Even though cognitive schemata are constructs, imbued with «as if,» that in Kant’s view start from a still blind material of the intuition, and in Peirce’s view start from a primary icon that does not yet provide us with any guarantee of «objectivity,» there must have been something in the platypus that prevented the explorer from defining it as a quail or a beaver. This does not guarantee us that it was right to classify it among the monotremes. Tomorrow a new taxonomy could radically change the rules. And nonetheless right from the start, in order to construct a schema of the platypus, attempts were made to respect the grain possessed by that manifestation of the still unsegmented continuum.
Even granting that the schema is a construct, we can never assume that the segmentation of which it is the effect is completely arbitrary, because (in Kant as in Peirce) it tries to make sense of something that is there, of forces that act externally on our sensory apparatus by exhibiting, at the least, some resistances.
Therefore there is probably a «truth» of the schema, a point of view, a profile, an Abschattung that always shows us something from a certain perspective. The 3-D model of a human being still depends on the fact that man cannot be interpreted as a quadruped, and no matter how many joints he has in his body, the ones that articulate the arm at the elbow and the leg at the knee will always exhibit a pertinence that would be hard to revoke (it can be abstracted but not denied).
There was also a truth in the schema that depicted the whale as a fish (i.e., with the schematic traits proper to fish). It was wrong (as we now say) from the taxonomic standpoint, but it was not (and still is not, even for us) from the standpoint of the construction of a stereotype. But in any case it would never have been possible to schematize the whale as a bird.
Even if the schema were a construct in a state of perpetual inferential becoming, it would still have to take account of experience and allow us a return to it by acting according to habits. This does not exempt us from supposing that perhaps there might be better ways of organizing experience (otherwise the principle of fallibilism would make no sense), but at the same time it must guarantee us that, according to the schema, experience can be reckoned with in some way.
The schema of something cannot be constructed arbitrarily, even though it is possible to have different schematic representations of one and the same thing. In Kant’s view, that the sun rises, that it illuminates the stone, and that the stone is gradually heated come from the perceptual judgment; that between the rising of the sun and the heating of the stone there is a lapse of time comes from pure intuition; that the sun is the cause of the heat of the stone comes from the marshaling of the entire categorial apparatus. Everything depends on the legislative activity of the intellect. But that it does not happen that the heat of the stone comes before and the sunrise after depends on the very stuff of the sensible intuition. I cannot think of the causal nexus that runs from the sun to the heated stone without the forms of the intellect, but no form of the intellect can ever allow me to establish that it is the heating up of the stone that causes the sun to rise.
The schemata can also be considered unnatural, in the sense that they do not preexist in nature, but this does not change the fact that they are motivated.35 It is in this hint of motivation that the grain of the continuum is revealed.
Chapter Three
Cognitive Types and Nuclear Content
3.1 From Kant to Cognitivism
If Kant had considered schemata early enough, Peirce said, they would have overgrown his whole work (WR 5: 258–59). In the previous chapter, I suggested that it was precisely the problem of schematism that obliged Kant to undertake a change of direction in the third Critique. But we might say something more: if we were to reconsider the problem of Kantian schematism, much of the semantics of this century, from the truth-functional to the structural variety, would find itself in difficulty. And this is what has happened in the area usually referred to as «cognitive studies.»
In point of fact, a hint of various forms of Kantian schematism (connected to a constructivist idea of knowledge) is present in the contemporary cognitive sciences, even though their practitioners are sometimes unaware of this connection.1 Nevertheless today, when we come across notions such as schema, prototype, model, and stereotype, they are certainly not comparable to the Kantian notion (they do not imply transcendentalism, for example), nor can these terms be understood as synonyms.
Moreover these cognitive «schemata» are usually intended to account for phenomena such as perception and the recognition of objects or situations, while we have seen that Kantian schematism, created to explain how judgments such as All bodies have weight are possible, fell short of the mark precisely when it had to explain how we manage to have empirical concepts. Cognitivism drew attention back to empirical concepts and recommenced wondering about the same things Locke (and Husserl too, basically) had wondered about: What happens when we talk about dogs, cats, apples, and chairs?2
But to say that cognitivism asks questions about cats and chairs does not mean to say that the conclusions it comes to (which are many and discordant) are satisfactory. The ghost of schematism haunts much contemporary research, but the mystery of this secret art has not yet been revealed.
Nor have I any pretensions to revealing it in these pages, also because, as we shall see, I would rather not poke my nose into the black box of our mind or brain processes. I shall ask myself only a few questions regarding the relations between a possible neo-schematism and semiotic notions of meaning, dictionary and encyclopedia, and interpretation.3
Given the erratic character I should like these reflections to have, I shall not always try to identify positions, theories, research, or the schools of thought within contemporary cognitivism. Instead I shall recount, as will be seen, lots of «stories» (mental experiments in narrative form) that exemplify some of the problems.
Most of my stories are about something fairly similar to what Kant held to be empirical concepts: I mean to say that I intend to deal with the way in which we speak (i) of objects or situations of which we have or might have direct experience (such as dog, chair, walking, eating out, climbing a mountain); (ii) of objects and situations of which we have no experience but could have (such as armadillo, or performing an appendectomy); (iii) of objects and situations of which someone has certainly had experience but we can no longer have, and regarding which the Community nevertheless transmits us sufficient instructions to speak of as if we had had experience of them (such as dinosaur and Australopithecine).
Dealing with such elementary phenomena from a semiotic standpoint poses first and foremost a preliminary question: whether there is any sense in talking of perceptual semiosis, that is, of a semiotic aspect of perception.
3.2 Perception and Semiosis
The problem of perception as a semiosic process has already made its appearance in 2. Of course, those unfamiliar with the Peircean standpoint will find this concept difficult (or quasi «imperialist»), because if we accept that even perception is a semiosic phenomenon, discriminating between perception and signification gets a little tricky.4 We have seen that Husserl also thought that perceiving something as red and naming something as red ought to be the same process, but this process might have diverse phases. Between perceiving a cat as a cat and naming it cat, or indicating it as an ostensive sign for all cats, is there not a jump, a gap (at least that shift from terminus a quo to terminus ad quern)?
Can we detach the phenomenon of semiosis from the idea of sign? There is no doubt that when we say that smoke is a sign of fire, the smoke we notice is not yet a sign; even if we accept the Stoic standpoint, smoke becomes a sign of fire not in the moment in which it is perceived but when we decide that it stands for something else. In order to pass on to that moment, we must leave the immediacy of perception and translate our experience into propositional terms so that the observation of smoke becomes the antecedent of a semiosic inference: (i) there is smoke, (ii) if there is smoke, (iii) then there is fire. The passage from (ii) to (iii) is a matter of inference expressed propositionally; while (i) is a matter of perception.
On the contrary, we speak of perceptual semiosis not when something stands for something else but when from something, by an inferential process, we come to pronounce a perceptual judgment on that same something and not on anything else.5
Let us suppose
