The moment the zoologist and I agree to recognize a mouse, we have both ascribed the token supplied to us by the stimulating field to the same CT that the zoologist can also interpret in terms of NC. Must this NC be identified with what is habitually called the «literal meaning» of an expression? If the literal meaning is that found in the dictionary, then certainly not, because we have seen that the CT of the mouse also ought to include tymic «connotations,» frames, and so on. If, on the other hand, literal meaning is to be understood as what most people are induced to associate with the word mouse under ordinary circumstances, i.e., when there is no need to suspect metaphorical use or explicit affective accentuations (such as the diminutive mousie, or when we talk of the mouse of a computer), then we can answer in the affirmative. Except that this literal meaning is also made of information that is usually recognized as «encyclopedic» and involves experience of the world.
This bears out yet again that the canonical opposition between Dictionary and Encyclopedia is perhaps useful for certain theoretical ends but does not refer in the slightest to the way in which we perceive and name things.
Up to now I have said that the zoologist and I «possess» a zone of common competence, and I have identified this zone with the CT and NC that is elaborated from it. The doubt might arise, since both the zoologist and I share the same CT, that it is given to us. A legitimate suspicion, given that it seems to spring from perceptual experiences, both my own (that I have already seen and can recognize mice) and those of the people who transmitted them to me (when they taught me to recognize mice).
But if this zone is given to us, we automatically wonder if we are dealing with an entity deposited somewhere or other, like the species or essences or ideas of days gone by. If this were the case, it would be the same for everybody (and at bottom the problem facing Kant was how to construct a schematic procedure that, in the third Critique at least, would become a conjectural labor that was the same for everybody). Instead, we have seen how this zone is bound up with the subject’s disposition, experiences, and knowledge, so much so that I have expressed doubts as to whether it includes the notion that mice are different from rats. This common competence is continuously negotiated or contracted (the zoologist agrees to ignore something he knows about the mouse, to accept only what I know about it, or he contributes to the enrichment of my CT of the mouse by making me note something that had escaped me). It can be negotiated, because the cognitive type is not an entity (even though it seems to carry out the function usually assigned to concepts): it is a procedure—as the Kantian schema is a procedure.
3.6 From Type to Token or Vice Versa?
When we recognize or identify something as a mouse, a token is ascribed to a type. In the process, we pass from the particular to the general. Only under these conditions can I use language and talk about a mouse. It has been seen that in the language of modern cognitive psychology this procedure is indicated (in a historically debatable way) as a phenomenon of categorization, and I have resigned myself pro bono communicationis to go along with this usage.
Nevertheless when the zoologist and I agree that we have seen a mouse, we are referring, verbally too, to that mouse. While in order to understand that particular token, I have had to bind it to the general, now I will once more bind the general to the particular. As Neisser (1976: 65) observed, discussing this oscillation from a psychological standpoint, on the one hand I generalize the object and on the other I particularize the schema.34
I do not know if it is a source of comfort or despair that, by so saying, he is merely retabling a debate that began some time ago. Thomas Aquinas would have said that on seeing a mouse one grasps, in the phantasma offered by the sensation, a quidditas, and therefore not «that mouse» but «the mouse as such» (naturally it would be necessary to recognize, as he did, that the sensation immediately offers us something already organized, as if a retinal image offered us a fully defined object that naturally, spontaneously, referred to the corresponding mouse, without any interpretative mediation). But Aquinas was aware that by so doing we do not explain why we can still go on talking about that mouse, the one we are seeing.
And so he came up with the reflexio ad phantasmata, not to the single mouse, mind you, but to its image. An unsatisfactory solution, all things considered, especially for a realist. Duns Scotus’s attempt (first the haecceitates—but in that case we have to decide how to form the universal concept) to obviate this problem (catching the single mouse) does not seem definitively persuasive, nor does that proposed by Ockham (first the single individual, and the concept as pure sign—which is a way of saying that CTs are drawn from the individual, without explaining how to solve the universal-particular dialectic when encountering other individuals that may be signified with the same concept).
Basically these were all ways of solving the problem of the black box. To keep out of it, we must focus on only one fact: that something happens. In talking of the mouse, we generalize it, but after having identified the token as a token of a type, we dwell once more on the token: otherwise we could not say, for example, that that mouse has lost a bit of its tail, while neither the mouse as such nor the CT of the mouse has a cropped tail.
This brings us back precisely to the Kantian problem of the schema: if the general is too general, perhaps we might manage to compare it to the manifold of experience (which deep down must be that mouse as Maus an sich), but it would be difficult to return from the general to the individual manifold. As a procedure for imagining the mouse, the schema mediates, and therefore there must be some correspondence, not of a straight one-to-one sort but at least of a many-to-very-many sort between the features of the type and those that can be found in the token. This means to say that the relation between type and token should not be that which exists between the concept of a geographical map and any geographical map but that which exists between a particular geographical map and the territory it is intended to represent. Peirce would have said that in the moment of Thirdness everything is generalized, but there is no Thirdness that is not impregnated with that hie et nunc that arises in Firstness and Secondness.
Throughout the entire history of philosophy it has been said that the individual is omnimode determinatus, determined in all respects, and therefore its properties are infinite. With regard to the mouse I am now looking at, I could predicate the number of hairs, its position with respect to Mecca, or the food it ate yesterday. If we always knew only individuals, then every general proposition would derive from an effective knowledge of all individuals in all respects. In order to say that mice are animals, I would not just have to say that for every x, if x is a mouse, then x is an animal; rather, I have really enumerated all the xs and have discovered that they all indiscriminately exhibit a property that can be signified by the term animal. Or I would have to say that there are some xs, the ones I have known, that have the property of being animal (suspending my judgment on the xs of which I have no experience). But if there is a function for the CT and the corresponding NC (not to mention the MC), it is that it must also stand for the xs I have still not met.
Let us once more refuse all bets regarding what happens inside the black box. Common sense assures us that the zoologist and I recognize a mouse, but we know we are dealing with that mouse, and if by chance we caught it and marked its back with a pen, on the next occasion we would recognize that we were dealing with the same mouse—which is moreover the way in which, by virtue of characteristic features that are far more complex than the stroke of a pen, we recognize the individuals we normally come into contact with every day (and when we cannot do this, the doctor starts talking about Alzheimer’s disease). We recognize individuals because we relate them to a type, but we are able to formulate types because we have experience of individuals. That we are capable of some reflexio ad phantasmata (or ad res) is a fact that we must take as food for thought, even though, personally, I possess no instruments for explaining it and take as my motto the phrase with which Saul Kripke (1971) ended a conference speech on identity and necessity: «The next topic would be my own solution of the mind-body problem, but that I do not have» (1971: 164).
But there is something we can say, and it is not
