Having clarified the conditions under which the following discourse may be followed, follow me.
Referring to Horses
If we return to the story of Montezuma related in 3.3, we see that (i) his messengers transmitted the NC of horse to him by interpretants; (ii) they were obviously referring to something they had seen in the course of the Spaniards’ landing; (iii) Montezuma understood they were referring to something even before he understood what it actually was; (iv) on the basis of their interpretation, he constructed a CT of the horse, thanks to which, presumably, he was able to recognize the referent when he came across it; (v) it seems that after having received the message, he kept silent for a long time, and we may suppose that he never referred to horses until the moment came when he recognized one; and (vi) at the right time, he might have recognized the mysterious maçatl his messengers had told him about, yet, continuing to brood, he might have refrained from talking about and therefore referring to horses.
Therefore we can link an NC to a term, and this NC (which should have a corresponding CT) contains instructions for the recognition of the referent, but the instructions for the recognition of the referent and recognition itself have nothing immediately to do with the act of reference to something.
Now let’s make our story a little more complex. The Spaniards arrive in Montezuma’s palace. He thinks he recognizes a maçatl in the palace courtyard and dashes off to his courtiers (whose number include his messengers), saying that there is a maçatl in the courtyard. In that case he would certainly be referring to a horse, and this is what his messengers would understand, given that they are the ones who told him the meaning of the word. But one of the messengers might harbor a doubt: is it certain that Montezuma is using the word maçatl in the sense they use it? This is no small problem: if Montezuma is right, and a horse really has appeared in the courtyard, this means that the Spaniards have already arrived in the capital.
And what if, on listening to their description, Montezuma has misunderstood, and thinks he has seen a horse when in fact he has seen something else? Even though some otherwise respectable people will insist that the word horse always refers to horses and to horses only (to horsehood) independently of the intentions or lexical competence of the speaker, I don’t think the messengers can content themselves with this comforting certainty, because their problem is to know what Montezuma has seen, and what he is referring to, even though he has got the name wrong.
The messengers’ problem is the same as the one facing many philosophers today: how to “fix the reference.” But their problem is not how to identify the referent of the word maçatl, about whose NC they have already agreed upon. They would be almost in agreement with those who define the extension of a term as the set of all the things for which the term is true (except that, aware they were still talking of terms and not sentences, they would have made a suitable correction: “the set of things to which one may correctly apply the term when wishing to utter true propositions”).
But they must decide whether Montezuma is applying the name properly (and the criterion of correctness is the one they—the Nomothetes—fixed on the day the Spaniards landed), and only after having made this decision will they be able to fix the reference understood by Montezuma by the sentence There is a maçatl in the palace courtyard. Note that by speaking, Montezuma presumably intends to use the word maçatl in the same sense as his messengers use it, but this is hardly a guarantee for us, and even less so for them. They could, out of the principle of charity, assume that Montezuma is using it in the same sense as they are, but they cannot be sure.
The messengers are sure that Montezuma is referring to something, and what he is putting into effect is an act of reference, but they are not sure that it “points” to the referent they mean.
What are they to do? There is only one solution: to question Montezuma, to know if by the word maçatl he intends to refer to animals made in such and such a way. But even this is not enough. Certainty will be attained only when Montezuma points out a certain animal to them while uttering the appropriate term, but until that time it is necessary to stimulate Montezuma’s interpretations with a view to making the NC of maçatl as public as possible.
Long negotiations must therefore follow, at the end of which both parties are holding a sequence of words, gestures, and drawings made public, like an affidavit or a sort of notarized deed. Only through that express contract can the messengers be reasonably sure that Montezuma is referring to the same thing they intend to refer to when they say maçatl. Fixing the reference of the sentence again means (as it does for the interpretation of the CT through an NC) making explicit a chain of intersubjectively verifiable interpretants.
At this point the messengers might be sure that Montezuma is referring to something and that what he is referring to is something they are prepared to recognize as a horse, yet they still cannot be sure that there really is a horse in the palace courtyard. Which tells us that referring to, intending (by referring) to use the language the way one’s interlocutors do, and possessing the same instructions for recognizing the referent still have nothing to do with the question of whether a linguistic act of reference expresses a true proposition.
I think these differences should be borne in mind when it is admitted that semiotics of a structuralist stamp has ignored referring. I don’t think anyone has ever denied that we use language for acts of reference; perhaps it has never been stated with sufficient forcefulness that the meaning of a term also includes a series of instructions for identifying the referent of this term (when it is used in a sentence with referential functions),4 but neither has it ever been denied that there should be something in the meaning of cat (even if it is “meowing feline quadruped animal”) that allows us to distinguish between a cat and a mat when necessary.
Instead, given that the problem facing structuralist semiotics was how to define the functioning of systems of signs (or of texts), the emphasis was placed, independently of the world to which they might refer, eminently on the relation between signifier and signified, or between expression and content.5 Certainly no one was doubting that any system of signs could be used to refer to objects and states of the world; but, in extremely simple terms, it was held that, to be able to use the word cat to refer to a cat, the speakers had to agree on the meaning of “cat” beforehand.6 Which was another way of putting, in a different context,Wittgenstein’s later assertion (1953 §40) that one must not confuse the meaning of a name and the bearer of a name: “When Mr. N. N. dies, one says that the bearer of the name dies, not that the meaning dies. And it would be nonsensical to say that, for if the name ceased to have meaning, it would make no sense to say ‘Mr. N. N. is dead.'”
Structuralist semiotics started from the principle that acts of reference are possible only insofar as we know the meaning of the terms used for referring—an idea with its supporters within the analytic paradigm; see Frege, for example. But unlike Frege, structuralist semiotics did not feel it worth going any deeper into the phenomenon of referring, considering it an extralinguistic accident. My suspicion is that the problem has also remained obscure for truth-functional semantics, and for obvious reasons: the problem of referring cannot be solved in formal terms, because it has to do with the intentions of the person speaking and is therefore a pragmatic problem. As such it has eluded the grasp of both structural semiotics and model-theoretic semantics. The provocative notion we owe to the theory of rigid designation (even though, as we shall see, I do not find it convincing) 7 is that there can be acts of reference that, at first sight at least, do not presuppose an understanding of the meaning of the terms used for referring.
The True Story of the Sarkiapone
This is the story of the sarkiapone, a famous humorous sketch from the Italy of the fifties, performed by the actors Walter Chiari and Carlo Campanini. For the purposes of my analysis, I have condensed the sketch into six phases.
Phase 1. Chiari enters the compartment of a railway train and greets Campanini and the other travelers. At a certain point Campanini gets to his feet and reaches up to the luggage rack, where there is a basket covered with a cloth. He withdraws his hand suddenly, as if he has
