Virtual Peirce

Posted on May 30, 2010
Filed Under Peirce, Philosophy | 2 Comments

Since the early 90′s at least the word “virtual” has become a buzz word. Since The Matrix it’s entered into common venacular and been applied to virtual worlds (video games like Halo or more social sites like Second Life) However it’s also had a fair use within philosophy as well. The idea goes back at least to Duns Scotus and was picked up by Charles Sanders Peirce in his mature philosophy. Typically “virtual” is used to apply to something non-actual but which acts as if it were actual.

Peirce developed arguably the most useful sense of signs. While neglected through much of the 20th century his use became significant again in the late 20th century as semiotics became important. For Peirce a sign is something standing for someone as something in some respect. That is the sign stands for its object and creates something (the interpretant) in someone. (Peirce conceived of semiotics more broadly, but thinking in terms of human minds is the easiest way to get up to speed on semiotics)

For Peirce all thoughts are signs but no present actual thought has any meaning. It’s meaning is always in terms of what the sign determines in the person (or their environment). Thus meaning is deferred to the future. As such the meaning is for Peirce virtual in that it is not present and actual when the thought takes place. An other way to think of it is that meaning is incomplete and is organically evolving.

I do not say that we are ignorant of our states of mind. What I say is that the mind is virtual, not in a series of moments, not capable of existing except in a space of time – nothing in so far as it is at any one moment. (CP 2:192)

Anything that is incomplete in this sense is virtual. While Peirce did accept elements of phenomena that were present to the mind it seems that the most important aspects were virtual. Further signs generate new signs. This semiotic process is always ongoing and thus we never reach an end to semiotics. We may reach a point of stability in which the forces (signs) determining interpretants are stable in their production.

The absolute actuality of a thought is what Peirce call’s its felling. (What it is purely within itself) However meaning is about regularities (stabilities in thought) and thus must be repeatable.

No thought in itself, then, no feeling in itself, contains any others, but is absolutely simple and unanalyzable; and to say that it is composed of other thoughts and feelings, is like saying that a movement upon a straight line is composed of the two movements of which it is the resultant; that is to say, it is a metaphor, or fiction, parallel to the truth. …Whatever is wholly incomparable with anything else is wholly inexplicable, because explanation consists in bringing things under general laws or under natural classes. Hence every thought, in so far as it is a feeling of a peculiar sort, is simply an ultimate, inexplicable fact. Yet this does not conflict with my postulate that that fact should be allowed to stand as inexplicable; for, on the one hand, we never can think, “This is present to me,” since, before we have time to make the reflection, the sensation is past, and, on the other hand, when once past, we can never bring back the quality of the feeling as it was in and for itself, or know what it was like in itself, or even discover the existence of this quality except by a corollary from our general theory of ourselves, and then not in its idiosyncrasy, but only as something present. But, as something present, feelings are all alike and require no explanation, since they contain only what is universal. So that nothing which we can truly predicate of feelings is left inexplicable, but only something which we cannot reflectively know. So, that we do not fall into the contradiction of making the Mediate immediable. Finally, no present actual thought (which is a mere feeling) has any meaning, any intellectual value; for this lies not in what is actually thought, but in what this thought may be connected with in representation by subsequent thoughts; so that the meaning of a thought is altogether something virtual. … At no one instant in my state of mind is there cognition or representation, but in the relation of my states of mind at different instants there is. In short, the Immediate (and therefore in itself unsusceptible of mediation — the Unanalyzable, the Inexplicable, the Unintellectual) runs in a continuous stream through our lives; it is the sum total of consciousness, whose mediation, which is the continuity of it, is brought about by a real effective force behind consciousness. (CP 5.289).

Representation and meaning are always virtual in that they are the repetitive regularities in experience that allow us to deal with general aspect within life.

. . .the object of a sign, that to which it, virtually at least, professes to be applicable, can itself be only a sign. For example, the object of an ordinary proposition is [a] generalization from a group of perceptual facts. It represents those facts. These perceptual facts are themselves abstract representatives, though we know not precisely what intermediaries, of the percepts themselves; and these are themselves viewed, and are,—if the judgment has any truth,—representations, primarily of impressions of sense, ultimately of a dark underlying something, which cannot be specified without its manifesting itself as a sign of something below. There is, we think, and reasonably think, a limit to this, an ultimate reality like a zero of temperature. But in the nature of things, it can only be approached, it can only be represented. The immediate object which any sign seeks to represent is itself a sign. (MS 599:36–37 [c. 1902]; cf. NEM 4:309–310)

Related posts:

  1. Sartre’s Existentialism and the Meaning of Life
  2. Peirce on Universals
  3. Peirce on Limiting the Pragmatic Maxim
  4. Meaning of Life?
  5. Language, Externalism and Meaning
  6. Peirce, Heidegger and Ready at Hand

Comments

2 Responses to “Virtual Peirce”

I’ve been enjoying your blog. I’m learning a lot.

I wonder if you know how much direct and/or indirect influence Peirce had on Heidegger.

Thanks, Baxter Wood

None as far as I can tell – Heidegger didn’t think much of Americans.

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