A subsequent letter from the Gold-receiver seems to confirm this account. Owen published the two letters but wondered what the two alleged eggs contained. If they had been opened and an embryo or at least a yolk had been seen, if someone had put them in a bottle of alcohol … But alas, nothing more was known about this matter. Perhaps it was all the effect of a miscarriage brought on by fright. Burrell (1927: 44) had to admit that Owen—whose behavior was that of a prudent scientist—was right; Burrell moreover reasoned that the eggs could not have been the size of any bird definable as a crow, and suggested that it might have been a prank on the part of some wag who had slipped bird eggs into the cage.
The debate continued in the scientific journals for many years after that, and it was only in 1884 (about eighty-six years after the discovery of the animal) that W. H. Caldwell, who had gone to Australia to carry out research on the spot, was to send a celebrated telegram to the University of Sydney: “Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic” (where the second datum establishes that the cells of the embryo divide in a way typical of reptiles and birds).
End of argument. The MONOTREMES were MAMMALS and oviparous.
4.6 Contracting
4.6.1. Eighty Years of Negotiations
What is the moral of the story? In the first instance, we might say that this is a splendid example of how observation sentences can be made only in the light of a conceptual framework or of a theory that gives them a sense, in other words, that the first attempt to understand what is seen is to consider the experience in relation to a previous categorial system (as in the case of Marco Polo and the rhinoceros). But at the same time we would have to say, again as in the case of Marco Polo, that when observations challenge the categorial framework, attempts are made to adjust the framework. In this way we progress on a parallel course, readjusting the categorial framework according to the new observation sentences and recognizing as real those observation sentences that are in accordance with the assumed categorial framework.
As we gradually categorize, we await the identification of new properties (no doubt in the form of a disordered encyclopedia); as properties are gradually found, we attempt to reestablish the categorial structure. But every hypothesis regarding the categorial framework to be assumed influences the way we make observation sentences and acknowledge them to be valid (with the result that those who would have the platypus a mammal do not search for its eggs, or they refuse to recognize eggs when they appear, while those who would have the platypus oviparous refuse to acknowledge either the mammae or the milk). This is the dialectic both of cognition and understanding, that is, of understanding and knowledge.
But is this conclusion sufficient? In point of fact, someone finally showed that there were both mammae and eggs. We might say that, given two competing theories, both won the day, obliging researchers in the field to look for something that the theory required to be there, and that if one academic faction had prevailed over another (because this is the mechanism that comes into play even when scientific theories are compared), perhaps neither the mammae nor the eggs would ever have been seen. But the fact remains that in the end both mammae and eggs were seen, so that today it seems hard to deny that the platypus nurses its young and, notwithstanding this, also lays eggs.
The story of the platypus therefore serves to demonstrate that in the final instance facts prevail over theories (and, as Peirce wished, the Torch of Truth will in any case be passed on from hand to hand despite the difficulties). But, judging by the literature on the argument in question, we still have not stopped discovering many unsuspected properties of the platypus, and one might say that this happens because the winning theory required that the animal be grouped with the mammals. Peirce would put our minds at rest: all we need do is wait, and in the end the Community will find a point of consensus.
But remember Shaw’s decision of 1799: it might be possible to assign the unknown animal to some class, but for the moment let us describe what can be seen. And what naturalists knew about the platypus, even before deciding on what class to put it in and, we note, as the debate about this wore on, was that it was a strange thing, certainly an animal, which could be recognized according to some instructions for its identification (beak, beaver tail, webbed feet, etc.).
For over eighty years, the naturalists could agree on nothing, except that they were talking about that creature made in such and such a fashion, specimens of which were gradually identified. That creature might or might not be MAMMAL, BIRD, or REPTILE, without its ever ceasing to be that double-damned beast that, as Lesson observed in 1839, had set itself athwart the path of taxonomy to prove its fallaciousness.
The story of the platypus is the story of a long negotiation, and in this sense it is an exemplary tale. But the negotiation had a basis, and this was that the platypus seemed similar to a beaver, a duck, and a mole, but not to a cat, an elephant, or an ostrich. If it is necessary to yield to the evidence that perception has an iconic content, the story of the platypus tells us so. Anyone who saw one, or a drawing of one, or a stuffed specimen, or one preserved in spirit, would refer back to a common CT.
There were eighty-odd years of negotiation, but the negotiations always revolved around resistances and the grain of the continuum. Given these resistances, the decision, certainly contractual in nature, to acknowledge that certain features were undeniable, was obligatory. At first, and for some decades after, people were prepared to delete everything about the platypus: that it was a MAMMAL or OVIPAROUS, that it had mammae or not, but certainly not the property of being the animal that was made in such and such a fashion and that someone found in Australia. And, while they were arguing, everybody knew they were referring to the same CT. Proposals regarding the MC were different, but negotiations were underpinned by an NC.
That the beak could not be deleted (first and foremost because it should not have been there) is revealed by the names with which the animal was indicated, both in ordinary and scientific language, from the beginning and throughout the course of the debate: Duck-billed platypus, Schnabeltier, Ornitorinco.
4.6.2 Hjelmslev vs. Peirce
I have long feared that the semiotic approach adopted in my Theory of Semiotics suffered from syncretism. What did it mean to try, as I did, to combine the structuralist perspective of Hjelmslev with the cognitive-interpretative semiotics of Peirce? The former shows us how our semantic (and therefore conceptual) competence is of a categorial type, based on a segmentation of the continuum by virtue of which the form of the content presents itself structured in the form of opposition and difference. We tell a sheep from a horse by the presence or absence of some dictionary markers, such as OVINE or EQUINE, and Hjelmslev suggests that this organization of content imposes a vision of the world.
But such an organization of content either assumes these markers as primitives not open to further interpretation (and therefore it does not tell us the properties of an equid or an ovine), or it demands that these components be interpreted in their turn. Alas, when we enter the phase of interpretation, the rigid structural organization dissolves in the network of encyclopedic properties, arranged along the potentially infinite thread of unlimited semiosis. How is it possible for the two points of view to coexist?
The result of the preceding reflections is that they must coexist, because if we choose one of them only, we cannot account for our way of knowing and expressing what we know. It is indispensable to make them coexist on a theoretical level, because, effectively speaking, on the level of our cognitive experiences we proceed so that we run—if the expression does not seem too reductive—with the hare and hunt with the hounds. The unstable equilibrium of this coexistence is not (theoretically) syncretistic, because it is on the basis of this happily unstable equilibrium that our understanding proceeds.
And this is why the categorial moment and the observational moment do not oppose each other as irreconcilable ways of understanding, nor are they juxtaposed through syncretism: they are two complementary ways of considering our competence, precisely because, at least at the “auroral” moment of understanding (when the Dynamical Object is a terminus a quo), they imply each other reciprocally.
Now I shall consider a possible objection. We consider taxa (let’s say MAMMALS, or BIRDS) as cultural constructs insofar as they sum up observation sentences like “this animal nurses its young” or “this animal lays eggs.” But why do we consider the presence or absence of mammal or eggs as facts to be simply observed? As if recognizing something as an egg rather than as an ovum, or deciding whether something is milk or mucus, does not depend on a structured system of concepts, only within which something is or is not an egg. In structural semantics, do we not have the oppositional analysis of properties, such as hard/soft, to distinguish a chair from an armchair?
The fact is that the
