On the other hand, who is Nancy? One presumes that the speakers are not fools: if there were many people with the same name in their circle, they would do well to ask for specifications. Unless they think it wiser to let the interlocutor, who is perhaps a little tipsy, to ramble on, that «white box» ought to be opened immediately.17
Nevertheless there is someone who has assumed the name Nancy in a highly rigid fashion, and that someone is we, I the writer and you the readers of these pages. We do not know who Nancy is (except that she is a girl with a weakness for analytic philosophers—a case of a labeled «white box»).
But all things considered, we are not all that interested in knowing more about her. It was enough for us to know that she is the girl that the fellow in the example was talking about, and if someone will be so good as to talk to others about this book, Nancy will be the girl on whom I carried out this exercise in referring as contract. No one will be able to deny that for some pages we were referring precisely to her.18
Who died on the Fifth of May?
A puzzling digression. Some people think that descriptions do not help to fix the reference. We have seen that there is no reference that does not acquire substance with some description. But there are cases in which it seems that the reference is fixed through descriptions only, leaving the name out of consideration.
The Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni wrote an ode called «5 maggio» (5 May) that deals with the death of Napoleon. However, those who go to read it again will notice that the name Napoleon is never mentioned. If we were to sum the ode up rather brutally in terms of macropropositions (and without any respect for its artistic value), we would say that the speaker is telling us:
(i) The person of whom I am speaking (to whom I am expressing my sentiments) is no more.
(ii) This person was characterized by a series of properties: he rose to great heights, fell, rose again; he performed memorable deeds from the Alps to the coasts of Africa, from the Iberian peninsula to the borders of France and Germany; it is unsure whether his was real glory, but there is no doubt that God saw him as a sublime representative of the human species; he tasted victory, power, and exile (and twice at that, as he knew both triumph and defeat); he may be considered the arbiter of two centuries; for a long time he planned to write his memoirs recalling the events of his past, etc.
Those who do not know that the ode was written in 1821 and that therefore the date 5 May refers implicitly to a precise day in that year, and those who do not know that Napoleon died on that day (which our encyclopedia has registered, by antonomasia or metonymy, as the date of his death), would have no other instructions—apart from the rather vague description offered by Manzoni—with which to identify the person designated. I have no desire to attempt an inspection of universal history, but I am fairly convinced we would find another historical figure to whom this description could very well apply. With a little goodwill, and by understanding some expressions as metaphors or hyperboles, someone might apply it to Nixon or to the great Italian cyclist Fausto Coppi.
This is a very difficult case for many theories of reference, because we know that that text refers to Napoleon only on the basis of much circumstantial and intertextual negotiation (and convention). Without these negotiations, the text would be most obscure, referentially speaking.
But let’s make things more complex. Let’s suppose that Manzoni (who luckily was not a wag of this type) wrote an ode very similar to the sketch about the sarkiapone, which went roughly like this: «I sing of the death of a Great man. All I will tell you of this man is that he did not rise to great heights, did not fall, did not rise again; he did not perform memorable deeds from the Alps to the coasts of Africa, or from the Iberian peninsula to the borders of France and Germany; he was by no means the arbiter of two centuries, and, come to think of it, he is not even dead.»
How could we understand his reference to this man (to whom he was evidently continuing to refer)? We would give him carte blanche, in the expectation that he would tell us something more about this person. We would still be unsure as to whether he meant to talk of Julius Caesar, Henry VIII, of his next-door neighbor, or of any other individual you care to choose from the billions who have populated the planet. Endorsing this carte blanche would be a form of acceptance of a really «soft» designation. It would have to be admitted, to keep the interaction going, that he was talking about someone who appeared somewhere or other, who was conceived with a certain genetic program, probably baptized in some way or other by his parents or by whoever saw him the first time, but what would not be known (for the moment) is who this person was. Nevertheless the designation would not be completely soft: the description given would lead us to exclude Napoleon at least.
Have I perhaps hypothesized an impossible communicative interaction? Of course not; things of this kind happen often, such as when someone says, I met a fantastic girl at the disco yesterday evening, you can’t even imagine what she’s like! And what do we do? We wait for the rest of the story. But we know that the reference is to a women and not to a man.
Impossible Objects
According to one of its interpretations, the sentence about Nancy brings optative possibilia into play. Sentences such as We will have a son and call him Louis, or I am certain I will find the man of my life in Hong Kong are cases of reference to optative possibilia. The same holds for I’m waiting for my croissants to arrive, insofar as at the moment they were ordered, croissants in general were required, but at the moment they arrive, they are undoubtedly wholly individual croissants possessed by the speaker. As they are optative possibilia, these individual things might also (successively) not exist: but references to possibilia can be made. Is it possible to make references to impossibilia or, in any event, to inconceivable objects?
I should like to avoid the usual squared circle which is a general object like the unicorn (and at best a formal individual; see 3.7.7). But if I say The highest prime number will be discovered in 2005, I am referring not only to an optative possibilium but also to something inconceivable.
All impossible objects are inconceivable, but not all inconceivable objects are impossible. For example, a limitless universe is more than our imagination can handle, but it is not impossible in principle. On the other hand, becoming the son of our own son seems impossible as well as inconceivable (at least as long as we live in a universe with open causal chains and not loops). But what distinguishes both conceivable and inconceivable possibilia is the impossibility of constructing a CT and NC for them (I maintain that for inconceivable possibilia it is possible to construct an MC, but I’m not sure of what type).
Since it has been said that it is possible to refer (completely on trust) to objects whose NC is unknown, which would therefore be objects impossible to identify, recognize, retrieve, or even interpret, it seems clear that we can also refer to inconceivable objects. The fact that many novels or science-fiction movies talk of characters who travel backward in time and meet themselves as youngsters, or become their own fathers—and the fact that we are able to follow these stories (albeit with a certain sense of vertigo)—proves that we can nominate inconceivable objects and therefore (since referring is a use we put language to) refer to them.19
In Eco (1990, 3.5.6.) it was shown that not only can we name these objects but also, as a result of a cognitive illusion, we get the impression that we can conceive them. There are cognitive and referential ambiguities just as there are perceptual ambiguities. We have the impression not only that we can refer to these objects but also that we can, so to speak, open the «white box» that contains them, in the sense that if we examine them in toto, we can’t manage to conceive them, but if we examine them one piece at a time,
Figure 5.1
we have the impression that they may have a form, even though we are unable to describe it. Besides, if someone gives us what are recognizably bicycle parts but taken from bicycles of different makes, so that in the end we cannot manage to assemble them, it does not follow from this that we have failed to recognize them as the parts of a dismantled (possible and optative) bicycle.
A visual example of an impossible possible world is the famous drawing as shown in figure 5.1, an archetype of many visual impossibilia.
At first sight this figure seems to represent a «possible» object, but, if we follow its lines
