When we presume a subject that tries to understand what it experiences (and the object—that is to say, the Thing-in-Itself—becomes the terminus a quo), then, even before the formation of the chain of interpretants, there comes into play a process of interpreting the world that, especially in the case of novel or unknown objects (such as the platypus at the end of the eighteenth century), assumes an «auroral» form, made up through trial and error; but this is already semiosis in progress, which calls pre-established cultural systems into question.
And so, every time I thought of putting my hand to A Theory of Semiotics again, I wondered if I shouldn’t have restructured it starting from the second part.
The reasons why I wondered this ought to become evident on reading the following essays. The fact that they are presented in essay form, explorations that are vagabond from diverse standpoints, says how I realized—gripped by the impulse to overturn everything systematically—I was unable to structure it (and perhaps no one can do this alone). Out of prudence I decided to shift from the architecture of gardens to gardening, so instead of designing Versailles, I limited myself to digging over some flower beds barely connected by beaten earth paths—and this with the lingering suspicion that all around there was still a romantic park in the English manner.
By deciding where to locate my flower beds, I have decided to take issue with myself (instead of taking issue with thousands of others), and that’s to say with various things I had written before, correcting myself when this struck me as the right thing to do, but without denying myself in toto, because one changes one’s ideas the way an animal sheds its coat, in patches: it’s never a wholesale change from one day to the next.
If I had to sum up the nucleus of problems around which I have been circling, I would talk in terms of the characteristics of a cognitive semantics (which certainly has little to do with the truth-functional or the structural-lexical varieties, even though it tries to draw themes and ideas from both) based on a contractual notion both of our cognitive schemata and of signification and reference—a position consistent with my previous attempts to elaborate a theory of content featuring a blend of semantics and pragmatics. In doing this, I try to temper an eminently «cultural» view of semiosic processes with the fact that, whatever the weight of our cultural systems, there is something in the continuum of experience that sets a limit on our interpretations, and so—if I weren’t afraid of sounding pretentious—I would say that the dispute between internal realism and external realism would tend to compose itself in a notion of contractual realism.
THE READER WILL notice that, starting from the second essay and more and more as I go on, these theoretical discussions of mine are interwoven with «stories.» Perhaps some readers will know that, when I feel the urge to tell stories, I satisfy it elsewhere, and therefore my decision to tell stories here is not dictated by a need to realize a suppressed vocation (a temptation for many contemporary thinkers who substitute philosophy with pages of bellelettrisme). It could be said that there is a profound philosophical reason behind my decision: if, as they say, the era of the «great narrative» has passed, it might be useful to proceed by parables, which let us see something in textual mode—as Lotman would have put it, and as Bruner invites us to do—without wanting to draw grammars from them.
But there is a second reason. In adopting a questioning approach to the way in which we perceive (but also name) cats, mice, or elephants, it struck me as useful not so much to analyze expressions like There is a cat on the mat in terms of models, or to go see what our neurons do when we see a cat on the mat (not to mention what the cat’s neurons do when it sees us sitting on the mat—as I shall explain, I try not to stick my nose into the «black box,» preferring to leave this difficult profession to the experts), as to bring an oft neglected character back to the stage, namely, common sense. And in order to understand how common sense works, there is nothing better than imagining «stories» in which people behave according to its dictates. In this way we discover that normality is narratively surprising.
But perhaps the presence of all these cats and dogs and mice in my discourse has brought me back to the cognitive function of the moralizing bestiaries and fables. In attempting at least to update the bestiary, I have introduced the platypus as the hero of my book. I am grateful to Stephen Jay Gould and Giorgio Celli (as well as to Gianni Piccini, via the Internet) for having aided and abetted me in my hunt for this imponderable little animal (which years ago I also encountered in person). The platypus accompanied me step by step, even where I don’t mention it, and I took the trouble to supply it with philosophical credentials by immediately finding it a relation with the unicorn, which, like bachelors, can never be absent from any reflections on language.
In debt as I am to Borges for many ideas in the course of my previous activities, I had been consoling myself for the fact that Borges had talked of everything, except the platypus, therefore I was overjoyed at having escaped the anxiety of influence, but just as I was about to hand these essays over to the printers, Stefano Bartezzaghi pointed out to me that Borges, at least orally, in a conversation with Domenico Porzio, in explaining why (perhaps) he had never gone to Australia, had spoken of the platypus: «Apart from the kangaroo and the platypus, which is a horrible animal, made from the pieces of other animals, now there are camels too.»1
I had already dealt with the camel, when working on the Aristotelian classifications. In this book I explain why the platypus is not horrible, but prodigious and providential, if we are to put a theory of knowledge to the test. By the way, given the platypus’s very early appearance in the development of the species, I insinuate that it was not made from the pieces of other animals, but that the other animals were made from pieces of the platypus.
I TALK OF cats and platypuses, but also of Kant—otherwise the title would be unjustifiable. As a matter of fact I talk of cats precisely because Kant brought in empirical concepts (and while he didn’t talk about cats, he talked about dogs), after which he didn’t know where to put them. I started from Kant to honor another debt I had incurred with myself, back in my university days, when I began to take down lots of little notes on that «devastating» concept (the suggestion came from Peirce) known as the schema. The problem of schematism has cropped up again today, right in the middle of the debate on cognitive processes.
But many of these lines of research suffer from insufficient historical background. Some people talk about neoconstructivism, for example, others make explicit references to Kant, but many others again indulge in neo-Kantism all unawares. I still remember an American book, a very good one, what’s more (but, as the saying goes, no names, no pack drill), in which at a certain point there is a note that says something like «It seems that Kant said something similar regarding this point (cf. Brown 1988).»
If it seems that Kant said something similar, the task of a philosophical discourse is to take another look at Kant’s point of departure and to see what group of problems he had been wrestling with, because his experience can teach us something too. We might still be the unwitting children of his errors (just as we are of his truths), and knowing this might help us avoid making analogous errors or thinking that we have just discovered something that he suggested two hundred years ago. Let’s put it this way: Kant knew nothing about the platypus, and that should not worry us, but if the platypus is to solve its own identity crisis, it ought to know something about Kant.
I’M NOT GOING to attempt an exhaustive table of acknowledgments, because it would be pure name dropping, starting with Parmenides. The bibliographical references at the end of this book do not make up a bibliography, they are only a legal device aimed at avoiding accusations of having omitted the names of persons from whom I took direct quotations. And so many important names—those of authors to whom I owe much but whom I have not cited directly—are absent.
I should like to thank the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University for giving me the opportunity to devote myself for two months to the first drafts of essays 3, 4, and 5.
Apart from this, in recent years I have been stimulated on these themes by the people who worked with me (and who have introjected the sound principle that you must speak of your friends without mincing words, because elaborate ceremonial is reserved for adversaries only). My debts in this sense, having been accumulated in the course of many debates, are infinite. It will be seen that I have quoted some dissertations produced in recent years, which have directly influenced many of these essays, but goodness knows how many names I have not had
