PEL Presents Closereads: Peirce's New Categories (Part One)

Reading Charles Sanders Peirce

0:00This is Close Reads, a philosophy podcast with Mark and Wes. I'm Wes Alwyn. And I'm Mark Linsenmeier.

0:10Let us start on a new reading for Close Reads, but it's really sort of a part three to our latest Partially Examined Life episode on Charles Sanders' purse. We had read for that episode a third essay on a new list of categories, and we referred to it a little bit, but we didn't get into it. So we thought we should just read it. It is a nine page paper. And, you know, we have read this before and we have taken notes on it. There was been a few weeks, so I reserved the right to skip over things

0:44or if we think we know what's going on. But this was a pretty challenging paper, if I recall. Yeah, it's got a lot to it. You know, his aim is to derive some fundamental categories in the sort of tradition of Aristotle or Kant, but he's going to do it by, well, he's going to do it in a very Kantian sounding way, which is to derive categories by determining what conceptions are necessary to unify the manifold, right? Because the function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sense

1:21impressions to a kind of unity. So his criterion of the validity of these fundamental categories is whether consciousness can be unified without them. If consciousness can be unified without them, then they are not necessary and they have not been deducted. So this sounds a lot like a transcendental deduction, but it's going to look in its details very different from Kant's. Right. And it wasn't clear to me just in reading it as we'll get into it, what the stated point was with Aristotle to very clear. I'm doing metaphysics. What are the fundamental

1:56kinds of things? For Kant, it is how does the understanding condition us to make sense of experience? What are the fundamental concepts that we would need to bring in given that the manifold through sensibility has already been put into space and time? So we're not worrying about those, but beyond that causality and individuality and things like that are the sort of bare minimum that we would need to have a priori synthetic knowledge about the world of experience that he thinks we have.

2:30But purse gives us a much more truncated introduction and doesn't really tell us like, this is my system that I'm building. It's just, we'll just have to see if it is clear to us as we get into it. So this is from 1868, just to state the normal stuff. I'd like to do this in one chunk, even if we don't get through the whole paper, maybe we'll be excited about it. But I know you're about to go on vacation for a few weeks. So it seems like it would be annoying to have to

3:00come back to this weeks after this. I'd rather have this just be a self-contained part three to the Partially Examined Life episode that is 396. You know, you might be hearing this on the public Close Reads feed. Wonderful. You're going to hear a lot of ads if you're hearing that. You could go to instead patreon.com slash Close Reads Philosophy, hear exactly the same episode without paying us anything with no ads. So maybe you want to just take a few minutes to do that.

3:33We're not actually sure how long the public feed is going to be in operation or we're maybe moving it to somewhere else. Insofar as it continues to exist, we'd love if you just go give us a nice five-star review if you're getting things out of this just to help spread the word. That is the only function of the public feed. Yeah, if we do have part two, part three, part whatever, those will be on the Patreon as well under a paid membership, but you don't have to do that to get the part ones. All right, let's go. On a new list of categories, section one.

Conceptions and unifying experience

4:08This paper is based upon the theory already established that the function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous impressions to unity and that the validity of a conception consists in the impossibility of reducing the content of consciousness to unity without the introduction of it. All right, listeners who are confused about why conceptions are these unifying functions, right? If we use an empirical concept like dog just before we even get to the more abstract

4:40conceptions or categories of the kind that Kant brings in, right? Like causality or something like that. An empirical concept is a unification of much more granular sensory data that have been synthesized into an object. So for Kant, that synthesis wasn't just the bringing under a concept. It was synthesis in space and time and things like that. But in this case, what we're thinking of is the ways in which concepts unify our experience by bringing different particulars under them and by

5:16allowing us to say that a bunch of sense data belongs to one object, one unified thing.

5:24Yeah, I don't know what he means exactly by the theory already established, but we can take it as already established that any concept, right? An empirical concept, a transcendental concept, whatever. The whole point is that you have a bunch of different appearances and you want to unify them together somehow. You see a bunch of dogs, we have the word dog that unifies them, we have particular breeds of dogs to unify just that group. But then how does that go with the validity of a conception consists in the impossibility of reducing the content of consciousness unity without the introduction. So the idea

5:57if we're being scientific, you don't want to multiply entities without necessity. You don't want to multiply concepts without necessity. So what's the sort of the bare minimum? This sounds like one of those car nap sort of projects where we want to have a bare minimum set of concepts and somehow that would then you could derive anything else that you want to get out of it. So maybe we don't end up needing dog in our fundamental sense of concepts because that's going to somehow fall out of material object or

6:31something else. So the theory already established is Kant. He references Kant later on. And it's a transcendental deduction. So I don't think it's really about Occam's razor. It's about what is the groundwork for the possibility of experience? And transcendental goes backwards. If a concept is indispensable to unifying experience, then it's valid. And the kinds of concepts we can't deduce, even though I gave that example of an empirical concept like dog, we can't deduce dog. Sorry, God or dog? We can't deduce dog in this

7:02way. We're going to have to deduce much broader categories. And for him, it's going to be things like substance and being and so on. All right. Well, let's go on. Section two.

Gradation among universal conceptions

7:15This theory gives rise to a conception of gradation among those conceptions, which are universal. For one such conception may unite the manifold of sense, and yet another may be required to unite the conception and the manifold to which it is applied and so on. So that doesn't sound like a gradation to me. It sounds like a potentially troublesome, infinite series of you. So you've got a manifold and then you have I'm just going to keep using empirical

7:45concept just because they're easier to picture. You have something dog unites all of the different dogs. But what unites that concept dog to all the different dogs? Well, it seems like we need another concept or maybe a person or something who is thinking the word dog and applying it to all these things. We need a rule. OK, well, now we have that rule or a second degree concept. Well, what and what unites that to the first set of things? It's you know, this was an issue way back

8:16for Plato in the forms. So he's thinking in terms of predication. Right. And for Aristotle, the substance was just the subject. It could not be predicated of anything else in the properties with the things that could be predicated of the sub of the substance. So if you say something like X is F, where X is substance and F is the property, you have two concepts. You have two basic categories,

8:47substances and properties. But then there's the question of what he's going to call being third category, which is what's captured by the copula is. So the gradations here come in in that there's some way in which is seems to be perhaps higher in some way or maybe lower. I'm not exactly sure than the other two concepts. But yeah, is there's perhaps a hierarchy here or I mean, maybe I think

9:17hierarchy is probably the wrong way to think about it. Actually, I think he might just mean something like series because we're going to deduce them in order. He's going to kind of, it's almost very Hegelian. He tries to get them one at a time, right? One from the other. But yeah. And does gradation imply analog versus digital? I mean, I normally that's, you know, a gradient. That's, I was looking up gradients to come up with my zoom background. Yeah, it's interesting he would choose a word like that. Yeah. Cause we don't,

9:47yeah, we don't really get that. Or maybe we'll find out there, you know, there is a reason for that word, but yeah, it seems like we just get a few distinct categories. I mean, I guess it doesn't have to be analog, right? First grade, second grade, third grade, those are distinct grades. It's not like your student is almost, you know, unless it's a, I'm 12 and a half, you know, but you're a gradient, right? It is, is continuous. Sure. It does. It evokes a spectrum and rather than something quantum, but yeah, let's, let's see what happens here. Section three, that universal

The present and substance

10:20conception, which is nearest to sense is that of the present in general. This is a conception because it is universal, but as the act of attend act of attention has no connotation at all, but as the pure denotative power of the mind, that is to say the power, which directs the mind to an object in contrast distinction to the power of thinking any predicate of that object. So the conception of what is present in general, which is nothing but the general recognition of what is contained in attention has no connotation and therefore no property, proper unity. This

10:56conception of the present in general of it in general is rendered in philosophical language by the word substance in one of its meanings before any comparison or discrimination can be made between what is present. What is present must have been recognized as such as it. And subsequently the metaphysical parts, which are recognized by abstraction are attributed to this it, but the it itself cannot be made a predicate. This it is thus neither predicated of a subject nor in a

11:27subject and accordingly is identical with the conception of substance. So you can't call it a clown. It's not quite. It's not, it's, it's, it's, it is. That's right. Right. The, the, it, the clown cannot be predicated of anything. He can kill you, but he's, he's more like a process ontology murderous process. All right. So the, this does sound a lot like Aristotle's categories. This idea of substance is a thing that's not predicable of anything else, but we also get a kind of hint here of, of its coming. It's a matter

12:06of ostention and it's something propertyless, right? In Aristotle, the, the substance is going to turn out to be a kind of natural kind. I think here, it is just a bare X. It is this bare propertyless thing. And then interestingly, he wants to capture that by using a temporal idea of the present in general. Right. I think in Aristotle, the closest we got here was just to being right. Being has no predicates because it is larger than any predicate. A predicate is something that would cut up being

12:40into things, but, but we're going to see that actually the, it is not being right. I think that it is one side of the gradation and being ends up being the other side of the gradation, the other extreme. Uh, so this is, you know, it's, it's a phenomenalist concept, just the, the blooming, buzzing confusion, the, the raw sensory given before it is cut up, just given as the present. So I guess that's the only, if you're going to, can we say that it has a predicate in that

13:12it exists in the present, right? That, that is the way we're cutting up the world. We're saying at a given moment, the given that's, that is it. Or am I, you know what? I, I think I set us down the wrong path here. Maybe it's what is present to us, right? It's like the, the given is really what the present means there. But I, but I do think you're right. And maybe, maybe I was on the right track a little bit by pointing out the temporal aspect of that

13:44because that's what the given is, right? The given is supposed to be, um, right. Even time for Kant comes after what is given time is synthesized is woven into the manifold, but we should keep in mind that present. Yes. Just means what is given, although he's going to deny that there's, there's a given in the, um, early modern or Kantian sense. And right. If there's anything that's given is it's just this bare property list thing in a given moment to which we turn

14:17our attention, the denotative power of the mind he talks about is ostention. It's just bare ostention. There's something there. We point to it. We don't know yet, yet know it's properties until we can put an is F onto it. Right. And so we say it has some property and therefore it has no unity, right? The properties are the unifying things. And this is, I think this is worth noting. This is an interesting, interesting aspect of creating unities, which is that,

14:48right. If we unify the sense data of something into a dog with the concept dog, we are right. Creating a kind of unity across all the particulars dogs, the particulars that are dogs and that are the extension of that concept. But we are also grounding the unity of the particular dog because it's, it has unity by virtue of being a real kind of thing by really belonging to a concept. So we should keep, I think that in mind, but in any case, before we do the predicate, there's no

15:23proper unity to this X that is present to us. So just to remind people, or I don't want people to be confuse the denotation and the connotation, right? So when you pick out a set of things, if you just say, so the set of dogs, and I just point to all the dogs, that's the denotation I'm referring right now to, although actually it's, it seems like it should be a larger set because like, what about possible dogs? What about the dogs that aren't born yet? Am I referring to them? Well, the denotation

15:55is strictly, maybe we never used something in a purely denotative way to, to actually just pick out this set, but without any description. And that is all because a connotation would be giving the property. They're dogs. They have that, they're a real unity in the way you just described. So I'm, I'm, I'm saying for any X, if X has all these qualities that dogs have, or that dogs typically have, then it's a dog. So that's using, that's the normal way that we define anything, but you could also just say, you know, the concept not only just has the connotation,

16:28which would be instantiate, which would be, could be trivially true, even if there were no dogs on earth, right? All the dogs are dead, but I'm referring to a type of thing, centaurs or whatever we could refer to as a set that happens to be empty. So it has no denotation, but it has a connotation. So he's saying here that before you bring in any properties, we still want to refer to something, but it just had to be pure denotation, the it. The, the, the, the manifold.

16:57Yeah. So the connotation is what Frege called the sense and the denotation is what he called the reference. And when you're talking about more than one object, the connotation is what analytic philosophers call the intention and the denotative is the extension. In general, right? Russell thought that we, the, the sense was the means by which we denoted. The sense was the way we referred. We use definite descriptions to pick out things is the way they would always talk about

17:32it. Kripke challenged that and said, actually there's a, the definite descriptions do not help us pick things out. We pick them out beforehand and assume that there's some natural kind description to them, that there's some essence, and then we can investigate that essence. So in general though, I think, I don't know how this works now, but I think if you're going to pick out an extension of objects, right? A bunch of dogs, you need an intention to get your extension.

18:04In language. In language. Yes. Formal logic. And yeah. So I think that's good to write. This is kind of this kind of stuff that's in the background, analytic philosophy. And I mean, Frege was a contemporary of Pierce and I don't know how much cross-pollination there is, or if there's just convergent evolution or something, but I think these are the ideas that are floating around. So I'm still a little confused and how this is fitting in with Aristotle and Kant because

18:35the it here, right, which he says is one of the definitions of, of the word substance in one of its meanings is clearly not Aristotelian substance, which, you know, according to Locke is not something we see at all. Whereas this is supposed to be a phenomenal account. The, the given, this is what I was consigning qualia to in our main partial exam in life discussion is oddly enough, qualia, you think, you know, to what it's like to see red or something, but no, there is no, what it, there,

19:07there is no, that actually also involves all way already involves connecting it to other wreath red things, or at least if you think of it, as I think purse does as propositional in that you are identifying it as red or something like that. Whereas the initial moment, only lasting a moment flash of something that has no properties yet is that he's calling the it, right? This is, it's a raw phenomenal feel, but we can't even say what it's a feel of. It's purely ostensive, right? Because

19:42you were just saying you can't pick out with language. You can't pick out dogs except by describing them in some way, giving their genetic. Well, that's for Russell. This sounds maybe more Kripkean, right? That, that you could just point to, you know, that's how you could specify an extension. And that's, what's happening here is it's the given I'm here. I'm pointing to it. You can do it in your own phenomenology at any given moment of your life. Yeah. And just, just one more thing about Aristotle, we distinguish the categories where it is the case that he defines substance in terms of

20:20the thing that cannot be predicated of anything else, but has things predicated of it. That's the way he does it in the categories. And that's the way that, that Pierce seems to do it here in part in the metaphysics, he goes farther and, and, and goes maybe in a little bit of a different direction or he supplements this idea by equating substance with not just with the bare substrate, but with the essence, the natural kind of the thing, strangely enough, because you think might think of that as just another predicate. No, that is the substrate. So in a way it's almost like

20:55identifying sense under one description, under one kind of natural kind description, we get an identification of sense and reference, which it, which it goes even farther than saying that we, we need definite descriptions to pick things out, I think. So for Kant, is there even a conscious apprehension of this it? Because I thought for Kant, you know, theoretically there is some data that is coming in from the things in themselves, but then before we

21:26experience it at all, right, it experience is put together by applying the categories, applying the forms of sensibility. So there would be no sense in talking about the it in this way, in this, at least I'm attributing that Pierce is saying, this is a phenomenological thing, not merely a metaphysical, because the metaphysical has to be based on the phenomenological, right? On the, on experience.

21:52Yeah, we know that he's going to be against the myth of the given. So the it as the manifold is something that he criticizes elsewhere. In other words, right, and the Hegel made the same criticism, the manifold is a hopelessly confused idea, because there's already a many in it. And if to be a many, there must be many ones, there's already already a lot of categorical stuff right there in the manifold, if you even want to call it the manifold.

22:23We can't make coherent sense of a given, which doesn't have any form to it, to which then form is applied, even for Aristotle, right? The bronze sphere, the matter of it has to be something that itself already has a form under another description, unless we subscribe to Aristotle's prime matter, where it would be this completely indeterminate stuff that then we stamp, or not we for Aristotle, but that form gets stamped onto. So it's, yeah, it's hard to make sense, I think. I mean,

22:57I think you're right to point this out. It's hard to make sense of a bare X, a bare it, to which predicates then get applied in order to unify. But maybe he thinks he's avoiding the problem of the given here. I'm not sure. Section four, the unity to which the understanding reduces impressions,

Being and the unity of propositions

23:14is the unity of a proposition. This unity consists in the connection of the predicate with the subject, and therefore, that which is implied in the copula, or the conception of being, is that which completes the work of conceptions of reducing the manifold to unity. The copula, or rather the verb which is copula in one of its senses, means either actually is, or would be, as in the two propositions, there is no griffin, and a griffin is a winged quadruped. The conception of being contains only that junction of predicate to subject,

23:50wherein these two verbs agree. The conception of being, therefore, plainly has no content. All right, just before you go on there, because the stove is black, is going to be an interesting example. This is our second category, right? We started with substance, and now we're getting the category of being. And it's just this connection of predicate and subject, and it's contentless, just as it is for Hegel. It's just the bare idea of the connection of the substance to the predicate.

24:22All right, and now he's going to give us an example. Right, so we wanted to reduce the manifold to unity as the whole point of these whole things, but first category, there is no reduction at all. And here, the job is done. So he's giving us the extremes that somehow we're going to fill in the middle. But yes, so let's look, you know, the predication at all is reducing the manifold to some kind of unity. Right, he's going to call these the two poles, right? So yeah, it's the second category, but in a way, it's the last category, and everything else that he derives will come in

24:56between substance and being, in a sense. But yeah, go ahead. If we say the stove is black, the stove is the substance from which its blackness has not been differentiated. And the is, yeah. All right. I mean, this is already weird because we were saying the substance is the it, but now we're saying it's a stove. Well, isn't the stove have properties? Okay, but ignoring its stoveness, just considering something that we're identifying as being black, the stove is the substance from which its blackness has not been differentiated.

25:30And the is, while it leaves the substance, just as it was seen, explains its confusedness by the application to it of blackness as a predicate. This is a very peculiar sentence. So explains its confusedness means resolves its confusedness. If it's a manifold, it's just a buzzing confusion. So it's weird. Yes, the stove, it's odd, because again, we were picking this out with the word stove, which is a kind word, right? It's a kind of object. And yet he's acting as if,

26:09right, but then we're going to back up to the point where the particular stove picked out is actually not anything yet to us because we haven't predicated anything to us. It's just a buzzing confusion and it's blackness. The predication of something of that object resolves it. It gives it a property to resolve the confusion. But how strange is it to say it leaves the substance just as it was seen, but it explains its confusedness. So it's like the, the, what you actually see the qualia remain

26:45confused, but now we have a proposition about it. The proposition is not given by the qualia. It's not in the qualia. The qualia are just this nothing. You can't say anything about it, but now we have emerged from the qualia to actual thought to apply a predicate to it. Right. Though being does not affect the subject, it implies an indefinite determinability of the predicate. For if one could know the copula and predicate of any proposition as blank is a tailed man, he would

27:18know the predicate to be applicable to something supposable at least. Accordingly, we have propositions whose subjects are entirely indefinite, such as there is a beautiful ellipse where the subject is merely something actual or potential, but we have no propositions whose predicate is, whose predicate is entirely indeterminate, where it'd be quite senseless to say a has the common properties of all things in, in as much as there are no such common characters. The substance and being are the

27:48beginning and end of all conception. Substance is inapplicable to a predicate and being is equally so to a subject. Yes. Okay. So being is inapplicable to a subject in the sense it doesn't transform the subject, as he was saying. It tacks something on, but it doesn't get deep into the guts of the substance and alter the underlying substance, right? The manifold. But before that, we're talking about determinability. And I think the overall point of this is that you can't have any indeterminate

28:23predicates. This is kind of reminiscent of Aristotle's law of non-contradiction, where being itself can't be indeterminate. If you're asserting a predicate, it has to be, you know, it may be fuzzy to some extent, but we have the idea that we could keep elaborating and make it more specific if necessary. Yeah. I wonder if this is a logical or a psychological point, right? Psychologically, if he wants to say that actually part of our experience is the blooming, buzzing confusion.

28:55And as soon as we think something, we're actually sort of breaking away from raw experience, which is something that is the material component of, weren't you saying last time in our main discussion, the quality or the material component of the propositions? Is that right? Or what were they the material component of? You said this like three times in our discussion. So I, every time I brought up qualia, but it's escaping me, I'd have to remember which paper was it? Uh, one of the others.

29:30Okay. You're talking about the material quality of mental signs. Yeah. Yes. Okay. That's in, um, some consequences. So, uh, a feeling he'll say a feeling therefore is a feeling as a feeling is merely the material quality of the mental sign. And then that goes for qualia and in general.

29:48So that, well, so I'm just trying to relate that, relate that to this. So if we, if we have the indefinite subject, the it, and now I'm determining it by saying, let's not even say it's black. Let's just say it's a stove. I'm going to put it in that category of stove. So stove has to be determined. I mean, it can't, you can't say blah is blah. You can't say nothing that the indeterminate subject, I haven't yet made sense of it. That's all that would mean yet. If you can't actually, I'm not applying a predicate, but you cannot successfully apply an indeterminate predicate

30:21to something that would not make any sense at all. Uh, although is, could you, could you say that the manifold is right? That's what we're getting at here. He's saying, no, actually you can't that being, even though it is, is being truly indeterminate. Are we running into the same problems that Aristotle himself had right? Being ended up not being one of the categories because being a category, you actually have to be determined in some sense. Yes. It was not the Uber category as

30:57one might've thought. Right. Section five. The terms precision and abstraction, which were formally

Precision and abstraction

31:04applied to every kind of separation are now limited, not merely to mental separation, but to that which arises from attention to one element and neglect of the other. Exclusive attention consists in a definite conception or supposition of one part of an object without any supposition of the other. Abstraction or precision ought to be carefully distinguished from the two other modes of mental separation, which may be termed discrimination and dissociation. Discrimination has to do merely with the senses of

31:38terms and only draws a distinction in meaning. Dissociation is that separation, which in the absence of a constant association is permitted by the law of association of images. It is the consciousness of one thing without the necessary simultaneous consciousness of another. Abstraction or precision, therefore, supposes a greater separation than discrimination, but a less separation than dissociation. Thus, I can discriminate red from blue, space from color, and color from space,

32:12but not red from color. I can present red from blue and space from color, as is manifest from the fact that I actually believe there is an uncolored space between my face and the wall, but I cannot present color from space, nor red from color. I can dissociate red from blue, but not space from color, color from space, nor red from color. I remember this making some sense given the examples that he gives, but then it's really hard to keep these in mind very long. But, you know, discrimination you can

32:44you can get that, right? Any difference in meaning at all. So, we're not saying anything about the metaphysics whatsoever, right? So, red is distinct from color in that it is a different term. It means a different thing, but we can't say that metaphysically you could have red apart from color, though you can, of course, have color apart from red because there are other colors. Yeah. So, we, you know, I was, I was thinking, so precision is abstraction and it's going to be what later on, and I think it's going to be what gives us the predicate, basically. It gives us

33:20what he calls the ground, which turns out to be the predicate. And I was thinking, is this sort of like, is the distinction here, de re versus like meaning? The association would be these distinctions and meanings and precision would have to do with some sort of deep ontological difference. And I talked to Claude about this, and he's, he's thinking really of in what's in the scholastics or what Duns Scotus calls in parte te re. Basically, there's a real formal distinction between space and

33:54color, something like that. And the, anyway, I'm not gonna be able to explain this. I might have been able to explain this if we did it when we recorded it on the show. So, let's just leave that aside. But, you know, dissociation is more, it seems more about what's going on in the mind. Can you, can you separate these things mentally? Well, that's distinguishing. Distinguishing is about the mind. Dissociation. So, dissociate, those are the last two. And dissociation is supposed to be the most metaphysical of the three. So, I can, I cannot dissociate

34:26space from color, whereas I can prescind space from color. So, dissociation just means- Right. That actually turns out to be the de re thing. Yeah. Yes. Yep. This is the most metaphysical. Yep. Yep. Okay. They are in themselves, inseparable. All right. So, we'll just keep reminding ourselves of what these are, because it's really hard to keep them in mind. But right, he's just, he's defining this new word, precision. I mean, he could have just said abstraction, but I guess that's any of them are sort of abstraction. You

34:56know, that's just an ambiguous term, but he's trying to give us, you know, this middle ground between complete de re, dissociation, and complete de dicto, right? Complete in the mind, which is just distinguishing concepts. Although in that case, right, you could distinguish, can you dissociate? I'm just looking at the Fregeian examples, you know, the, the morning star and the evening star, Superman from Clark Kent. I guess you can dissociate those things because you can think one thing, as you were saying, it's like the Fregeian sense. You can

35:27certainly not, sorry, God damn it. You can discriminate those two things. You cannot dissociate those two things because they are one in the same. So how would, what would prescending say about this? Clearly there's either, either you can or you can't.

35:44Yeah. Let's just try to, let's go over these examples, right? So you, in the case of discrimination, where you get this distinction of meanings, I think we're, we're operating, operating on the level of connotation. Yep. And so that red, for instance, you can't comprehend red without color. Those are just analytically related ideas. And this would be de dicto inseparability, but I think you got it

36:15wrong. I can discriminate red from blue. Oh, sorry. No, no, I, you're right. I cannot discriminate red from color. So I'm wrong because discriminate, I thought was purely, it's a different concept and red and color are clearly different concepts. Yes. He's going to call this the weakest. It's just, yeah, some sort of analytical conceptual connection of meaning. Mm-hmm. Right. That you have to use, even though it's, it's a separate concept, you have to have

36:48color in the definition of red in any understanding of red, you have to have color in there. So therefore it's not, you cannot discriminate them. So like, so space and color, for instance, they're not, their meanings are not analytically related. They can be discriminated in the mind, but we can't, well, we can present in one direction, but not the other. We can't have color without space. We can have space without color, but we can't have color without space. But that's not

37:19a matter of an analytic connection. That's a matter of a direction of abstraction. Yeah. It's more about the world. All right. All right. Precision is not a reciprocal process. It is frequently the case that while A cannot be presented from B, B can be presented from A. We just gave the one about color. This circumstance is accounted for as follows. Elementary conceptions only arise on the occasion of experience. That is, they are produced for the first time, according to a general law,

37:50the condition of which is the existence of certain impressions. That's a weird sentence. All right. So this is just straight out of Kant. Concepts basically apply rules. Okay. And they assemble things according to a rule. So if you get some experience, if you get a bunch of impressions, then you get this rule or this general law that organizes them into a concept. Yeah. Okay. Now, if a conception does not reduce the impressions upon which it follows to unity,

38:24it is a mere arbitrary addition to these latter. And elementary conceptions do not arise thus arbitrarily. But if the impressions could be definitely comprehended without the conception, this latter would not reduce them to unity. Hence, the impressions or more immediate conceptions cannot be definitely conceived or attended to, to the neglect of an elementary conception which reduces them to unity. I mean, this sure sounds like Occam's razor to me. I'm not, I mean, but,

38:54but I guess that's... It's transcendental. It's just this transcendental argument. The grounds for the possibility of a unity. It's the constant deduction is just, you know, do we need them? Yes. Are they, uh, can we do unity without them or do we need them? If we need them, then they're legit, they're legit for our purposes. On the other hand, when, when such a conception has once been obtained, there is in general, no reason why the premises which have occasioned it should not be neglected. And therefore the explaining conception may frequently be prescinded from the more immediate ones and from the impressions. I would be extremely

39:28surprised if anyone listening to me read that sentence understood what it said. So the explaining conception may frequently be presented from the more immediate ones in the impressions. So what's a explaining conception? It could be, I think we have to think in terms of empirical concepts here. So we can prescind space from color, right? We can think of space without

40:00color, right? The more immediate ones are the color and the explaining conception is space. So you, you write the explaining conception is in terms of primary qualities. In other words, that's an easy way to think of this is primary and secondary qualities. You can prescind, in fact, that that's sort of this paradigmatic case of prescinding. You can prescind primary from secondary qualities, but not secondary from primary. That's why we, you know, early moderns tend to think of the primary

40:30qualities as sort of in things themselves, like we, but let's go, let's just back up a little bit. I like the idea of dealing with the examples here and color and space are great ones, but it, what you just said is not making sense to me of, it may frequently, so we're saying space can be prescinded from color, right? Because you can imagine it. Okay. Okay. So the explaining conception is space. And at the more immediate one, the impressions is color. I mean, you think you,

41:03you perceive color in space. So, but you don't perceive space itself. Like space is an abstraction. You have to think about, whereas color, at least a particular color is just giving right there impression. This is the asymmetry of prescindability, right? We do need, we can't have color without space. Okay. He's going to go on to give more examples, I think. Let's just make sure he's doing that. Uh, no. So let's just go, go over all these. So if when, with red and blue, right, they're discriminable, they can be discriminated because they're not analytical, analytically connection,

41:36but connected by meaning. Right. I have the blues only restroom. They're also, they don't, um, right. The blues, the, what's the next one? Prescinding. Precision. Precision and disassociation. Okay. So they can be dissociated, right? To imagine blue, we don't need to imagine red and vice versa. And they can be presented in the sense I can attend to one without attending to the, to the other. And then if you take

42:08space color, right, they're different in meaning, but they are necessarily associated. Okay. But I can present, right? So they are necessarily associated. So that actually complicates our, our picture. I can present color from space, not space from color, but they, but, but each is associated reciprocally with each other. Oh, what a mess. Why are they associated? I mean, they're just metaphysically linked. Right. Yeah. There are no, there is no non-colored

42:39space. Well, he says there is in reality. He says there is. Well, he says, I can think, I can think that there is clear a color. Yeah. I mean, if clear is not a color, then black shouldn't be a color either. How necessary is clarifying this to, because I think what we're going to do now is we're going to use precision to the asymmetry of precision to, to derive all the other categories. Yep. All right. So let's just take that as a given. Let's just keep going, I think.

43:15So, so just to, just to kind of give the overall idea here, right? When we predicate blackness, we're prescending. He thinks we, that we've got to abstract in order to get that blackness. We got to be able to think of it independently, oddly, in order to predicate it. So we, we, we think of properties usually as these dependent things, but he's going to call them the ground as we go forward. We abstract it. It becomes the, it becomes the ground of being, but. Right. Because it, because it makes the manifold definite. Hey, we're grounding a distinction of

43:50some sort. Uh, is it me? Six? I think it's me now. The facts now collected afford the basis for a

Systematic search for categories

43:58systematic method of searching out whatever universal elementary conceptions there may be intermediate between the manifold of substance and the unity of being. It has been shown that the occasion of the introduction of a universal elementary conception is either the reduction of the manifold of substance to unity or else the conjunction conjunction to substance of another conception. It has been shown. Yep. It is. It has further been shown that the elements conjoined can be supposed without the conception, whereas the conception can generally be supposed

44:32without these elements. This is where the asymmetry precision comes in, right? The conception is the precise thing, persist thing. Prescended. Prescended thing. We can think of that presented thing by itself as an abstract, right? Platonic form. But the elements are unthinkable by themselves. We need concepts to think of these elements, the manifold. All right. Now, empirical psychology discovers the occasion of the introduction of a conception, and we have only to ascertain what

45:06conception already lies in the data which is united to that of substance by the first conception, but which cannot be supposed without this first conception to have the next conception in order and passing from being to substance. Why bring in empirical psychology here if he was doing the purely Kantian thing? Yeah. We're in section six here. I'm just trying to look at my notes as well. So, yeah. So, he says, you know, we have these elementary conceptions. They either reduce the

45:39manifold to unity to give us an object, or they take that object and then they join it to another concept, right? Men are mortal. The manifold has been reduced to unity in man, but then we add the concept of mortality, which is actually maybe analytic. I don't know. So, we just have to find out what? The conception already united with the subject? The conception already, I don't know how this

46:14applies to what he's doing next. Lies in the data, which is united to that of substance by the first conception. I mean, I think he's trying to get at, right? How many steps, how many grades are we going to need between these extremes, I think is a good question here? And I don't know if the answer is infinitely many, right? I'm thinking of his triangle analogy that we talked about in the other, you know, that these are clearly asymptotal, that you don't simply apply, you don't really experience

46:49the unformed it. Do we actually experience the complete predication? I would think not that, you know, sort of per Lacan, you apply a concept to some part of experience, but then there's all this unsaid stuff that is the real, what Lacan called the real. So, it seems like that saying you could take the entirety of the manifold and unify it with a conception. All right, well, the conception

47:19being, that doesn't leave anything out, I don't think, but that's the only one, you know, that's an entirely empty one. Yeah, I think the idea is that we, are we on our way from substance to being? I'm not sure if that's exactly what it is, but we're using the asymmetry of precision, right? So, we're going to need, ultimately, he's going to give us three other categories of quality, relation, and representation. And we're going to need the, the precision is relevant here, because these are things that

47:52can be thought by themselves, but we can't think substance and being without them, something like that. We'll have to figure that out as we, as we go along. But it's still on that kind of transcendental track, where, you know, what are the, we have substance and being, what are the grounds for us being able to think about them? And those grounds will be quality, which is the ground, and then relation, or correlate, and then representation, or the interpretant.

48:23Just, there's a little, one more paragraph at the end of section six, it may be noticed that throughout this process, introspection is not resorted to. Nothing is assumed respecting the subjective elements of consciousness, which cannot be securely inferred from the objective elements. So, my, my attempt to make this whole thing phenomenological may be really wrong, because that sounds like it's introspection, that he's doing something that is more like logic. I mean, what do you think of that? Because it's not quite the same thing.

48:55You could be doing phenomenology, because phenomenology is about the intentional objects. Hmm. And he's saying, I'm not looking at the structure of my consciousness. Sure. I'm looking at the objects of consciousness. Yes, okay, okay, yes. I'm sorry, I'm confusing introspection with just empiricism, and he's definitely empiricist, so.

49:15Yep. All right. Okay. Section seven.

Quality as the first conception

49:19The conception of being arises upon the formation of a proposition. A proposition always has, beside a term to express the substance, another to express the quality of that substance. And the function of the conception of being is to unite the quality to the substance, right? X is F. Quality, therefore, the is is the being part. Quality, therefore, in its very widest sense, is the first conception in order in passing from being to substance. All right. So, what's connected, right? We have substance, the X. We have being,

49:54the is. Now we need the F. The F is the quality. We can't do without the F. We know it's a legitimate category. What would we do without the F? We really wouldn't have substance, or what sense does it make to say X and is without the F? That's the deduction. Okay. And, of course, the particular quality could be black or could be is a stove or any number of these things. But because we're doing general categories, we're just going to say quality,

50:24right? That's at least one that Aristotle and Kant have in common. Yeah. Quality seems, at first sight, to be given in the impression. Seems to be in the given, so to speak. Such results of introspection are untrustworthy. A proposition asserts the applicability of immediate conception to a more immediate one. See, I hate this. I hate this. Again, I don't think I was crazy in thinking that just empirically reporting your experience amounts to introspection, right? Quality seems to be given

50:58in the impression. Yeah. Whether he can say this is not introspective, I don't. You can say you're attending to the objects, but you seem to be attending to more than that. So, a proposition asserts the applicability of immediate conception to a more immediate one. Since this is asserted, the more immediate conception is clearly regarded independently of this. The more immediate. This is really hard to pronounce these. I thought I said that. Did I not say that? It just sounded like the more immediate. Yeah. So, the more immediate conception is the quality, the property. Okay. So, that's,

51:34is clearly regarded independently of the circumstance. The immediate one is the X. Okay. For otherwise, the two conceptions would not be distinguished, but one would be thought through the other without this latter being an object of thought at all. Are you sure he's not talking about the trope? So, the green in general is the immediate conception. The immediate conception is the green trope, if I'm using that word correctly. In other words, the instance, this particular green that

52:04I'm immediately in touch with. Yeah. I think what he's saying is that you can't have green tropes be the grounds of the green, of green, the abstraction. Yes. Green, the abstract, it runs the other way. To get the green tropes, we have to start with the green abstraction. That's the whole point of the section, I think, is that we're not assembling the sense, you know, we're not, well, aren't we though? Aren't we getting sense data and then

52:36abstracting from them? Let's see. Let's just go over this carefully. The immediate conception, which is the quality, the property, is regarded independently of the circumstance, the immediate. Otherwise, the two conceptions would not be distinguished. Right. There's a reason why we're distinguishing the X and the F, the object and the applied concept. Well, or this green, which is the object that is green versus greenness in general. Yeah. I don't know about the tropes here.

53:09Okay. Although you might convince me, but one would be thought through the other without this ladder being an object of thought at all, this ladder, which is the immediate conception. Right. So if you said that, contra what you're just saying, you don't need the general concept of green, but you just have the trope green and through, you know, maybe a Platonist might say this, that all we actually perceive is this trope green here. And we don't even have to think of the form

53:44green, but what an analyst would come along and say, ah, you know, it actually, you're only, it's only possible for you to think of that as green if you are, you know, connecting it to the other greens. Well, let's, let's move on to his example. The immediate conception then in order to be asserted to be applicable to the other must first be considered without regard to the circumstance and taken immediately, but taken immediately, it transcends what is given the more immediate conception and its applicability to the ladder is hypothetical. Take for example, the proposition,

54:16the stove is back, back, the stove is back in town. Sorry. The stove is black here. The conception of the stove is the more immediate that of black, the more immediate, right? So that when he's referring to the stove, right, he, remember he was talking about the contentless present substance, even though he's using this word stove to pick it out, I would really just say the conception of the axe,

54:46but the conception of the stove of the axe is more immediate, that of the black more immediate, sorry, that of the black more immediate, which latter to be predicated to the former must be discriminated from it and considered in itself, not as applied to an object, but simply as embodying a quality blackness. Sure. So it has to be presented in order to be thought, and it has to be presented as something separate, right? The object, in order to think of blackness, the object can't come along

55:22with the blackness. Otherwise, it wouldn't be blackness anymore. Maybe that's the best way to put it. Now, this blackness is a pure species of abstraction, and its application to the stove is entirely hypothetical. This is like saying it's a contingent property. The stove might not be black, could be other things. The same thing is meant by the stove is black, as there is blackness in the stove. Embodying blackness is the equivalent of black. Okay, before we go to the proof, does that, are you in agreement? Yeah, I don't see a problem there.

56:00It seemed, I'm not sure why, what, how this helps. Why saying there is blackness in the stove? Is that, is the, the different syntax of that supposed to be getting at, you know, just that, okay, just that blackness is the quality, the platonic, you know. Right. So the ontology here is that it's not that there are these predicates, which, right, the prop, Aristotle's properties, which only exist only insofar as they are in the substance. Right. It's a very scholastic, duns-godis thing, I think,

56:34where we need some sort of ontological independence. In fact, they're going to be the grounds, right? Maybe they're even more basic. We, we need these at a more basic metaphysical level in our system. So in order to make sense of this, because otherwise, at least from the point of view of abstraction, right, they wouldn't be thinkable if they were just joined to the hip with objects. If objects and properties were just Siamese twins, then conceptually, we'd never, never be able to get

57:07the property away from the object and the property wouldn't be the property. It would just be, confused in there with, with stoveness. So we need blackness as something presented, abstract, ontologically fundamental. All right, let's, let me just get to the end of the section, then we can stop. These conceptions are applied differently to precisely the same facts. If therefore they were different, the one which was first applied would fulfill every function of the other so that one of them would be superfluous. Now, superfluous conception is an arbitrary

57:42fiction, whereas elementary conceptions arise only upon the requirement of experience so that a superfluous elementary conception is impossible. Moreover, the conception of a pure abstraction is indispensable because we cannot comprehend an agreement of two things except as an agreement in some respect. And this respect is such a pure abstraction as blackness, such a pure abstraction reference to which constitutes a quality or general absent attribute may be termed a ground reference to a

58:14ground cannot be presented from being, but being can be presented from it. Let's see if we remember what that last bit means. So you could think of being without thinking of the ground. There could be being without this particular blackness, but blackness is something that something that is. So you cannot present being from it. Well, no, say that being, it's the other way around. So we can't think of being

58:44without the qualities, without the grounds. You know, we, we need the X, X is, is not enough, right? Yes. Yes. Cause right. So we need to, we need to get to the predicate is, is the, the ground of all this. And now we can think of the predicates without the X's and the is's according to him, right? That's why they're the ground. They, we can present the immediate circumstance. We don't, to think of redness, uh, we don't have to think of, uh, it seems to him, it seems what he's saying

59:15is particularly red objects, but to think of particular objects, we have to think of them under some description as Davidson would put it. We need some description like red or black or whatever to get, to talk about particulars, but we can talk about properties or universals without talking about the particulars. All right. So one might, I don't know if that's right, but one might think that we're done because we had the multi, the manifold that was not predicated. We were trying to get to the end, to the being where being is sort of all the way predicated. How do you do that?

59:47Well, you need quality. There you go. You, you made the jump, but he's going to give us two more steps that somehow the very act of predicating is going to require, as he just hinted at the beginning, some intermediary between the subject and the predicate. And then we're going to need one more, which ends up being called an interpretant that we can get into. So yes, we do have to do another hour of this. Hopefully I think we're halfway through actually pretty much, believe it or not. 2,000 words through a 4,000 word thing. Yep. All right. So I'm glad we,

1:00:21you know, this is probably better. We went, we're much more careful than we would be doing if this was a normal part three or, you know, tried to fit this in the last 20 minutes. See, this is what I, this is what I want to be doing on the show. Well, here we are doing it. And we don't have to have Seth being impatient with us. Yeah. Guys, can we just get back to the text? We're reading it. We literally just read it out loud. All right. Bye everybody. Thanks. Bye.

1:01:08Bye. Bye.