Kant and the Platypus, Umberto Eco

Contents
Introduction

Chapter One ON BEING
1.1 Semiotics and the Something
1.2 An unnatural problem
1.3 Why is there being?
1.4 How we talk about being
1.5 The aporia of being in Aristotle
1.6 The duplication of being
1.7 The questioning of the poets
1.8 A model of world knowledge
1.9 On the possibility that being might abscond
1.10 The resistances of being
1.11 The sense of the continuum
1.12 Positive conclusions

Chapter Two KANT, PEIRCE, AND THE PLATYPUS
2.1 Marco Polo and the unicorn
2.2 Peirce and the black ink
2.3 Kant, trees, stones, and horses
2.4 Perceptual judgments
2.5 The schema
2.6 And the dog?
2.7 The platypus
2.8 Pierce reinterpreted
2.8.1 The Ground, qualia, and primary iconism
2.8.2 The lower threshold of primary iconism
2.8.3 Perceptual judgment
2.9 The grain

Chapter Three COGNITIVE TYPES AND NUCLEAR CONTENT
3.1 From Kant to cognitivism
3.2 Perception and semiosis
3.3 Montezuma and the horses
3.3.1 The Cognitive Type (CT)
3.3.1.1 The recognition of tokens
3.3.1.2 Naming and felicitous reference
3.3.1.3 The CT and the black box
3.3.2 From CT toward Nuclear Content (NC)
3.3.2.1 Instructions for identification
3.3.2.2 Instructions for retrieval
3.3.3 Molar Content (MC)
3.3.4 NC, MC, and concepts
3.3.5 On referring
3.4 Semiosic primitives
3.4.1 Semiosic primitives and interpretation
3.4.2 On categories
3.4.3 Semiosic primitives and verbalization
3.4.4 Qualia and interpretation
3.4.5 The CTs and the image as «schema»
3.4.6 «Affordances»
3.5 Empirical cases and cultural cases
3.5.1 The story of the archangel Gabriel
3.5.2 CT and NC as zones of common competence
3.6 From type to token or vice versa?
3.7 The CT archipelago
3.7.1 Types vs. basic categories
3.7.2 Tiny Tim’s Story
3.7.3 Quadruped oysters
3.7.4 CTs and prototypes
3.7.4.2 Some misunderstandings regarding prototypes
3.7.4.3 The mysterious Dyirbal
3.7.5 Other types
3.7.6 If on a Winter’s Night a Driver
3.7.7 Physiognomic types by individuals
3.7.8 CTs for formal individuals
3.7.9 Recognizing SC2
3.7.10 Some open problems
3.7.11 From the public CT to that of the artist

Chapter Four THE PLATYPUS BETWEEN DICTIONARY AND ENCYCLOPEDIA
4.1 Mountains and MOUNTAINS
4.2 Files and directories
4.3 Wild categorization
4.4 Indelible properties
4.5 The real story of the platypus
4.5.1 Watermole or duck-billed platypus
4.5.2 Mammae without nipples
4.5.3 A la recherche de l’oeuf perdu
4.6 Contracting
4.6.1 Eighty years of negotiations
4.6.2 Hjelmslev vs. Peirce
4.6.3 Where does the amorphous continuum lie?
4.6.4 Vanville
4.7 Contract and meaning
4.7.1 Meaning of the terms and sense of the texts
4.7.2 Meaning and the text

Chapter Five NOTES ON REFERRING AS CONTRACT
Can we refer to all cats?
Referring to horses
The true story of the sarkiapone
Are there closed white boxes?
The Divine Mind as e-mail
From the Divine Mind to the Intention of the Community
Quid pro quo and negotiations
The strange case of Doctor Jekyll and the brothers Hyde
Is Jones mad?
What does Nancy want?
Who died on the fifth of May?
Impossible objects
The identity of the Vasa
On Ahab’s other leg
Ich liebe Dich

Chapter Six ICONISM AND HYPOICON
6.1 The debate on iconism
6.2 Not a debate between madmen
6.3 The arguments of the sixties
6.4 Dead ends
6.5 Likeness and similarity
6.6 Outlines
6.7 Surrogate stimuli
6.8 Back to the discourse
6.9 Seeing and drawing Saturn
6.10 Prostheses
6.11 More on mirrors
6.12 Chains of mirrors and television
6.13 Rethinking painting
6.14 Recognition
6.15 Alpha and beta mode: a catastrophe point?
6.16 From perceptual likeness to conceptual similarities
6.17 The Mexican on a bicycle

Endnotes
Works Cited

Introduction

What has Kant got to do with the platypus? Nothing. As we shall see from the dates, he couldn’t have had anything to do with it. And this should suffice to justify the title and its use of an incongruous set that sounds like a tribute to Borges’s ancient Chinese encyclopedia.

So what is this book about? Apart from the platypus, it’s about cats, dogs, mice, and horses, but also chairs, plates, trees, mountains, and other things we see every day, and it’s about the reasons why we can tell an elephant from an armadillo (as well as why we don’t normally mistake our wife for a hat). This is a formidable philosophical problem that has obsessed human thought from Plato to present-day cognitivists, and it is one that even Kant (as we shall see) not only failed to solve but didn’t even manage to express in satisfactory terms. So you can imagine how much chance I’ve got.

This is why the essays making up this book (written over twelve months, picking up the themes I have been dealing with—including some unpublished material—over these last few years) spring from a nucleus of interconnected theoretical concerns, and while they are interreferential, they are not to be read as «chapters» of a work with systematic ambitions. Although the various paragraphs are sometimes scrupulously numbered into sections and subsections, this is only to enable rapid cross-referencing between one essay and another, without this artifice necessarily suggesting an underlying architecture. And while I say many things in these pages, there are many more that I don’t say, simply because my ideas are not clear in that regard. In fact, I should like to take as my motto a quotation from Boscoe Pertwee, an eighteenth-century author (unknown to me), which I found in Gregory (1981: 558): «I used to be indecisive but now I’m not so sure.»

Written therefore in a spirit of indecision and beset by numerous doubts, these essays spring from my feeling of not having honored certain debts incurred when I published A Theory of Semiotics in 1976 (in which I took up and developed various lines of research begun in the latter half of the sixties). The debts concerned the problems of reference, iconism, truth, perception, and what in those days I used to call the lower threshold of semiotics. In the course of these twenty-two years, many people have posed me some most pressing problems, orally or in writing, while an even greater number have asked me if and when I was going to write an updated version of A Theory of Semiotics. These essays were written also to explain, perhaps to myself rather than to others, why I did not do so.

Basically, there are two reasons. The first is that, while in the sixties it was possible to think of linking up the scattered members of many semiotic research projects in order to attempt a summa of them, today the area covered has become so wide (overlapping that of the various cognitive sciences) that any new systematization would seem rash. What we are now faced with is an expanding galaxy and no longer a planetary system for which fundamental equations can be supplied, a situation that strikes me as a sign of success and health. Questioning about semiosis has become central to a great number of disciplines, even on the part of those who did not think they were practicing semiotics, or were practicing it unwittingly, or simply did not wish to practice it.

This was already true when I was writing A Theory of Semiotics (just to make one ex ample, it was not because biologists had been reading books on semiotics that they began talking about genetic «codes»), but the phenomenon has grown so widespread as to suggest that, no matter how selective their theoretical criteria, those interested in the argument would be well advised to apply a kind of ecumenical tolerance, in the same sense in which the broadminded missionary decides that even the infidel, whatever the idol or superior principle he worships, is naturaliter a Christian and shall therefore be saved.

Nevertheless everyone, no matter how tolerant he may be of other people’s opinions, must also enunciate his own, at least with regard to fundamental questions. With a view to integrating and correcting A Theory of Semiotics, then, here I am ready to explain my most recent ideas regarding some points that that book left in abeyance.

As a matter of fact (and here we come to the second reason), in the first part of A Theory of Semiotics I began with a problem: If, in a Peircean sense, there is such a thing as a Dynamical Object, we know it only through an Immediate Object. By manipulating signs, we refer to the Dynamical Object as a terminus ad quem of semiosis. In the second part of the book, devoted to the ways in which signs are produced, I presupposed (even though I did not spell it out) that if we speak (or emit signs, of whatever type they may be), it is because Something urges us to speak. And this ushered in the problem of the Dynamical Object as a terminus a quo.

The decision to state the problem of the Dynamical Object first in terms of its being a terminus ad quem was to determine my successive interests, following the development of semiosis as a sequence of interpretants—interpretants being a collective, public, observable product laid down in the course of cultural processes, even though one does not presume the existence of a mind that admits of, uses, or develops them. This led to what I have written on the problem of signification, the text and intertextuality, narrativity, and the elaboration and limits of interpretation.

But it is precisely the problem of the limits of interpretation that set me to wondering whether those limits are only cultural and textual or something that lies concealed at greater depths. And this explains why the first of these essays deals with Being. It’s not a matter of delusions of grandeur but of professional duty. As will be seen, I speak of Being only inasmuch