As a matter of fact, the ultimate referent of a rigid designation (in-tended as the possible extension of a given term) can be defined in two ways. If rigid designation is (as Kripke seems to suggest) a process of mentions leading backward to an initial and aboriginal baptismal cere-mony (and therefore to a primeval act of ostension accompanied by the utterance of the name), then the chain of mediatory information that guarantees the link with the original christening is made up of an unin-terrupted series of discourses, descriptions, stories told about other stories up to the initial event; and in this case there is no difference between rigid designation and the encylcopedia, the sum of all these links representing the encylcopedic competence of a society in its very progress through time.
But the process of rigid designation can also be described in the terms used by Putnam (1975:200). Suppose, suggests Putnam, that I were standing next to Benjamin Franklin when he made his experiment on electricity and that Franklin told me that ‘electricity’ is phenomenon so and so. He would have given me an approximately correct definite de-scription of the phenomenon.
Now when I use the term /electricity/, I refer to the introducing event, the moment I learned that term, and every-one of my uses of the name will be causally connected to that event, even though I forgot when I first learned what I know about that name. Now suppose that I teach someone the word by telling him that the term /electricity/ names a physical magnitude so and so (listing some proper-ties of the magnitude) without mentioning the causal link occurring be-tween my present use of the word and the introducing event. The being of this word in someone’s vocabulary will still be causally connected to the introducing event. End of Putnam’s example.
Even in this case, what makes my (and someone’s) language work is not the introducing event but the encyclopedic set of more or less defi-nite descriptions I was able to provide (and that Franklin was able to give me). The introducing event was something similar to Peirce’s Dynamic Object (intending the Dynamic Object both as electricity as physical magnitude and as my original experience of it). But what per-mits communication between me, Putnam, and someone else is the out-line, via definite descriptions, of an Immediate Object, which is the encyclopedic representation of /electricity/.
It would be possible that among the interpretants of the word /electricity/ there be also a photo-graph of Putnam speaking with Franklin; as a matter of fact, among my own (Eco’s) interpretants of /electricity/, there are some images of Franklin performing his experiment. But, since even introducing events can be spoken of through interpretants (disregarding the fact that even Putnam’s memories of his own introducing event, if any, could be viewed as mental interpretants or mental icons), what remains is only an encyclopedic chain.
Finally, if the introducing event described by Putnam really took place (in the way he describes it in Putnam 1975:200), the only things one can semiotically test are just the printed expressions at page 200 of Putnam 1975, along with their interpretable content.
There is a further objection to the theory of rigid designation (at least such as it is proposed by Kripke and by many of his interpreters). Maybe we call a halibut halibut because of a first baptismal ceremony, and a halibut will still be a halibut (with an essence of its own, as Putnam suggests) even though we change by counteffactual conditionals every possible definite description of it. Let us accept this view. Now let us suppose that, in order to avoid future world wars, the United Nations decided to establish a Peace Corps of ISC (Inter-Species Clones). This corps will be composed by half-human beings, to be produced by clon-ing, through a genetic hybridation of human punk rockers and speaking chimps trained in ASL.
Such clones would guarantee a fair and unbiased international control, because they are independent of any national or ethnic heritage. The UN Assembly has to speak a lot about this new natural kind’ because the members must reach a final agreement—that is, they have to speak about ISCs before ISCs exist, and just in order to make them exist. It is clear that, if there were any baptismal ceremony, what the UN christened as ISC was not an original ‘thing’, but the encyclopedic description of such a thing. There was neither original os-tension, nor causal link; there will be only an established corre-spondence between an expression and the operational description of its content (with the understanding that, in the future, such an expression, along with its content, will be used in order to mention some state of affairs, as yet merely possible).
It is evident that we use linguistic expressions or other semiotic means to name ‘things’ first met by our ancestors; but it is also evident that we frequently use linguistic expressions to describe and to call into life ‘things’ that will exist only after and because of the utterance of our expressions.
In these cases, at least, we are making recourse more to stereotypes and encyclopedic representations than to rigid designators.
Many of Putnam’s suggestions (for instance, the distinction between stereotyped knowledge and expert knowledge) are accepted by Petofi’s theory of encyclopedical representation. Let us consider, for instance, the tentative representation (Figure 2.12) of chlorine proposed by Neubauer and Petofi (1980:367). Chlorine is more interesting than elec-tricity because we have good reasons to believe that not even Putnam was witnessing its baptismal ceremony when Scheele christened it in 1774. (Incidentally, I suspect that he baptized it in German as Chlor, and this fact shuffles the causal chain.)
One can say that the fact that chlorine is a gas is a piece of common knowledge as well as the fact that it is a disinfectant. But Petofi’s pro-posal is tentative: the difference between commonsense knowledge and expert knowledge should be traced each time according to the specific co-text. What is important is to assume that all the items of information listed (Figure 2.11) are part of a possible linguistic competence, irre-spective of the difference between dictionary and encyclopedia. There are novels in which many of the ‘industrial’ properties of chlorine are more important than the one of being a chemical element. (Incidentally, Petofi records as commonsense knowledge what Putnam would record as semantic information, since to be an element is an ‘analytical’ property.)
The advantage of Petofi’s model over Putnam’s is that the former definitely gives up the distinction between intension and extension. Any item of expert knowledge can be intended as a meaning component that serves to establish the extension of the term under certain circumstantial conditions: since we are not living on the Twin Earth (see Putnam 1975), when someone is invited to look in some closet for some chlorine, it is enough that he looks for a greenish liquid, disagreeable to smell, and his subsequent indexical assertion there is some chlorine can be evalu-ated in terms of truth values even according to Tarskian criteria.
There are many other models for an encyclopedic representation, and, at the present state of the art, it would be embarrassing to decide which one is the more suitable. Rey-Debove (1971) speaks, apropos of the work of lexicographers and of their ‘natural’ definitions, of bricolage; she also remarks that, looking at the existing dictionaries, it seems that it is easier to define infrequent expressions such as /infarct/ than frequent ones such as /to do/. A semiotic encyclopedia, even though only designed
A. Sector of commonsense knowledge B. Sector of expert knowledge
. generic term . color
- smell
· element · greenish
· disagreeable, bad
- Chemical knowledge •element category
•family
- valence
•chemical symbol •natural occurrence •chlorine compounds,
etc.
nonmetallic
halogen univalent polyvalent Cl
In chlorides
NaCI, HCI
- Physical knowledge • natural state or matter •other states
- weight
•atomic weight •atomic number
- Biological know/edge •effect on living
organisms
gas
liquid chlorine 2,5 times as
heavy as air
17 33.453
poison
- Geological know/edge
- amount in earth’s crust
- Historical information •discovery
«further research
0.15%
Scheele 1774; Davy 1810
production of liquid
chlorine in 1823
6.Etymological information
- origin Greek chloros
- Industrial knowledge • production
- uses
- storage
electrolysis from common salt
bleaching in paper and textile industry
disinfectant {germicide and pesticide)
chemical warfare cool, dry conditions,
in iron, etc. container
FIGURE2.12
under the form of local examples, is subjected to the same re-strictions. However, the choice of the encyclopedia over the dictionary is not a free one: we have shown that dictionaries cannot exist if not as theoretical figments. The universe of natural languages (and not only of verbal ones) is the universe of semiosis. The regulative idea of encyclopedia is the only way to outline a possible format of such a universe and to try tentative devices for describing part of it.
2.3.4. Clusters
According to the last representation we have examined, it is clear that, when the content of an expression is represented in the format of ency-clopedia, there is no way to establish —out of any context—a hierarchy among properties. In Figure 2.3 we have refrained from inserting sexual differences into the tree. After the critique of the Porphyrian tree, we are now in the position of understanding the reason for this act of pru-dence. When differences like the sexual ones are taken as specific dif-ferentiae (a decision that Porphyry would not have encouraged), they can occur in many nodes of the tree, so compromising once again its structure. Following the suggestion
