Therefore by dictionary competence I mean something that limits itself to registering (both in terms of NC and MC) that a given concept belongs on a certain node in the tree of directories. Encyclopedic competence, on the other hand, involves both a knowledge of the names of the directories and the files and a knowledge of their contents. The totality of files and directories (those currently registered and even those that have been deleted and reordered or rewritten in the course of time) represents what on various occasions I have called Encyclopedia as a regulative idea—the Library of Libraries, a postulate of a globality of knowledge that cannot be realized by any single speaker, a perpetually increasing treasure most of which has not been explored by the Community.
4.3 Wild Categorization
At the level of NC there is a continuous organizing and reordering of “wild” categories, most of which spring from the recognition of constant precategorial features. For example, in the Western world the chicken is considered one of the edible animals while the dog is not, but in some Asiatic regions the dog is a fully fledged member of the edible category and is kept around the house much like a turkey or a pig in the West, in the knowledge that at a certain point it will have to be eaten.3 But it is in the specialized sector of the MC that negotiations become more punctilious.
Just think of the notions of mineral, vegetable, or insect. Many speakers, who would hesitate about recognizing that a certain animal (the porpoise, for example) is a mammal, would cheerfully admit that the fly or the flea is an insect. Could it be said that we are dealing with a zoological category, at first proper to an MC, which in the course of time has been captured, so to speak, by the NC? I should say not: this would happen if we noticed that common competence has accepted the idea that cows are mammals (a notion learned at school), but there is no doubt that people were recognizing insects before taxonomists decided to label a certain class ARTHROPODS.
This happens because MAMMAL was coined in 1791 as a technical term, preceded by MAMMALIA (extended for the first time to include the CETACEANS), in Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae of 1758, and it depends on a certain functional criterion that takes the reproductive system into account. On the contrary, insectus, a Latin caique from the Greek entoma zoa, meant a “cut” animal: this is an interpretation of a morphological feature that takes into account the typical form of these little animals (from the instinctive feeling that those bodies might be cut and divided where they are joined in a bottleneck shape or by rings). The “wild” category of insects still has such strength that we commonly give the name insect to many animals that zoologists do not recognize as such, such as spiders (which are ARTHROPODS but ARACHNIDS instead of INSECTS).4 In this way, on the level of NC we might find it odd if someone said that a spider is not an insect, while on the level of MC the spider is not an INSECT.
Therefore “insect” is either a semiosic primitive, of a precategorial type, which ordinary speech has presented to naturalists (while the mammals are a category that, if anything, has been given to ordinary speech by naturalists), or it is a wild category in any case. In categorizing wildly, we group objects by what use they have for us, by their relation to our survival, by formal analogies, et cetera. Our indifference in retaining the fact that an animal is a mammal is due to the fact that the scientific category MAMMAL includes animals that are not only very different to look at but also very different to deal with (e.g., there are mammals that we eat and mammals that eat us), while insects strike us as being more or less morphologically alike, and all equally noisome.
For the speaker, these wild categories usually sum up, almost stenographically, a large number of features and also implicitly contain instructions for identification or retrieval. When Marconi (1977: 64–65) suggests that, even if we do not know what uranium is or looks like but are told that it is a mineral, we could probably identify it when it was showed to us together with an unknown fruit and an unknown animal, he is referring to the wild category of minerals, not to MINERALS. In fact, if we asked someone devoid of any scientific knowledge to tell an ARTHROPOD from a spider, a millipede, and an orthopedic prosthesis, he would not know what to do. But when we know (roughly) that uranium is a mineral, we ( go to look in the wild directory of minerals, just as when we are told that Ayers Rock is a mountain, we go to look in the wild directory of mountains (and if they had told us that it was a stone, we would have gone to look in a directory where we would not have found good instructions for its identification).
Now, if we consider categorial (or dictionary) competence by referring to its scientific model, we have been told that one of the characteristics of that competence is that it is composed of indelible features: if we know that a porpoise is a CETACEAN, a CETACEAN is a MAMMAL, and a MAMMAL is an ANIMAL, it cannot be said that something is a porpoise but not an ANIMAL, and if (just to avoid always using canonical examples) on a certain planet all the porpoises were robots, the fact that they were not ANIMALS would prevent us from saying they were porpoises: you can have toy porpoises, pseudopor-poises, virtual porpoises, but not porpoises. On the other hand, a folk competence tells us that a porpoise is like a dolphin with a rounded nose and a triangular dorsal fin (and so on, with regard to the habitat, habits, intelligence, and edibility of the porpoise), but any feature could be legitimately deleted, because the cognitive type does not organize the features hierarchically, nor does it rigidly fix number (of features) or precedence. We can recognize porpoises with prognathous or malformed or retroussé snouts and serrated dorsal fins, porpoises that would not win any porpoise beauty prizes but are porpoises for all that, just as much as their better-looking kin.
The features of a scientific taxonomy cannot be deleted, because they are organized into a series of embedded hyperonyms and hyponyms: if a spider is an ARACHNID, it cannot not be an ARTHROPOD, otherwise the entire categorial system would collapse; but precisely because a spider is an ARACHNID, it cannot be an INSECT at the same time.
Also on the level of NC our knowledge is organized into files and directories, but the organization is not hierarchical. Let us look over some features of the definition of mouse examined in 3.4.3:
People think that they are all of the same kind.
People think they live in or near places where people live.
A person could hold one easily in one hand (most people wouldn’t want to hold them).
This means that the mouse file can be put both in the “animals that live in the home” category (which includes the cat file) and in the “repugnant animals” category, together with flies and cock roaches (which can also infest the home) as well as caterpillars and snakes. The same file, depending on the occasion, can be put in several directories simultaneously and taken from one to the other according to the context. And in fact, Lévi-Strauss reminds us that the Savage Mind proceeds by bricolage, which is a form of patchwork that does not envisage any hierarchical organization.5
But if this is the case, the file does not necessarily imply the directory, as in scientific taxonomies; in other words, it is very easy to deny entailment when entailment is not convenient. Those who breed charming white mice do not put them in the category of repugnant animals. In Australia, the rabbit is considered a harmful pest. In certain Chinese markets, people display cages containing things that they consider delicacies but we perceive as loathsome rats, and if they were to appear in our lofts, we would be terrified. On the other hand, chickens have been listed among farmyard animals for millennia, while that directory (if not already for us, at least for our descendants) will sooner or later contain only one species of chicken, known as free-range, while all its kin will be classified as factory-farmed animals. On the level of MC, a chicken is a BIRD and cannot not be one, while on the level of NC, a chicken (a bird up to a point, but certainly less so than an eagle) may or may not be classified among the farmyard animals.
4.4 Indelible Properties
Does the wild nature of nonscientific categorizations therefore prevent there being features that cannot be deleted? It does not seem so, since it has been rightly observed (Violi 1997: 2.2.2.3) that some features appear more resistant than others, and that these indelible features are not merely categorial labels such as ANIMAL and PHYSICAL OBJECT. In the life of semiosis, we notice that we are also wary of deleting some “factual” properties that seem more salient and characterizing than others. A great many people would accept the idea that a porpoise is not a MAMMAL (we have
