3.7 The CT Archipelago
3.7.1 Types vs. Basic Categories
Certainly it is one thing to refer to a CT to recognize a token of a natural kind, such as mouse, and another to refer to a CT to recognize individually a person. Neisser (1976: 55) admits that our schemata can operate on different levels of generality, so that we are ready to recognize «something,» «a mouse,» «my brother-in-law George,» and even a sneer of disdain (not a smile) on George’s face. Of the possible existence of individual types (and the oxymoron already obliges us to investigate further), I shall have more to say in 3.7.6., but for now we need to talk of the difference between generic types and specific types, in other words, of the fact that we sometimes want to tell a tabby cat from a Siamese, sometimes a cat from a dog, or sometimes only a quadruped from a biped. Evidently it is a matter of postulating CTs at different levels of generality, but the problem immediately arises as to whether we can think of a sort of «tree» for the different CTs or whether we must consider them as an archipelago with no hierarchical order.35
The fact that has been and is still widely discussed is that we show different capacities of discrimination for different natural and artificial kinds. As for myself, I am capable of distinguishing a hen from a turkey, a swallow from an eagle, and a sparrow from a canary (and even a barn owl from a little owl), and therefore I have a CT of them; however, I would not be able to distinguish between wrens, redstarts, chaffinches, bullfinches, blackcaps, skylarks, goldfinches, great tits, warblers, starlings, jays, curlews, or wagtails. I would recognize them as birds, and that’s all. Naturally a hunter or a bird-watcher would have a competence different from mine, but this is not the problem. The problem is, if that of the swallow is a CT, what is the CT of birds in general? Even if we accept the idea that we know by categorial organization, this organization varies according to diverse areas of experience, according to human groups, and according to the individual.
If our knowledge were really structured according to a homogeneous system of classes and subclasses, we should name and recognize the objects that follow according to the diagram in figure 3.4.
Figure 3.4
When we presuppose a schema of this kind, we likewise presuppose that the basic categories are the ones learned first and that therefore they not only play a crucial role in linguistic exchange but also govern the processes of identification or recognition. When subjects are asked to enumerate the features, properties, or attributes of a series of stimulus terms (such as animal, furniture, chair, dog, fruit, apples, and pears) it can be seen that (i) for the superordinate categories, the features are very few in number; (ii) for the basic categories, the features grow remarkably; and (iii) for the subordinate categories, the difference in terms of features as compared to the basic categories, is minimal. For example, only two features are individuated to define clothing (it’s something we put on and something that keeps us warm), a great number of features are individuated for trousers (legs, pockets, buttons, they are made of cloth, you put them on in a certain way, etc.), while for a subordinate category such as jeans the subjects usually add only the characteristic feature of color (they are usually blue). According to the number of these distinguishing features, it is obvious that it is easier to tell trousers from a jacket than to discriminate between two different kinds of trousers.36
All the experiments in this regard have shown that our everyday knowledge does not correspond to this classification. The situation can vary according to the subjects, but while many of them can tell a hen from a turkey, in the case of the curlew and the redstart they recognize only a bird.
Rosch (1978: 169) talks of an unexpected result when, although Tree and Furniture were hypothesized as superordinate categories, it was seen that the subjects could tell a chair from a table much better than they could an oak from a maple, which were both generically recognized as trees. I was not surprised in the least by the result, bearing in mind that for some time Putnam has been telling us that he cannot distinguish between an elm and a beech (and I must join the club), while I imagine he can distinguish very well between a chair and a table or between a banana and an apple. There are two problems here.
We tend to elaborate CTs with reference to perceptual situations in which, as far as our corporeal exigencies are concerned, morphology and pertinency count for more than the function we might call aesthetic and social (and I refer the reader to the paragraph on affordances in 3.4.7). To decide that a bookshelf and a chair both belong to the superordinate category of Furniture, we need to have an elaborate notion of what a habitat is, of what we expect from a standard habitation, and of where one goes to purchase the objects that serve to furnish a standard habitation. The category Furniture, therefore, requires a capacity for abstraction. I maintain that a dog may recognize a chair or a divan, and perhaps a table, as objects on which he can curl up and have a nap, while he sees a bookshelf or a (closed) cupboard simply as obstacles, every bit as much as he sees the walls of the room as obstacles.37
On the other hand the property of something being a tree is one of those semiosic primitives that we instinctively distinguish in the surrounding environment, and as a result we discriminate between the tree and animals and other objects (and I don’t think a dog behaves any differently when he uses trees generally as urinals—except for any repugnance he may feel for some particular olfactory stimulus). We elaborate first and foremost a CT of the tree (while the difference between beech and linden tree belongs only to a more elaborate type of knowledge), because, unless we are primitive forest dwellers who depend on their ability to recognize different species of trees, trees appear to us as furnishings of the environment that, as far as our needs go, all perform the same function (they give shade, mark boundaries, cluster together in woods or forests, etc.).38
But we can tell a banana from an apple very well, because the difference counts for our needs and our alimentary preferences, because we often have to choose between them, or because they present different conditions of consumability. Therefore it seems natural that we have distinct CTs for banana and apple and a generic CT for trees.39
These statistical rules are subject to noteworthy exceptions depending on personal experience. Unable as I am to tell an elm from a linden tree, I can recognize both banyan trees and mangroves very well. There are three reasons for this: the first is that we are dealing with trees that nourished my childish imagination as a reader of adventure stories (especially Salgari’s books, at least as far as the banyan is concerned); the second, which depends on the first, is that in the course of my travels, when I heard it said that something was a banyan and that the clumps of vegetation along the coasts of an island or alongside a swampy canal were mangroves, I hastened to look at them and to commit their morphological features to memory; the third is that both the banyan and the mangroves have highly singular and uncommon features, the former because the trunk branches out toward the roots in a series of star-shaped «blades,» and the latter because (by no means fortuitously) they are known in colloquial English as walking trees, that is to say, from a distance they look like insects walking on the water.
Naturally, still owing to biographical accidents, by this time I would recognize a platypus with certainty. I can identify an iguana, but I still have only the vaguest ideas about the anaconda. This does not mean that were I obliged to tell an anaconda from a badger and a magpie, I could not identify it, because I know it is a snake, but my idea of snake is «wild» and has nothing to do with the scientific idea of reptile.
3.7.2. Tiny Tim’s Story
We know very well that it is only at a certain age that children acquire classificatory competence, which does not prevent them from recognizing many objects perfectly well. The following dialogue is the transcription of a tape recording made without any scientific intention in 1968, in the course of a children’s party, with the sole purpose of making them play with the recorder, to tell stories or improvise dialogues. As far as I recall, the subject
