It seems more convincing to admit that, in Tarsky’s formulation, [ii] stands conventionally for the assignment of a truth value to [i]. The Tarskyan state of affairs is not something we can check in order to recognize the proposition that expresses it as true; on the contrary, it is what a true proposition, or indeed anything that is expressed by a true proposition, corresponds to (cf. McCawley 1981: 161), in other words its truth value. In this sense Tarsky’s notion does not tell us whether it is more true to say that a cat is a cat than it is to say that a cat is a mammal.
17.6. Meaning, Referent, Reference
This node, between truth-conditional semantics, reference semantics, semantics of the sentence, and textual semantics compels us to revise a few concepts, something I attempted to do in my Kant and the Platypus.
- Meaning of a term like cat. It may contain categorial elements like mammal and feline, but it also contains instructions to define the referent. But the referent of cat is not some individual cat, but cats in general. In this sense, terms that denote nonexistent objects may contain reference instructions (for instance, “unicorn”). It is possible to transmit and understand instructions for identifying the referent without having had and without ever having the occasion of referring to something.
- References to cats (My cat is in the kitchen). Reference as a linguistic act, to be negotiated. The reference, however, is completely unconnected either to the empirical truth of the proposition (if I am lying or mistaken, the cat is not there) or to any discussion of its truth value. To be sure, if there is a cat in the kitchen, there is a feline mammal in the kitchen (sense 4), I am certainly referring to a specific cat, mine (sense 3), but it might not be true that it is in the kitchen. Senses 1 and 2 are presupposed by semantics of the third type, and can be taken into consideration by semantics of the fourth, but the converse is not true. Let us not forget that Morris (1938) reminded us that semantics is concerned with the relationship between a sign and its designata, that a semantic rule establishes under what conditions a sign is applicable to an object, but that the notion of designatum has nothing to do with the existence of the object; the designatum of a sign is something the sign may denote—but establishing whether there really are objects of this kind goes beyond the competence of semiotics.
Let us now suppose that I were to visit a culture (with a language adequate to express it) in which only two animals are known: the cat, hairy, smaller than a human being, domesticated, and harmless, and the crocodile, usually bigger than a human being, and scaly. For the members of that culture, based on such an elementary system of oppositions, which constitutes the full extent of their classification of the animal kingdom (a cat is everything a crocodile is not, and vice versa), if a dog were to show up, given that it was hairy, domesticated, and friendly, it would be defined as a cat (however unusual its appearance) and certainly not as an unusual crocodile. Let us suppose again that I realize that there is a boa constrictor behind my native interlocutor’s back. I wouldn’t be able to tell him that it was a boa because there is no adequate term in his language, and I couldn’t describe the strange and unusual animal without wasting precious time. I would therefore have to tell him that there was a crocodile behind him, assuming that, since in that culture animals are divided into harmless and hostile, I would thus be informing him that he was in a dangerous situation. This example is not chosen at random because in some medieval encyclopedias, not knowing how to define a crocodile (since the author had probably never seen one), they were content to call it a serpens acquaticus.
If I succeed in causing my interlocutor to be concerned, as was my intention, and if I obtain his consent to my proposition (he turns around, gives a start and concedes that the animal, obviously not a cat, is indeed a crocodile), I will have behaved according to certain methodological principles of sense 2, to make a successful reference in the sense of sense 3, obtaining his consent in terms of sense 4.
But in fact all this is because I am basing myself on the principles of sense 5, according to which it is the text and the context that have the last word in defining the meaning of terms.
This whole discourse will no doubt lead someone to opine that there is no semantics that does not need to be backed up by a pragmatics. I can only agree, as indeed I always have, from my A Theory of Semiotics (1976) to Kant and the Platypus (2000).
Paper presented at the symposium “La semantica fin de siècle: Dalla fondazione di Michel Bréal all’attualità della ricerca” (“Fin de siècle semantics: From Michel Bréal’s foundation to contemporary research”), held at the Center for Semiotic and Cognitive Studies of the University of San Marino in November 1997. It was later published with the title “Cinque sensi di ‘semantica’ ” [“Five Meanings of ‘Semantics’ ”] (Eco 2001).
- English translation: Bréal (1964: 99).
- English translation: Greimas and Courtés (1982: 432).
- [Translator’s note: The Venetian painter Giorgione was born Giorgio Barbarelli. The two names are used as a paradoxical example in Quine 2004.]
- “To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true” (Wittgenstein 1922: 4.024). Nevertheless, we know the truth conditions of the proposition: “At twelve noon on August 2, 1810, all living cats made up an odd number,” but it is unlikely that either today or in the future anyone will ever be able to say whether it is true or false.
- In any case, here is what Tarsky thought in 1944: “We may accept the semantic conception of truth without giving up any epistemological attitude we may have had; we may remain naive realists, critical realists or idealists, empiricists or metaphysicians—whatever we were before. The semantic conception is completely neutral toward all these issues.”
- Weak Thought versus the Limits of Interpretation
In 1983, a symposium entitled Il pensiero debole (Weak Thought), edited by Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovati, was published by Feltrinelli. The notion of “weak thought” had been proposed by Vattimo, and in that collection of essays thinkers of various stripes were invited to discuss its definition. To my knowledge, not all of those invited to join in the debate agreed to take part, and so my own contribution appeared in a context in which those who bought into the project of “weak thought” were more numerous than those with reservations. Furthermore, in their introduction, Vattimo and Rovatti, after pointing out that the essays in the volume were not to be lumped together under the label of a school, “given the heterogeneous provenance and theoretical orientations of their authors,” nonetheless claimed that what they all had in common was the idea that the various discourses on the crisis of reason had still not thoroughly explored “the experience of the forgetfulness of being, or the ‘death of God’, of which Heidegger and especially Nietzsche had brought the tidings to our culture” (p. 9).
Anyone rereading my contribution to that symposium—entitled “L’antiporfirio” (“The Anti-Porphyry”: a good deal of which is recapitulated in the Chapter 1 of this book)1—will observe that I showed no interest in the theories of Heidegger or Nietzsche or in the death of God, so much so that Cesare Cases, in a review in the periodical L’Espresso dated February 5, 1984, could write: “with the exception of Umberto Eco, who sticks to the encyclopedists, the others see it [i.e., weak thought] embodied above all in Nietzsche.”
What possible connection could I have pointed out between a hypothetical metaphor of “weak thought” and the encyclopedists? On that occasion I argued against the model of thought represented by dictionary semantics, to which I opposed an encyclopedic semantics. My presentation (though it took up and anticipated what is for me a central theme which received its definitive formulation the following year in the 1984 Italian edition of Sémiotique: Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage (see Greimas and Courtés 1982) was not totally alien to Vattimo and Rovatti’s proposal, since I argued that, from the point of view of an encyclopedic semantics—dominated by the Peircean idea of interpretation and hence of unlimited semiosis—no thought expressed in language ever claims to reflect in a definitive fashion the Dynamical Object (or thing in itself) but is aware that what it is putting into play are Immediate Objects (pure content), interpretable in their turn by other expressions that refer back to other Immediate Objects in a self-sustaining semiotic process.
Naturally, I alluded to the question, developed at length elsewhere, that, from the Peircean perspective, the “flight” of the interpretants does not resolve our conception of the world into a mere sequence of interpretations, but generates habits and therefore modes of transformation of the natural world. In that communication, however, I was content to take for granted as obvious my conviction that semiosis is an activity that takes place in a world of facts, since the position of weak thought had not yet been summed up in the catchphrase according to which there are no facts, only interpretations. In other words, I had not yet realized that the return to
