A case of undercoded abduction, working for nonlinguistic signs, is the one of Kepler’s discovery, quoted above. Kepler met a surprising fact, and then he had to select among alternative explanations: there were many geometrical curves that could account for the movement of Mars. Their number was not infinite, and some previous assumptions about the regularity of the universe suggested to Kepler that he had to look only for closed, nontranscendental curves; therefore, ellipsis seemed more plausible than spyrals or sinewaves. Notwithstanding this hierarchy of plausibilities, Kepler had to try.
(c) There are, finally, cases of creative abduction, in which the rule acting as an explanation has to be invented ex novo. This could be the case of Copernicus when he had the intuition of heliocentrism in De revolu-tionibus orbium coelestium. Copernicus felt that the Ptolemaic system was inelegant, without harmony, like a painting in which the painter repro-duced all the members without composing them into a unique body. Then he decided that the sun ought to be at the center of the universe because only in this way the created world would have displayed an admirable symmetry. He figured out a possible world whose guarantee was its being well structured, ‘gestaltically’ elegant.
As in every case of creative abduction, this way of reasoning required a sort of meta-abduction, which consisted in deciding whether the possible universe (or state of things) outlined by the creative abduction was the same as the ‘real’ universe. In over- and undercoded abduction this metalevel of inference is not compulsory, because there are preexisting explanations of the same kind that have already proved to be plausible in other cases. In other words, in over- and undercoded abductions one uses explanations that already held for different results. In creative abductions one is not sure that the explanation one has selected is a ‘reasonable’ one.
We implement creative abduction when dealing with poetic texts, as well as when solving criminal cases. Many interpretive decisions con-cerning symbols (see Chapter 4 of this book) involve creative abduc-tions. Many cases in which language is used not to confirm but to chal-lenge a given world view or a scientific paradigm, and to decide that certain properties cannot belong any longer to the meaning of a given term (see Chapter 2 of this book) require an interpretive cooperation that displays many characteristics of a creative abduction.
So far, inferences are at work at every level of semiosis, in verbal language as well as in the understanding of so-called natural signs. In this sense, there is a link between theory of meaning and theory of evi-dence that, according to Harman (see 1.4 above), is to be carefully dis-tinguished. If there is a difference, it is not between linguistic and natu-ral signs or between words and symptoms, but rather between semiotic and scientific inference, or between two kinds of certitude.
The semiotic plausibility is based on social habits, whereas the scien-tific plausibility is based on other criteria of verifiability. This difference is of the greatest relevance under many respects, indeed. But it should not blur that other evidence: that we deal both with language and with every other kind of sign by implementing inferential processes. These processes can be defined as interpretive processes. The understanding of signs is not a mere matter of recognition (of a stable equivalence); it is a matter of interpretation.
1.12. The criterion of interpretability
Thus substitution (aliquid stat pro aliquo) is not the only necessary con-dition for a sign: the possibility of interpretation is necessary as well. By interpretation (or criterion of interpretability) we mean the concept elaborated by Peircc, according to which every interpretant (either a sign or an expression or a sequence of expressions which translate a previous expression), besides translating the Immediate Object or the content of the sign, also increases our understanding of it. The criterion of inter-pretability allows us to start from a sign in order to cover, step by step, the entire circle of semiosis. Peirce maintained that a term is a rudimen-tary proposition and that a proposition is a rudimentary argumentation (C. P. 2.342—44). By saying father I have already produced a two-argument predicate: if father, then someone who is a child of this father.
The interpreted content allows me to go beyond the original sign and makes me see the need for future contextual occurrence of another sign. From the proposition ‘every father has or has had a child’, one can go on to analyze whole argumentative topics, while the intensional mechanism leads us in the direction of propositions to be analyzed extensionally.
At this point it is clear that the death sentence pronounced on the sign on the basis of the charges of equality, similitude, and reduction of differences was quite unfounded. It based itself on the blackmail of a ‘flat’ linguistic sign, seen as a type of correlation based on dead-end equivalence, on the substitution of the same. In truth, the sign always opens up something new. No interpretant, in adjusting the sign interpret-ed, fails to change its borders to some degree.
To interpret a sign means to define the portion of continuum which serves as its vehicle in its relationship with the other portions of the continuum derived from its global segmentation by the content. It means to define a portion through the use of other portions, conveyed by other expressions. If the interpretation is pushed to its extreme, it is possible to cast doubt on the content determined at the beginning, and even the global criterion of segmentation. This implies that we must cast doubt on the way in which the form of the content has segmented the continuum.
Hjelmslev leads us to believe in the existence of two separate con-tinua, one for the expression and one for the content. But the sign-function model should, in the light of Peirce’s semiotics, be reformu-lated (Figure 1.4). The matter, the continuum about which and through which signs speak, is always the same. It is the Dynamic Object that Peirce talked about that motivates the sign, though the sign does not render it immediately, since its expression only conveys an Immediate Object (the content). A specific civilization organizes the content in the shape of fields, axes, subsystems, and partial systems which are often not coherent with each other.
They are articulated according to a specific contextual perspective (and the context can be the culture of a millen-nium as well as a poem or a diagram). These content-segments can cor-respond to physical entities (woman, dog, house), abstract concepts (good, evil), actions (to run, to eat), genera and species (animal, plane figure), as well as directions and relations (above, before, toward, if and then, or). These portions are articulated in larger sequences according to the inferential links we described above. In order to express them, one must choose formalized or formalizable portions of the continuum, which are the same as what is talked about, that is, the same continuum seg-mented by the content. Sometimes the material elements, chosen in order to express them, utilize portions of the continuum different from the expressed continuum (sounds can be used in order to express spatial relations). At other times the same portion of the continuum is used as material both for the expression and for the content (spatial relationships in a diagram used to express spatial relationships on a tridimensional surface).
FIGURE 1.4
The matter segmented in order to express something expresses other segmentations of that matter. Through this interplay from sign to sign, the world (the continuum, the pulp itself of the matter which is manipu-lated by semiosis) is called into question. The form that we attribute to the Dynamic Object is continuously changed through the formulation of Immediate Objects and their constant redefinition by successive inter-pretants.
1.13. Sign and subject
The notion of sign as expression of equality and identity could be legitimately claimed to support a sclerotic (and ideological) notion of the subject. The sign as the locus (constantly interrogated) for the semiosic process constitutes, on the other hand, the instrument through which the subject is continuously made and unmade. The subject enters a beneficial crisis because it shares in the historical (and constitutive) crisis of the sign. The subject is constantly reshaped by the endless resegmen-tation of the content. In this way (even though the process of resegmen-tation must be activated by someone, who is probably the collectivity of subjects), the subject is spoken by language (verbal and nonverbal), by the dynamic of sign-functions rather than by the chain of signifiers. As subjects, we are what the shape of the world produced by signs makes us become.
Perhaps we are, somewhere, the deep impulse which generates semiosis. And yet we recognize ourselves only as semiosis in progress, signifying systems and communicational processes. The map of semiosis, as defined at a given stage of historical development (with the debris carried over from previous semiosis), tells us who we are and what (or how) we think.
[2] DICTIONARY VS. ENCYCLOPEDIA
2.1. Porphyry strikes back
2.1.1. Is a definition an interpretation?
The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the untenability of that model for definition, structured by genera, species, and differentiae, known as the Porphyrian tree and elaborated from Boethius through the whole Middle Ages, as an interpretation of the Isagoge
