwise um you have no uh motivation uh to know. Um and without that motivatedness, uh, which is the motivatedness of a particular uh observer uh in a particular place in time from a particular perspective, perspectivalism, however you want to put this, um there's no way to purify it of that motivation because that's why the experiment is taking place in the first place. All knowing is motivated, which means simply all knowing has reasons. You can find out what those reasons are, um, perhaps by uh asking, you know, what motivates the learning. In uh evolutionary niche construction, uh the uh motivation is uncertainty reduction or you know, the accuracy uh of predictions so that you know you can survive and reproduce uh in the you know given niche that you are thrown into. So your perception is given to you in that niche, uh in the body, uh which is a part of your niche, uh, is a part of the relation to your niche, that perception of that body is mediated via the motivation to you know survive and reproduce. Whatever is in itself or unmotivated or unrelated is another way to put it to uh the survival uh and reproduction of the organism of the body that finds itself uh in that niche, that is undetectable uh with any perceptual apparatus because it doesn't affect that body uh in any way that one can um perceive. But language users have a kind of uh interesting trick that makes um language users think they can get around this and see something that's not there. And this is the basic uh relation, or you might even say non-relation, between uh a sign uh and its uh referent or a signifier and its uh signified. And here's where we get going with uh some Pearcyan um semiotics. So for the first sort of relation between a sign and whatever it is that it signifies, uh would be for Peirce the iconic relation. And this is a relation uh based on resemblance. So something looks like something else. Um the thing that it looks like is not directly present, uh, but it can be presented by the thing that looks like, resembles uh whatever its uh referent is or whatever it's signified is, whatever is signified by the iconic relation. So a picture or an image or an object that looks like, feels like, you know, sounds like, any of the senses, um, something else in some way. So there's this beginning of abstraction here, of abstract uh thought here. Uh it's probably not exactly correct, but there's this six million-year-old or something like that, um, mariganset pebble from uh South Africa. And some people say that it was selected by some very early form of humanoid, you know, author uh, I think Anthro Lopitha uh Lopithecus or something like that, who uh, you know, picked up the pebble because it looked sort of like its own face. Uh it resembled a face, and so they kept this pebble not for any other reason, but for a symbolic reason, and uh it became like the first sort of like abstraction from uh you know one thing to the next. And in this abstraction, there's a kind of distantiation, so that's a distance between the pebble uh and what it you know resembles, you know, the face of the authoral lopithecus or whatever they're called. And so the idea here is that there is this gap, and this is the same gap that we're talking about between phenomena and pumina. So there is the phenomena is a you know signification of some kind. It resembles to some degree whatever it is trying to uh refer refer to across a gap through through some distantiation uh to whatever you know the thing itself is, the uh the signified uh by the uh you know phenomena. And so we can start to get to uh an understanding right off the bat also, does phenomena do concepts, whatever, do they somehow represent uh what there is, or do they um somehow present what there is, or is there some combination of presentation through representation, or is there a kind of immediacy to the presentation uh of a uh of a signifier, especially uh if it is a relation uh of um resemblance? When you're looking through an old photo album or whatever of you know somebody um who is not directly there, does that somehow present them to you uh in a sensual kind of like intentional uh manner? Uh, or is that sort of like a highlighting of the absence so that there is this um representation uh that mediates in such a way um as to um present an absence uh in a uh dead static concept. And so, you know, in general, people would think that you know, phenomena uh purified of its concepts, and this is the idea that um Husserl uh kind of was working at with the idetic reduction, uh, would be some sort of raw experience. Again, not like of the things in themselves, because this is the things as they are related to us through our perceptual apparatuses. But if they were without ideas, you know, you would just see like patches of color here, texture there, you know, sort of like distance, locatedness, whatever, you would still have those those kind of things, but you just wouldn't uh objectify them into you know conceptual objects. You would just have sort of like uh what um Pierce would call a firstness, a a rawness uh of just like all presentation, no mediation, so what we would call immediacy. Or rather the immediacy uh of no ideas and the mediation of the a priori categories as they are uh instantiated uh in your perceptual uh apparatuses, uh, so that this is before ideas but not before uh percepts have been joined, uh not in order to make concepts, but in order to make perception itself. Now, once you join uh the percept uh of a sign to the um not perceivable uh of a um signified, or at least a not directly perceivable uh of a signified, now there is some uh level of abstraction beyond mere perception. And so we can start to talk here uh about some kind of elementary ideation. So as um A N Whitehead uh talks about concepts, they're two uh concepts joined together by a rule. Uh so if they're if that rule that's joining them is just a perceptual rule based on you know the basic uh quantity, quality, uh relationality, and modality, um, then that That's you know still within the realm of just mere perception. We don't really have a concept there yet that's bringing them together because again, for Kant, the a priori categories are not concepts. Uh they are um intuited and they are what synthesize um through this category. They intuit um the world, but they don't conceive of a world yet. So did the uh Astro Lopithecus, who picked up the Merriaganset uh pebble, um, and see for the first time uh the resemblance in it to a human face, uh, connecting up something that was directly present uh to it with something else uh that was not directly present to it, because um, you know, it probably couldn't see its own face, or even if there was some other Athropificus there to see, um, it's it's uh imagining. And we're talking about like virtuality, degrees of virtual possibility here, where you have something that is a new kind of possibility space uh that isn't already completely determined by uh physical uh material causality. This is a uh possibility space uh, you know, of imaginal um proximity uh that is allowed by the relation between uh proximity and distantiation. The imagination brings something far near, but in such a way that is not completely determinate. So when Kant kind of talked about the antinomy between determination and freedom, and he said, you know, that you know causality, including physical causality, is not completely determinate. There's still some uh open possibility, some incompletion uh in that possibility space that isn't utterly um you know determinate, so that there is some uh inbuilt freedom. Well, you're gonna have more freedom uh in this type of virtual, conceptual, imaginal space uh between um the face on the pebble and the face um that you imagine it uh references. Um and so you're gonna be able to see faces in clouds and trees and whatever else. And you know, and the other way around too, you could, you know, ex you you know, the Ameriganset pebble was uh in um uh this like red stone kind of a thing. So you could imagine now uh all kinds of associations uh with the red smooth surface uh of the stones that were found in that bed, and you can, you know, now you can see in somebody's face who's got kind of a red, smooth look to it the stone. Uh and or you could see uh in the person uh who is really um determined about something, a stony uh determination or whatever. Now you have all kinds of ways to imagine uh new worlds once you've got this relation between nearness and farness, uh proximity uh and um distantiation. Uh and the big one here for language is abstraction versus concreteness. So the concreteness of the pebble uh across this gap uh is the abstraction to uh something else that is also uh concrete, uh a person's face, but both the pebble and the and the face have been abstracted to some degree in order to uh make the relation. Or rather, the the face involves both abstraction and uh concreteness, so that uh whatever the abstract uh formal um causality of a face is, uh, because we see it uh you know and we s associate it with other faces, um, we know that um there is also this particularity of uh facial differences as well. Um so this is you know Hegel's basic concept of the um abstract concrete or the um abstract particular or the concrete particular uh or the uh or whatever. This is the idea of like this um instantiation uh of concreteness via um abstract uh formality. So the whole history of art may have begun there six million years ago or whatever it was in South Africa with the marigansid pebble or whatever, or in some similar way uh making this abstract relation. But the history of art then, of representation, has been um about levels of particularity versus uh abstraction, and then you know, just tweaking with that all the time, so that you know, once the you know total verisimilitude of you know ultimate realism of the photograph or whatever uh you know was realized, then you know you have this desire to increase um abstraction in the painting uh or in the art, and uh in so doing somehow, um, and that could be through particularity as well, by the way, which is I know very confusing, but we'll get to it later. But the idea here again is that uh just playing with like what's uh the same and what's different, um, what what we might call the identity, uh, as Kant does, of identity and difference. So just the idea that identity, um, when it's not complete, when it's not a complete identification, when it's not a equals a, um, has room for freedom, has room uh in which you can make abstractions or make uh leaps uh across uh some distantiated gap in order to arrive at the signified, uh, but you have all these virtual imaginal degrees of freedom now uh in between the sign and the signified. Um and for Pierce uh that is um taken up with the idea of the interpretant, which is kind of like the concept that mediates the uh signified uh and the um signal or the uh sign uh so that you have here a triad, and everything is going to come down to a triad uh with Pierce. You have a um signifier or a signal, uh, and then you have uh what it's signaling or uh what a sign and what it signifies. But you always have a necessary third uh in order to bring that far or that absent um signified near uh through the uh signifier. It's not direct, it comes through an interpretant, which is the semantic meaning, uh, or just you could just say the concept that you're using to mediate um that relation and or that presentation of uh the um absent signifier. So back again to why you know Husserlian um phenomenology, the project failed, even according to Husserl's own evaluation of it, is because there cannot be a you know complete idetic reduction. Sure, there can be a reduction uh of your you know theory-ladenness, of your uh preconceived uh preconceptions, all this stuff, something like a Heideggering, you know, clearing. Uh so you can or a Deleuzian uh deterritorialization, you can, you know, you can make room, um, you know, you can get out of your own way to some degree, but it but there is always going to be the mediation of a concept. Uh again, this is like kind of like the primary triad uh for Pierce, which is uh the sign, uh, and then, so not directly to the signified, but the sign to the interpretant, which is the concept, the semantic meaning, uh, and then you have the signified. Um, so always um this mediation, uh, and no way to do uh any kind of direct, immediate uh encounter or presentation. Because then you would just be in it, on it, however you want to put that, so closely uh related to it that there isn't a relation. There's no way to relate to it because there's no distance to relate to it from. There's no uh stepping outside of it to see it, to know it. Uh there's no no knowing it at all. Because whatever it is, it's you. It's whatever, you know, there's no object for the intention to intend to. So see how this uh, you know, degrees of freedom of the virtual space offered by this distantiation or this abstraction um is given uh to each one of the Pearcyan signs. Uh we start with this relation of resemblance, which you know, for Peirce, uh Peirce is a natural place to start because it's um kind of like um shares a form somehow, not like a direct uh it doesn't share a direct formal uh causality, but it like somehow has a um uh symmetrical uh morphology um you know very um abstractly realized. So his second uh sort of sign um is a indexical sign or an index uh because it's something that points to something else entirely. Uh so there is not uh any resemblance. The example that is mostly used for this is smoke uh and fire. So you don't see the fire, but you see the smoke. Smoke doesn't resemble fire, um, but it indicates fire. So it's indexical, it's an indexical relation. So this is something that you you know could learn through operant conditioning, basically. You just learn to associate uh two different signs or two different events um with each other, um, and so that you know one is an indicator of the other. Um this is cause and effect. Um they're all cause and effect, like I said before, like the idea of relation is is very important. Uh just that the other one, the resemblant one, is the you know, formal kind of like causality, um, but you know, a very loose one. And then this one is just a regular old physical uh or material causality, um, where you see one thing, then that indicates the other. In terms of um this switch between uh phenomenology to uh recurs hermeneutics, you can really see here that this would be one where you really wouldn't um have too many degrees of freedom for interpretation. Now, there could be um, I don't know, different things that cause smoke or look like smoke, I don't know, fog or something like that. So there's there's possible slippage, there's there's possible uh interpretations uh that could happen here. Uh but you can see that just in terms of like levels of freedom and or degrees of freedom and inter in and in interpretation, uh the interpretant uh of the um index uh is less free or less open, let's say, than the interpretant uh for the icon. So the um relationality, uh the causality uh of the um icon is pretty open. You can see faces all over the place. Um and you know, you could not see them there too. Uh it you know, there's there's just a lot more choice in the matter. Uh but like you know, between um smoke and fire, you know, pretty much that's gonna indicate fire. Or, you know, you might think of between like the scat of a predator um and the predator itself, uh, you know that you know you're not directly seeing the predator, but you know, I guess depending on the condition of that uh poop, is it um warm still or whatever? Uh it there's gonna be all kinds of um, you know, ways in which that thing more closely um indicates its referent, uh, or closely references its referent, however you want to put that. Um and so this is the kind of thing that you know scientific observation is looking for, um, so that you could have a kind of you know causality that is just an indicator, so that it just identifies a phenomenon. Uh so smoke you know lets you know that there is a fire happening or whatever. Uh, but there's really no way to get like this 100% A for A. This indicates that kind of thing uh in the sciences, again, because of the ideas uh that the scientist needs to make their observation, uh, which brings us to our third um type of sign for um Pierce, which is the symbol. Uh mostly in modern-day semiotics, uh, we call these signifiers. Uh but the thing about the symbol is that it's kind of like the um icon in the sense that there's some resemblance there, but it's not a physical or a materially indicated uh resemblance of any kind. So it's not like the Mariganset pebble where there's like two eyes and like a little mouth-looking thing that you know would count for the resemblance or whatever, um, and would somehow you know draw one, you know, to in any way determine that that thing could be considered a face. And the symbol is the least like an indicator, and this is the problem for the sciences, uh, because it has so many degrees of freedom. As a matter of fact, our signifiers in general, especially now that we have spoken and written language based on you know phonemes, has no relation uh other than an arbitrary one uh that is given to us via you know the agreed upon usage uh of a language, uh what Lacan would call the uh symbolic. So famously, the phoneme cat uh has nothing to do with what it indicates, uh, an actual cat. So uh there's no necessary relation at all. Uh it's just completely uh open and free, you know. Now you aren't open and free to decide uh that you know cat is gonna refer to something else. That's not the type of freedom that we're talking about here, uh, because that is already determined to uh to a large degree uh by whatever language you're born into, by whatever culture you're born into, whatever time and place society, whatever that you're born into. That's already there. You are given a language uh you know from your parents or from your caregivers. The freedom or the degrees of freedom that are being referred to here are the utter arbitrariness of that phonem and its necessary or its determined relation uh to its signified or to its referent. Now, onomonopoetic words, which is, you know, some people think that's how language began through some kind of onomonopoeia of some kind or another. Uh, but anyways, onomonopoetic words um do bear some resemblance. Uh they are an imitation to some degree of either the sound that the referent or or the um signified makes or emits or something like that. Um or you know, you know, if you're using sign language or something like that, then for sure there's some you know uh resemblance or some iconic resemblance where the you know signs uh at least initially you know look like um whatever they're trying to refer to or whatever. So when you're uh in a scientific observation, though, you're trying to decide whether what you're observing um is uh related to what you are uh saying about it. So does the signifier um you know map on in an identical way directly, or is it equivalent to uh what is signified? Um and so the problem there is that you've got to go through a concept to do that, which is going to create um some uh slippage. There's not gonna be uh a perfectly um translucent uh concept uh to mediate this relation. Why? Because that's what we kind of were doing in the whole first part here, because uh concepts are motivated. They are ideas that um allow us to see in the first place, but they are ideas uh that come from um our culture, not just our niche uh in an evolutionary uh biome or whatever, but a um particular uh culture uh that um symbolizes the um world uh in such a way as to make a symbolic world. So the quest for like a scientific objective language would be that the signifier discloses the signified uh in this A for A identical or identifying manner, so that there is an equivalency between uh the statement uh the cat is on the mat uh and empirical, independently verifiable reality, the cat is observably uh by anybody who comes by on that mat. But any one of the terms there, uh what it means to be a cat, what is catness, what it means to be on, what it means to be a mat, all these things have to then be defined in a very scientific way, which is like what the point of the idetic reduction is. So it's not the arbitrariness of the phonem cat related to, you know, this cat. It doesn't really matter what it's called uh in another language, but it's the precision uh of the identifier cat. So does it group together uh the different aspects of a cat, the parts of a cat, uh, in such a way as to identify what is consistent or what defines uh each and every particular instance of uh catness. But the problem is that every final definition of a cat, and you can look it up, there are final scientific definitions of the species uh feline or whatever the species is, doesn't pick it out uh from other types of things uh with total uh discrete, quantifiable uh qualities, which ultimately would be qualities that could be defined quantitatively, uh somehow could be measured because that's the gold standard for uh scientific uh definition. In order for a measurement, though, to not be arbitrary in any way to be uh absolute, it would need to be a necessary quantity, something that was demanded in terms of the correspondence uh of catness uh and the uh the whatever quality was being measured uh to make something uh a cat. So these measured uh quantities would define the qualities of a cat. They would have a causal relation, so a determinant relation. That's the end goal. So what causes a cat or what determines a cat uh is the relation, this particular relation, this essential, necessary uh relation, uh grouping together of uh quantities uh and qualities uh in such a way that you um you know have uh before you uh without any doubt a cat. Aeriology is the philosophical study of how uh parts and wholes relate and how those relations, so for example, um how uh quantities in put in particular relations uh make particular qualities or intensities. So an essential definition of a cat would be necessary, in other words, compelled by the fact of the matter and sufficient, in other words, not overdoing it, nothing that isn't uh absolutely necessary for a cat. So uh is it necessary for a cat to have hair and still be a cat? No. Um so that would not be uh part of the essential definition of what a cat is. But the problem is that a cat is a mammal, so it needs to at least have the potential to have a hair, have hair, even if it for some reason is born with a condition where it doesn't have it or whatever. But the point is that there's an essential grouping of parts or attributes uh via a whole that um defines uh in an essential way, a necessary and sufficient way, what a cat is. But this is the problem called uh natural kinds. Well, it's not a problem for some people because they just believe that um the universe uh is in discrete units, so that there is no continuum uh among different things that can be called cats, there are no outside cases, there are no things that are close, uh, there are just uh either or uh cats or not. So, this is this uh law of the excluded middle type of um law of identity that you get in uh Aristotelian uh logic. A cat is a whole, uh you could represent Presented with a concept. We're talking about this in languaged idea of a signifier. And it's a whole that groups together its parts, its attributes, its quantities, its qualities in an essential way. And if there is another whole that doesn't relate its attributes, its parts in that essential way, then it's not a cat. And this is actually what the Husserlian eidetic reduction was. It was seeing what types of groupings of parts or what types of qualities could be added, taken away, and the thing, whatever it was that you were trying to know what it was, you could see through this very systematic procedural of like adding, subtracting, rearranging, you know, what was essential to the thing, because at some point, obviously whatever it was would have changed either into something else or would just be broken and no longer be the thing anymore. But this just didn't work because the world doesn't seem to break down into discrete units. It seems to be continuous in a more Bergsonian sense. Now, in order to have the objects, the objectifications of the phenomena that you see before you, you do need discrete units. You need to put in breaks, but those breaks are arbitrary. And the arbitrariness, again, it is different than you know the phonem dog being arbitrarily related to a dog. It is the idea that the concept of dog, uh, what is its relation to an essential dogginess. This is the problem. Dogginess is somewhat arbitrary, it's somewhat on a continuum. There is no absolute uh essential uh form uh uh of a dog because you have all these uh in-between cases. And where you decide to draw the line is more a matter of agreement rather than something that is compelled, rather than something that is necessary and sufficient uh about uh dogs. The obvious example here would be something like a platypus, which has had this incredible history of trying to figure out like, you know, does it count as a mammal? So then you just wind up saying something like, yeah, it's an egg-laying mammal or whatever, and it's got all these other weirdnesses about it, that it's like in between, it would seem, uh, a lot of different categories. Now we're not talking about the a priori categories necessary for perception, uh, because those are intuitive. Now we're talking about conceptual categories. And when we're talking about conceptual categories, we're talking about language. And within language, that distance, that gap between the signifier and the signified uh is a realm where there can be a lot of slippage. Now, it is that slippage that are the degrees of freedom of any particular uh observation or situation, so that that allows you to, you know, find a resemblance uh in a rock to a human face or whatever. But that slippage also can be um very frustrating for somebody who just wants to know what something is. Uh and then we're seeing here, hopefully we're seeing here, that that's a matter of convention. Uh somebody like John Searle wanted to talk about the difference between uh scientific description uh versus a more cultural description. So obviously, the cultural one is gonna be more arbitrary and relative to a particular culture, whereas a scientific description is going to be necessary and sufficient so that everybody is going to agree, just like mathematics, the universal language. Uh the problem is, is once you get outside of mathematics, even if you just try to use mathematics, how are we going to measure, what are we going to measure, all that kind of stuff, all of a sudden, again, now you've got the problem of a continuum. Because deciding how math is going to divide things up, how it's going to measure, uh, what it how it's going to measure things as discrete units, all those groupings, uh, those things are not always demanded uh by necessity. And so we take uh something as arbitrary as time, you know, different cultures have different ways of measuring it, whatnot, and then we try to absolutize it by establishing it with you know the Planck's time or the Planck's length, so that you know we're have some absolute measure that's demanded by nature or demanded by the natural laws. However, the problem remains because it's all about this shift from uh quality to quantity, or or rather in reverse, it goes, you know, there so I've got this absolute time now, but you know, the qualitative experience of time, uh you need to be able to have some like absolutizable experiential time as well, but there isn't any if if you're gonna map uh an experience, an uh empirical observation uh onto a absolute quantity. As Bergson again points out, you know, stuff you don't want to do takes a lot longer, uh, regardless of whatever spatio-temporal measure you're using, um, takes a lot longer to do, even if it's you know the exact same amount of quantifiable time uh than something that you do want to do. Uh and there, you know, time flies. And so, you know, being is uh duray. Uh, you know, things that take a duration, uh, they're not um exactly mappable um onto um, in a independently verifiable way, um, absolute uh measurement of any kind. So again, you have this observer effect of uh perspectivalism where it matters how your intention uh relates uh to um this measurement. This is actually where uh Heidegger kind of picks up from Husserl uh after you know Husserl kind of is able to adumbrate some of the problems uh with the idetic reduction. Um Heidegger takes this uh as the hermeneutic circle so that you're no longer trying to get an absolute necessary um definition of things, but you kind of have to realize uh that this uh mariological relation uh of parts and holes uh is uh somewhat um regroupable or differently groupable. You can you can group parts differently, uh, and and you do that just by relating them differently to each other and to the whole and all that kind of stuff. And so the you know, example that people give that's pretty easy, I guess, is the you know, Wittgensteinian duck rabbit, where you know, in order to see a duck, you have to group together the uh parts of the picture uh in a certain way to make you know it a duck. And then if you rearrange those parts, um now it's a it's a dog, or I'm sorry, it's a rabbit. And so the idea though is that you know, in order to see one, uh, you know, you have to not see the other. Uh but doesn't mean that the other isn't there, and whatever that could mean. Mostly what it means uh is that um just because you are currently um seeing uh a rabbit on your intentional screen uh doesn't mean that somebody else couldn't group those things in the same picture simultaneously uh next to you uh in a different way uh to see the dog. It doesn't mean that you couldn't just shift uh and find the dog again. There is no absolute fact of the matter. Uh there is no necessary uh and sufficient reason why that is uh uh either one, a duck or a dog. It just has to do with interpretation. Uh, and this is the Heideggerian uh hermeneutic circle, because it's uh as a circle of uh interpretation. So not only different interpretations by different people, but also within you, you can group things together differently too. Uh, of course, you need to like learn to see in different ways because the world is just given to you as it is, but then you know, eventually, you know, your way of seeing will be broken uh because you won't be able to project uh how you see things uh conceptually onto what you see. There will be uh phenomena that um exceed the concept uh that are supposed to frame them and unify it into a one. The necessity of a unificatory objectification uh of the world um begins in some sense with the phenomenological intention itself. Uh the oneness of the intention is one of its uh you know Husserlian features, is that it has this um consciousness is one, it is uh not many. Our phenomenological screen may be made up of many objects or uh of many different types of multiplicity, but in the fashion of the duck rabbit, um, it's going to unify whatever there is into either a duck or into a rabbit. Uh it's very difficult to kind of like stay in the intermediary state of the liminal space, because that is kind of what you get with certain forms perhaps of meditation where you're not, you know, seeing objects any longer, you're at the level of sense perception. But even um sense perception, or just like the most basic percepts, again, are imperceivable. And again, in some types of uh meditation, that's where you're going to this like total like consciousness of nothing. But uh until you get to that point, you're still like at least aware of something, like of a of a basic perception. But even uh the most basic perception, again, is at least uh made up of two different percepts uh because you need that difference, that unification of difference through uh a relation given by uh uh quality, quantity, um modality, or relationality itself. So, like baby has no awareness uh of temperature in mom's womb if it is you know totally consistent. Baby only becomes aware when there is some difference for its sensory apparatus, in this case, touch or the uh temperature sensing cells of the skin, uh, when it's delivered to you know register that um there's a difference, and to join the you know identic womb uh oneness state with the difference of the outside state. And that's actually what makes um uh us aware of anything is that difference. Uh and again, awareness is of um something, always of something. And I again I know that there are claims in certain forms of meditation that you can have pure consciousness, pure awareness that doesn't have anything you know popping up on its screen. But in uh Husserlian phenomenology, at any rate, um, and in my best understanding of intention, uh it has to be of something, consciousness of something. So that even if your uh consciousness is of lack of thingness, uh lack of quiddity, quididity, or lack of a thing to be aware of, um, that's still already consciousness of something in the sense that it's uh uh it's given to you by this binary opposition. So uh you would have to, if there's nothing, um, you are only gonna be able to be aware or conscious of nothing uh via its contrast with something. Uh this is the kind of way presence and absence works. We don't get presence without absence and vice versa, light without darkness and uh oneness without multiplicity, and on and on and on. I've done a number of uh episodes on binary oppositions. So if intention uh is basically the aboutness, um aboutness is always about uh some kind of a whatness. Um so even if there is no whatness uh to be about, this is aboutness, about uh no whatness, it is still uh aboutness. So uh intention of uh for nothing uh is still an intention. Uh that is um an intention that uh there be, you know, whatever there is without your uh intending it, which we might understand as intentionless intention, uh, which doesn't mean uh you're not aware of anything or unconscious. That would be um not and not your Freudian conscious, that's not what I mean at all. I just mean like dead or like have no uh intentional screen at all. Uh what this means is that you can uh intend uh what is unintentional. That that means what is other than you. Um so how do you you know encounter um things that are not or do not accord uh to your intention? So to wrap it up for today, um uh the cat is on the mat is thought to be more than simply uh intentional, and and notice the prefix in an intentional. And so, in other words, it's not just some interior subjective reality. Um, if uh it's an objective reality, it's outside of me if I can verify it. But guess how I verify it? By looking inside, because my intention, my conscious awareness is in me in the first person perspective. And even if somebody else shows up to independently verify that um this cat is indeed on the mat, they are still verifying it in from their own first person perspective. So I can't actually, even if they say uh that they see the cat on the mat, I can't verify that independently to know that it's really independently verifiable. Because, you know, let's just say hypothetically, they could be saying it for any number of reasons. Uh, maybe they are wearing virtual goggles in their programmed that way. Maybe they're saying it to be nice to me because they don't want to like, you know, counter uh my psychotic state or something like that, and they're just like trying to be cool with me or whatever. Um, the point is that, you know, if anybody is going to do this independent uh verification, um, it has to be in the first person, which brings up uh, you know, the issue of correspondence, but on two different levels. So, you know, there can be a sort of perceptual level without conceptual uh agreement about where the uh cat is or whatever, but it wouldn't involve words like cat or mat or uh maybe even prepositions with on. It would just be this very perceptual, maybe visual, spatial, kind of like we're just, you know, both um, you know, touching where the cat is, or you know, showing that we both can perceive that there's something there. Uh, but the second sort of correspondence is going to be in our language. So we're using the same words uh for this thing, and we've learned to group together uh whatever those molecules are over there uh as a cat, and you know, we've learned to, you know, locate things in space and time using prepositions like in or whatever. And so that's like the conceptual level of the cat being on the map. And so, you know, what people want to have is this correspondence so that it's you know totally objective, so that even though my only access to the cat on the mat is internal and my intention, um, there's something you know that verifies it outside of myself. And so it seems that, you know, if we can both, um, let's just say on the perceptual level find the cat there, uh, then it's you know really there or whatever. But the question again is like, what in a grouping together under the name cat? Um, is that necessary uh and sufficient? And this will actually bring us to um Pierce's uh in the next episode, hypostatic abstraction. How does a thing become a thing uh through language? What is um eligible in the statement uh the cat is on the mat is the observer. Uh so the statement uh in truth is I see or somebody sees uh the cat on the mat. And this is akin to Lacan's distinction between the subject of the sentence, and in this case the cat, uh, and then the subject of enunciation, the subject who is uh pronouncing that the cat is on the mat. So that is the I, if it's I see cat on the mat, or the scientist if it's some kind of scientific uh observation. So if we get uh the I as a part of the statement, which is you know the full statement really, um, you're going to get the intention, um the intention to see the cat on the mat or the uh cat uh on the mat appearing on the intentional screen uh as a projection of one's intention. And so you're going to see that in order to verify that the cat is on the mat or to see if it's in correspondence with the statement uh in some you know basic truth procedure, there has to be a unity, a oneness of consciousness, of perception, that is uh what an intention is. It it unifies the scene so that I can put things into relation uh under uh its wholeness, to see as little unified objects or to see as parts with relation to the wholeness uh that intention intends. I have to relate whatever I perceive to the oneness, to the wholeness of my intention. So again, all multiplicity relies uh on a on a one, and so you're either foregrounding the multiplicity or you're foregrounding the oneness, and this is how the intention works. It's a backgrounding, foreg foregrounding mechanism of oneness against the many and manyness against the one. So if you have a one, that means it has been foregrounded against the differential background. If you have the uh differential background foregrounded, then you see, you know, ununified uh multiplicity. But mostly what you do see, uh, if you see a whole or a one of any kind, so an object, uh, what you're seeing there is a unification of multiplicity uh under a concept or under a perception, not uh under a percept, because a percept can't be perceived uh because it's singular, but under a uh perception, you're gonna have you know multiply unified uh percepts. But mostly what we have once we've you know gotten the language and been enculturated to some degree is we see things grouped by parts and wholes according to concepts, because most of our percepts uh first of all will be copulated with each other, but then they will be copulated to uh concepts, basically based on the symbolic uh relations that we have been uh born to, or the symbolic that we have been uh born into, if you know, you use the Lacanian concept. So basically we have the uh structuralist idea here uh that the world is you know comprised of these uh binary oppositions, the binary oppositions of difference and language, uh, but um it's not static because in in the duck rabbit uh thing, uh because those um ways of grouping together uh via the binary oppositions um are not absolutely necessary. There certainly is a relation between determinism and necessary, but oftentimes um we can make what was determinate uh indeterminate through um virtuality or through um the imaginal possibility of grouping you know uh things together under the subjunctive sort of framework of it could be like this or would be like this or whatever. Uh that's just the imaginal framework that the subjunctive uh aspect of language gives us. But we have um a shift, a possible shift of structures whenever we come up to you know something that the structure um doesn't uh allow us to see or a way that we're not allowed to be in the world or relate to the world via the uh symbolic that was uh given to us. And then the sort of post-structuralist move, although I really just think it's a part of structuralism, which I'm not really into the idea of post-structuralism. You haven't gotten past if it's supposed to be after structure. No, it's like it's a part of the structure to be able to shift uh because of that gap that we've been talking so much about, that gap of difference, uh, the gap between the signified and the signifier, that Lacan calls the real. So we see uh the world as built up of little holes and part relations. Um, and those things could hypothetically be grouped together differently. Now, in the sciences, it is the belief that you know, if you break this stuff down far enough to like its most elemental relations, uh then you know, you have you're gonna have like the most necessary level, which is just gonna be this very basic material level uh of describing the world that doesn't have a whole lot to do with the way that we experience the world. Of course, it's a part of the overall picture. But whatever total uh necessity, uh objectivity you can get at that level, um, it's not the kind of objects that we see uh on a regular basis. And it's not the kind of objects even that are given to us uh through our perceptual apparatuses, which is why we can't perceive like the most basic level of reality at all. Uh we need to you know imagine those things uh but uh through models and whatnot. But and it's not just because they're infantile, either super small or whatever, it's also because um or or they're too vast for our perceptual apparatus. That is certainly a part of it. Uh, but it's because of the way we put together reality um as these sort of, I mean, somewhat arbitrary ways of grouping the world together. And because of this um lack of total necessity, things can be grouped together differently. So this is the obvious point about differences in language, differences in culture, differences in you know, the location of you know your time and place, you know, within a culture and you know, history and all this other kind of stuff. These are the facticity, you know, parts of being an embodied being of our throneness that you know Heidegger would talk about that affect our intention. And whatever affects our intention and affects our intention towards um you know the world that uh we have been thrown into is going to affect that world. So one you know can affect the other. The inside affects the outside, and the outside affects uh the inside because this is a relation. Uh so quantity, quality, um, relation, modality, um, these kinds of things are gonna affect the way in which we uh see uh grouping uh parts and wholes and just see the world uh together. And so this is kind of our entry point um into um hermeneutics. Uh we see that hermeneutics are kind of at the most basic level in some sense of the world, at least the world as it appears to us. Um so we're not gonna get a world appearing to us or a descriptive uh way of talking about the world, even uh, that is just purely um objective and necessary. Um we are always gonna get a world that is um intentional. Um, and now there are ways to reduce some of the um intentionality of that and allow you know the otherness outside of us to speak for itself, uh, but our interpretation uh of that um encounter, of that relation to the other, uh is always going to be uh mediated through concepts through language. Um and so next time we're gonna talk about um firstness, secondness, and thirdness in Pierce and how that maps onto Paul Record's primary and secondary naivete, and especially what this means for Record's idea of a metaphoric relation in language that um is going to enter us into a clash of meanings or a clash of interpretations, a clash of interpretants uh in Pierce's way of thinking about it. Um and that's just how we get new meanings, new concepts, new interpretants, new um ways of being in the world. Um and so um join me next time. Thank you for listening.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:30

We not only can uh be in the world and instrumentalize a transactional way, we can also be in the world in such a way as to just be present to it. Whenever I encounter something that is refusing my intention, then it appears in some sense present at me. So it appears as it is without my intention for it. It's present to me, but I'm not grasping at it. I'm not grasping at it.