Although a vast competence is required to distinguish a referee from a goalkeeper (no vaster, however, than that required to tell a platypus from an echidna), we introject instructions for recognizing a referee in action. Some could be morphological (the referee wears an outfit of a certain type—and for the same reasons we can recognize who the bishop is in a religious ceremony), but they are not strictly necessary. The bishop in an ordination ceremony and the referee (even if in plain clothes) in a football match are recognizable by what they do, not by their appearance. And this recognition is also based on perceptual experiences.
Nevertheless perceptual experience must be oriented by a set of cultural instructions: those who do not know what a soccer match is see only a gentleman who, instead of kicking a ball like the other twenty-two gentlemen, runs about among them performing incomprehensible actions. But the person who saw a platypus for the first time saw something incomprehensible too: just as someone who knows nothing about soccer sees men on a field and is not quite sure what they are doing, or at least why they are doing it and in accordance with what rules, this person saw an animal equipped with some fairly original properties without understanding what it was or whether it breathed under the water or out of it.
And just as little by little he began to recognize other tokens of the platypus, even without being able to classify it in a reasonable manner, we can perhaps say that the soccer ignoramus, after having been exposed to the experience of several games, manages to infer that it is a matter of an activity probably having to do with play, in which the players try to propel a ball into a net, while the twenty-third gentleman intervenes occasionally to interrupt or regulate their activity. And so, if we admit right from the start that the discoverer of the platypus had elaborated a CT of the still provisionally named animal, why can’t the soccer ignoramus produce a CT (God only knows what kind, but probably a functional one) to recognize tokens of the referee?
It seems therefore that the referee is perceptually more recognizable than a cousin or a bachelor, and this is empirically true. But even in the case of natural kinds, we recognize some on a morphological basis (cat and platypus), others on the basis of definitions and a list of their possible behavior patterns, and we need only think of certain chemical elements or certain minerals of which we have never had perceptual experience. Yet no one is saying that we have a CT for cat but not for uranium: as Marconi (1997) suggests, a simple competence regarding the definition of uranium would allow us to recognize perceptually a sample of uranium if we had to choose between it, a butterfly, and an apple. It is not enough to say that we recognize as uranium something that has the evident property of not being a butterfly or an apple: as a matter of fact the simple information that uranium appears in mineral form disposes us to recognize one thing rather than another.
I do not think that the difference between the competence we have of a cat is different from the one we have of a bachelor, on the basis of the difference that according to Greimas-Courtés (1979: 332) lies between figurative semes (exteroceptive, which refer to the sensible qualities of the world) and abstract semes (interoceptive, dimensions of content that serve to categorize the world). The abstract semes are of the type «object vs. process,» not «bachelor vs. married.» Where do the bachelors stand according to Greimas? His abstract semes are extremely general categories, and between them and the figurative semes we would still need that mediation that Kant entrusted to the schemata, intermediaries between the abstraction of the categorial apparatus and the concreteness of the manifold of the intuition.
Nor do I think that Marconi’s (1997) distinction between referential competence and inferential competence stands up, or not in this case at least. Ideally speaking, someone who knows what a pangolin is has referential competence regarding it (he possesses the instructions with which to identify a token of it), while someone who knows what a bachelor is has only inferential competence (he knows that bachelors are unmarried adult males). But let us suppose we provide a computer with the necessary instructions for an understanding of English: its competence regarding the world pangolin would be no different from its competence regarding the word bachelor, and in both cases it would be prepared to make inferences of the type «If pangolin, then animal» and «If bachelor, then unmarried.» I could have only inferential and not referential competence of the pangolin, to the point that if one were to appear at my desk while I was writing, I would not know what it was.
But it might be objected that, in ideal conditions, I could obtain all the instructions necessary for recognizing a pangolin. Would I have to exclude that, in ideal conditions, I cannot be supplied with all the instructions for recognizing a bachelor? Let us imagine I am a detective, and that I am following day by day, hour by hour, the behavior of an individual. I note that in the evenings he goes back to the apartment where he lives alone, and that he has only transitory contact with members of the opposite sex, changing his partner every day. He could certainly be a false bachelor, a husband who lives separated from his wife, or a compulsive adulterer. But in the same way, could I not fail to recognize a hyperrealistic plastic model of a pangolin or a pangolin-robot, which behaves in every way like a pangolin, rolling itself up into a ball when threatened, or whose scales and sticky tongue are accessible to the sight and touch?
Counterobjection: a pangolin is such by divine (or natural) decree, while a bachelor is such by social decree or linguistic convention. Agreed, it would be sufficient to consider a society that does not recognize the institution of marriage, so that those whom we recognize as bachelors would no longer be so. But what is in question here is not that there is a difference between natural kinds, functional kinds, and goodness knows how many other types of objects, or that there is a difference between empirical and cultural cases (between cat and emphyteusis). The question is whether we can talk about CTs as systems of instructions that allow us to recognize tokens for cultural kinds too.
3.5.1 The Story of the Archangel Gabriel
The following story is inspired by the canonical Gospels, but it strays from them in some aspects. Let us say that it is inspired by an apocryphal gospel that, as it is apocryphal, I might have written myself.
The Lord decides to get the business of the Incarnation under way. He has prepared Mary for immaculate conception since her birth, and she is the only human being suited to this purpose. In addition, let us suppose that He has already seen to or is about to see to the miracle of virginal conception. But He must inform Mary of the event, and Joseph of the task that awaits him. He therefore calls for the Archangel Gabriel and gives him his orders, which we might sum up as follows: «You must descend to the Earth, to Nazareth, find a young girl called Mary, the daughter of Anna and Joachim, and tell her this and that. Then you must identify a virtuous and chaste man, called Joseph, of the line of David, and you will tell him what he must do.»
All very simple, if an angel were a human being. But angels do not speak, because they understand one another in an ineffable fashion, and what they know they see in the beatific vision. Yet in this vision they do not learn all that God knows, otherwise they would be God; they learn only what God allows them to know, according to their rank in the Heavenly Host. Therefore the Lord must make Gabriel able to carry out his mission by transmitting him certain competences: first of all, the entirely human capacity to perceive and recognize objects, then a knowledge of Hebrew, as well as other cultural notions, without which, as we shall see, the mission could not come to a happy conclusion.
Gabriel descends to Nazareth. Identifying Mary is not hard. He asks around for Joachim’s house, enters a fine and gracious colonnade, sees what is beyond doubt a young woman, calls her by name to be sure he is not making a mistake (she reacts by gazing at him in trepidation), and as far as the Annunciation is concerned, that’s that.
The serious problems begin now. How to identify Joseph? It’s a matter of identifying a member of the male sex, and Gabriel is perfectly able to discern, from dress and facial features, a male from a female. But the rest? After his successful strategy with Mary, he begins calling for Joseph loudly all around the village, but no good comes of it, because many men come running at his call, and he realizes that names may well be rigid designators in certain circumstances (he has read a little modal logic in the Divine Mind), but they are far less so in social life, where Josephs are more abundant than strictly necessary.
Naturally Gabriel knows that Joseph must be a virtuous man, and it is possible that he
