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

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3. Cognitive Types and Nuclear Content

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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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