Peirce on Perception and Reasoning: From Icons to Logic

232 Pages·2017·3.97 MB·English

by  Kathleen A. Hull

Peirce on Perception and Reasoning
This book contains original, insightful, and inspiring papers on important
aspects of Peirce’s theory of perception, the role of icons and indices in rea-
soning, and diagrammatic reasoning more generally. This is most certainly
a must-read book for anyone interested in the most recent work on the later
Peirce, theories of perception, the connection between perception and semi-
otics, phenomenology, visual thinking, and the constitutive role of diagrams
in logic and reasoning.
—Cornelis de Waal, Indiana University—
Purdue University Indianapolis, USA
In this book, scholars from around the world examine the nature and signif-
icance of Peirce’s work on perception, iconicity, and diagrammatic thinking.
Abjuring any strict dichotomy between presentational and representational
mental activity, Peirce’s theories transform the Aristotelian, Humean, and
Kantian paradigms that continue to hold sway today and forge a new path
for understanding the centrality of visual thinking in science, education, art,
and communication. This book is a key resource for scholars interested in
Peirce’s philosophy and its relation to contemporary issues in philosophy of
mind, philosophy of perception, semiotics, logic, visual thinking, and cogni-
tive science.
Kathleen A. Hull resides in Boston and taught for over a decade at New
York University and Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research and
publications have focused on Charles Sanders Peirce and pedagogy. She has
won awards for teaching excellence, creative thought, and inspiring stu-
dents with a love of learning.
Richard Kenneth Atkins is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Boston Col-
lege. He is the author of Peirce and the Conduct of Life: Sentiment and
Instinct in Ethics and Religion (2016) and Puzzled?! An Introduction to
Philosophizing (2015), as well as numerous essays.
Routledge Studies in American Philosophy
Edited by
Willem deVries, University of New Hampshire, USA, and
Henry Jackman, York University, Canada
1 Intentionality and the Myths of the Given
Between Pragmatism and Phenomenology
Carl B. Sachs
2 Richard Rorty, Liberalism and Cosmopolitanism
David E. McClean
3 Pragmatic Encounters
Richard J. Bernstein
4 Toward a Metaphysics of Culture
Joseph Margolis
5 Gewirthian Perspectives on Human Rights
Edited by Per Bauhn
6 Toward a Pragmatist Metaethics
Diana B. Heney
7 Sellars and Contemporary Philosophy
Edited by David Pereplyotchik and Deborah R. Barnbaum
8 Pragmatism and Objectivity
Essays Sparked by the Work of Nicolas Rescher
Edited by Sami Pihlström
9 The Quantum of Explanation
Whitehead’s Radical Empiricism
Randall E. Auxier and Gary L. Herstein
10 Peirce on Perception and Reasoning
From Icons to Logic
Edited by Kathleen A. Hull and Richard Kenneth Atkins
Peirce on Perception and
Reasoning
From Icons to Logic
Edited by
Kathleen A. Hull and
Richard Kenneth Atkins
First published 2017
by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hull, Kathleen A., editor.
Title: Peirce on perception and reasoning : from icons to logic / edited by
Kathleen A. Hull and Richard Kenneth Atkins.
Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series:
Routledge studies in American philosophy ; 10 | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016053819 | ISBN 9781138215016 (hardback :
alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 1839–1914. |
Perception (Philosophy) | Iconicity (Linguistics) | Visualization.
Classification: LCC B945.P44 P47 2017 | DDC 121/.34—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053819
ISBN: 978-1-138-21501-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-44464-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Preface vii
List of Abbreviations xi
1 What Do We Perceive? How Peirce “Expands Our Perception” 1
AARON BRUCE WILSON
2 Perception as Inference 14
EVELYN VARGAS
3 Inferential Modeling of Percept Formation: Peirce’s Fourth
Cotary Proposition 25
RICHARD KENNETH ATKINS
4 Idealism Operationalized: How Peirce’s Pragmatism Can
Help Explicate and Motivate the Possibly Surprising Idea
of Reality as Representational 40
CATHERINE LEGG
5 The Iconic Ground of Gestures: Peirce, Wittgenstein,
and Foucault 54
ROSSELLA FABBRICHESI
6 Foundations for Semeiotic Aesthetics: Mimesis and Iconicity 61
KELLY A. PARKER
7 Semiotics, Schemata, Diagrams, and Graphs: A New Form
of Diagrammatic Kantism by Peirce 74
CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI
vi Contents
8 The Chemistry of Relations: Peirce, Perspicuous
Representations, and Experiments with Diagrams 86
CHIARA AMBROSIO AND CHRIS CAMPBELL
9 Graphs as Images vs. Graphs as Diagrams: A Problem
at the Intersection of Semiotics and Didactics 107
MICHAEL MAY
10 C. S. Peirce and the Teaching of Drawing 119
SEYMOUR SIMMONS III
11 What Is Behind the Logic of Scientific Discovery? Aristotle
and Charles S. Peirce on Imagination 132
CHRISTOS A. PECHLIVANIDIS
12 The Iconic Peirce: Geometry, Spatial Intuition,
and Visual Imagination 147
KATHLEEN A. HULL
13 Two Dogmas of Diagrammatic Reasoning: A View from
Existential Graphs 174
AHTI-VEIKKO PIETARINEN AND FRANCESCO BELLUCCI
References 197
List of Contributors 212
Index 217
Preface
The primary purpose of Peirce on Perception and Reasoning: From Icons
to Logic is to explore Peirce’s work on the function of icons, images, and
diagrams in cognitive activities such as imagination, perception, inference,
problem solving, and logic. In addition to some insightful new scholarship
offered here, we think that Peirce’s research on iconicity, in particular, will
continue to bear fruit in future studies in philosophy and in other fields of
intellectual endeavor to which he contributed. The international range of
authors in this book reflects the widening influence of Peirce’s work and also
indicates a growing interest today in American Pragmatism more generally.
While primarily directed toward Peirce scholars and other philosophers, this
book may also be of interest to education and communication theorists,
cognitive and computer scientists, or any reader having a deep curiosity
about visual thought and the role of pictures in our reasoning processes.
Fundamental debates within the history of philosophy about the role of
images in perception and intuition are touched upon here, with some papers
bringing Peirce’s views to bear on contemporary discussions within analytic
philosophy and semiotics. Two of the papers offer practical applications of
Peirce’s thought in the teaching of drawing and in science education.
The volume appears at an especially auspicious time for thinking about
these issues. First, as Pietarinen and Bellucci note in their essay here, the-
orists in diverse fields have recently taken an enormous interest in visual
thinking. Second, developments in design and user-interface systems make
heavy use of visual elements to communicate ideas, as a simple glance at
one’s smartphone reveals. Indeed, ongoing research in machine intelligence
has struggled with the fact that simple perception (the process by which
sensory inputs such as images are turned into concepts in the mind) is eas-
ily performed by human children but not easily by machines. Models for
processing visual information, such as Google software programs created
to recognize commonplace objects, now allow one to take a photo of a bird
with an iPhone and to receive not only the output ‘bird,’ but even the species
of bird. These new technologies fundamentally begin with solving prob-
lems of inference from visual images and also involve questions of learning,
whether by humans, machines, or other beings. Third, over the last twenty
viii Preface
years, scholars working in the philosophy of perception have taken a keen
interest in how perception and belief relate to each other. This is nowhere
more evident than in the debate over whether and how perception makes a
rational—not merely causal—contribution to knowledge. Key thinkers such
as Donald Davidson, John McDowell, and Anil Gupta, among many others,
have made vital contributions to this question, but Peirce’s views have not
received their due.
In fact, long before these issues were of pressing theoretical importance,
the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce was already working
on them. In 1885, Peirce criticized Kant for drawing too sharp of a line
between the deliverances of sensation (intuition), on the one hand, and rea-
soning or thought (conception), on the other. Peirce’s earliest works—the
Journal of Speculative Philosophy Series of 1868–1869—argue that all cog-
nition, sensation and attention included, can be reduced to the form of an
inference. Over thirty years later, in 1903, he would argue that perception
can be represented to have the form of an abductive inference. Yet, simul-
taneous to arguing that perception can be represented inferentially, Peirce
would develop a system of logical notation that was graphical, one that uses
images and icons to represent (as Peirce himself puts it) the moving pictures
of thought. Peirce thought carefully about how diagrams, icons, and images
are capable of conveying ideas and developed a diagrammatic logic—the
Existential Graphs—that is roughly equivalent to our modern-day first-
order predicate logic. A founder of the field of semiotics, he developed an
elaborate theory of signs and sign relations. Peirce’s ideas were not only
innovative for their time; they remain of singular importance in our own.
What Peirce’s thought, as explored in these essays, reveals is a story about
cognition, one that begins with a distinctive theory of perception, moves to
an account of abstraction that emphasizes the role of the imagination, and
then presents a theory of reasoning that involves perceptual elements.
The first several essays in this collection focus on Peirce’s theory of per-
ception. In the first, Aaron Wilson argues that, on Peirce’s theory, we can
perceive properties not commonly thought to be perceptible, such as kinds,
law-like generals and properties, and modal properties. Peirce’s account of
perception differs remarkably from the account we find in figures such as
Locke and Hume and in the associationism paradigmatic of British Empiri-
cism. As Evelyn Vargas argues, because James’s account of perception is
indebted to associationism and because he rejects the view that perception is
akin to inference, James cannot account for perception as subsuming some-
thing under a general class and compelling assent. In contrast with James,
Peirce holds that perception has the form of an abductive inference; that is
to say, perception produces hypotheses about the world around us—and
these hypotheses are shot through with cognitive content. Richard Kenneth
Atkins draws on contemporary work in geometrical optical illusions, synes-
thesia, and cognitive penetration to defend Peirce’s claim that the formation
of perceptions may be modeled as having the form of an abductive inference.
Preface ix
Catherine Legg argues that Peirce’s theory of perception, along with his
pragmatic view of experience, gives rise to an operationalized idealism, an
idealism that can make sense of the notion that reality is both representa-
tional and (as Peirce puts it) “confrontitional,” though not absolutely so.
The next group of essays begins to build out from Peirce’s theory of per-
ception, with its blurred distinction between sensation and reasoning, to a
deeper account of iconicity. Icons and that which they represent have a com-
mon structure. This common structure allows us to reason directly on the
representation in order to draw conclusions about what it depicts. Accord-
ingly, a key feature of icons is that they pictorially or graphically contain
information. As images that contain information, icons are things from
which we can extract information and with which we may make new dis-
coveries through experimentation on the image. For example, Geographic
Information Systems technology (GIS) allows fire and rescue workers to
produce maps that capture diverse data sources into a single visual display.
Known hazards (e.g., neighborhoods of wood-frame houses), locations of
water supply systems and fire trucks, population centers, and local com-
munity assets are all depicted in a pictorial representation. This “picture”
contains further information about overlapping risk densities, allowing for
emergency planning and critical decision making while fighting fires. The
interactive digital quality of GIS maps allows for experimentation with vari-
ous tactical strategies to reduce response times and save lives.
Yet we do not need technology to understand how iconicity assists us in
interpreting signs and constructing meaning. In the fifth essay of the volume,
Rossella Fabbrichesi turns to Peirce’s theory of the icon in order to give an
account of how gestures form the basis of the significance of symbolic and
conventional communication and finds that the iconic roots of gesture lie in
mimicry. Kelly Parker argues that all mimesis is a kind of iconicity and that
conceiving of mimesis as a form of iconicity opens the door to an aesthetic
theory in which abstract, non-representational art is situated in relation to
more traditional kinds of work. Claudio Paolucci argues that Peirce’s theory
of the icon, especially as it relates to diagrams, functions much like Kant’s
theory of the schematism. As such, it holds together both intuition and con-
ception (in Kant’s terminology), and, in Paolucci’s judgment, finds its perfect
embodiment in Peirce’s iconic logic, the Existential Graphs.
As is well known, Peirce did not earn his crust as a philosopher but as a
scientist, and his theory of the icon and his account of diagrammatic think-
ing are closely related to his scientific work. Chiara Ambrosio and Chris
Campbell show that Peirce’s theory of the icon has its roots in his train-
ing in chemistry and that his work in chemistry was one of the material
sources that informed and directed his thinking about the epistemic and
logical value of diagrams and diagrammatic reasoning. However, the use of
icons and diagrams can also be misleading. Drawing on his work in science
education, Michael May shows that the use of graphs as images in students’
model comprehension may lead them astray unless they also have a firm