Kant and the Platypus
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Kant and the Platypus

Essays on Language and Cognition

Umberto Eco

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  2. English
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eBook - ePub

Kant and the Platypus

Essays on Language and Cognition

Umberto Eco

Angaben zum Buch
Buchvorschau
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Quellenangaben

Über dieses Buch

How do we know a cat is a cat... and why do we call it a cat? An "intriguing and often fascinating" look at words, perceptions, and the relationship between them ( Newark Star-Ledger ). In Kant and the Platypus, the renowned semiotician, philosopher, and bestselling author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum explores the question of how much of our perception of things is based on cognitive ability, and how much on linguistic resources. In six remarkable essays, Umberto Eco explores in depth questions of reality, perception, and experience. Basing his ideas on common sense, Eco shares a vast wealth of literary and historical knowledge, touching on issues that affect us every day. At once philosophical and amusing, Kant and the Platypus is a tour of the world of our senses, told by a master of knowing what is real and what is not. "An erudite, detailed inquirity into the philosophy of mind... Here, Eco is continental philosopher, semiotician, and cognitive scientist rolled all into one." — Library Journal (starred review)

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Information

Chapter Three

Cognitive Types and Nuclear Content

3.1 FROM KANT TO COGNITIVISM

If Kant had considered schemata early enough, Peirce said, they would have overgrown his whole work (WR 5: 258–59). In the previous chapter, I suggested that it was precisely the problem of schematism that obliged Kant to undertake a change of direction in the third Critique. But we might say something more: if we were to reconsider the problem of Kantian schematism, much of the semantics of this century, from the truth-functional to the structural variety, would find itself in difficulty. And this is what has happened in the area usually referred to as “cognitive studies.”

3.2 PERCEPTION AND SEMIOSIS

The problem of perception as a semiosic process has already made its appearance in 2. Of course, those unfamiliar with the Peircean standpoint will find this concept difficult (or quasi “imperialist”), because if we accept that even perception is a semiosic phenomenon, discriminating between perception and signification gets a little tricky.4 We have seen that Husserl also thought that perceiving something as red and naming something as red ought to be the same process, but this process might have diverse phases. Between perceiving a cat as a cat and naming it cat, or indicating it as an ostensive sign for all cats, is there not a jump, a gap (at least that shift from terminus a quo to terminus ad quern)?

3.3 MONTEZUMA AND THE HORSES

The first Aztecs to hasten to the coast witnessed the landing of the conquistadors.10 Although only a very few traces of their first reactions remain and the best information we have depends on Spanish reports and indigenous chronicles written after the event, we know for sure that various things must have completely amazed them: the ships; the Spaniards’ awesome and majestic beards; the protective coverings that lent those fully armored “aliens” with their unnaturally white skins such a frightening air; the muskets and the cannons; and finally, apart from the ferocious dogs, those unheard-of monsters, the horses, in terrifying symbiosis with their riders.

3.3.1 The Cognitive Type (CT)

At the close of their first perceptual process, the Aztecs elaborated what we shall call a Cognitive Type (CT) of the horse. 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. But for an Aztec where was the concept of horse, given that he did not have one before the Spaniards landed? Of course, after having seen some horses, the Aztecs must have constructed a morphological schema not that dissimilar to a 3-D model, and it is on this basis that the coherence of their perceptual acts must have been established. But by speaking of a CT, I do not mean just a sort of image, a series of morphological or motor characteristics (the animal trots, gallops, rears); they had perceived the characteristic neigh, and perhaps the smell, of horses. 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 inspire terror and the functional characteristic of being “rideable,” since it was usually seen with human beings on its back. In short, let’s say that the CT of the horse was of a multimedial nature right from the start.

3.3.1.1 The Recognition of Tokens

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 the phenomenon of recognition that induces us to talk of type, in fact, as a parameter for the comparison of tokens. This type has nothing to do with an Aristotelian-Scholastic “essence,” and we have no interest in knowing what the Aztecs grasped of the horse (perhaps wholly superficial features of a kind that left them unable to discriminate between horses and mules or donkeys). But it is certain that by talking of type in this sense, we conjure up the ghost of a Lockian type of “general ideas,” and some might object that we have no need of these to explain...

Inhaltsverzeichnis