These are questions that can arise only if the picture is understood as the equivalent of a series of utterances. But anyone looking at the portrait (if not in the extreme case in which it might be used for historic-documentary purposes or for identification) does not translate his own experience in these terms. See, rather, how Calabrese (1981) identifies plastic signifiers of eminently visual signifieds. The categories in play, over and beyond the problematics of resemblance, are, for example, oppositions regarding the size of the picture, the position of the hands, the relation between figure and space-background, the direction of the gaze, and consequently the relation between a portrait that betrays the knowledge that it will be looked at by the spectator and another portrait in which the person depicted is looking at something but not at the spectator, and so on. A portrait does not just tell me that I am looking at a «man-picture,» nor does it tell me that what I see is the Duke of Wellington (by the way, I get this information from the plaque on the frame, not from the image): but also whether that man is likable, in good health, sad, or disturbing. To say verbally that Mona Lisa’s smile is «enigmatic» is a poor interpretation of what the image communicates to me. However, I could identify (by modifying Leonardo’s image with a computer) the minimal features that make that smile enigmatic, and if I were to alter them, the smile would become a grin, or an inexpressive grimace. These eminently visual features are also crucial for interpreting the portrait as a reference to a person or a state of things.
23 The new cognitive approaches have certainly recovered this pre- or extralinguistic space, even though they sometimes appear reluctant to consider it a semiosic space. See, for example, the position of Jackendoff. The assumption is that thought is a mental function independent of language and that the inputs for the cerebral processes arrive not only by auditory means but also through other channels: visual, thermic, tactile, proprioceptive. It is worth observing that for each of these channels various specific semiotics have studied semiosic processes that develop precisely at these levels. But the problem of a semiotics of perception is not whether an image or a musical sequence can be analyzed in «grammatical» terms, a problem that appertains to a specific semiotics; it is whether the cognitive type also handles information arriving through these channels. Jackendoff seems to have admitted the role of visual information, and for example he stresses that the representation of a word in the long term memory not only requires a partial combination of phonological, syntactical, and conceptual structures but also may contain a partial 3-D structure—in other words, knowing the meaning of a word that denotes a physical object implies in part a knowledge of the appearance of this object (1987, 10.4). The same thing would also happen with propositions that express complex scenes or situations. For example, in Jackendoff (1983, 9) the disambiguation of a phrase such as «The mouse went under the table» would require the visualization of two situations, one in which something goes to position itself under the table, and another in which something passes under the table. However, I do not think he went on to discuss other sensory channels, perhaps out of the difficulty of verbalizing such experiences.
24 As Violi (1997, 1.3.4) also points out, the fact that visual qualities are easier to interpret than the olfactory or tactile variety depends on our physiological structure and our evolutionary history: even medieval man knew that senses such as sight and hearing were maxime cognoscitivi. We are better at remembering and interpreting sensations we can reproduce: with a drawing, even a poor one, we can reproduce what we have seen, and we can reproduce a sound or a melody we have heard; we cannot reproduce, nor produce (voluntarily) a smell or a taste (except for particular cases such as perfumers and cooks: however, they do not do this with their own bodies but by blending substances). This incapacity to make with the body resolves into an incapacity (or reduced capacity) to interpret and even to remember (we remember a melody and we can reproduce it, but we do not recall with the same vividness the scent of a violet, which we tend to evoke by associating it with the image of the flower or a situation in which we perceived it). The tactile sense is a case apart: using our own or another person’s body, or through our own body, we can reproduce many tactile sensations (many but not all, not that of velvet, for example). This mixed nature of the tactile sense explains why it can sometimes be used as a cognitive medium, for example in the Braille alphabet, not to mention many cases of the deliberate arousal of affections or disagreeable feelings, in erotic or conflictual relationships. As for the relation between reception and production in animals with other sensory resources, I cannot pass judgment.
25 For frames, see Minsky 1985. For scripts, see Schank and Abelson 1977. For a 3-D representation of behavior and corporeal actions, see Marr and Vaina 1982. For anger, see Greimas 1983.
26 Or by using 3-D models like those of Marr and Vaina 1982. Let us suppose there is a person (e.g., one of these severe scholars of whom it is said that they have been studying like university professors since they were small, i.e., they have never played) to whom it is explained during a debate on translation how one skips. On such an occasion it would not be very dignified to explain this by ostension. So, trusting in his ability to understand and formulate propositions, one would translate the instructions contained in Nida’s table into words for him, thus leaving him free to go back to his garden and enjoy the corresponding primary experience for the first time.
27 Gibson 1966: 285; Prieto 1975. See also Johnson-Laird (1983:120): an artifact is seen as a member of a category not so much for morphological reasons as because it appears appropriate to a certain function. See also Vaina 1983: 19 ff.
28 On the relationship between cognitive types and corporeal and motor reactions, see Violi (1997, 5.2.4): «Whereas from a Whorfian standpoint we were accustomed to thinking of the language as the hinge linking thought and cultures, now the linguistic system has assumed a mediatory function between body and thought too.»
29 To talk only of «figures in the mind» would postulate the traditional homunculus that perceives them, and the consequent regression of homunculi to infinity; for this argument, see also Edelman (1992: 79–80). However, one could say that the 3-D representation is not part of the semantic representation but, rather, serves to access the representation (Caramazza et al. 1990). For this, see also Job 1995. For the ensuing problem of double coding, see Benelli 1995.
30 In the morning we usually recall fairly vividly what we did or saw or said the evening before (and not only in visual but also in auditory terms, for example). However, when one awakes after an evening of copious libations, one recalls that something was done or said (and one is able to express this verbally to oneself or to others), but one cannot reconstruct «ironically» what happened. Let us say that a threshold has been created whereby one recalls in iconic terms what happened between nine and midnight (before the alcohol intake became excessive), while one conserves only a «propositional» memory of what happened after (and hence the scenes exploited in so many comedies, in which the character recalls having said or done something horrible the previous evening but can no longer reconstruct the scene).
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