International Phenomenological Society

A Misunderstanding of Peirce's Phenomenology

Author(s): Joseph Ransdell
Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Jun., 1978), pp. 550-553
Published by: International Phenomenological Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2106579 .
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 DISCUSSION

A MISUNDERSTANDING OF PEIRCE'S PHENOMENOLOGY

Paul Tibbetts' "Peirce and Mead on Perceptual Immediacy and

Human Action"' exhibits a thoroughgoing misunderstanding of the
nature of Peirce's phenomenology, and indeed of phenomenology in
general, I should think. Consider Tibbetts' initial characterization of
Peirce's view:2
According to Peirce, phenomenology or "phaneroscopy" is the descriptive
science of what is immediately given in perceptual experience prior to
evaluation, reflective analysis, and even questions of validity or falsity. As
Peirce writes, "Phaneroscopy is the description of the phaneron; and by
the phaneron I mean the collective total of all that is [ in any way or ] in
any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds
to any real thing or not." (CP 1.284) Not unlike its European counterpart,
Peirce's phenomenology "just contemplates phenomena as they are,
simply opens its eyes and describes what it sees; not what it sees in the real
as distinguished from figment - not regarding any such dichotomy - but
simply describing the object, as a phenomenon, and stating what it finds
in all phenomena alike." (CP 5.37)
[The bracketed phrase was omitted in Tibbetts' quotation.]
Let us compare what Tibbetts says about Peirce with what Peirce
himself says in the passages quoted.
(1) Tibbetts says Peirce's phenomenology is the descriptive
science of what is immediately given in perceptual experience. But
what Peirce says is that it is concerned with "all that is in any way or
in any sense present to the mind," which certainly includes for him
both what is immediately and what is mediately "given" or present.
For the phenomenon universally contains Thirdness or mediation
(i.e., inference, representation, semiosis), and therefore contains
what is mediated as well as the immediate. If there should be any
doubt on this it can be settled by reading further in the paragraph in
Peirce from which the second quotation is taken: "I will not restrict
[phenomenology] to the observation and analysis of experience but
extend it to describing all the features that are common to whatever is
experienced or might conceivably be experienced or become an ob-
ject of study in any way direct or indirect." (CP 5.37)3 If the term "im-
l This journal, Vol. XXXVI, No. 2 (Dec. 1975), pp. 222-232.
2 Ibid, p. 222.
1 Italics in the original. Peirce's emphasis here
on the distinction between ex-
perience and that which is experienced is due to the fact that he is here comparing
his idea of phenomenology with that of Hegel, whom he regards as not
distinguishing between being and being represented, i.e., between the object and
the thought about the object.

550

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 A MISUNDERSTANDING OF PEIRCE'S PHENOMENOLOGY 551

mediately given" has any application within Peirce's philosophy, it

can refer only to what he calls "Firstness," which is but one of three
basic elements which Peirce claims to find universally present in the
phenomenon, "so inextricably mixed together that no one can be
isolated." (CP 1.286)
(2) Tibbetts speaks of "perceptual experience," and it is clear
from the sequel that the term "perceptual" is not merely being used
redundantly here but means for him specifically sensory perceptual
experience. But as is clear in the above quotations, Peirce is talking
about any experience, of which sensory perception is only one kind. I
suspect that if it were not for this confusion Tibbetts would not have
written his paper at all, since it then would have been obvious to him
that he cannot validly compare Peirce's explanation of the nature of
the science of phenomenology and its subject matter with Mead's
analysis of sensory perception, which is a quite different topic.
(3) Tibbetts says phenomenology is the descriptive science of
what is "prior to evaluation, reflective analysis, and even questions of
truth and falsity," by which he seems to mean that phenomenology
does not concern itself with any of these phenomena. Apparently,
Tibbetts has taken certain of Peirce's characterizations of the
phenomenological "attitude" or perspective, restated it in his own
vague terms, and then misconstrued that into a characterization of
the subject matter of phenomenology. In any case, what we have
here, again, is Tibbetts' mistaken belief that phenomenology is sup-
posed to be concerned with some sort of "immediately given"
material. What he does not understand is that, in the passages he
quotes, Peirce is simply saying that the phenomenologist is concerned
with what is called nowadays the intentional object of consciousness,
without regard to its actual existential status. In other words, Peirce is
talking about what Husserl called "bracketing," or the dropping of
the "naturalistic" attitude, which shift in perspective is supposed to
yield the phenomenon as such.
There is little point in tracing out the results of these
misunderstandings in any detail. Having confused phenomenology
with its subject matter, Tibbetts identifies the meaningless result of
this with an isolable, prereflective awareness of pure firstness present
in sensory perception prior to its interpretational aspect, all of which
leads him finally to the claim that Peirce held to the view that in-
ference and expectation cast a "distorting influence on immediate
perceptual experience."4 Now Tibbetts does not merely mean that in-
ference is liable to error, which Peirce would hardly deny, but rather
that it is somehow essentially "distorting." Essentially distorting of
4 Ibid., p. 229, italics in the original.

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552 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

what? Inference is sign-interpretation or semiosis, which is one of the

categories or constituting elements in all experience, according to
Peirce's phenomenology, which means that there is no "immediate
perceptual experience" to distort-the very phrase is self-
contradictory within his philosophy.
Apparently, the reason Tibbetts thinks there is some essential
distortion is to be found in the following passage from Peirce, quoted
in the earlier part of his paper:
What the world was to Adam on the day he opened his eyes to it, before
he had drawn any distinctions, or had become conscious of his own ex-
perience-that is first, present, immediate, fresh: new, initiative,
original, spontaneous, free, vivid, conscious, and evanescent. Only, re-
member that every description of it must be false to it. (CP 1.357)5
The last sentence, taken apart not only from the context of Peirce's
philosophy in general but from the rest of the passage in which it is
embedded, might well mislead someone into thinking that Peirce
regards a description of a "First" (which would be an abductive con-
clusion) as essentially a distortion of it. But Tibbetts himself
recognizes that "Firstness itself cannot be an object of cognition or,
alternatively, propositional knowledge,"6 and yet does not seem to
realize this means that Peirce cannot hold that inference distorts it.
What Peirce means is that it is not the sort of thing which can be
described at all. Thus he says in the same passage:
It cannot be articulately thought: assert it, and it has already lost its
characteristic innocence; for assertion always implies a denial of some-
thing else. Stop to think of it, and it has flown! (CP 1.357)
Now this is a somewhat literary way of expressing a logical point, but
Peirce has a right to this because he had previously expressed the
point at issue in a strictly philosophical way in his 1867 paper "On a
New List of Categories." (CP 1.545-559) In that essay, which is
foundational in his phenomenology and therefore in his philosophy in
general, Peirce so analyzed the structure of predication as to show
that the logical role of a quality of First is that of a "ground" of
predication than that of an object of which something is predicated."
Roughly, what this means in non-Peircean terms is that, insofar as a
First functions logically, it does so as that which is connoted by the
predicate term of a proposition, rather than as that which is denoted
by the subject term. In short, they do not function as the objects of

p. 223.
5Ibid.,
6
Loc. cit.
7 The foundational status of this essay in Peirce's philosophy is well
documented by William L. Rosensohn in his The Phenomenology of Charles S.
Peirce (Amsterdam: B. F. Griiner), 1974, pp. 31-32.

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 A MISUNDERSTANDING OF PEIRCE'S PHENOMENOLOGY 553

thought.8 This is precisely what distinguishes Peirce's analysis from

the sort of sense-data phenomenalism which holds that the data are
the ultimate objects of knowledge, whether it be "knowledge by ac-
quaintance" or "knowledge by description." Tibbetts has, in effect,
imputed just such a phenomenalism to Peirce, though quite
mistakenly.
JOSEPH RANSDELL.
TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY.

8 Except in the case of second-order predication, wherein "hypostatic abstrac-

tions" become the object of thought. But this involves symbolic mediation and is
not, in any case, the sort of judgment Tibbetts is concerned with in his paper. For
discussions by Peirce of the nature of hypostatic abstraction see the following
passages in the Collected Papers: 1.83, 2.357, 2.364, 2.428, 3.642, 4.531, 5.162,
5.534.

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