Therefore any phenomenon, for it to be understood as a sign of something else and from a certain point of view, must first of all be perceived. The fact that the perception may be successful precisely because we are guided by the notion that the phenomenon is hypothetically understood as a sign (otherwise we would pay no attention to certain stimuli) does not eliminate the problem of how we perceive it.6
When the phenomenological tradition speaks of «perceptual meaning» it refers to something that legitimately precedes the constitution of meaning as the content of an expression; and yet (see A Theory of Semiotics 3.3) if I descry an indistinct animal form in the darkness, the success of the perception (the judgment That is a dog) is governed by a cognitive schema, something that I already know about the dog and that can legitimately be considered as a part of the content I usually assign to the word dog. In such a case I have made an inference: I have surmised that the indistinct form I descried in the darkness was a token of the type dog.
In the example of the fax, the letters -ear stand, in the inferential process, for the y they make it possible to hypothesize. The subject of our example possesses the (purely graphical) knowledge of at least one English word that could end with those letters and therefore guesses that -ear is an (incomplete) token of the lexical type denominated year. If on the other hand he has a good knowledge of English, he will also have the right to assume that the missing letter could be chosen from among b,d,f,g, h, n, p, r, t, and w (with each of which one can form an English word that makes sense), without being able to assume c, i, o, q, or u. But if he extends the inference to the whole syntagm Xappy neX Xear, he notices that one solution is more probable than the others, because he assumes that the whole string (incomplete in three places) is none other than Happy New Year (a stock phrase and a highly codified expression of good wishes).
We could then say that even in such an elementary process the token stands for its type. But what happens in the perception of unknown objects (such as the platypus)? The process is certainly more adventurous, that to stand for is contracted through processes of trial and error, but the relation of mutual referral from type to token is fixed once a perceptual judgment has been established.7
If (as is reiterated in Eco 1984) the basic characteristic of semiosis is inference, while the equivalence established by a code (a = b) is only a scleroticized form of semiosis, fully found only in ciphers (i.e., in the equivalences between one expression and the other, as in Morse code—see Eco 1984: 172–73), then the perceptual inference may be considered a process of primary semiosis.8
Naturally it might be decided that the question is wholly nominalistic. If it were established that semiosis occurred only when institutionalized sign functions appeared, then any talk of semiosis in the case of perception would be purely metaphorical—and in such a case we would have to say that so-called primary semiosis is only a precondition of semiosis. If this makes it possible to do away with pointless discussion, I have no problems in speaking of perceptual presemiosis.9 But things would not change that much, because, as we shall see in the following story, the relation between this primary phase and the successive development of full-fledged semiosis presents no evident fractures; rather, it constitutes a sequence of phases in which the preceding one determines the following one.
3.3 Montezuma and the Horses
The first Aztecs to hasten to the coast witnessed the landing of the conquistadors.10 Although only a very few traces of their first reactions remain and the best information we have depends on Spanish reports and indigenous chronicles written after the event, we know for sure that various things must have completely amazed them: the ships; the Spaniards’ awesome and majestic beards; the protective coverings that lent those fully armored «aliens» with their unnaturally white skins such a frightening air; the muskets and the cannons; and finally, apart from the ferocious dogs, those unheard-of monsters, the horses, in terrifying symbiosis with their riders.
The horses must have been no less perceptually puzzling than a platypus. At first (maybe also because they did not distinguish the animals from the pennants and armor that covered them), the Aztecs thought that the invaders were riding deer (and in so thinking they behaved just like Marco Polo). Oriented therefore by a system of previous knowledge but trying to coordinate it with what they were seeing, they must have soon worked out a perceptual judgment.
An animal has appeared before us that seems like a deer but isn’t. Likewise they must not have thought that each Spaniard was riding an animal of a different species, even though the horses brought by the men of Cortes had diverse coats. They must therefore have got a certain idea of that animal, which at first they called magçatl, which is the word they used not only for deer but for all quadrupeds in general. Later, since they began adopting and adapting the foreign names for the objects brought by the invaders, their Nahuatl language transformed the Spanish caballo into cauayo or kawayo.
At a certain point they decided to send messengers to Montezuma to tell him of the landing and of the terrifying marvels they were witnessing. We have posterior evidence of the first message they sent to their lord: one scribe gave the news in pictograms, and he explained that the invaders were riding deer (magaoa, the plural of maçatl) as high as the roofs of the houses.
I don’t know whether Montezuma, confronted with such incredible news (men dressed in iron with iron weapons, perhaps of divine origin, equipped with prodigious instruments that hurled stone balls capable of destroying all things), understood what those «deer» were. I imagine that the messengers (worried about the fact that in their neck of the woods, if the news was not to the hearer’s liking, there was a tendency to punish the bearer of it) screwed up their courage and integrated the report with more than just words, since it seems that Montezuma was wont to require his informers to provide him with all the possible expressions for one and the same thing. And so they must have used their bodies to hint at the movements of the maçatl, imitating its whinnying, trying to show how it had long hair along its neck, adding that it was most terrifying and ferocious, capable in the course of the fray of overwhelming anyone who tried to withstand it.
Montezuma received some descriptions, on the basis of which he tried to get some idea of that as yet unknown animal, and goodness knows how he imagined it. That depended both on the skill of the messengers and on his agility of wit. But he certainly understood that it was an animal, and a worrisome one too. In fact, still according to the chronicles, at first Montezuma did not ask other questions but withdrew into a distressing silence, with head bowed and wearing an absent, sorrowful air.
Finally the encounter between Montezuma and the Spaniards came to pass, and I would say that, no matter how confused the messengers’ description may have been, Montezuma must have easily identified those things called magaoa. Simply, faced with the direct experience of the maçatl, he must have adjusted the tentative idea he had conceived of them. Now, like his men, every time he saw a maçatl, he too would recognize it as such, and every time he heard talk of maçaoa, he would understand what his interlocutors were talking about.
Then, as he gradually got to know the Spaniards, he would learn many things about horses, he would begin to call them cauayo, he would learn where they came from, how they reproduced, what they ate, how they were reared and trained, what other uses they could be put to, and to his regret he would very soon understand how useful they could be in battle. But according to the chronicles, he must also have harbored a suspicion regarding the invaders’ divine origins, because he was told that his men had managed to kill two horses.
At a certain point the learning process whereby Montezuma was gradually increasing his knowledge of horses stopped, not because he could not learn any more but because he was killed. And therefore I will leave him (and the great number of those who were massacred along with him for having had the revelation of Horse-hood) in order to observe that in this story a great number of different
