Champagne’s Semiotic Account

Philosopher Marc Champagne gives a semiotic account of consciousness that pivots on C. S. Peirce’s demonstration that qualities can be extricated from causal and inferential relations only “prescissively” (i.e., in thought, not in fact). The approach retrieves neglected distinctions from the history of ideas (e.g., Duns Scotus) so as to reactivate them in contemporary debates. By expanding the standard type/token framework to include tone, and by foregrounding similarity-based reference (iconicity), Champagne claims to construct a new conceptual toolbox that prevents experiential qualities from being explanatorily anomalous.

Champagne reviews Peirce’s contributions: He founded phenomenology (“phaneroscopy”) independently of Husserl; he was the first to suggest that electrical circuitry could perform logical operations; and he conducted (with Jastrow) the first psychology experiment using randomization and blinding. The father of American Pragmatism also coined the term “qualia,” which he sometimes called “qualisign” or tone. Since pragmatic verification and qualia are now seen by many as conflicting commitments, Champagne tries to understand how Peirce could (or thought he could) have it both ways.

Type, Token, and Tone

Peirce’s full sign-vehicle typology—type, token, and tone—captures nuances obscured by contemporary debates (e.g., type-physicalism, token identity theory). Consider the following sentence: “Because of his long fast, he was too weak to stand fast or hold fast or even to run fast.” The truncated type/token dichotomy taught in today’s graduate schools would tell us that there are four tokens and one type of “fast,” but the original and correct Peircean verdict is that “fast” appears three times as type, four times as token, and once as tone (Peirce 1931–58). Qualities thus figure as primitive vehicles, prior to their instantiation or semantic deployment (Champagne 2019).

One drawback or challenge of Champagne’s framework is that it demands familiarity with semiotics, a relatively underexplored philosophical discipline (Champagne 2014b; Deely 2001). The conceptual reorientation that Champagne invites us to make, therefore, conflicts with many entrenched assumptions (Champagne 2015). The tradeoff, however, is significant, since “[c]ognitive science and philosophy of mind now have a viable account of phenomenal consciousness qua ‘Qualia’ that is not only licensed by reason but also fully integrated and reconciled with oppositional accounts of access consciousness” (Pelkey 2019).

Iconicity: Reference by Resemblance

Iconicity, for example, further refines our understanding of acquaintance. Beyond causal contact, agents can grasp another’s experience through similarity. A resemblance can convey contents even in the absence of direct exposure, demonstrating that shared qualities can mediate understanding in a manner different from convention or causation. So, if a stranger walks in and someone nearby utters “That woman looks just like my deceased mother,” it is possible to know what the utterer has in mind (Champagne 2014a).

Prescission: Separating a Quality in Thought

Prescission completes the picture. By formally distinguishing a quality from all its relations—less than physically but more than verbally separating it—we arrive at a limiting case: a pure tone, a “mere logical possibility” (Peirce 1931–58) that would stand for anything like it, irrespective of whether such a token exists (thereby explaining the previous reference to the deceased).

In a passage that combines hard-nosed logic with descriptive acumen, Peirce enjoins us to examine “a feeling of [...] purple without beginning, end, or change” and honestly note what could and could not be inferred from that quality alone. Granting that such a color “would require a mind to feel it” and “a physical substratum,” Peirce reminds us, quite rightly in Champagne’s estimate, that none of these things are actually present in the color. Hence, “there can be no logical difficulty in supposing them to be absent,” such that projecting subjects and matter onto or into a bare quality is “as uncalled for as to suppose that there is freedom of the press or a magnetic field” (Peirce 1931–58).

Prescission is a means of explanation which we can in turn explain—an unmysterious technical tool we can share and apply with constancy (unsurprisingly, since Peirce initially developed it to elucidate the workings and verdicts of formal logic). Indeed, “[i]t may be noticed that, throughout this process, introspection is not resorted to. Nothing is assumed respecting the subjective elements of consciousness which cannot be securely inferred from the objective elements” (Peirce 1931–58). A semiotic account of phenomenal consciousness would thus seem to meet the desideratum laid down by Daniel Dennett, who encouragingly stressed that “[t]he third-person approach is not antithetical to, or eager to ignore, the subjective nuances of experience; it simply insists on anchoring those subjective nuances to something—anything, really—that can be detected and confirmed in replicable experiments” (Dennett 2001; emphasis in original).

Mind-Involving without Mind-Dependence

The verifiable abstraction mobilized in Champagne’s work explains intuitions behind qualia while also revealing an important constraint or caveat, since it requires us to adulterate experience as it actually unfolds (Champagne 2009). “Some complex patterns are pattern-grasping. When these pattern-grasping patterns are human creatures, what ‘emerges’ is not a qualitative dimension that other things lack, but a unique power to isolate the individual qualities that comprise patterns” (Champagne 2018). This stance conjoins two theses: 1) prescission is something we (humans) do, and 2) it is not up to us (humans) what results when prescission is properly carried out. To many, this conjunction can seem unstable because, usually, something is considered real only when it is mind-independent. It would, of course, simplify matters if everything surrounding a given quality could really be absent, not just supposed absent. Champagne, however, urges us to acclimate to the nuance, since something can be mind-involving without being mind-dependent.

Some theorists like Shaun Gallagher use a combination of third-person science and first-person phenomenology. Champagne, who highlights what he claims to be inconsistencies in Gallagher’s program (Champagne 2013), instead advocates a combination of third-person science and third-person philosophy—with scientists explaining everything and philosophers justifying the persistent sense that this is not enough. Those who feel that materialism is insufficient are not victims of an illusion. At the same time, some of the aspirations (about immortality, etc.) commonly accompanying the rejection of materialism cannot be accommodated.

Dissolving, Not Solving, the Hard Problem

Once we accept the paradigm shift Champagne calls for, he argues that the “hard problem” of consciousness is not a “problem” or “hard” in the same way that, say, cancer is a problem and curing it is hard. Indeed, as he points out,

• If we read [David] Chalmers’ chapter on “Two Concepts of Mind” closely, we notice that he first pinpoints a very narrow sense of “experience.” Only once this is done does he ask us to conceive experience-free zombies. This means that, whatever stance one takes on the traditional issue of dualism versus (materialist) monism, the quality/function distinction can be rendered intelligible on its own grounds. Chalmers and his commentators seem to consider the distinction between the two concepts to be mere table setting, but I think it is where all the major action transpires. (Champagne 2018)

The task, he says, is not to solve the problem but to dissolve it by not reifying the warranted distinction that generates it. Alleviating such perplexity is an accomplishment. Still, given that icons convey contents by something close to Aristotle’s “formal cause,” and given that a better understanding of qualia neither demands nor supplies any special technology, Champagne champions moments of inefficiency—in the double sense of an escape from efficient causation (Champagne 2016) and a respite from technological progress (Champagne 2024).

References

Champagne, M. (2009). “Explaining the Qualitative Dimension of Consciousness: Prescission instead of Reification.” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 145–183. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217309090088

Champagne, M. (2013). “Can ‘I’ Prevent You from Entering my Mind?” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 145–162. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9196-0

Champagne, M. (2014a). “Referring to the Qualitative Dimension of Consciousness: Iconicity Instead of Indexicality.” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 135–182. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217313000899

Champagne, M. (2014b). “Semiotics.” Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy, edited by Duncan Pritchard. https://doi.org/10.1093/OBO/9780195396577-0179

Champagne, M. (2015). “A Less Simplistic Metaphysics: Peirce’s Layered Theory of Meaning as a Layered Theory of Being.” Sign Systems Studies, vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 523–552. https://doi.org/10.12697/SSS.2015.43.4.10

Champagne, M. (2016). “Can Pragmatists Believe in Qualia? The Founder of Pragmatism Certainly Did…” Cybernetics and Human Knowing, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 39–49. http://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/chk/2016/00000023/00000002/art00004

Champagne, M. (2018). Consciousness and the Philosophy of Signs: How Peircean Semiotics Combines Phenomenal Qualia and Practical Effects. Cham: Springer.

Champagne, M. (2019). “Consciousness and the Philosophy of Signs: A New Précis.” The American Journal of Semiotics, vol. 35, nos. 3–4, pp. 443–462. https://doi.org/10.5840/ajs2019353/458

Champagne, M. (2024). “Putting Aside One’s Natural Attitude—and Smartphone—to See what Matters More Clearly.” In Phaneroscopy and Phenomenology: A Neglected Chapter in the History of Ideas, edited by Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen and Mohammad Shafiei, pp. 25–55. Cham: Springer.

Deely, J. N. (2001). Four Ages of Understanding. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Dennett, D. C. (2001). “Are we Explaining Consciousness Yet? ” Cognition, vol. 79, nos. 1–2, pp. 221–237. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0010-0277(00)00130-x

Peirce, C. S. (1931–58). The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. 8 vols. Edited by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Pelkey, J. (2019). “A Watershed for Qualia: Marc Champagne’s Unified Theory of Consciousness.” The American Journal of Semiotics, vol. 35, nos. 3–4, pp. 431–442. https://doi.org/10.5840/ajs2019353/457