‘… a sort of composite photograph’: Pragmatism, Ideas, and Schematism.

by Christopher Hookway

1. Introduction

Around 1898, Peirce wrote that an idea ‘can be roughly compared to a

composite photograph’. (CP 7.498) [1] A few years later, he urged that the
predicate “yellow” refers to ‘a sort of composite photograph of all the yellows
I have seen.’ (CP 7.634) Indeed, a predicate expression ‘only conveys its
signification by exciting in the mind some image, or, as it were, a composite
photograph of images.’ (CP 2.317) This metaphor is employed on many
occasions – I have found many instances dating from 1893 (CP 2.435ff) until
1908. Moreover it is not applied only to simple sensory ideas such yellow:
Peirce’s own examples include moral ideals, and he went so far as to claim
that all the operations of the intellect consist in taking ‘composite photographs
of quale consciousness’. (CP 6.233)

This metaphor, that an idea is a sort composite photograph, seems to have

been very important to Peirce: he employed it on many occasions over a period
of at least fifteen years; and there is no evidence that he was ever dissatisfied
with it. It is reasonable to conclude that he found it useful for capturing some
important features of cognition. This makes it surprising that it has received
little scholarly attention. [2] What makes the metaphor so suggestive? To what
features of cognition does it draw our attention? Although I do not pretend to
give the final word on this topics, this paper makes a start on formulating the
issues they raise and explaining why they are important for understanding
Peirce’s thought.

The concept of a composite photograph may be less familiar now than it was in
the late nineteenth century. It is striking that although Peirce uses it on many
occasions, he never sees any need to explain just what it means. Section two
explains the concept of a composite photograph, one that had wide currency in
scientific circles at the time at which Peirce was writing. We then examine a
selection of the passages in which Peirce uses the concept in order to explain
the nagture of how general terms and concepts function (section three). This
prepares for a discussion of the role of the concept in Peirce’s defense of his
pragmatism (section four) and some of its connections with an important
aspect of what Peirce learned from Kant (section five). The concluding section
offers a conjecture of just what the force of this metaphor or analogy was. This
will enable us to identify some features that composite photographs must
possess if they are to meet Peirce’s philosophical needs. We can then turn to
some crucial interpretative issues. What does Peirce hope to gain from the
claim that ideas are photographs? What additional insight is promised by the
claim that they are composite photographs? And just what does it mean to say
that an idea is ‘composite’ in this way?

One reason that this issue is interesting is that it has a bearing on Peirce’s
search for a proof of pragmatism that preoccupied him in the first decade of
the twentieth century. I suspect that the appeal of the metaphor depended on
the fact that it captured something that was central to pragmatism: if the
metaphor can indeed be made good, then the shape of the proof of pragmatism
may become much clearer. Richard Robin once commented that Peirce’s search
for a proof ‘is neither inductive nor deductive. Nor is it transcendental. Rather
it has that special character related to a coherentist defence, which in itself is
a reflection of an underlying architectonic conception of philosophy’. [3] This
seems right. As Robin records, it is easier to assemble the many elements of
Peirce’s philosophy that were relevant to the proof than to fit all the pieces
together. It is characteristic of such a ‘coherentist’ defence that we need
metaphors to keep a grip on the whole while assembling the parts and
attempting to find the detailed ways in which they should be connected. The
metaphors are especially valuable when they reflect the traces of other large
philosophical systems, enabling us to identify tasks that arise within other
systems of philosophical architectonic whose inspiration we wish to
acknowledge but whose details, we think, involve mistaken conceptions. The
metaphor of a composite photograph, I shall suggest, serves these two roles. It
makes vivid some of the requirements for an adequate defence of pragmatism,
and it enables Peirce to acknowledge some links between his system of
architectonic and Kant’s.

2. Composite photographs

The Century Dictionary provides a very clear definition of ‘composite

photograph’:

A single photographic portrait produced from more than one subject. The
negatives from the individuals who are to enter faces are made as to show the
faces as nearly as possible of the same size and lighting and in the same
position. These negatives are then printed so as to register together upon the
same piece of paper, each being exposed to the light for the same fraction of
the full time required for printing. It is believed that by study and comparison
of such photographs made from large series of subjects, types of countenance,
local, general, etc can be obtained. (1152)

The technique is most commonly associated with the statistician and eugenicist
Francis Galton, who produced composite photographs to display the common
characteristics of criminals and of members of learned organizations. According
to an article by Joseph Jastrow in Science, the process was employed to find a
solution to two problems. First: ‘Given a series of objects having in common
an interesting characteristic, to find a single type which will represent the
whole group.’ (p.165) And second: ‘given a series of representations of the
same object, to find a single representation which shall give a superior effect
by combining the strong points and neglecting the defects, of each of the
series.’ The second case is illustrated by considering ‘the composite of six
medallion heads of Alexander the Great’, which ‘might be taken to represent
the real Alexander better than any one of the originals, because the probability
of the six artists having introduced the same inaccuracy is very small’. When
we address the first problem, however, ‘we are introducing an essentially new
face, - a type representing par excellence the peculiar characteristic for which
the originals were grouped together.’ Using examples that reflect Galton’s
innovative work, he points out that ‘In combining the portraits of criminals, the
object is get a type of criminality; in combining the portraits of national
academicians, one of recognized scientific ability.’ [4]

The fact that Jastrow wrote this 1885 article means that there can be
no doubt of Peirce’s familiarity with the techniques described. Jastrow
attended Peirce’s logic classes at Johns Hopkins in 1882-3 (W4: lv), claiming
that they gave him his ‘first real experience of intellectual muscle’. (W4: xliii)
The classic paper they wrote together, ‘On small differences in sensation’ (W5:
122-35) appeared in 1885, the same year (and in the same journal) as Jastrow’s
paper on composite photography. Moreover when Peirce delivered an early
draft of their joint paper at meetings of the National Academy of Sciences in
October 1884, he also participated in discussions of a paper ‘On an
experimental composite photograph of the members of the academy’. [5] (W4:
xxxv) There can be no doubt of what Peirce had in mind when he wrote of
‘composite photographs’ a decade later.

A composite photograph promises to provide a sort of stereotype: a single

representation that somehow captures the common features of all the
particular ones. A contemporary example helps to make this clear. The
photographer Nancy Burson attempted to capture the differences in ideals of
female beauty characteristic of the 1950s and 1980s. Her ‘First Beauty
Composite’ combined Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren
and Marilyn Monroe; and the representation of beauty from the 1980s
composed Jane Fonda, Jacqueline Bisset, Diane Keaton, Brooke Shields, and
Meryl Streep. [6] As Terry Landau notes, the results do seem to ‘capture and
epitomize the differences in the ideal of the 1950s and of the 1980s’:
registering, for example, ‘the arched eyebrows and heavily made up mouth of
the fifties beauty versus the more “generic” natural look of the eighties’. [7]
Of course the results will be influenced heavily by the choice of subjects and
by the means by which the photographs are combined: once an artist such as
Burson uses a computer rather than the simple photographic techniques
advocated by Galton and his followers, there is no temptation to regard the
results as an innocent combination of effects of light on lens and film. There
probably never was any such temptation. Jastrow was clearly aware of how
results are affected by just how the different faces are lined up, and observed
that features from male photographs tended to dominate in composites of
subjects of different sexes. The prevalence of facial hair and differences in
dress were contributing factors, he suggested. (166)

It is not surprising that the most interesting examples of composite

photographs involve faces: if I try to combine photographs of every house I
have every seen, or every mammal, it is hard to see why anything interesting
or revealing should result. Most likely we would find simply a formless and
undifferentiated mess. So the suggestion that composite photographs could be
found that correspond to all our ideas cannot be taken seriously. Galton
himself was aware of this. As he admitted in his book Inquiries into Human
Faculty [8] , his attempts to construct ‘really representative faces of ‘the
criminal type’ were unsuccessful. While the results displayed someone ‘of
mean description’ it did not capture the essence of ‘villainy’. They resembled
many non-criminals more closely than they resembled many or most criminals;
they had ‘no villainy written on them’. Galton himself seems to have concluded
that there may be different types of villainy, his disappointing results thus
being attributed to the fact that he tried to find a common factor to all these
different types. His editor, Karl Pearson, urged, surely more plausibly, that
villainy is a mental characteristic which need not be associated with any
particular physical features, and hence would not show up in photographs. It
seems to be agreed that illuminating composite photographs will be found for
only a limited range of ideas. [9]

We must distinguish the claim that an illuminating composite photograph can

be constructed for some idea from the thesis that our possession of such ideas
or concepts can be explained by saying that we possess appropriate ‘composite
photographs’ – more strictly that we possess things that are strongly analogous
to composite photographs. Perhaps we use composite photographs as a
‘template’ or stereotype in applying concepts – or in applying at least some
concepts. Perhaps we recognize people or types by comparing them with a
stored schema or template, with a stored ‘composite’. How this could work
may be mysterious, but the quotations from Peirce suggest just such a view.
Moreover, we should note that Jastrow is most famous in contemporary
philosophy as the originator of the duck-rabbit ambiguous figure. Perhaps we
turn the duck into a rabbit figure by bringing to bear an appropriate visual
template, our rabbit composite taking the place of our duck one. If we need
such templates or schemata to explain our use of concepts that are applied to
things on the basis of how they look, and if we think that they must be the
results of our earlier experiences of ducks and rabbits, then perhaps the
composite photograph analogy has some explanatory value. It might explain
how we can see something as a rabbit. Even in cases like rabbit, we would
surely need a set of templates which would enable us to recognize rabbits from
different directions, when engaged in different kinds of behaviour and so on.
And Galton’s suggestion that we may need different composites that apply to
different cases – to different kinds of ducks, for example – may also have to be
endorsed. This paper is concerned with passages in which Peirce appears to
endorse this strong thesis.

3. The Short Logic: composite photographs and general terms

Armed with an understanding of what composite photographs are, we can turn

to the passages in which Peirce uses the notion. We begin with the earliest use
of the metaphor with which I am familiar, a discussion in the Short Logic of
around 1895 (see CP 2.435-441; also in EP2: chapter 3). Peirce has just
explained the central ideas of his theory of signs and introduced one of his
most important classifications of signs. This distinguishes symbols from
indexical signs and icons, and he is returning to his familiar claim that an
adequate language for expressing thoughts must employ signs of all three
kinds. The section we are concerned with was subtitled ‘Judgments’ – it is
concerned with the content of judgments and assertions. A judgment or
assertion is an act, and Peirce tells us that it always involves the judgment or
assertion that ‘two different signs have the same object’ (CP 2.437, EP2: 20). I
‘cause an image or icon to be associated … with the object represented to us
by an index.’ When I see someone and judge them to be a rascal, I use an index
(perhaps a demonstrative or a name) to pick the person out, and I apply a
general idea or concept to them. For the assertion to be true, the person
picked out by my indexical sign must be identical to one of the objects of the
concept of a rascal. As we have seen, Peirce holds that the general concept
(rascal in this case) takes the form of an ‘image or an icon’.

Other examples exhibit the same pattern. Even if I say ‘It rains’, which
does not appear to involve demonstrative reference, the concept of raining is
applied to an indexically identified time (and, presumably, a place): the rain is
predicated of now and here. (CP 2.438, EP2: 20) In fact things are more
complex than these examples allow: most propositions will involve a set of
indices, and the iconic representation will apply to that set.
Thus in the proposition, “A sells B to C for the price D,” A, B, C, D form a set of
four indices. The symbol “- sells – to – for the price –” forms a mental icon or
idea of the act of sale, and declares that this image represents the set A, B, C,
D, considered as attached to that icon, A as seller, C as buyer, B as object sold,
and D as price. If we call A, B, C, D four subjects of the proposition and “-
sells – to – for the price – ” a predicate, we represent the logical relation well
enough, but we abandon the Aryan syntax. (CP 2.439, EP2: 20-21)

Subsequent sections consider more complex propositions and inferences in

ways that need not concern us here. It is enough to see that Peirce is drawing a
logical distinction between the roles of indexical expressions that identify the
‘subjects’ of propositions and the rather different ‘iconic’ role of predicative
expressions.

Within this short passage, he uses the ‘composite photograph’

metaphor several times in explaining the iconic role of the predicative
component of propositions. When I apply the concept of dishonesty to
someone, ‘I have in mind something like a “composite photograph” of all the
persons I have known and read of who have had that character’ (CP 2.435, EP2:
19-20). In the case of “it rains”, ‘the icon is the mental composite photograph
of all the rainy days the thinker has experienced.’ (CP2.438. EP2: 20) [10] So
the appeal to composite photographs is intended to illuminate the character of
what we can call the predicative component of a thought or proposition. That
the idea reflects ‘all people I have known or read about ..’, or ‘all the rainy
days the thinker has experienced’ indicates that an explanation is offered of
how such ideas can be general, applicable to a wide range of cases, including
those that have not previously been encountered. And the description of it as a
‘photograph’ is, perhaps, intended to help us to understand how such signs can
be iconic. But the passages considered here offer little insight into how such
representations work, of just how our ideas are both general and iconic.

One clarification should be made here. Peirce claims that the

predicative expressions employed in a public language function as
(conventional) iconic signs. He also claims that mental representations of
general conceptions employed (ideas) function iconically. I have already
discussed the former on a number of occasions. [11] The composite-photograph
metaphor is used to describe ideas (mental representations); it is not applied
directly in characterising the iconic form of words from public language.
Indeed, as we have seen, Peirce often suggests that public language predicates
serve as conventional public symbols of ideas.

The examples we have considered remind us of another feature of

Peirce’s position. The ideas are composites of those rainy days that the thinker
has experienced, of those dishonest people that he has known or read about.
Hence the metaphor seems to tell us something about the history or genesis of
our ideas. The idea is ‘composed’ of cases with which the possessor the idea
has been in sensory content. This echoes the empiricist conception that our
ideas are produced by our sensory encounters with the world. Indeed, we may
be struck by the analogies between Peirce’s talk of composite photographs and
Locke’s claims about abstract ideas: we obtain the latter when by eliminating
all that is not common to all ideas of (say) a rascal; we obtain the former by
compounding photographs so that what is most commonly found in cases we
have encountered becomes predominant. We can now list some features of
ideas that are to be explained by the metaphor:

a) Ideas are iconic signs or representations (which function as components of

contents that can be judged).

b) Ideas are composed out of cases which the subject has known: has
experienced, or of which knowledge has been obtained through testimony.

c) Ideas are general. The nature of our ideas must explain how they can be
applied to new and unfamiliar cases.

One source of the mystery of Peirce’s claims here can now be expressed
clearly. The metaphor holds that an idea is a composite photograph. What
does composition consist in? If, as suggested in the previous section, many
ideas cannot be associated with ordinary composite photographs, then his
claim can have the evident plausibility he takes it to have only if other forms of
‘composition’ are allowed for. We also need to ask how general Peirce’s claim
is supposed to be. If, as the passages suggest, it is to apply to all ideas, we
have further reason to take this notion of composition metaphorically: what
kind of composition is involved in my idea of rain, or of yellow, or of a rascal?
Until we have answers to these questions, Peirce’s claims are wholly unclear.

Similar claims are found in later texts. We learn that a predicate

expression ‘only fulfils its signification by exciting in the mind some image, or,
as it were, a composite photograph of images’ (CP 2.317, c1902). When I wake
and say ‘It is broad daylight’, my momentary experience is connected to ‘the
composite photograph of daylight produced in my mind by all my similar
experiences.’ (CP 3.621, from the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology).
There is some interesting variety in the things that are identified with
composite photographs. As well as ideas, we encounter: images (CP 2.441,
1893), and qualities, which are ‘composite photographs of ideas of feeling’ (CP
4.257, c1897). I shall not consider the significance of this variation. It is also
useful to note a passage where Peirce applies the metaphor to ideas that are
not primarily sensory: as well as mathematical examples, he suggests that a
‘moral ideal’ can be ‘a sort of composite photograph’ (CP 1.573, cross
reference). So one question we confront is: what metaphorical force does the
notion of a composite photograph carry once we consider cases where real
composite photographs would be of no or little value? What insights can be
conveyed by this wide application of the idea of a composite photograph?

4. Composite photographs and pragmatism

The passages we have considered so far do not suggest any close connection
between the composite-photograph metaphor and Peirce’s pragmatism. I shall
now note some passages in which these themes are linked and also suggest that
the metaphor introduces some ideas which are central to Peirce’s search for a
proof of his pragmatism. We begin with the latter.

In the seventh of the ‘Pragmatism’ lectures of 1903, Peirce identified

three ‘cotary propositions’ upon which his demonstration that the pragmatist
principle was the ‘whole logic of abduction’ depends. The first was:

‘Nihil est in intellectus quod non prius fuerit in sensu’.

He explained this further by saying that the starting point for all our ideas lies
in sensory judgment. (CP 5.181, EP 2 226-7) The analogy between photographs
and ideas – and the suggestion that all of our ideas can be understood as
composed from ‘photographs’- captures this idea, even if it does little to
explicate how sensory input should be understood. But more important, since
composite photographs correspond to general ideas, the metaphor provides a
story about how sensory input can give rise to general ideas: the relation of
idea to sensory judgment is analogous to that between composite photograph
and particular photograph. At least, so it appears.

Now the core of pragmatism is that the content of an idea can be

clarified exhaustively in terms of the sensory judgments we should expect to
make, if a variety of circumstances, including ones in which we act upon our
surroundings. There is no part of the content of the idea which has a different
source, coming perhaps from a priori intuition or from the a priori structure of
our understanding. If an idea is a composite-photograph, then its content can
be traced entirely to the ‘photographs’ from which it is composed. So if
particular photographs are analogous to sensory judgments, and if the content
of an idea is exhaustively clarified by describing how it is ‘constructed’ out of
sensory judgments, then a ‘photograph’ which is composed entirely out of
particular photographs will be (at least in this) analogous to an idea. What this
shows is that if the metaphor can be shown to work for all our ideas, and if a
suitable analogy can be found between the composition of photographs and the
‘construction’ of ideas, then some sort of argument for pragmatism may be
forthcoming.

Before we continue, we should note the other two ‘cotary

propositions.’ The second is:

… perceptual judgments contain general elements, so that universal

propositions are deducible from them in the manner in which the logic of
relations shows that particular propositions usually … allow universal
propositions to be necessarily inferred from them. (EP 2: 227)

We saw that composite photographs are supposed to have a general character

and that this follows from their being composed of a number of particular
photographs. However if perceptual judgments correspond to the particular
photographs from which the composite is made, then the metaphor seems to
find no room for the claim that even perceptual judgments involve generality.
Is this a weakness of the metaphor? No: according to Peirce, even particular
photographs are ‘composite’: since the exposure is not instantaneous, the
photograph is ‘composed’ out of a number of successive impacts of lights. (CP
2.442) So perhaps the metaphor helps us to see how perceptual judgments can
share this feature of more abstract judgments. To differing degrees and in
different ways, each corresponds to a photograph that is composite. However
the similarities between these claims have limits: the relation of particular to
composite photographs does not seem to be analogous to that between
perceptual judgments and other propositions that can be inferred from them
using the logic of relations. We shall return to this in the final section.

The third cotary proposition urges that generality is present in

percpetual judgments because the latter are ‘nothing but the extremist case of
Abductive judgment’. (EP2: 229). If that is correct, then the process by which
generality enters perceptual judgments and the process by which general
concepts are arrived at in reflective reasoning have a similar structure: each
involves abduction, recognizing that some general conception makes sense of
the available data. Perception then leaps to acceptance of this judgment
unless reflection leads us to revise our perceptual belief, while more reflective
inquiry takes the abduction as a suggestion which can be tested experimentally
or reflectively before being accepted. This does not undermine the parallel
between the cases. But, if the way we have related the use of the metaphor to
the three cotary propositions which ground Peirce’s 1903 proof of pragmatism
is correct, then we face another apparent difficulty. The passages from the
Harvard Lectures suggest that experience yields general ideas – and perceptual
judgments are formed – through a process of inference. Thus the construction
of composite photographs out of particular photographs must be a
metaphorical way of thinking about a process of inference. Fortunately, the
texts bear this out. In this review of Pearson’s Grammar of Science Peirce
discusses the example of seeing an inkstand.
He notes that ‘our logically initial data are percepts’ and, remarking that these
involve three sorts of psychical elements, he continues:

… their qualities of feelings, their reactions against my will, and their

generalising of associating element. But all that we find out afterward. I see
an inkstand on the table: that is a percept. Moving my head, I get a different
percept of the inkstand. It coalesces with the other. What I call the inkstand is
a sort of generalized percept, a quasi inference from percepts, perhaps I might
say a composite photograph of percepts. (CP 8.144, EP2: 62, 1901)

What does the allusion to composite photographs add to this?

One further passage in Peirce’s writings, from ‘Consequences of

Common-Sensism’ explicitly relates composite photographs to pragmatism. If a
critical common-sensist is also a pragmaticist, he writes:

He will further hold that everything in the substance of his beliefs can be
represented in the schemata of his imagination; that is to say, in what may be
compared to composite photographs of continuous series of modifications of
images; these composites being accompanied by conditional resolutions as to
conduct. (CP 5.517, c.1905)

This passage is important for two reasons. First we should register the Kantian
tone: we are concerned with how beliefs (and ideas) are represented in the
schemata of the imagination. It is these schemata that are compared to
composite photographs. Perhaps we must look to Kant for further information
about what composite photographs are supposed to do for us. And second, we
learn more about the objects of these composite photographs. We noted
earlier Peirce’s reference to photographs of ideas, qualities and images; now
we find that they are of continuous series of modifications of images. Given
Peirce’s synechism, this is not surprising: generality is linked to continuity, and
it is the presence of continuity in experience that enables us to say that we
experience real generality. But we still face the problem of how the metaphor
helps: we would expect the composite of a continuous series of modifications
of images of buildings, for example, to be an undifferentiated mess.

Although the ideas are different, many readers may be struck by

analogies between the claim that ideas are composite photographs and the
Lockean claim that we form general ideas by abstraction. For Locke, we form
our abstract idea of a criminal through performing an operation upon our
different individual ideas of criminals: we eliminate from these ideas
everything that is idiosyncratic, everything that is not a feature of all. For
Peirce too, we perform an operation upon our individual ideas or images: we
superimpose them and expose the photographic plate so that those features
which are common to all the individual ideas acquire prominence and those
which are more idiosyncratic disappear from view. And the two views face a
similar pair of problems. First, it most cases, it seems, nothing very distinctive
or useful will result from this operation: there may be no characteristics that
are common to all criminals, that remain when everything idiosyncratic has
been eliminated. Or what does remain may be too limited to explain our
understanding of the concept or idea. And second, if something does remain,
it will be an idea or image of a particular face, albeit one that was constructed
out of other particular faces that we have encountered and that was, perhaps,
rather blank and lacking in character. The abstractness of the idea, and the
compositeness of the photograph, do not seem to explain how our ideas can be
general. The solution to this second problem calls for a more detailed account
of how we can use this schematic idea or photograph in applying our general
concepts. Perhaps the references to Kant’s schematism show how the Peircean
claims avoids the difficulties that Locke’s account of abstract ideas faces.

5. Schematism

The schematism is one of the most puzzling parts of the Critique of Pure
Reason, but it is one whose importance and promise was not lost of Peirce. He
remarked that:

[Kant’s] doctrine on the schemata can only have been an afterthought, an

addition to his system after it was substantially complete. For if the schemata
had been considered early enough, they would have overgrown his whole work.
(CP 1.35.)

The breakneck hurry in which the C.d.r.V. was written is its only defence
against a charge of slovenly workmanship. Every detail is left in the rough; and
there is no more unfinished apartment in the whole glorious edifice than that
he devoted to the Schematization of the Categories. Kant says that no image,
and consequently we may add, no collection of images, is adequate to
represent what a schema represents. If that be the case, I should like to know
how a schema is not as general as a concept. If I ask him, all he seems to
answer is that it is the product of a different “faculty”. (CP 5.531)

The first passage attests to the power of these aspect of Kant’s thought, and
the second suggests that, even if Kant did not fully work this out, the
Schematism contains the matterials for an adequate understanding of general
concepts. But both suggest that the details of Kant’s theory were not to
Peirce’s taste. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the material about
composite photographs is part of a way of thinking about ideas and concepts
which develops some of the themes that surface in this section of Kant’s book
and which is fundamental to Peirce’s pragmatism.
 The concern of the schematism is with how concepts, the creatures of
the understanding, are applied to the empirical world, applied to the objects
of empirical intuition that appear to us in space and time. Imagination
provides the link: each concept is allied to a schema whose role in the
reproductive imagination provides a sort of rule for the anticipation of
experience. The details are sufficiently obscure and difficult that they need
not concern us here. From our discussion so far, it will be evident that Peirce’s
appeal to composite photographs is intended to provide an account of general
concepts which meets this need: the composite photograph is a schema whose
representation in the imagination yields something that can be compared with
and or applied to sensory experience. Moreover the appeal to photographs is
intended to capture the pragmatist insight that these general ideas and schema
need contain no conceptual elements which cannot have their source in
experience. The pragmatist principle, we might conjecture, shows how
general concepts can be schematised; and the composite photograph metaphor
helps to make plausible the idea that all ideas can be schematised in this
fashion.

Here is one passage which fills in some details. Considering Bain’s

suggestion that generalization on the basis of experience of associations is the
effect of “an effort of similarity”, Peirce says:

Why not say, at once, it is the first half of a suggestion by similarity? I am

trying to recall the precise hue of a certain emerald that my mother used to
wear. A sequence of shades runs through my mind. Perhaps they run into a
continuum; but that makes no difference. They are a multitude of colours
suggested by that one colour. Conceived under what Kant imperfectly
described as a rule or schema, they constitute a general conception of a green
something like that emerald …

The vague memory of a sensation is just an aggregate, whether continuous or

not makes no difference, of ideas that are called up together by a suggesting
idea. (CP 7.407)

The composite photograph metaphor seems to be concerned with how a

multitude of experienced ideas can be fused into a single representation, the
photograph. This passage seems to suggest the reverse process: the single
representation, the idea, calls up, or generates a sequence of shades, a
sequence of particular images or photographs. And the example captures two
things that are important for the schematism: the idea generates particular
representations in the imagination or in the form of images; and the logical
structure of the idea is displayed in time in a sequence of images.

A theme in Peirce’s theory of perception will help us to see where this

idea can lead. As we saw, perception involves an abductive inference, albeit an
‘acritical’ one. Suppose I see a chair. The judgment that it is a chair is not
derived as a conscious inference from more primitive premises which describe
the qualitative character of the percept. Rather the inference is immediate
and ‘acritical’ and it infects the qualitative character of my experience itself:
the object presents itself to me as a chair. Sometimes this is described as the
‘limiting case’ of an abductive inference. This claim is supported by appeal to
cases where what is seen is under our control – we can control whether we see
the picture as of a duck or a rabbit, as of a young girl or an old woman, as of
stairs going up or down, or so on. The imagination is involved in this process,
and it involves anticipating how the scene will develop. If the ‘rabbit’s ears’
suddenly open and spear a fish, our experience loses its coherence and we
adopt the new perceptual abduction that we were looking at a duck. The form
taken by these abductive perceptual judgements involves sensuous anticipation
of how things will develop, and, we might suppose, imagination is needed to
fuse the qualitative and the judgmental in this sort of way. The concepts we
apply in perceptual experience and judgment anticipate continuous
development in the quality of our experience, and such continuous
development can be confirmed by (or confuted by) the experience we actually
have. Peirce’s writings on pragmatism from 1903 emphasise this broad picture.
I am suggesting here that he found echoes of these claims in Kant’s schematism
and, also, that the ‘composite photograph’ metaphor helped Peirce to think
about this dark and difficult themes. The idea that infuses perceptual
experience provides a sort of iconic representation of how experience will
develop, or of how experience will be if its objects are of the kinds we take
them to be. Composite photographs provide one exemplar of something that
might do this sort of job without bring to experience any contents we can think
of as a priori. The composite owes its content entirely to the impact of light
upon the lens, and it provides an exemplar against which things can be judged.

If there is any plausibility in this account of the appeal for Peirce of

the composite photograph metaphor, it raises a number of questions of
interpretation. First, Galton style composites are available for, at best, a very
small number of concepts which are applied to experienced items on the basis
of how they look. We need an understanding of the metaphor which has a much
wider application. Just what would a composite photograph of a moral ideal
be? Or of an electron? Or of a building? The Galton model must be stretched
and developed if it is to have the general application that Peirce seeks.
Second, Galton style composites are static: they are like snapshots of criminal
types or learned scientists. As Peirce recognizes, Kant’s schematism makes
essential reference to sequences of intuitions in time. And the examples we
have just used to make plausible the connections between Peirce’s position
and Kant’s have also appealed to the role of composites in recording the
continuous spread and development of ideas. What we need is more like a
composite film than a composite snapshot; and the prospects for informative
composite films on the Galton model are very poor indeed.
6. Conclusion and conjecture

It is difficult to make much progress with this, but the following

conjecture may show the way forward. It seems obvious that Peirce’s use of
the composite photograph metaphor commits him to claiming that we can
understand ideas as ‘made out of’, or ‘composed of’ large numbers of
particular experiences or ‘photographs’. The question we must ask is: how does
this composition work? Galton’s work suggests one story. The difficulties we
have seen the view facing, and the analogies we have noticed between Peirce’s
apparent claim and the Lockean theory of abstract ideas, have depended upon
assuming that Peirce’s account of the ‘composition’ of ideas employs a story
that is largely true to the Galtonian mechanism for constructing composite
photographs out of individual ones. However several of the passages from
Peirce that we have cited suggest a different story, a different account of how
general ideas are compounded out of particular ‘photographs’.

Consider an example Peirce employed in a paper that dates from

before his exposure to composite photography, ‘The doctrine of chances’.

When a naturalist wishes to study a species, he collects a considerable number

of specimens more or less similar. In contemplating them, he observes certain
ones which are more or less alike in some particular respect. They all have, for
instance, a certain S-shaped marking. He observes that they are not precisely
alike, in this respect; the S has not precisely the same shape, but the
differences are such as to lead him to believe that forms could be found
intermediate between any two of those he possesses. He, now, finds other
forms apparently quite dissimilar – say a marking in the form of a C – and the
question is, whether he can find intermediate ones which will connect these
with the others. This he often succeeds in doing in cases where it would at first
be thought impossible … In this way, he builds from his study of Nature a new
general conception of the character in question. (W3: 276-7)

Note some features of this case. The new idea results from the naturalist’s
experiences of specimens: in this, it resembles a composite photograph. The
idea generates a continuous series of actual or possible experiences. The
possible experiences can then be used to test the idea against experience:
actual experience can be compared with these anticipations of experience.
Although it is not a single ‘photograph’ which contains all the others, it is still a
composite of a continuous series of possible photographs, of possible
experiences. The idea provides a rule that generates a continuous array of
concrete ideas, and these can be used to recognize or make sense of the
further experiences that we have. I recognize a specimen of this kind when the
idea generates an iconic representation which fits the experience. This can
occur habitually and acritically; and, presumably, it can also occur through
conscious reflection and deliberation. So, although the mode of ‘composition’
is not the same as Galton’s, we can see marked analogies between general
ideas so understood and composite photographs.

In that case, the idea generates a continuous spread of iconic

representations which vary along the dimension described. It is easy to see
how most ideas will embody continuous variation along a large number of
‘dimensions’. We can also see how the application of the concept may be quite
a complex matter: some dimensions may matter more than others; vagueness
and indeterminacy are likely to be involved; and so on. The important point
here is that we can understand a different mode of ‘composition’ which can
still fit the metaphor. There is one important difference. When we construct an
idea is this manner, we do build it out of cases we have known, out of the
actual photographs. But the idea will contain many elements that have not
been experienced. We form ideas of possible specimens that fill the gaps along
the different dimensions. But, as is suggested by Peirce’s pragmatism, the
cases that we add do not differ in kind from those that we have experienced.
All are experiencable and, as the cited passage suggests, we test our idea by
looking for examples of the sorts of cases we have added. The idea contains
nothing that cannot be an object of experience.

Time has still not entered the picture, but it is easy to see how it does
so. My idea of a duck will also trace ways in which the appearance of a duck
can change. Its appearance will alter as I move round it, as it walks closer or
further away, as it turn around, as it takes off and flies, and as it matures from
duckling to full grown duck. Once again, we do not need a single snapshot that
records this information. But it provides further possibilities of continuous
growth and change which can be recorded in the continuous series of iconic
representations that the idea can generate in the imagination. So the general
picture: the content of an idea is exhausted by a listing of the complex system
of iconic representations, varying along a number of continuous dimensions
including time, and which can serve as templates for perceptual abductions.
Moreover many of these iconic representations have been obtained through
perception; and the others all represent states of affairs that can, in principle,
be experienced.

This leaves more abstract ideas such as moral ideals, theoretical

entities such as electrons, mathematical ideas, psychological states and the
like. The question how to apply the composite photograph metaphor to these
is, in large part, the question of how we can clarify such concepts using the
pragmatist principle. And that is too large a problem to take on here. However
the present conjecture does answer one difficulty we might have in applying
the metaphor to such cases. Galton’s composite photographs are all of things
that have a distinctive look, and moral ideals, numbers, electrons, and states
such as anger don’t have such ‘looks’. If ideas can be composite through being
systems of iconic representations which vary, in many cases, along many
continuous dimensions, then it is easy to see how there can be such ideas of
things which do not have any distinctive look. My idea of anger may generate
icons of how people behave when angry, of how they justify their anger, of
how their anger can abate, without offering a single schematic picture of anger
as such. [12]

Notes

[1] For references to Peirce, I use standard forms of reference. Wn.mm

refers to Writings of Charles S. Peirce, Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
by volume and page. CPn.mmm refers to Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce,
edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, by volume and numbered sections. And Epn: mm refers to The Essential
Peirce, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, by volume and page.

[2] One exception to this is provided by a helpful note by Nathan Houser in EP

2: 504 n.10.

[3] Richard Robin, ‘Classical Pragmatism and Pragmatisms’s Proof’, in The Rule
of Reason, edited by Jacqueline Brunning and Paul Forster, Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 139-152, at page 139.

[4] Much of Jastrow’s article is devoted to describing different techniques for

obtaining the same effects as ordinary composite photographs, and indicating
some of their more interesting features. Jastrow’s article, ‘Composite
Portaiture’ is in Science volume VI, 165-7

An issue of the same journal in the following year, written by John Stoddart,
was illustrated by composite portraits of undergraduates from Smith College:
two versions of a photograph of some forty nine members of the previous
senior class, and a photograph of twenty members of the class who formed an
elective division in physics. His article pointed out some of the decisions one
must make in creating composite photographs. Science volume VIII, 89-91.

[5] See Nathan Houser’s introduction to W4: xxxv.

[6] At the time of writing, these pictures are available on Burson’s web site at
http://www.nancyburson.com/ec/ec1.html. Another of Nancy Burson’s
examples is equally fascinating, her 1983 piece ‘Big Brother: Stalin, Mussolini,
Mao, Hitler, Khomeini’, produced for a CBS programme on 1984.
[7] About Faces, New York: Doubleday, 1989.

[8] Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, London: Dent, 1907 (2nd
edition), page 11.

[9] See Karl Pearson Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, Cambridge
University Press, 1914-1930. p.286. There are also some illustrations of
composite photographs of different kinds of criminals at this reference.

[10] CP 2.441 tries to extend the idea to apply to universally quantified

propositions. I shall not consider that here.

[11] Hookway Peirce, London: Routledge, 1985, chapter six and Truth,
Rationality and Pragmatism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000, chapter three.

[12] Many thanks to Nathan Houser for a very helpful discussion of this topic
and for providing access to material in the Peirce Edition Project’s files,
especially the articles in Science. Jennifer Saul helped too by telling me about
the Nancy Burson composites and by commenting on an earlier version of the
paper.