From among these virtuous men Gabriel must choose a bachelor, and, having received instructions about the Jewish language and the society of the period, he knows that his candidate must be an adult male and unmarried, even though the man could marry if he wished. And so Gabriel does not think of going to look for a homosexual, a eunuch, or a priest of some religion that requires ecclesiastical celibacy.
All he needs do is pay a visit to the Nazareth registry office. But, alas, as we all know, Caesar Augustus was to announce the famous census only nine months afterward, and at the time there were no public records, or if there were, they were in unspeakable disorder. To establish whether the various Josephs he has spotted are bachelors or not, Gabriel can infer their condition only from their behavior. The Joseph who lives alone in the back of his carpenter’s shop could be a bachelor (but he could also be a widower).
In the end, Gabriel remembers that Joseph is of the line of David; he supposes that in the Temple there will be old registers; he subpoenas them, and then, by comparing them with oral testimony, he manages to identify the Joseph he is looking for. End of Gabriel’s mission. Gabriel reascends to heaven to receive the warm congratulations of his fellow angels for a mission well and truly accomplished. With them Gabriel would be able to interpret and therefore to describe step by step the procedures he followed to ascertain that Joseph was a bachelor; then he would supply his fellow angels with the NC of the expression bachelor, which certainly includes the cultural rule that says «an adult male who is unmarried even though he could be otherwise,» but also includes a mixture of images, scripts that concern typical behavior, and procedures for the collection of data. 33
But now let us make our story more complicated. Lucifer, by nature rebellious when it comes to divine decrees, wants to try to prevent the Incarnation. He cannot oppose the miracle of virgin conception, but he can act on events—as he will indeed do later, by instigating Herod to commit the massacre of the innocents. And therefore Lucifer tries to make the encounter between Mary and Joseph fail in such a way that, if the birth must occur, it will seem illegitimate in the eyes of all Palestine. So he orders Belphagor to precede Gabriel to Nazareth and to eliminate Joseph with a dagger.
Fortunately the Prince of Darkness teaches us his tricks but not how to hide them. He forgets that Belphagor—who for millennia has been assigned to the savage peoples of Terra Incognita—isused to the customs of those peoples, among whom virtue is expressed through acts of warlike ferocity and is ostentated (or vaunted) by tattoos and scars that render the face repugnant. And so our poor devil tries to identify the virtuous Joseph and sets his eye, by an understandable error, on the father of the future Barabbas. He does not know what a bachelor is, because he comes from a hirsute tribe where by decree lads of tender years must couple with lascivious old men, only to move on, immediately after initiation, to an unbridled but legitimate polygamy.
And Belphagor will have trouble identifying Mary, since he does not know what it means for a young girl to be nubile and chaste; in the place whence he comes women are given, while still children, to the men of another clan, and they procreate by the time they are twelve. Nor does he know what it means for a bachelor or a nubile girl to live alone or with their parents, because in his neck of the woods everybody lives in large huts that house entire families—and the only ones who live alone are those the gods have made mad. As the society from which Belphagor comes from is founded on the avuncular principle, the archdevil does not know what it means to be of the line of David. As a result, Belphagor does not manage to identify Joseph and Mary, and his mission fails.
It fails because Belphagor did not know some things that Gabriel knew. But he was not wholly ignorant. Like Gabriel, Belphagor could tell a male from a female, night from day, the habitat that was little Nazareth from that of great Jerusalem. If he had passed by Joseph’s workshop, he would have seen that Joseph busied himself planing wood rather than pouring olives into a press; if he had met Mary, he would surely have said to himself that this was a young woman. In short Belphagor and Gabriel would have shared cognitive types that referred to empirical cases but not cognitive types dependent on the Palestinian cultural system of the first century (just) B.C.
In the light of this story, it would be easy to conclude that (i) there are empirical cases that we know and recognize through perceptual experience; (ii) it can happen that, for objects never before perceived directly, we first receive an NC by interpretation, and it is only on the basis of this that we produce a CT, even though a tentative one; (iii) for empirical cases therefore we go from the CT, founded on experience, to the NC, while for cultural cases the reverse occurs.
But things are not that easy. We have seen that to discriminate between to hop and to skip we must consider data proceeding from perceptual experience but also need information that I would call «choreographic,» without which it is impossible to count the order in which the limbs contact the ground (and it would be impossible to recognize that a certain convulsive movement executed by a dancer is a perfect entrechat). Conversely, being a professor is certainly a cultural case, but anyone who enters a (traditional) classroom can immediately tell the teacher from the students, because of their reciprocal spatial positions—and better than an ordinary person, when asked, can distinguish between a weasel and a stoat or even between a frog and a toad. We are able to understand the different cognitive operations that distinguish the recognition of a cat from the recognition of a square root, but between these two extremes there stand a variety of «objects» whose cognitive status is fairly unstable.
By way of a conclusion, my guess is that we must recognize the existence of CTs for cultural cases too, and therefore when necessary I shall take them into consideration, without putting them in question and without even trying to create an exhaustive typology of them. In reality, in this chapter, I am concerned with cognitive types for empirical cases, and I shall continue to deal with them directly.
Naturally this decision does not eliminate another problem: that is, whether there are observation sentences independent of a «corporate» system of assumptions, or whether the difference between a male and a female is not in some way possible only within a system of «warranted assertions.» But I shall be dealing with this in section 4.
3.5.2 CT and NC as Zones of Common Competence
I certainly have some notions about a mouse, and I am able to recognize a mouse in the little animal that suddenly flashes across the floor of my house in the country. A zoologist knows many things about the mouse that I don’t, perhaps more than those things recorded in the Encycbpedia Britannica. But if the zoologist is with me in the lounge of that country house, and if I draw his attention to what I am seeing, under normal conditions he ought to agree with me that there is a mouse in the corner over there.
It is as if, given the system of notions that I have about the mouse (MC:, which probably also includes personal interpretations due to previous experiences, or many notions about mice in literature and the arts, which are not part of the zoologist’s competence) and given the system of notions, or MC 2, of the zoologist, we both agree on an area of knowledge that we have in common (fig. 3.3).
figure 3.3
This area of knowledge coincides with the CT and NC shared by the zoologist and me; it allows both of us to recognize a mouse and to make some commonsensical observations about mice, probably to distinguish one from a sewer rat (even though this is a controversial point), and to react with some common behavior patterns.
The fact that the zoologist reacted not only with the verbal expression There’s a mouse! but also with dynamic interpretants that I could foresee, and the fact that, were he asked to draw what he saw, he could supply something very similar to figure 3.1, or that he can always explain what mice are in words to a child by using a series of descriptions not dissimilar to those proposed by Wierzbicka—all this tells me that, somewhere, the zoologist must have a notion not unlike my own. Proof of this lies in the fact that both of us, were we to construct a mousetrap, would build it more or less the same size, and both of us would study the distance between the bars so that a standard-format mouse would not be able to escape, and both of us would use cheese as bait rather than salad or chewing gum. Neither of us
