From this discovery, Thomas does not draw all the conclusions he should have regarding the possible nature of the tree of substances: he cannot bring himself (psychologically perhaps) to call the tree into question as a logical tool for obtaining definitions (something he could have done without going out on a limb), because the entire Middle Ages is dominated by the conviction (however unconscious) that the tree mimics the structure of reality, and this Neo-Platonic conviction also affects the most rigorous of Aristotelians.
It is clear, however, if we follow its inner logic, that the tree of genera and species, however constructed, explodes into a swirl of accidents, into a nonhierarchizable network of qualia. The dictionary dissolves of necessity, as a result of internal tensions, into a potentially orderless and limitless galaxy of elements of knowledge of the world. It becomes, in other words, an encyclopedia, and it does so because it was already in fact an encyclopedia without knowing it, an artifice invented to camouflage the inevitability of the encyclopedia.
1.2.2. The Utopia of the Dictionary in Modern Semantics
We see a return to the dictionary model in the linguistics of the second half of twentieth century, when the first attempts appear to postulate or recognize—in order to define the contents expressed by the terms of a natural language—a finite system of figures possessing the same characteristics as a phonological system (based on a limited number of phonemes and their systematic oppositions). Thus, a feature semantics (features being primitive semantic atoms) was postulated, designed to establish the conditions necessary and sufficient for a definition of meaning, excluding knowledge of the world. In this way, in order to be recognized as a cat, something must have an ANIMAL feature, but it is not requested that it meows. These necessary and sufficient features are dictionary markers. Something along these lines was anticipated by Hjelmslev (1943[1961]) when he proposed to analyze the concepts corresponding to the twelve terms ram, ewe, boy, girl, stallion, mare through a combination of the male/female opposition and the assumed primitives SHEEP, HUMAN BEING, CHILD, HORSE.
Hjelmslev’s was not the only modern proposal for a dictionary representation, though the many others proposed in the area of linguistics or of analytic philosophy, almost always in ignorance of Hjelmslev’s proposal, did no more than repropose his model.12
Reconsidering Hjelmslev’s model, we see that a dictionary representation would allow us to solve the following problems (as Katz 1972 will suggest later): synonymy and paraphrase (a ewe is a female ovine); similarity and difference (the pairs ewe and mare and mare and stallion have some features in common, while we can establish on the basis of what other features they can be distinguished); antonymy, complementarity, and contrariety (stallion is the antonym of mare); hyponymia and hyperonymia (equine is the hyperonym of which stallion is the hyponym); sensibleness and semantic anomaly (stallions are male makes sense while a female stallion is semantically anomalous; redundancy (male stallion); ambiguity (the terms bear and bull, for example, have more than one meaning); analytical truth (stallions are male is analytically true, because the definition of the subject contains the predicate); contradictoriness (there are no male mares); syntheticity (that ewes produce wool does not depend on the dictionary but on our knowledge of the world); inconsistency (this is a ewe and this is a ram cannot be equally true if referred to the same individual); semantic entailment (if ram, then ovine).
Unfortunately this model does not permit us to represent what we must know about sheep and horses if we are to understand many discourses about them. It does not allow us, for instance, to reject expressions like the stallion was bleating desperately like a ram (justifiable only in a metaphorical context, and a very daring one at that), given that the mechanism of definition does not explain what sound horses naturally emit.
And this is not all. Even if a system of this kind could be implemented based on assumed primitives, and if SHEEP and HORSE were primitives, they would serve to define only a very limited share of the terms concerning part of the animal kingdom. How many primitive features would be needed to define all the terms in any given lexicon? And how do we define a “primitive” feature?
It has been said that primitives are innate ideas of a Platonic nature, but not even Plato succeeded in satisfactorily deciding how many or of what kind were the universally innate ideas (either there is an idea for every natural genus, like equinity, in which case the list is an open one, or there are a few far more abstract ideas, like the One, the Many, the Good, or mathematical concepts, which are insufficient to distinguish the meaning of lexical terms).
It has been said that primitives are elements of a whole that, by virtue of the systematic relationship between its terms, cannot be anything but finite: but this would be a simplified Porphyrian tree or a tree of genera and species good only for the purposes of classification.
It is hard to define primitiveness by distinguishing between analytical and synthetic properties, a distinction severely criticized by Quine (1953a), in part because the notion of analyticalness is completely circular (if a property contained in the definition of a term is analytic it cannot be a criterion for establishing the appropriateness of a dictionary definition).
The possibility of positing a difference between necessary and contingent properties must also be excluded, because if it were necessary for a cat to be mammiferous and contingent for it to meow, then all “necessary” would mean is “analytic.”
It has been proposed that finiteness is a requirement for a packet of primitives (primitives ought to be limited in number, considering that it would be anti-economical to have as many primitives as there are lemmata to define), but it is precisely the cataloguing of this finite number of semantic atoms that has turned out so far to be problematic.
It has been suggested that primitives are simple concepts, but it is difficult to define a simple concept (the concept of mouse seems more simple and immediate than that of mammifer, and it is easier to define concepts like emphyteusis than verbs like to do).
It has been suggested that they depend on our experience of the world, or that there are (as Russell 1905 suggested) “object-words” whose meaning we learn directly by ostension, and “dictionary-words” that can be defined by other dictionary-words—but Russell was the first to recognize that pentagram is a dictionary-word for most speakers, but would be an object-word for a child who grew up in a room in which the wallpaper was decorated with pentagrams.
The requirement of adequacy has been proposed (primitives should serve to define all words), but, if we consider as primitives sufficient to define the concept of “bachelor” features like HUMAN MALE ADULT UNMARRIED, why does it seem inadequate to call a Benedictine monk a bachelor? We would have to add other constrictions (for example, a bachelor is an adult human unmarried male who has not taken a vow of chastity), and with that we have introduced encyclopedic elements into our dictionary.
The requirements of independence (primitives should not depend for their definition on other primitives) and absence of further interpretability have been proposed, but not even HUMAN seems without further interpretability if we consider the whole debate over abortion and cloning that is taking place today precisely on the subject of what it means to be human. In reality, in any lexicon any term is potentially interpretable by means of other terms in the same lexicon, or other semantic devices, according to the criteria of interpretance and unlimited semiosis established by Peirce.
Lastly, if primitives are rooted in our way of thinking, the principle of universality suggests itself. It is assuredly possible that certain experiences related to our bodies are universal, such as above/below, eat/sleep, be born/die, but in the first instance it is unthinkable that we can define all the objects and events in the universe in terms of these ideas, and, secondly, universal does not mean primitive, given that a universally understood concept such as dying needs to be further defined, as is demonstrated by the debates on end-of-life decisions and the harvesting of organs.
In the face of these criticisms, since the middle of the twentieth century, the conviction has made more and more headway, especially among the theorists of cognitivist semantics, that linguistic competence is always encyclopedic, and that in semantic representation no distinction can be made (except on a provisional basis and for the purpose of specific analyses) between linguistic knowledge and knowledge of the world.
But at this point we must abandon the vicissitudes of the dictionary to trace the historical evolution of the encyclopedia.
1.3. The Encyclopedias
The role of the encyclopedia has fluctuated over the
