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Thank you very much for having me today. I’m sorry because my English is not perfect. My linguistic effort would be useless if the topic were not interesting to you. Interesting maybe because it is an original perspective, which has its origin in Mitteleuropean psychology of perception. I’ll talk about the tertiary-expressive qualities, theory and practice for design. Everybody knows the very famous quip: “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice, there is” (Yoghi Berra or Benjamin Brewster). This little “theory” does not actually apply to design because design practice is to make choices. And when we make a choice we need a theory that laid that choice. A theory can be explicit or implicit, but there is no designer without a theory. And with a wrong theory the project will be wrong. Quip apart, to introduce TEQS, the starting point is necessarily epistemological. Tertiary because in reference to the celebrated tripartition of John Locke. According to tradition, the primary qualities are objective, the secondary qualities subjective but the cause is external, whereas the TQS are subjective with the internal cause. This is the positivistic tripartition (to be exact, John Locke had a different definition for TQS, which we can leave aside). This subdivision comes from Galileo. It is always exciting to read Galileo: «When touched upon the soles of the feet, for example, or under the knee or armpit, it feels in addition to the common sensation of touch a sensation on which we have imposed a special name, ‘tickling’. This sensation belongs to us and not to the hand. (…) if the live and sensitive body were removed it would remain no more than a mere word». This passage is taken from Il Saggiatore (The Assayer). Galileo needed to distinguish the objective from the subjective qualities of experience. He had to base physics on objective qualities. Metaphysical positivism has interpreted this distinction as ontological. The primary qualities are reality, whereas the secondary qualities are not. However, in Galileo, there is an ambiguous position. According to Husserl “Galileo is a genius who discovers and hides”, and for many other authors (Gurwitsch, Geymonat, Bozzi) his was not an ontological intent. Galileo gets to the mathematization of nature by assuming the primacy of spatiality as a model for quantification. In other words, he imposes onto immediate experiential qualities the schema of quantification, thus determining quality discrimination. As when a child shapes a star by sand with mold. It is the mold that imposes the star. Galileo's operation is methodological: he excludes the immediate experiential data, which are not practically useful to physical knowledge, to measurement. He excludes them not because they are not cognitively legitimate, but because they are not cognitively mathematizable. Positivist scientists have argued that Galileo is a positivist; but Galileo often uses immediate observation even to justify physical laws. For example, when Galileo discusses the cause that the Moon whiteness is not due to the lunar matter itself, he deduces the physical truth assuming as true the premise of the law of visual contrast. «convinced that if it shone with such a light by itself, it would show itself much more brilliantly in the depth of a dark night than in the twilight of dusk». Everyone knows the so called “Müller-Lyer illusion”. The term illusion is a positivist term (Helmholtz), which takes physical reality mediated by an instrument as true and immediate experience as an error. From a phenomenological perspective, we must say that they are only different because the ways of observation are different. The compass, an instrument that allows mediated observation, isolates the observation of the segment. Otherwise, the perceiver observes the segment as a whole, and the functional effect of the appendices is not separable. So we have two different outcomes. Obviously, we can measure the difference with psychophysics. And that’s what we normally do in our laboratories. Within the phenomenological perspective, even extension can therefore be observed immediately, without therefore a physical measurement. Within the phenomenological perspective, extension is also a TQ. In fact, TQ is defined as a quality of experience observed freely, without reduction in a category, within a scheme, within a mold. The object under observation is observed in its experiential essence, and this is the meaning of Husserl’s famous motto “back to the things themselves”, back to the ways that things are actually given in experience, and the no less famous Köhler Stimulus Errors appeal, for which it is wrong to confuse what we observe with what we know of the observed object. Within TQ fall also the Gestalqualitäten, introduced by von Ehrenfels and typically exemplified by melody. Many TQS, such as extension, can tend to be neutral. Other TQS, according to their own characteristics, express something. So, tertiary-expressive qualities are a sub-calls of TQS (sometimes called also ‘physiognomic qualities’ in reference to human character, valences within a field dynamics, sometimes also ‘affordances’, even if valences and affordances are somewhat different concepts). “To express” comes from the Latin “exprimere”. It is composed of the prefix “ex”, which means “out”, and the second part that means “to press”. In this meaning, the word “to express” can be defined as to externalize something that is internal, to make something extrinsic that which is intrinsic. The distinction between internal and external is common knowledge. A private thought is inscrutable and closed into the inner personal mind. It is less evident how objects, or qualities, can have an internal dimension from which to externalize something. This difficulty has historically fueled a theoretical prejudice: to speak about an interior dimension of objects induces, ontologically, a soul in the object. However, it is not a metaphysical assumption to maintain that every object expresses the character of its own perceptual structure. In the eighth chapter of Gestalt Psychology, Köhler speaks of expression and brings the famous demonstration of takete and maluma. This demonstration is important because it is a prime example of how one quality of experience (shape) can express a character that is found in another quality of experience (sound). All perceptually associate the figure on the right with the second word. The figures have no past experience because they are saw for the first time, and the words are not signs because they are meaningless. On the other hand, here the reference of a sign is not studied, but what is under observation is studied: a presence. Research has produced endless literature on intermodal qualities in the wake of Köhler’s demonstration. I can refer here to some of my papers only because they deal with the EQS, as I’m presenting them. Köhler says «I do not see any reason why such ‘tertiary qualities’ should not occur on the objective side of the phenomenal field». Within a phenomenological view, also James J. Gibson says «the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ of things in the environment can be directly perceived. Moreover, it would explain the sense in which values and meanings are external to the perceiver». Here we must distinguish two different types of meanings: the signs, which are always a reference, and the percepts, which are given in presence. The former requires mental mediation: a sign precisely because it stands for something that is not present (the image of Napoleon refers to the referent Napoleon: Napoleon is not present). Conversely, the orange color that I see here and now does not reflect anything, it has a meaning as an observable, it has meaning in its presence. In this theoretical perspective of immediate and direct perception, the Experimental Phenomenology view, the assumption of a stage of representation of the cognitive system is excluded, to the point that I can state here a “reference fallacy”, similar to Umberto Eco, who claims that “referential fallacy” is the false assumption that the meaning of a sign is determined by its referent (that is by the reality to which the sign refers). In fact, Umberto Eco postulates the mediation of a concept, of a representation (that is the reference). Then, communication through signs is necessarily cultural, it concerns past experience and cognitive integration. One must know the meaning in order to understand a sign. Conversely, perceptual communication is not mediated, because it communicates through the percept itself. Then, communication through signs is subjective, perceptual communication is universal. A symbol varies according to the reader, the takete-maluma association does not change according to the subject or culture. This is very important in communication because sometimes the designer does not know how much a sign is shared by the communication target. It is not known which subjective and cultural associations can be activated by the recipients. Conversely, the perceptual level is stable: we know that a perceptual value if it is experimentally demonstrated, will hit the mark. These two levels are absolutely independent. Nothing prevents them from being opposed. A perceptual value can be used as a sign of the opposite value. If orange is happy, a culture can use it as a sign for sadness. Everyone will perceive it as happy but will interpret the perceived happiness as a sad value. Obviously, when a designer conveys messages through perceptual data, the coherence between these two levels makes the message more effective.