46 A variant of this experience occurred in my department in the university. Unexpectedly glabrous, I entered a colleague’s office, where she spoke with me for several minutes without showing any surprise. It was only when I had left, that a student present asked her if it had really been me. Faced with her amazement at such a question, he emphasized the fact that I did not have a beard. At that point my colleague understood. The explanation is that she had known me for a great many years, from the days in which I had no beard. But that same afternoon she had passed by my office and through the open door glimpsed an unauthorized person seated at my desk. She was puzzled for a moment and then obviously realized it was I without my beard. She knew me from my pre-beard days, but in that office (into which we had moved only a few years before) she had always seen me in post-beard mode. It would seem therefore that she had two different physiognomic types for me, let’s say one private and one professional. Another experience that should be common to people who undergo weight swings punctuated by periodic diets is to meet other people who hasten to say how they find them fatter or slimmer than usual; the pronouncement never coincides with the subject’s actual state; what happens is that the subject hears himself defined as fatter when he has lost at least eight kilos, and slimmer when he has put them back on again. What this means is that the issuer of the judgment relates the other person to a type constructed a long time before and that this is based on the state of the subject on the first, or most significant, encounter. In social relationships one is not fatter or slimmer in relation to what the scales say but in relation to other people’s physiognomic types.
47 Note that, if a technique of total cloning were possible, in which the person cloned had not only the same body but also the same thoughts, the same memories, and the same genetic inheritance as the archetype, then even individuals like Johnny would become reproducible like a novel or a musical composition: there would be a «score» for producing Johnnies at will.
48 Obviously we must consider the case in which my interlocutor and I are both familiar with SC2. Otherwise we all have uncertainties. Some people, for example, can recognize the Appassionata (or «Michelle») at the first notes but not Les Adieux (or «Sergeant Pepper»)—but this is the same as saying that we recognize Johann Sebastian because he works with us every day, while we find it hard to recognize Ludwig every time we meet him after a ten-year absence.
49 In this regard, see some interesting mentions in Merrell (1981: 165 ff.).
50 If the parameter of timbre counts for so little, could we say that Beethoven’s Fifth played on the mandolin is still the same composition? Intuitively we could not—at best we would recognize the melody line. Why then do we content ourselves with the transcription of SC2? Evidently because the latter is a composition for a solo instrument, while the former is a symphonic work, and in the execution on the mandolin of the former we do not simply pass from one timbre to another but also lose the overall complexity of timbre that is essential to the work. But this answer is not entirely satisfactory. What reductions in the number of orchestral instruments are we prepared to put up with in order to say that that execution is still the Fifth ? Would SC2 transcribed for the ocarina still be SC2 as it remains transcribed for the recorder? If I whistle the beginning of SC2, am I «executing» SC2 or am I providing only a sort of paraphrasis, as if I were to say that Ivanhoe is a historical romance? Or by whistling am I only offering mnemonic backup with which to call up the type, as when I say that Twelfth Night is that play that begins «If music be the food of love, play on…» And what happens with Ivanhoe translated into French? Is it like SC2 transcribed for the recorder? I shall have to wait for another day to supply answers to these and other questions, of great moment for what is known as the intersemiotic theory of translation (and here the reader is referred to Nergaard 1995) but of lesser importance with regard to the problem I am discussing here.
51 I think this is getting closer to the second of the two cases considered by Marconi (1997: 3): intact inferential competence and poor referential competence versus good referential competence and poor inferential competence.
52 Briiggen would be capable of equating his CT with his MC, but in this case we would be dealing with the same competence that the zoologist has of the mouse, and we have seen that we are interested only in the competence that we share with the zoologist.
Chapter Four / The Platypus between Dictionary and Encyclopedia
1 Diego Marconi (1986, Appendix) examined a series of bilingual and monolingual dictionaries from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century and found that definitions (or glosses) appear (when they appear and are not mere lists of permitted words): (i) as synonyms in another language; (ii) as instructions for the identification or production of the referent (see, e.g., Sextus Pompeius Festus, second century, De verborum significatu, in which muries (brine) is obtained by crushing coarse salt in a mortar, collecting it in an earthenware vase, etc.); (iii) as pure word lists of difficult words translated into simple words (but the problem of a dictionary-type competence is that of defining simple words!); (iv) through synonyms (adulterate = to counterfeit or to corrupt); (v) with the use of Latin as the lingua franca (ambiguous = «anceps,» «obscurus»).
2 The drawbacks with Wilkins’s (1668) method are those I commented on in the definition of bachelor in Katz and Fodor (see Eco 1975: 2.10).
3 Even when cognitive psychologists talk of categorial activity, they refer mostly to a primary capacity to subsume experience under classifications that we can define as wild. For example, Bruner et al. (1956: 1) talk of classes of «dangerous situations» in which one is naturally induced to include an air-raid alarm, a python disturbed while we are climbing a tree, and a rebuke from a superior.
4 For this information, see Alan Rey, éd., Le Robert Dictionnaire Historique de la Langue Française, Paris: 1992.
5 In other words, we proceed in the way many of us organize our own library. While ten years ago Croce’s Aesthetics was found in the division called «Aesthetics,» the moment epistemological research begins, the book can be moved (until the research is completed) to the section «Knowledge.» The criterion is personal but nonetheless pertinent, once the rules for retrieval are fixed.
6 This category of cancelable properties on the level of NC includes not only taxonomic properties. Marconi (1997: 43) offers the example of two assertions that, according to his point of view, are both necessary but not constitutive of common competence, although the first is universal and the second particular: (i) the atomic number of gold is 79, (ii) 37 is the thirteenth prime number. Sentence (i) certainly does not reflect common competence, and I would accept that it is «necessary,» that is to say indelible, within the bounds of scientific discourse. It might not be so in the future, when it is discovered that the present paradigm does not account adequately for the difference between the elements. A goldsmith can tell gold from pinchbeck on the basis of criteria (I don’t care which) that I would define as empirical, and in any case people have a rather vague CT of gold, a fact that allows confidence men and forgers to pass off fake gold with ease. As for (ii), it could be more «cogent» than (i), if one accepted the Kantian distinction between analytic judgments and a priori synthetic judgments. Kant would have said that our knowledge regarding the number depends on transcendental schematism, while that of gold is an empirical concept (as a matter of fact, Kant presumed to know how the number 37 could be generated but not how one could determine what gold is). Between the two sentences there is a difference that I do not think has been completely captured by the universal and necessary opposition vs. the necessary particular. There is no doubt that (ii) does not belong to the NC: all we need to know is that 37 is a number less than 38 and greater than 36, and how we can
