Kant and the Platypus : Essays on Language and Cognition

by Eco, Umberto

• ISBN13: 9780151004478
• ISBN10: 0151004471
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-11-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

How do we know that a cat is a cat? Why do we agree on calling the beast a cat? Interesting questions, but an even more intriguing question lies at the heart of all modern philosophy-how much of our perception of things depends on our cognitive ability and how much on linguistic resources? At this point semiotics becomes inextricably linked to epistemology, or cognition. In these essays, Umberto Eco explores in depth such subjects as perception, the relationship between language and experience, and iconism that he only touched on in A Theory of Semiotics. Forgoing a formal, systematic treatment, Eco engages in a series of explorations based on common sense, from which flow an abundance of illustrative fables, often with animals as protagonists. Among the characters, a position of prominence is reserved for the platypus, which appears to have been created specifically to "put the cat among the pigeons" as far as many theories of knowledge are concerned. In Kant and the Platypus, Eco shares with us a wealth of ideas at once philosophical and amusing.

Author Biography

Umberto Eco is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(12)
On Being
Semiotics and the Something	12	(3)
An unnatural problem	15	(2)
Why is there being?	17	(3)
How we talk about being	20	(4)
The aporia of being in Aristotle	24	(2)
The duplication of being	26	(5)
The questioning of the poets	31	(4)
A model of world knowledge	35	(7)
On the possibility that being might abscond	42	(8)
The resistances of being	50	(2)
The sense of the continuum	52	(3)
Positive conclusions	55	(2)
Kant, Peirce, and the Platypus	57	(66)
Marco Polo and the unicorn	57	(2)
Peirce and the black ink	59	(7)
Kant, trees, stones, and horses	66	(10)
Perceptual judgments	76	(4)
The schema	80	(4)
And the dog?	84	(5)
The platypus	89	(10)
Pierce reinterpreted	99	(21)
The Ground, qualia, and primary iconism	100	(6)
The lower threshold of primary iconism	106	(6)
Perceptual judgment	112	(8)
The grain	120	(3)
Cognitive Types and Nuclear Content	123	(101)
From Kant to cognitivism	123	(2)
Perception and semiosis	125	(2)
Montezuma and the horses	127	(17)
The Cognitive Type (CT)	130	(1)
The recognition of tokens	130	(2)
Naming and felicitous reference	132	(2)
The CT and the black box	134	(2)
From CT toward Nuclear Content (NC)	136	(3)
Instructions for identification	139	(1)
Instructions for retrieval	140	(1)
Molar Content (MC)	141	(1)
NC, MC, and concepts	142	(1)
On referring	143	(1)
Semiosic primitives	144	(19)
Semiosic primitives and interpretation	144	(1)
On categories	145	(5)
Semiosic primitives and verbalization	150	(3)
Qualia and interpretation	153	(2)
The CTs and the image as ``schema''	155	(6)
``Affordances''	161	(2)
Empirical cases and cultural cases	163	(16)
The story of the archangel Gabriel	172	(4)
CT and NC as zones of common competence	176	(3)
From type to token or vice versa?	179	(3)
The CT archipelago	182	(42)
Types vs. basic categories	182	(4)
Tiny Tim's Story	186	(5)
Quadruped oysters	191	(4)
CTs and prototypes	195	(1)
Some misunderstandings regarding prototypes	196	(3)
The mysterious Dyirbal	199	(2)
Other types	201	(1)
If on a Winter's Night a Driver	202	(3)
Physiognomic types by individuals	205	(4)
CTs for formal individuals	209	(2)
Recognizing SC2	211	(6)
Some open problems	217	(1)
From the public CT to that of the artist	217	(7)
The Platypus between Dictionary and Encyclopedia	224	(56)
Mountains and Mountains	224	(5)
Files and directories	229	(3)
Wild categorization	232	(3)
Indelible properties	235	(6)
The real story of the platypus	241	(7)
Watermole or duck-billed platypus	241	(3)
Mammae without nipples	244	(2)
A la recherche de l'oeuf perdu	246	(2)
Contracting	248	(22)
Eighty years of negotiations	248	(3)
Hjelmslev vs. Peirce	251	(3)
Where does the amorphous continuum lie?	254	(3)
Vanville	257	(13)
Contract and meaning	270	(10)
Meaning of the terms and sense of the texts	271	(4)
Meaning and the text	275	(5)
Notes on Referring as Contract	280	(57)
Can we refer to all cats?	281	(4)
Referring to horses	285	(4)
The true story of the sarkiapone	289	(2)
Are there closed white boxes?	291	(5)
The Divine Mind as e-mail	296	(4)
From the Divine Mind to the Intention of the Community	300	(2)
Quid pro quo and negotiations	302	(3)
The strange case of Doctor Jekyll and the brothers Hyde	305	(5)
Is Jones mad?	310	(2)
What does Nancy want?	312	(3)
Who died on the fifth of May?	315	(2)
Impossible objects	317	(4)
The identity of the Vasa	321	(4)
On Ahab's other leg	325	(6)
Ich liebe Dich	331	(6)
Iconism and Hypoicon	337	(56)
The debate on iconism	338	(2)
Not a debate between madmen	340	(1)
The arguments of the sixties	341	(2)
Dead ends	343	(1)
Likeness and similarity	344	(4)
Outlines	348	(5)
Surrogate stimuli	353	(4)
Back to the discourse	357	(1)
Seeing and drawing Saturn	358	(3)
Prostheses	361	(2)
More on mirrors	363	(8)
Chains of mirrors and television	371	(5)
Rethinking painting	376	(4)
Recognition	380	(2)
Alpha and beta mode: a catastrophe point?	382	(4)
From perceptual likeness to conceptual similarities	386	(5)
The Mexican on a bicycle	391	(2)
Endnotes	393	(40)
Works Cited	433	(20)
Index	453