7 What do we perceive when we see someone wearing a shirt under a jacket? We do not see but we know that the shirt also covers the back. We know this, because we have a CT of the shirt based on perceptive (and productive) experiences. Whether or not it has a collar and of what type, or whether it has long or short sleeves is optional, but if it has cuffs, then it has long sleeves. Now, in the film Totd e la dolce vita, the miserly wife obliges her husband Totd to wear a shirt made only of a collar, front, and cuffs. The rest was covered by his jacket, and so there was no need to waste cloth unnecessarily. Toto reasonably objects that, if by chance he were to feel unwell on the tram and they were to remove his jacket, everybody would discover the shameful deception: in point of fact, he is saying that in such as case the onlookers would realize that they had integrated incomplete stimuli with a strong CT, thus coming to pronounce a mistaken perceptive judgment. At that point the onlookers would decide that what they had perceived as a shirt was instead a fake shirt. But the wife (excluding the possibility of this incident) speculates on her own irrepressible faith in the existence of CTs that include indelible features.
8 On the other hand, Walt Disney managed to make us recognize as a mouse an animal that has the tail and the ears of a mouse but is bipedal with an anthropomorphic torso. It is legitimate to ask ourselves if we would have recognized him as a mouse if he had not been introduced to us right away as Mickey Mouse. In such a case we might say that the name, in suggesting a CT to us, has led us to apply the CT in an indulgent manner (while iconographic convention saw to the rest).
9 The story is so amazing and still controversial in many senses (some evidence or scientific articles from the period are hard to find, as historians admit), and the bibliography is so complex, that I will stick to what I have learned from Burrell (1927) and Gould (1991), referring the reader to them for more complete bibliographical references. Where Burrell’s own references are incomplete, I have put «Burrell» in parentheses. I would also point out that on the Internet I found over 3,000 sites regarding the platypus, some of which were entirely accidental (persons or institutions that have decided to name clubs, bookshops, and the like after the platypus) but others worthy of interest, ranging from university centers to those who maintain that the platypus is the best proof of the existence of God, to fundamentalist groups that, having ascertained the paleontological seniority of the platypus with regard to other mammals, ask themselves how this little animal managed to migrate from Mount Ararat to Australia after the Flood. More or less at the same time as the Italian version of this book, Harriet Ritvo published her The Platypus and the Mermaid, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997, from which I have drawn some additional bibliographic information for this English translation.
10 Account of the English Colony in the New South Wales, 1802: 62 (Burrell).
11 The Naturalist Miscellany, Plate 385,386 (Burrell).
12 General Zoology, London: Kearsley, 1800, vol. I (Burrell).
13 Everard Home, «A description of the anatomy of the Ornithorhynchus Hystrix» Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 92, 360.
14 For Home, see «A description of the anatomy of the Omithorhynchus paradoxus,» Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, part 1, no. 4, pp. 67–84. For Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, see «Extraits des observations anatomiques de M. Home, sur l’échidné,» Bulletin des Sciences par la Société Philomatique, 1803; «Sur les appareils sexuels et urinaires de l’Ornithorynque,» Mémoires du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, 1827. For Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique, Paris, 1809.
15 Unless it is manifested through behavior rather than language. Put ten men to march through the desert and, after days of thirst, have them come across three palm trees and a pool of water: all ten will throw themselves at the water and not the trees. Have they recognized the water? The problem is badly put, they have certainly recognized something that all of them desired equally, but we might say that they recognized it as water only after they had been led to interpret their behavior verbally, or only after two of them agreed to interpret it in such a way—and so we are back to square one.
16 Hjelmslev’s analysis (1943), whereby the semantic space covered by the French term bois does not coincide with that covered by the Italian word legno («wood»), tells us that the category «bois» for a French speaker can include both wood for burning, wood for building (which for an English speaker would be only timber), and the clump of trees that Italians would call bosco («a wood»). This segmentation of the continuum can correspond to what Davidson, in refuting it, called a conceptual schema. But it is certain that a French speaker has a CT for the trees and another for the woods, even though his language obliges him to use a homonymous term. In the same way Italians can very easily tell the difference between the sons of their sons and the sons of their brothers or sisters, even though they (unlike the French) have only the homonymous term nipote with which to indicate both.
17 Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena is from 1943. Quine’s «Two Dogmas of Empiricism» is from 1951. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is from 1962. That the two currents proceeded independently is another matter. Hjelmslev knew Carnap, and from personal knowledge I can testify that Kuhn did not know Hjelmslev but had decided to take a look at the structuralist tradition before writing the works he was unable to complete before his death. I do not know how much Quine knows about the structuralist tradition.
18 In any case here is what he thought in «The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics» (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1944). He said that we can accept the semantic conception of truth without abandoning whatever epistemological stance we may have; we can continue to be naive realists, critical realists or idealists, empiricists or metaphysicians—or whatever we were before. See Bonfantini 1976, Ili, 5, and Eco 1997.
19 If we assume Tarski’s example in a naive way, we find ourselves in the same situation as Saussure’s publishers, who represented the relation between signifier and signified with an oval divided in two, whose lower part contained the word arbre and whose upper part contained a sketch of a tree. Now the signifier arbre is certainly a word, but the drawing of a tree is not and cannot be a signified or a mental image (because if anything, it is another, nonverbal, signifier that interprets the word below). Given that the drawing elaborated by Saussure’s publishers had no formal ambitions, only a mnemonic function, we can forget about it. But in Tarski’s case, the problem is more serious.
20 The conference, entitled «W. V. O. Quine’s Contributions to Philosophy,» took place in the International Center for Semiotic and Cognitive Studies of the University of San Marino in May 1990. The proceedings of the conference are now in P. Leonardi and M. Santambrogio, 1995.
21 I am talking of the map, not of the «physiognomy» of the place: for this problem the observations made in 3.7.9. hold good.
22 I should like to refer to an old piece of research done on the barking of dogs (which now appears in Eco and Marmo 1989). The idea for the research came about (during a seminar on medieval semiotics) when it was noticed that, in talking of various forms of expression as opposed to articulated human speech, different authors of the period always mentioned the latratus canis (together with the groaning of the sick and the cock’s crowing). Since we were dealing with highly complex classifications, attempts were made to outline a sort of taxonomic tree for each author, and in doing this we realized that the dog’s bark, the groaning of the sick, and the cock’s crowing occupied, according to the authors, a different node of the tree (and sometimes they appeared as examples of the same semiosic behavior, sometimes as different cases). Medieval man was in the habit (I don’t know how deprecable, but certainly opposed to modern habits) of saying new things while pretending to be repeating what had been said before by others, with the result that it is always difficult to understand to what extent he assumed positions contrary to earlier tradition. This experiment showed us clearly that apparently analogous discussions on communicational phenomena concealed profound systematic differences. In short, and without going further into the matter, the barking of a dog was one thing for a thinker and something else for another. In the light of the system, the same behavior assumed different meanings. Yet each author perceived the same phenomenon (the common experience of hearing dogs bark). This was a case of analogous observation sentences
