For all these people, every reference to Doctor Jekyll is the reference not to an essence but to an actor in the social comedy, and in this sense any one of them knows one Doctor Jekyll and one only. They have a CT of him, they can list some of his properties, and they speak of him and no one else. Anyone who has been treated by Doctor Jekyll, has signed a contract with him, has received a good check from him, has told someone to find him Doctor Jekyll (and had his wish fulfilled), or says he has spoken with Doctor Jekyll and means to be believed, behaves as if there were one Doctor Jekyll and one only.
From an ontological point of view, we might say that Doctor Jekyll does not exist, that he is only a social figment, an aggregate of legal properties. But this social figment is sufficient to make every proposition concerning Doctor Jekyll socially true or false.
One day, while John is on duty, he trips on the stairs and breaks his ankle. He is immediately taken to the hospital orthopedist, Doctor Holmes, who takes an X-ray, puts the ankle in plaster, gives John two splendid aluminum crutches, and sends him home in a taxi. Fiendishly clever, the two brothers understand that it is not enough for Bob to put his foot in plaster: Doctor Holmes might want to replace the plaster, and would discover the deception. Heroically, Bob, after having made a careful study of his brother’s X ray (we must remember they are both doctors), takes a hammer and with one precise blow breaks his ankle too, puts the foot in plaster, and shows up at the hospital the following morning.
The thing might work, but Holmes is highly meticulous. At the time of the accident, he ordered some blood tests on Jekyll-John; and a few days later, worried about an excess of triglycerides, he repeats the tests, but this time on Bob. And he notices that the results of the two tests do not coincide. Having no reason to suspect (so far) a deception, he presumes there has been an error and ingenuously speaks of the matter to Bob. That evening the two brothers put their heads together, scrutinize the results of the tests, and one of the two decides to go on a strict diet to bring his level of triglycerides to that of his brother. They do what they can, but it is not enough to fool Doctor Holmes, who—after the tests have been made again, and twice at that, and by a trick of fate on both John and Bob—still notices a discrepancy. Holmes begins to suspect the truth.
The two brothers engage in a deadly struggle with their enemy. In various ways they try to ensure that the fracture heals in the same time, they continue with their rigorous diet, but tiny details make Doctor Holmes more and more suspicious. He injects one of the two with an allergen that has an effect within twenty hours and lasts two days, and he notices that after injecting Jekyll with the substance on Tuesday at 5 P.M., on Wednesday at the same time the effects still have not manifested themselves. But on Thursday they appear. Holmes has grounds to conjecture that there are two people involved, but he has no convincing proof to show in public.
One way of ending the story would be that Doctor Holmes manages to reveal the deception. From that moment (not considering all the legal, romantic, or social problems that would result) the social body would have to decide that the name Jekyll is a homonym indicating two different people. Among other things, even if they were sentenced to prison, the two brothers would be obliged by the judge to wear a lapel badge stating their blood group and other medical-biological data, so that they might be recognized. The other (more appealing) solution is that Doctor Holmes does not attain absolute certainty, nor does he manage to exhibit any decisive proof of the deception, because the two brothers are smarter than he is. The affair therefore continues ad infinitum, in a sort of hunt in which the prey always eludes the hunter but the hunter does not give up.
But in this case what interests us is: Why does the hunter not give up? Because Holmes, although used to pragmatic ways of referring like everybody else, has his own stubborn idea of ontological reference. He believes that, if Jekyll exists, there is an essence, a «Jekyll» haecceitas that represents the parameter of an ontologically true reference. Or he believes that, if two different people were to exist in place of Jekyll, as he suspects, at a certain point he ought to identify two different haecceitates. Remember that Holmes does not know which principium individuationis he is hunting for: it could be a particular composition of the blood, a minimal variation in two electrocardiograms, something that could be revealed by a scan or an intestinal exploration, the discovery of two different genetic makeups, a miraculous X ray of the soul … Holmes tries everything; he will always be defeated, but he will not stop searching, because he postulates the essence, that is, the Thing-in-Itself, which is not the Unknowable but the very postulate of infinite research.13
This persuasion that an ontological point of view may exist can be found in Peirce’s notion of the final logical interpretant, the wholly ideal moment in which knowledge coincides with the totality of the thinkable. This is a regulative concept, which does not hinder the progress of semiosis but does not discourage it either, so to speak, and let it be understood that, even if it is infinite, the process of interpretation tends toward something. Like Peirce, Holmes thinks that by continuing to search, he is carrying forward the Torch of Truth, and that in the long run the Community might agree to an incontestable final assertion.
He knows that the long run could last for millennia, but Holmes has a philosophical and scientific mind, and he believes that those who come after him will arrive at the truth, perhaps through the examination of puzzling osteological evidence some hundreds of years later. He does not aspire to knowing: he aspires to carry on searching. Holmes could even be a relativist, who believes that we can provide infinite descriptions of the world as it is, and yet he is also a realist (in the sense of Searle 1995:155) for whom a profession of realism does not mean to assert that we can know the way things are, and not even that we can say something definitively «true» about them. Realism means only to assume that there is a way in which they are, and that this way does not depend on us or on whether or not we will one day know it.14
Holmes has found a photo of Doctor Jekyll in the hospital archives. By now convinced of the existence of the two Hyde brothers (even though he perhaps does not call them this way), he knows with absolute certainty that, if the photo is a snapshot taken at a certain time on a certain day, it can be only causally connected to one of the two brothers (of whose existence, as Peirce would have put it, it is an index), and this is for him (as it is for us) an in-confutable certainty. But the photo is of no use to him at all, it is not even the proof that his hypothesis is right. It is the certainty alone that his hypothesis is right that drives him to think that the photo is causally connected to only one of the two individuals who impersonate Jekyll on alternate days. For anyone else the photo is causally linked to Doctor Jekyll, and social credence prevails over the ontological datum that is hidden, presumed, believed, but inaccessible.
What is the moral of our story? That in everyday life we always have to do with pragmatic acts of reference, and it would be our hard luck if we made too much of a problem of it. But to ensure the development of knowledge, we can invoke the ghost of ontological reference as a postulate that permits research in progress.
Is Jones Mad?
Let’s get back to negotiation. I apologize for reusing a decidedly overworked example, but after the impudence with which I have reflected on bachelors, nothing embarrasses me anymore. Let us return to the renowned example used by Donnellan (1966) to distinguish between the referential and attributive use of a sentence.15 Used referentially, the sentence Smith’s murderer is mad means that that description is intended to indicate a specific person, known both to the speaker and the listener; used attributively (to assess the brutality of the crime), it means to say that whoever has the property of being Smith’s murderer also has the property of being mad.
Unfortunately, the matter is not that simple, and
