But the point is that, in A Theory of Semiotics too, the emphasis was placed on the social life of signs, not on epistemological problems, otherwise it would not have begun with a chapter dealing with a Logic of Culture (and not of nature). However, my exclusion was not as radical as it seemed, and I am grateful to Innis (1994, 1) for having highlighted all the points in A Theory of Semiotics in which (even though only «postulating it») I reiterate that perceptual semiosis is a central problem for semiotics, and that it is indispensable to think of a semiotic definition for percepts (e.g., 3.3.3). I could not be indifferent to the problem, given that in my presemiotic works such as Opera Aperta, I had been enormously inspired by phenomenology, from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty, and by the psychology of perception, from Piaget to transactional psychology. But evidently that «postulating» instead of dealing with (which was intended to be a simple limitation of my field of investigation at that time) presupposed and produced a fundamental ambiguity: as a matter of fact I was not making it clear whether the inferential effort required to understand something was the object of a psychology of perception and cognition, and therefore a problem that was vestibular but not central for semiotics, or on the contrary whether intelligence and signification were a single process, and therefore of a sole subject of investigation, as required by the phenomenological tradition with which I identified myself. One of the reasons for that ambiguity has been explained in the preceding pages: A Theory of Semiotics was structured in such a way as to focus first and foremost on the Dynamical Object as a terminus ad quem of semiosis (and therefore it opened with a theory of sign systems insofar as they were already socially constituted). In order to posit the problem of perceptual semiosis in the first place, it was necessary to consider, as I do in this book, the Dynamical Object as a terminus a quo and therefore as that which comes before semiosis and from which we start off in order to elaborate perceptual judgments.
5 It is true that we can consider (according to Helmholtz’s Empirical Theory of Vision) sensations as «signs» of objects or external states, from which by (unconscious) inference we begin to set an interpretative process in motion (we must learn to «read» these signs). Nevertheless while a word or an image, or a symptom, refers us to something that is not there as we perceive the sign, Helmholtz’s signs refer us to something that is there, to the stimulating field from which we take or receive these sign-stimuli, and at the end of the perceptual inference these things that were there make what was already there comprehensible to us.
6 This is the difference between the Alpha and Beta modalities I discuss in 6.15.
7 I could say that in this case one sets in motion that process (described in Pareyson 1954) whereby the artist, starting from an as yet formless cue offered him by the material he is working with, draws from it, so to speak, a suggestion that affords a glimpse of the form that will give sense to the work as a whole upon its completion but that is not yet present at the beginning of the process so is only heralded by the cue.
8 The reader is referred to Ouellet (1992) for one of the most interesting attempts to blend Husserlian problematics with that of semiotics, by reviewing the relations between sensible knowledge and propositional knowledge, perception and meaning, and the opposition between a semiotics of the natural world and a semiotics of natural language (in Greimas and Courtes 1979: 233–34). For the problems of primary semiosis, see also Petitot 1995.
9 In 2.8.2 I admitted that it is possible to recognize organic phenomena such as steric «recognition» as presemiosic (and nevertheless at the roots of semiosis).
10 I have tried to make use of this episode without straying too far from the known facts, even though it is a mental experiment. All the philological information comes from Alfredo Tenoch Cid Jurado, who wrote a hitherto unpublished essay called «A Deer Called Horse» specifically for me and to whom I am most grateful. See also the reflections on the semiotic aspects of the conquest by Todorov (1982, II).
11 Cases of felicitous reference cause serious problems for theories that allow of no «transcendental meaning.» It may be that it is hard, and sometimes impossible, to define the transcendental meaning of a text, or, of an articulated and complex system of propositions, and that at this point an interpretative drift comes into play. But when I say to someone There’s somebody at the door, please go let him in, and that person (if cooperative) goes to open the door and not the window, it means that on a level of everyday experience we tend not only to assign a literal meaning to utterances but also to associate certain names with certain objects in a consistent fashion.
12 Since I feel there is no need for me to go into the terms of the debate, I refer the reader to Gardner (1985, n) for a fundamentally faithful account, and to Johnson Laird (1983, 7) for a series of reasonable proposals. For images, see also Varela 1992 and Dennet 1978.
13 Neisser (1976) would postulate even in the case of verbal instructions the activation of «cognitive maps» that are of the same nature as the schemata and that orient perception.
14 Felicitous reference, insofar as it is behavior that interprets the sign, is also a form of interprétant. For the referent as implicit interprétant, see Ponzio 1990, 1.2.
15 With regard to this vexed question Goodman (1990) suggests trying to translate the noun with a verb: as if, instead of wondering about the concept of «responsibility,» we were to ask ourselves what being or feeling responsible for something means.
16 Marconi (1995, 1997) talks of a double lexical competence: the inferential and the referential sort. It seems to me that this latter type of competence must divide into the three different phenomena of the instructions for recognition, for identification, and for retrieval, and naturally must not be identified with the execution of acts of reference (as we shall see in 5).
17 Some time ago I was amazed that in Paris many Vietnamese taxi drivers had a very poor knowledge of the city, whereas one presumes that a taxi driver must prove he has a remarkable knowledge of the local map if he is to obtain a license. When I once questioned one of them about this, he replied, evidently in an access of sincerity: «When one of us shows up with his documents for the exam, would you be able to say whether the photo on the document was really his?» Therefore, speculating on the proverbial fact that for Westerners all Orientals are alike, and vice versa, a sole competent candidate presented himself on several occasions for the exam showing the identity documents of his incompetent fellow countrymen. The identity documents supplied the NC connected with his name (with all the required accuracy), but the intercultural situation ensured that the instructions for identification were very weak as far as the examiners were concerned, inducing them to entertain a CT that was cognitively generic and nonindividual.
18 Bruner (1990: 72). But see also Piaget 1955, II, vi. At various stages in their development children initially apply the idea of life to everything that moves and then gradually only to animals and plants, but this idea of life precedes all categorial learning. When children perceive the sun as something living, they are activating a subdivision of the continuum that is still precategorial. See also Maldonado (1974: 273).
19 For a series of Thomist texts on this argument (De ente et essentia vi; Summa Theologiae 1,29,2 ad 3; I, 77,1 ad 7; 1,79, 8 co; Contra Gentiles III, 46), see the treatment in Eco 1984, 4.4.
20 For a view of classifications that are much closer to effective linguistic usage, see Rastier 1994: 161 ff.
21 By maintaining that the concept expressed by the pronoun I is one of her «primes»—and it strikes me as reasonable to admit that the sense of one’s own subjectivity, insofar as it is opposed to the rest of the world is a «prime,» but one understands how it is such only at a certain stage of ontogenesis—Wierzbicka (1996: 37) maintains that, insofar as it is a universal common to all cultures, this idea cannot be interpreted. Therefore, faced with the proposal that I may be interpreted as «the pronoun referring to, or in general denoting, the subject of the act of utterance,» she comes up with, as a negative proof, the fact that, at this point, the sentence I am not in agreement with the one who is speaking should be translated as «The one who is speaking is not in agreement with the one who is speaking.» The result would obviously be absurd, but it calls for a fundamentally stupid speaker. In point of fact the sentence should be interpreted as «The subject of this act of utterance is not in agreement with the subject of the act of utterance to which he is referring.»
22 The perplexity connected with this identification between the signified and the proposition
