But how are we to justify the fact that the starting point of all knowledge is not inferential in nature, because it is immediately manifest, without being open to discussion or denial, when Peirce’s entire anti-Cartesian polemic is based on the assumption that all knowledge is always inferential in nature?
15.2. Peirce and the Coffeepot
In his doctoral thesis Claudio Paolucci (2005) maintains with a wealth of arguments that there is no “realistic” turning-point in Peirce that leads him to consider the possibility of intuitions of a Kantian type, and in so doing he is very polemical in his criticism of both Fumagalli (1995) and Murphey (1961), to whom Fumagalli is referring. Let me say at once that I have no intention of contesting this contestation of Paolucci’s. I simply want to point out that in K & P I wrote: “Fumagalli observes that we have a Kantian return here to the immediacy of intuition, prior to all inferential activity. Nevertheless, since this intuition, as we shall see, remains the pure sentiment that I am confronted with something, the intuition would still be devoid of all intellectual content, and therefore (it seems to me) it could withstand the young Peirce’s anti-Cartesian polemic” (p. 99).
Paolucci still finds this “I am confronted with something” embarrassing, and he writes: “There is no question that Peirce, to describe the formal moment that gives body to the second phenomenological category, describes on several occasions a type of nonmediated relationship between a subject and an individual external object (a haecceitas or thisness). Should this type of relationship turn out to be a cognition (but, as we shall see, it isn’t), it would certainly be correct to speak of a return on the part of Peirce to the immediacy of intuition, since we would be dealing with a cognition not determined by previous cognitions.” Quod est impossibile, if we assume that Peirce always remained anti-Cartesian.
But, in K & P, was I really talking about cognitions?
The position Paolucci has always defended, including in his thesis, is that Peirce’s notion of synechism has to do, not with an amorphous continuum to be segmented (à la Hjelmslev), but with the series of cognitive inferences that, proceeding en abyme, always lead us to make a supposed primum that offers itself to our experience, the point of departure for a subsequent inference (and it is no accident that Paolucci has always appealed in this regard to the principles of infinitesimal analysis). Therefore, every cognitive phenomenon, even the most aurorally primal, must call upon all three categories. Assuredly, there are moments in which Firstness or Secondness seem preeminent, but they are never the exclusive components of the process because any kind of experience always needs to be made up of all three phenomenological categories. How then can we speak of a primary experience?
This is not all, but for Peirce the three categories are not cognitions but formal structures that found the possibility of all cognition (in this sense Peirce was a Kantian), or they are not kinds of experience but pure forms that make up experience. Therefore, if a sensation of redness is an example of Firstness or, in one of the examples I provided at the time, the burning I feel when I touch a hot coffeepot, this Firstness in itself is still nothing from the point of view of my cognitions (a “mere maybe”), and I recognize it as a burn from the coffeepot only if it is immediately placed in relation to Secondness and Thirdness.2
Naturally I agree that, indeed let me remind you that in K & P I made it clear that, even in the face of the immediacy of a quale (a sensation of redness, a burning feeling, the whiteness of a sheet), I can always become aware later, precisely when that Firstness becomes defined as such in the interplay of all three categories, that my first reaction was the result of an error (that I had experienced as red or scorching something that wasn’t), and that I might have received the stimulus in conditions (external or internal) that were such as to “deceive” my nerve terminals. Except that, as Peirce himself made clear, even after recognizing that my senses have been deceived, I cannot say that I have not experienced (let alone “that I have not known”!) a sensation of redness or excessive heat. Going back to the housewife with her sheet, she might say: “A short time ago, after having made my first over-hasty perceptual inference, I entertained the belief [(a cognitive fact)] that I had experienced a sensation of whiteness, upon further reflection however …”
Paolucci’s objection is that, given that Peirce denies all power to intuition and asserts that all cognition arises from a previous cognition, not even a unrelated sensation, be it thermal, tactile, or visual, can be recognized (and therefore known) except by bringing into play an inferential process that, however instantaneous and unconscious it may be, guarantees its reliability.
Nevertheless, the problem that ought to interest a reconstructionist (more “-ologist” than “-ist”) is the following: Is it possible that a sensible person like Peirce should deny that in some fashion the inferential process that leads me to say “I burned myself by touching the coffeepot” arises from a sensation of scorching that compels me (like any other animal) to withdraw the limb from the point of stimulus, even before recognizing it as something other than myself that opposes resistance? Furthermore, Peirce could not deny it because his realism, whether Scotist or otherwise, was based on the fact that all knowledge refers to a Dynamical Object that lies outside of myself and my cognitive acts, and precedes every possible inference—even if by chance this Dynamical Object were to remain forever unattainable, multiplying itself into an infinite series of Immediate Objects. Peirce could not deny that the perceptual process seems to begin in a vague and marshy zone between Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, and the knot of inferences that leads it to perfect itself in perceptual judgment appears to situate itself after the apparition of something, not before—which is tantamount to saying that in order to interpret there must be something there to interpret, otherwise we would not be Peirceans but Deconstructionists or Nietzscheans (see K & P, sect. 1.9).