Let us examine a series of assertions (after Cacciari 1995):
(i) He looks like Stephen to me.
(ii) These flowers look real.
(iii) I think someone’s ringing the doorbell.
(iv) That portrait looks like me.
(v) He looks exactly like his father.
(vi) Wittgenstein’s rabbit looks like a duck (or vice versa).
(vii) That cloud looks like a camel.
(viii) This music sounds like Mozart.
(ix) When he smiles, he looks like a cat.
(x) She looks ill.
(xi) He looks angry.
(xi) A camel is like a taxi.
(xiii) Conferences are like sleeping pills.
(xiv) Sleeping pills are like conferences.
Certainly (i) and (iv) are based on primary iconism. We have already dealt with the recognition of faces, and there are some who persuasively maintain that this is an innate capacity, also found in animals. Artificial flowers, like waxwork figures, are an example of very high definition surrogate stimuli. As for the impression that we can hear the doorbell, it is like the impression of perceiving a certain phoneme. In the presence of imprecise stimuli, we relate the token to a type; but we could have decided that it was the telephone, or, as often happens, that the sound of a bell (very high definition surrogate stimulus) was coming from the television program we were watching. Finally, the impression of likeness generated by those hypoicons that are photographs and hyperrealist paintings (iv) has already been discussed.
A sentence such as (v) has to do with primary iconism (and with the recognition of faces), but on a more abstract level. Here we are not recognizing a face, we are selecting some features common to two faces, leaving the rest in obscurity. We are all well aware that, from a certain point of view, a person can resemble his father and mother both, and sometimes the impression is wholly subjective, and optative (the last resort of cuckolds).
Sentences (vi) and (vii) have to do with phenomena related to the perceptual ambiguity of hypoicons. As the drawing gradually becomes more abstract, we enter the Droodle zone (as in fig. 6.9), in which the iconic hook is minimal and the remainder is a system of expectations and propositional suggestion (key to interpretation).
Sentences (viii) and (ix) pose serious problems. A piece of music may resemble Mozart for reasons of timbre, melody, harmony, or rhythm, and it is hard to say on what bases (from which point of view) the judgment of likeness is made. Out of prudence I would consider the judgment of likeness as being akin to that of the likeness between father and son. In Malaparte’s La pelle, there is a fine page in which it is related how, on listening to Addinsel’s Warsaw Concerto, certain English officers say that it sounds like Chopin, while the author manifests doubts of an aesthetic nature. I would say that Malaparte is behaving like a cuckolded but aware husband, who rejects attributions of likeness between him and his presumed son (or, better, he is refusing to recognize Addinsel as the son of Chopin). For reasons that are still mysterious, I would put the sentence on the cat in the same category. The reasons for which someone’s smile reminds me of that of a cat could be the same (ceteris paribus), and so Addinsel can seem to be Chopin, and they largely depend on what I think both Chopin and a cat are.
To say that someone looks ill probably has only rhetorical value. As a matter of fact, the term «to look» is used metaphorically to express a symptomatic inference, but a perceptive doctor might say that by certain physiognomic features he can immediately recognize someone suffering from a certain disease. In this sense, saying that someone looks ill to me would be like saying that someone looks angry to me. It would concern a capacity (I do not intend to state whether innate or based on cultural competence) whereby a passion can be recognized by the facial expression. There is a great deal of literature on this subject, and I think the question is still open to debate. There is no doubt that from the point of view of the polemic from the sixties it was not difficult for the iconoclasts to recognize the evident fact that Asians express their feelings differently from Europeans, but it must perforce be admitted that a smile (whatever feeling it expresses, be it embarrassment or good humor) is perceived on the basis of iconically universal physiognomic features.
It would be hard to say that (xii) through (xiv) are based on morphological similarities. We are completely on the categorial level. Similarity is established from the point of view of certain properties that are propositionally attributed to the objects in play. To such a degree that, contrary to current opinion (see Kubovy 1995 and Tversky 1997), I think it can be said with equal efficacy both that conferences are like sleeping pills and that sleeping pills are like conferences. It is true that in the first case the salient feature of the predicate (sleeping pills induce sleep) is a peripheral feature of the subject, while in the second case it would seem that no salient feature of the predicate is a peripheral feature of the subject. But after years of frequenting seminars and conferences, I hold that one salient feature of conferences is their ability to induce sleep, and if I said to a colleague that sleeping pills are like conferences, my metaphor would be understood. Which confirms that on these conceptual levels similarity is only a question of cultural stipulation.
What is the threshold that separates these levels of so-called «similarity»? I think we can draw a line of demarcation between cases (i) through (xi) and cases (xii) through (xiv). In the first eleven cases, the judgment of likeness is pronounced on perceptual bases. In the other three cases, we apply successive levels of interpretation and greater knowledge, which is why the analogy can be established on purely propositional bases: I can say that a camel seems a taxi or a ship of the desert even if I have never seen a camel and possess a purely cultural knowledge of them (for example, they have been described to me as animals that are used as a means of transport in the desert). I can say that uranium is like dynamite even if I have never had any perceptual experience of a uranium sample, knowing only that it is an element used to trigger atomic bombs.
Yet even at these propositional levels there lingers, albeit in a most pallid form, a shade of primary iconism (in the same way as I would tend to say that cultural elements intervene even at levels on which the presence of primary iconism appears with greater clarity): as if to say that for different subjects the threshold between alpha and beta mode shifts in accordance with criteria that cannot be established a priori but depend on circumstances.
In the expression The dog bites the cat, it is beta mode that allows us to recognize dog and cat as words in the English language, but what has been called a phenomenon of syntactic iconism is recognized through alpha mode: in English syntax, the fact that the sequence is «A + verb + B» tells us, through a perception of vectoriality, that A performs the action and B undergoes it.
An interesting example of similarity at the limits of the categorial is given by Hofstadter (1979: 168–70) apropos of two different melodies, which he calls BACH and CAGE, taking advantage of the fact that musical notation also makes use of alphabetical letters. The two melodies are different but share a «skeleton» that is the same from the point of view of the intervals and the relations between them. The first, from the opening note, goes down one semitone, then goes up by three semitones, and finally goes down again by one semitone (-1, +3, -1). The second goes down three semitones, goes up by ten, and then goes down again by three (-3, + 10, -3). It is therefore possible to obtain CAGE by starting from BACH and multiplying each interval by 31/2 and then rounding down to the smaller number.
I have tried playing the two melodies and would not say that a normal ear could perceive any likeness at all. Hofstadter has undoubtedly constituted a criterion of similarity on a conceptual level. Nonetheless, although we are a very long way from something that can be «perceived,» the iconism of perception is implicit in the fact that
