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.

1. On Being

• It is not the primary act of attention that defines the something, it is the something that arouses the attention, indeed the attention lying in wait is already part (is evidence) of this something.
• The condition of every question is that being exists.
• We begin to grope our way through being by carving entities out of it and gradually constructing ourselves as a World.
• Entities are the way in which being makes its rendezvous with us.
• As it is thinkable, being manifest itself to us right from the outset as an effect of language.
• There is no definition for being.
• It is the most ancient mystical tradition that has given to the modern world the idea that there exists, on the one hand, a discourse capable of naming the entities univocally, and, on the other, a discourse of negative theology that allows us to talk of the unknowable. This leaves the way clear for the persuasion that the only people who can talk of the unknowable are the poets, the masters of metaphor (which always talks of something else) and of oxymoron (which always talks of the presence of opposites).
• From Plator to Baumgarten, we have a sort of devaluation of artistic as opposed to theoretical knowledge.
• Peirce, in Some Consequences of Four Incapacities:
  • We have no power of introspection.
  • We have no power of intuition.
  • We have no power of thinking without signs.
  • We have no conception of the absolutely incognizable.
• The poets assume as their own task the substantial ambiguity of language, and try to exploit it to extract a surplus of interpretation from it rather than a surplus of being.
• Through this continuous reinvention of language, the poets are inviting us to take up again the task of questioning and reconstructing the World and of the horizon of the entities in which we calmly and continuously though we lived, without anxieties, without reservations, without any further reappearance of curious facts that cannot be ascribed to known laws.
• But who talks of being? We do, and often as if being were outside us. But evidently, if there is Something, we are part of it.
• Being is something that, at its own periphery (or at its own center, or here and there in its mesh), secretes a part of itself that tends to interpret itself.
• The Mind could therefore be represented not as if put before the World but as if contained by the World.
• The mind could try to describe the world only a piece at a time, as if it were looking at it through a keyhole, unable ever to describe it in its entirety.
• In fact, the truth is a poetically elaborated "mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms" that subsequently gel into knowledge, "illusions whose illusory nature has been forgotten," coins whose image has been worn away and are taken into consideration only as metal; so we become accustomed to lying according to convention, in a style that is binding for everyone, placing our actions under the control of abstractions, and having reduced the metaphors to schemata and concepts. Thence a pyramidal order of castes and ranks, laws and delimitations, constructed entirely by language, an immense "Roman columbarian", the graveyard of intuition.
• This brings us to an "ontology supported by 'weak' categories". Nietzsche's announcement of the death of God is nothing more than the proclamation of the end of the stable structure of being. Being exists only "as suspension and as shirking".
• Something resistant has driven us to invent general terms (whose extension we can always review and correct).
• Being may not be comparable to a one-way street but to a network of multilane freeways along which one can travel in more than one direction; but despite this some roads will nevertheless remain dead ends. There are things that cannot be done (or said).

2. Kant, Peirce, and the Platypus

• Often, when faced with an unknown phenomenon, we react by approximation: we seek that scrap of content, already present in our encyclopedia, which for better or worse seems to account for the new fact.
• The platypus seems to have been conceived to foil all classification, be it scientific or popular.
• For Peirce:
  • The very first impressions of an object are something unknown until the mind manages to wrap them up in predicates.
  • To name is always to make a hypothesis.
  • The Ground lies at the roots of the origin of conceptual understanding. It is an "initial" way of considering the object from a certain point of view.
• Different approaches to the mind:
  • Scholastic (beginning with Plato and Aristotle) - The work of the mind amounts to what the active intellect (wherever it may work) does in the blink of an eye.
  • British Empiricists (Locke etc) - The intellect is active, in the sense that it works: it combines, correlates, and abstracts
  • Kant - Seeks a transcendent foundation for the empiricists. His primary interest is how it is possible to have a pure mathematics and a pure physics. His critique comes shortly after the publication of Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, the first tentative monument to the establishment of a classification of "natural kinds". For Kant, concepts of the pure intellect are only logical functions, not concepts of objects.
• Peirce needed a concept of schema, but he could not find one with its modalities already founded and he could not deduce them. He had to find them "in action", in the middle of the incessant activity of interpretation.
• There is a sort of shift from logic to epistemology.
• Prodi: "An enzyme selects its substrate from among a number of meaningless molecules with which it can collide: it reacts and forms a complex only with its partner molecule. This substrate is a sign for the enzyme (for its enzyme). The enzyme explores reality and finds what corresponds to its own shape; it is a lock that seeks and finds its own key. In philosophical terms, an enzyme is a reader that "categorizes" reality by determining the set of all the molecules that can react with it factually... This semiotics (or proto-semiotics) is the basic feature of the entire biological organization (protein synthesis, metabolism, hormonal activity, the transmission of nervous impulses, ans so on).
• In a bague and swampy region between Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, the perceptual process begins.
• The Ground and the Immediate Object are respectively the point of departure and the first stop on a journey that could continue for a long time as it runs along the tracks of potentially infinite interpretation.

3. Cognitive Types and Nuclear Content

• We're concerned with the way in which we speak of objects and situations of which:
  • We have or might have direct experience (dog, chair, walking, eating out, climbing a mountain)
  • We have no experience, but could have (armadillo, performing an appendectomy
  • Someone has certainly had an experience but we can no longer have, and regarding which the Community nevertheless transmits us sufficient instructions to speak of as if we had had experience of them (dinosaur, Australopithecine)
• If we accept that even perception is a semiosic phenomenon, discriminating between perception and signification gets a little tricky.
• When the Spaniard first confronted the Aztecs, the Aztecs at first thought that the invaders were riding deear:
  • Oriented by a system of previous knowledge but trying to coordinate it with what they were seeing, they must have soon worked out a perceptual judgment. An animal has appeared before us that seems like a deer but isn't.
  • Likewise they must not have thought that each Spaniard was riding an animal of a different species, even though the horses brought by the men of Cortès had diverse coats. They must therefore have got a certain idea of that animal, which at first they called maçatl, which is the word they used not only for deer but for all quadrupeds in general.
  • Later, since they began adopting and adapting the foreign names for the objects brought by the invaders, their Nahuatl language transformed the Spanish caballo into cauayor or kawayo.

Cognitive Types

• At the close of their first perceptual process, the Aztecs elaborated what we shall call a Cognitive Type (CT) of the horst. If they had lived in a Kantian universe, we should say that this CT was the schema that allowed them to mediate between the concept and the manifold of the intuition.
• Apart from the appearance, the Aztecs must have immediately attributed a characteristic of "animality" to the horse, given that the term maçatl was immediately applied, as well as the capacity to instpire terror and the functional characteristic of being "rideable", since it was usually seen with human beings on its back.
• ie, the CT of the horse was of a multmedial nature right from the start.
• On the basis of the CT thus elaborated, the Aztecs must have been immediately able to recognize as horses other exemplars that they had never seen before (and this apart from variations in color, size, and vantage point). It is precisely this phenomenon of recognition that induces us to talk of type.

• Naming is the first social act that convinces them that they all recognize various individuals, at different times, as tokens of the same type.
• The passage to a generic term springs from the social need to be able to detach the name from the hic et nunc of the situation, and then to bring it to the type.
• We must start from the principle that, if there are felicitous acts of reference, it is because, both in recognizing a second time something perceived previously and in deciding that object A and object B can satisfy the requisite of being a glass, a horse, or a building - or that two forms are oth definable as right-angled triangles - we relate tokens to a type.
• Semiosic experience tells us that we have the impression that we retain mental images and above all that we interpret many terms publicly and intersubjectively through visual representations. And so the iconic component of knowledge must be postulated as well as the existence of the CT, if we are the account for what common sense proposes to us.

Nuclear Content

• The CT established an area of consensus and the Aztecs associated a "content" with the expression maçatl. At first this agreement must have taken place as a disordered exchange of experiences, but they gradually interpreted the features of their CT in order to homologate it as much as possible.
• We shall call this set of interpretants the Nuclear Content (NC), and we shall use the word meaning only as a synonym of content.
• The CT is private, a phenomenon of perceptual semiosis, while the NC is public, a phenomenon of communicative consensus.
• The CT, which cannot be seen and cannot be touched - may be postulated only on the basis of recognition, identification, and felicitous reference; the NC represents the way in which we try intersubjectively to make clear which features go to make up a CT.
• The NC, which we recognize in the form of interpretants, can be seen and touched - and this is not just a metaphor, given that the interpretants of the term horse include a great many horses sculpted in bronze or stone.
• A CT does not necessarily spring from a perceptual experience; it can be transmitted culturally (in the form of an NC) and lead to the success of a future perceptual experience.
• An NC is expressed sometimes in words, sometimes with gestures, sometimes through images or diagrams.
• We postulate a CT as a disposition to produce an NC, and we treat an NC as proof that there is a CT around somewhere.
• I could identify an aliigator the first time I encountered one because the NC of the word alligator had been communicated to me.
• By supplying instructions with which to identify a token of the type, the NC orients one toward the formation of a tentative CT.

Molar Content

• Eventually, Montezuma would develop a complex knowledge of horses. Not an "encyclopedic" knowledge, but a "broadened knowledge" which includes notions that are not indispensable for perceptual recognition.
• This Molar Content (MC) would be different from that of his first messengers or his priests, and it would be in continuous expansion.
• A zoologist has an MC of horse, and so does a jockey, even though the two areas of competence are not coextensive.
• On the level of MC there ought to be generalized consensus, albeit with some fraying and gray areas.
• The sum of all MCs coincides with the Encyclopedia as a regulative idea and a semiotic postulate.

Concepts

• What is a concept?
  • Either it governs perceptual recognition and is the same as the CT and is expressed by the NC
  • Or it is a rigorous and scientific definition of the object, and in that case it is the same as a particular sectorial MC.
  • From Eco's point of view, it comes to mean only what one has in mind.

Referring

• The CT provides instructions for identifying the referent, and this undoubtedly constitutes a form of competence. Referring to something is, instead, a form of performance.
• An entity all by itself in an environment will need to develop notions of:
  • High and low
  • Standing upright or lying down
  • Some physiological operations, such as swallowing or excreting, walking, sleeping, seeing, hearing, perceiving thermic, olfactory, or gustatory sensations, pain or releif
  • Various movements and gestures
• Once the entity comes into contact with other beings it will have notions regarding the presence of something opposes its body:
  • Coitus, struggle, the possession or the loss of an object of desire, the cessation of life
  • The moment we enter into language, there is a disposition toward meaning of a prelinguistic character. These primary recognitions are preconceptual, having to do with perception and not with categorial knowledge (if anything they orient categorial knowledge, offering themselves as a basis for interpretation at higher cognitive levels).

Categories

• Grouping manifold tokens under a single type is the way in which language works.
• What cognitivism calls basic categories are certainly CTs, while what it calls superordinate categories (as Tool, over hammer) are Taxa. Taxa belong to a more complex phase of cultural elaboration and are stored in the MC of some particularly gifted speakers (they depend on a coherent system of propositions, or on a given cultural paradigm).
• Eco will adopt the term category for things hierarchically ordered in a system of basic, superordinate and subordinate concepts.
• Wizezbicka identifies certain primes, common to all cultures:
  • I, someone, something, this, other,
  • one, two, many, much
  • think, want, feel, say, do, happen,
  • good, bad, small, big
  • when, before, after, where, under
  • no, some, live, far, near, if, then, etc
• These are not necessarily innate. They may be primitives only for a single individual, while other individuals may start from other different experiences.
• There is no absolute primitive.
• A strictly dictionary-type definition such as "mammal, murid, rodent" (which goes back to the taxa of the naturalistic classifications) is insufficient.
• The encyclopedia definition is insufficient too; Those who have never seen a mouse would never be able to identify one on the basis of this extremely vast and organized collection of data.
• A folk definition could contain primitive terms only.
• Every interpretation is always partial.
• We use narrative schema to organize our experience.

Empirical Cases and Cultural Cases

• While empirical cases are things we can perceive, cultural cases require a reference to a framework of cultural rules.
• Notions of this kind require negotiation on the basis of conventions and behavior bound up with cultures.
• When I understand the meaning of cousin and president, I call up in some way a kinship or an organizational schema.
• CTs are not just visual images. They can also correspond to scripts or flowcharts for the recognition of a sequence of actions.
• Perceptual experience must be oriented by a set of cultural instructions.
• For empirical cases we go from the CT, founded on experience, to the NC, while for cultural cases the reverse occurs.
• We must recognize the existence of CTs for cultural cases too.

CT and NC as Zones of Common Competence

• Somewhere, the zoologist must have a notion not unlike my own.
• The opposition between the dictionary and the encyclopedia is perhaps useful for certain theoretical ends but does not refer in the slightest to the way in which we perceive and name things.
• The common competence is continuously negotiated or contracted because the CT is not an entity - it is a procedure - as the Kantian schema is a procedure.
• There is a constant oscillation - one the one hand I generalize the object and on the other I particularize the schema.
• We recognize individuals because we relate them to a type, but we are able to formulate types because we have experience of individuals;

4. The Platypus Between Dictionary and Encyclopedia

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5. Notes on Referring as Contract

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6. Iconism and Hypoicon

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