Nevertheless there is something in the way that P. laboriously recognized people that strikes us as being very close to the way in which we recognize them—except for the fact that P.’s behavior is a caricature of ours. First of all P. notices the details; he recognizes the photo of Einstein only because of the mustache and hair, and the photo of his brother Paul only because of the large teeth. This was like another patient mentioned by Sacks in the postscript: he did not recognize his wife and children but recognized some friends through certain relevant characteristics: a tic, a mole, extreme thinness.
It seems to me that in elaborating types of individuals, we normally proceed like this. We certainly have the ability to construct schemata and «primal sketches,» we can abstract from an infinite number of particulars, we restrain our tendency to dwell on every minimal individual detail: nevertheless we accept a regulated imbalance, we tend to seize on salient aspects and retain them with greater care in our memory. My physiognomic type of Johnny is different from Mark’s, because both of us (to a very limited extent) are like Mr. P. Ultimately it is continuous social interaction that obliges us not to be completely like Mr. P., because to be defined normal, it suffices (for better or worse) to keep to the rules laid down—and if necessary corrected—by the community, step by step.
3.7.8 CTs for Formal Individuals
Johnny is an individual, unique and unrepeatable, but Mark and I can both recognize him for different reasons. Now let us ask ourselves if there is a CT for Scott’s Ivanhoe and Beethoven’s Fifth. I would say that there is, because on opening the book (or at least on reading the first lines) or at the beginning of the composition, anyone who knows these two works well will recognize them. But what are these works of the intellect (I use this expression not only for literary, pictorial, architectonic, and musical works but also for philosophical and scientific essays)? Let us take another look at what was said in Eco (1976 3.4.6–8).
Johnny is an individual. The phoneme I pronounce is a replica of the phoneme type (there are variations in pronunciation, but the pertinent features established by the type are retained). Any first edition of Ivanhoe is a double of all the other books with the same title printed by the same publisher (in the sense that every copy has, at least on a molar level, all the properties of any other copy). But it is at the same time the clone of a «literary» archetype: the publishing type regards the substance of the expression (paper, font, binding), while the literary archetype regards the form of the content.
In this case my paperback copy of Ivanhoe (paper and typographic problems excluded) is a clone of the same literary archetype of which the first copy of the 1819 edition is itself a clone. While from an antiquarian standpoint (in which the substance of the expression, the paper, becomes pertinent) a copy of the 1819 edition is more valuable, from a linguistic and literary standpoint (the form of the expression) my copy possesses all the pertinent properties of the archetype as it flowed from the author’s pen (with the result that, immaterial of the edition, an actor could declaim passages from the text, producing the same substance of the sound expression and creating the same aesthetic effects).
The archetype of Ivanhoe is not a generic type, a form of Peircean Legisign: it looks more individual than Johnny, because Johnny would always be Johnny even if he lost his hair, teeth, and arms, whereas if someone were to change the beginning or the end or replace words here and there, Ivanhoe would become something else, a counterfeit, a case of plagiarism in part.
Is Ivanhoe as individual as the Mona Lisa? We know (Goodman 1968: 99) that there is a difference between autographic art, which does not allow of notation and is therefore not replicable (the Mona Lisa) and the allographic arts, replicable—some in accordance with rigorous criteria, such as books, but others in accordance with interpretative flexibility, such as music. But if one day it were possible to replicate every nuance of color, every brush stroke, and every detail of the canvas of the Mona Lisa, the difference between the original and the copy would have antiquarian value (just as in the world of rare books the more valuable copy between two copies of the same edition is the one signed by the author) but not semiotic value.
In short, whether we like it or not, lvanhoe is an individual, even though it has the property of being reproducible (but in such a way that every one of its doubles has the same exquisite individual characteristics as the archetype).47 That is why I can have a nongeneric physiognomic type of it. Not knowing what to call these strange types of individuals that are works of the intellect, and bearing in mind that their individuality concerns only the form of the expression and the content, not the substance, I would venture to call them formal individuals. Once we are on this path, other interesting formal individuals could be identified, but for the time being I shall restrict myself to applying the definition to those works of the intellect that are objects of direct perception.
Naturally, I might open a book I have already read and fail to recognize it from the first pages, but on the other hand if I caught a glimpse of Johnny from a distance and from behind and in the middle of a crowd into the bargain, I might feel just as puzzled. It is worth talking about this puzzlement, because it could upset our ideas on recognition and identification. Since the ploy of lvanhoe or the Fifth seems too facile, let us try a mental experiment that involves a more problematic formal individual.
3.7.9 Recognizing SC2
All the electrical appliances at home are out of order following a blackout, except for the radio with the built-in CD player, which is battery-powered. Left in total darkness, all I can do is listen to my favorite composition, Bach’s Second Suite for Solo Cello (which henceforward I shall call SC2), in a transcription for the treble recorder. Since it is pitch dark and I cannot read the CD labels, there is nothing for it but to try them all. To make the story more complicated, since I have a plaster cast on one foot but my friend Robert, like me a fan of SC2, is in the room, I ask him to grope his way to the CD player-radio and to do the job in my stead. Therefore I say to him: Please, go to find me SC2, precisely as if I were asking him to go meet our mutual friend Johann Sebastian at the railway station. I have started an operation of reference that presumes, on Robert’s part, the capacity to identify the referent, or the designatum of my linguistic act.48
As far as a musical piece is concerned, the notion of individuality seems compromised by the fact that different executions of the same composition can be made by different performers. In such a case, however (and for those sensible of these differences), the individual would be not SC2 but that thing known as SC2/Briiggen, as distinct from SC2/Rampal. In this mental experiment of ours, we shall behave as if there were only one execution of SC2, reproduced on thousands of records. In this case recognizing SC2 is like leafing through various books and recognizing lvanhoe. And in fact this is exactly how it happens with the majority of listeners, who always recognize SC2 in its various executions despite the differences in interpretation.
What are the instructions that Robert possesses in order to identify the individual, and to what extent do they coincide with those at my disposal?
Wittgenstein (Tractatus, 4.104) says that «the gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world. To all of them the logical structure is common.» Let us leave aside the strong assumption of Wittgenstein’s theory of Abbildung, which would have linguistic propositions as icons of the state of things to which they refer (the later Wittgenstein was far more prudent with regard to this). Considering only the musical example, it seems clear to me that we are faced with two different phenomena.49
We have the iconic relation between sound waves and the grooves in the vinyl of the disc or the sequences of discrete signals in the CD. We are certainly dealing with cast relations, with a primary iconism like that discussed in 2.8, a relation that would establish itself even in the absence of any mind to interpret it and that continues to subsist both when the sound waves are recorded analogically and when they are translated digitally.
There is a different relation between the physical phenomenon and its transcription on the stave, on the one hand, and between it and the «musical idea,» on the other. Transcription to the stave certainly
