Now I would like to move on to discuss Peirce's phenomenology in a bit more depth. Peirce provided the following set of requirements for a phenomenological method:
`1) Seeing what stares one in the face, just as it presents itself, unreplaced by any interpretation, unsophisticated by any allowance for this or that modifying circumstance;
2) Resolute discrimination, which fastens itself like a bulldog upon the particular features that we are studying;
3) the generalising power of the mathematician who produces the abstract formula that comprehends the very essence of the feature under examination purified from all admixture of extraneous and irrelevant accompaniments.' [C.P. 5.42]
A phenomenological method of investigation involves, according to Peirce, an initial avid, unconditional attention to what presents itself intuitively to us, uncoloured by interpretations or possible allowances for modifying circumstances. What we notice must be unconditionally taken for what we become conscious of at the moment of its perception. A prerequisite for this kind of openness to the strange or surprising event or observation is of course that we have sufficient prior experience of trying to make sense of the world to allow us to notice when something is new or different from what we have experienced before. Peirce's next criterion is a willingness to fasten one's attention doggedly to some aspect of the phenomenon by particularising or fragmenting it out from the continuity of the ongoing stream of consciousness. This requires a high degree of directedness or intentionality. The phenomenon as it appears to us must be grasped sufficiently strongly for us to be able to begin to make sense of it. The final step in his method involves invoking the ability to generalise through the logic of symbolic reasoning and abduction to the best possible explanation.
Similiarities between Peirce's and Husserl's phenomenologies are, according to Spiegelberg (1994) as follows:
`1) the program of a fresh approach by way of intuitive introspection and description to the immediately given, and apporach free from preconceived theories;
2) the deliberate disregard, in so doing, of questions of reality and unreality
3) the insistence upon the radical differences between phenomenology and psychology
4) the claim that such a phenomenology would be a rigorous science, basic not only for philosophy but even for logic.' (p. 43)
Where Peirce seems to differ most from Husserl (apart from his concern with the relationship between the ontological categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, the non-reflective nature of his phenomenology, the lack of the intentional pattern and different principles governing the adoption and modification of phenomenological terminology (see Speigelberg p. 42)) is in Peirce's unbending assertion of the absolute reality of the phenomena of the external world (the real), and of the role of the community of interpreters as a kind of consensual filtering function that will "in the long run" allow humanity to gradually approach and understand the true nature or essence of the particular phenomena being studied. Peirce, then, considers this particular function of the community of interpreters as one of the most important aspects of the constitution of "efficient interpretants".
Now, the concept of "efficiency" as used by Peirce in this connection is rather difficult to understand, but in modern terms it may possibly be easier to relate it to the notion of adaptive sufficiency within an evolutionary perspective, and thus to the idea of selection. The problem with simplifying the idea of efficiency as used by Peirce in relation to his concept of the efficient interpretant is however that he in fact framed his argument the other way around, which meant that that which is given for us ontologically, i.e. the real, can only ever become fully manifest for us (i.e. in the sense of becoming a truly efficient interpretant) in the long run as a result of an unlimited, ongoing process of semiosis within a community of interpreters that is itself driven by the ejective force of a presemiotic nature which gives currency to the multifarious levels of semiosis within the evolutionary process (see Corrington 1994). This stance taken by Peirce is revealed quite clearly in the two passages I have quoted below:
`The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of you and me. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that the conception essentially involves the notion of COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase in knowledge.' [C.P 5.311]
and also:
I have also argued elsewhere (Coppock in press) for a grounding of research into the constitution of text- and interactional norm systems in virtual environments in a pansemiotic ontology such as we find in the later Peircean pragmaticism. In this connection I stated that:
I would like to expand on this point a bit. When I say that the separating out of dynamic open systems represent a break in continuity, I mean to say that a break (some theorists refer to such breaks as "catastrophes") seemingly occurs at some point in time, or at least over a period of time (things appear to "just happen"), but I do not mean to imply that this break in continuity necessarily remains discrete and identifiable as a trace "in the long run" of evolutionary history. I do not either wish to discount human intentionality as an element in this wider picture of things. However, in dynamic open systems like languages or cultures framed within the ontological horizon of evolution, there are no real permanencies, only continuing processes of multilevelled development and change. What we perceive as permanencies are artefacts of these systemic processes such as technologies, tools, texts, images, works of art and various kinds of waste products which mostly revert over time back to nature, providing nourishment for further growth and development. Material objects as such are not permanent in any real sense, being subject as we are to the tooth of time, the unidirectionality of the evolutionary process and continual buffeting from the ejective force of the semiosis of the natural environment, as the recent earthquake catastrophe in Kobe so well illustrated for us.
If we accept the ejective force of evolution, the non-reversibility of the presemiotic realm, the continuity of universe, nature and mind, and the principle of fallibilism, then there is no real reason to maintain that anything has any "permanence" beyond the very moment of its conception and manifestation for us "as is", however "long" that moment (within our human terms of temporality) may last.
Let us take an example from genetics. Genetic traits are generally considered to be observable, researchable and describable phenomena which are in some way discrete and, as such, subject to investigative interpretation by the scientific community. This considered discreteness is a fundamental prerequisite for any meaningful investigation and discussion of what the concept of trait might stand for (i.e. 'mean') for us as human beings. Human intelligence is generally considered to be such a genetic trait; envisioned and described by geneticians and biologists as reflecting and signifying some kind of determinate order at the level of the phenotype and genotype.
At the same time human intelligence is a changing signifier of an irreversible, and thus, to all intents and purposes irretrievably undescribable, evolutionary process. Now, there is nothing wrong whatsoever in forwarding the idea that intelligence "is there" as a phenomenon to be investigated - it seems to manifest itself to us in various ways, and we (at present at least) seem to choose to interpret these manifest phenomena as signs of its existence. But since we use our own minds (some would say our intelligence) to constitute the concept of intelligence, and since our minds (whether we choose to consider these minds as individual entities or as tied to a community of interpreters and the continuity of nature as Peirce does) are always delimited by the present state of their own evolutionary development, by the current state of research and knowledge, our understanding of what intelligence is at this time remains incomplete and "punctual". The same kinds of considerations also apply to the idea of consciousness, as I have discussed elsewhere in relation to artificial intelligence (Coppock 1995(a)).