Perception, Dreams, Films: Iconicity and Indexicality in Peirce's Theory of Perception
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chronologically speaking, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) could have mentioned the technique of film in the context of his phenomenological, or as he called them, phaneroscopic theories. But when he compared the human percepts to “moving pictures accompanied by sounds and feelings” in 1905 (MS 939 : 24), Peirce did not speak of the cinema. However, his investigations in the fields of cognition and phenomenology show relevant intersections with major concepts and problems of filmic perception theory. The present article aspires to investigate Peircian philosophy and film theory through some of their common concepts. The question will be raised as to whether the filmic viewing situation can be understood as a genuine perceptual situation in the Peircian sense. In a first step, I will give an analysis of Peirce’s theory of perception. In contrast to the majority of interpretations of the latter, which emphasize its iconic character, I shall argue for a perceptual process where iconicity is not the starting point but rather the outcome of it. This will imply an analysis of the roles of iconicity and indexicality in perception and of their relation to cinema’s “impression of reality”. Despite the phenomenological realism of cinematic images, the nature of what the viewer actually perceives is not as obvious as one might be tempted to think. Finally, an interpretation of filmic images as “diagrams of perception” will open up to some pedagogical dimensions of film viewing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".