Is it a bird?
Is it a fish?
Hugh Lawson-Tancred
KANT AND THE PLATYPUS by Umberto Eco Secker, £20, pp. 464 Imagine that you are an Aztec warrior confronted by the sudden arrival on your shores of the Conquistadores. You have never had any dealings with that species of animal which we call horse, but now you see specimens of it bearing down on you at speed carrying armed Spaniards. Or imag- ine you are Marco Polo visiting Indonesia and being introduced to a member of the species rhinoceros, of which you similarly have no antecedent knowledge. Do you take it to be a non-standard example of a unicorn or congratulate yourself on having made a profound discovery about the real and hitherto unknown properties of uni- corns? Or imagine that you are a zoologist in London in 1798 as the first specimens of the platypus are brought in — is it a mam- mal, is it a fish or is it a bird?
All these are cases in which the subject encounters an object which his experience and background knowledge do not suffice for him to identify or even classify. In all such cases, however, classification is even- tually achieved. Such examples are of great interest to philosophers, because they may be able to throw light on the central human cognitive achievement, that of taking some segment of the manifold of sensory presen- tations as something, and in particular as an instantiation of a type. The explanation, abjuring the appeal to magic, of this extraordinary feature of the natural world is the focal task of modern philosophy, often referred to by the techni- cal term 'intentionality' or more generally thought of as the problem of representa- tion, on which the Anglo-Saxon 'analytical' tradition, the Continental strands of struc- turalism, phenomenology and semiotics and the lush scientific growth areas of cog- nitive science and artificial intelligence are converging at such a rate of concentration as to threaten to obliterate all current per- ception of the ideological divides which will be so salient to later historians of 20th- century philosophy and human science.
Umberto Eco is perhaps the leading con- temporary representative of the philosophy of semiotics. The school, descending remotely from the critical philosophy of Kant and proximately from the writings of the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce, seeks, in essence, to offer a general theory of signs and symbols based on the assumption that to grasp a sign is to inter- pret the code in which it consists.
Indeed semiotics takes our very percep- tion of sensory phenomena to be an act of interpretation, and in Kant and the Platypus, Eco sets out to offer an account of how we interpret such ambiguous mani- festations as the horse, the rhinoceros and, most intractable of cases, the platypus. His theory is that the naïve subject first forms a private 'cognitive type', an internal mental representation (roll over, Wittgenstein), out of his experience, with the unidentified galloping object and then, through interaction with others in the same cogni- tive predicament, comes in time to have access to a public 'nuclear' content associ- ated with it, effectively the linguistic mean- ing of the term for the item. This can later be supplemented by a range of 'molar' con- tents, going diversely beyond the nuclear core and each peculiar to the various spe- cialisms that arise in connection with the entity. Eco is adamant that this process remains thoroughly flexible even when fully mature. Both nuclear and molar content are always subject to 'negotiation'.
This amounts to a general theory of mental and linguistic content which centres on the notion of entertaining an object rather than that of grasping a proposition. Anyone who can (still?) be labelled an 'analytical philosopher' will suspect that the story about grasping objects will turn out to be in one way or another secondary to that about grasping propositions. If, however, we give Eco his pinch of salt, his theory is plausible enough but arguably not very illu- minating. He details at length the relation- ship between nuclear and molar content, but one wonders about the philosophical importance of this. It is, in effect, as Eco acknowledges, an exploration of the phe- nomenon which the American philosopher Hilary Putnam has dubbed 'the division of linguistic labour', but there seems no rea- son to suppose that this feature of our lan- guage use is of as much interest to the philosopher as it is to the lexicographer. On the other hand, he fights relatively shy, in a perplexing final section, of the vexed but central question how content (sense for Frege and the analytical tradition) connects with reference, that actual picking out of objects which is the real riddle of seman- tics.
The discussion makes some amends for its lack of philosophical gravitas by being consistently fertile and provocative and by providing a wealth of suggestive anecdotes and illustrations, purporting to throw light on the shifting taxonomy implicit in our categorisations of the world. These are often oases of readability, as in the recon- struction of the 80 years of debate about the classification of the platypus, brought to a denouement with the receipt by the University of Sydney of a telegram reading. `Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic'.
This, then, is a structure whose ornamen- tation is more stimulating than its frame. Unfortunately, if you like to follow a clear- ly delineated line of argument and have not spent a year or two studying post-Kantian philosophy, you will find it fairly hard to follow the plot (specially in the ontological first essay). Eco indulges in technical jar- gon and esoteric references to a greater extent than, frankly, is acceptable under the current (extremely high) standard of popular scientific exposition.
This is not a book for the novice, but for anyone who knows and cares it will be a pleasant illustration of how the philosophi- cal width of the English Channel is narrow- ing rapidly almost to that of the Atlantic Ocean.
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