Kant and the Platypus

I enjoyed parts of this and other parts were hard-core philosophy arguing over positions in semiotics that I don't hold and am not interested in.

The main thrust of Eco's position seems to be that we cannot understand and navigate in the world without categorizing the objects that we encounter but that these categorizations are:

• never perfect,
• never perfectly understood
• personal to each one of us and when we communicate, the words we use are based on our own definitions/categories and are understood by our interlocutor only in terms of her own imperfect and different definitions/categories.

The platypus acts as a good example as when a European encountered one at first, he tried to fit it into multiple different categories, each of which it fit into imperfectly, and a discussion continued over many decades with the categories never satisfactorily being resolved.

There is a lot of discussion of Peirce, who Eco is sympathetic too, even if his attempts to delineate the process from perception to identification are muddled, and Kant, whose schema seems to idealize categorization in ways that do not align with our modern introspection.

The most interesting section for me was around Cognitive Types, which are made up of:

• Nuclear Content - the core set of characteristics that enable us to identify an encountered object as belonging to the type. For example, for horses, they have four legs, a mane and a tail. They can gallop fast and can be ridden with a saddle and reins. As we encounter more instances of the CT, we may refine the nuclear content but after a while it becomes relatively fixed and forms the basis for communicating about this type of object.
• Molar Content - is slowly accreted around the nuclear content with each encounter either in the world or through writing, pictures or other media

Another very valuable idea is the ability to refer to something, to use a word, and how we take many (all) of these references on trust. We can communicate even if we do not understand the words that are being used and through questioning and inference we build understanding.

Much like encountering novel objects in the world and using a process that cycles between categorization and revision (of the categorization and of the categories being used), in discussion, we negotiate to a common understanding of the terms we are discussing.