Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition by Umberto Eco
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Umberto Eco starts off in the first chapter with asking why is there something instead of nothing? Although he references much philosophy in this first go around, this is just a way for him to get to a more interesting question (he says that the fact that we can ask this question isn’t to question Being itself, but to question common sense… that Being is the initial condition for common sense). So let’s get to what he really wants to ask. Eco is really asking, how can we know that something is what it is and not something else.
As a semiotician, he is interesting in understanding why we get what we do, and how we come to learn about new things. This is not an easy task at all. While he strings together the disparate discourses of philosophy, piecean semiotics, linguistics, psychology and cognition in a complex and fascinating way, he eventually comes to hinge his articulation on the figure of the sign as a mediating device. He distinguishes between internal and shared external meanings, and then extended intensive “expert” modeling. What makes Eco so impressive isn’t the vast range at which he runs, he also writes clearly and cleverly, demonstrating that a specific formulation of how to get from A to B can have a multitude of pathways, some of them contradictory but all consistent in their own logic.
This can wrap around itself however, as the articulation of new knowledge itself requires the continual deferral of old knowledge in the place of new knowledge. But knowledge isn’t all that he is after; because knowledge is only the expression of an internal understanding. This is to say that he also creates new understanding in order to supply understanding to understanding itself! So in a very reductive way, he can’t fully explain understanding except so much as to describe a possible path. If we accept it internally, then we can say that we understand it. If we reject it, we would claim it nonsensical or that we can’t understand it. While I am getting a little astray from Eco’s formulation, it is safe to say that Eco is best interested in trying to gasp the steps in formulation to get at any difference in deployment of any aspect of formulation.
In a way, I wish Eco had come up with a better conclusion. He did say what he wanted to say, but the crux of his discussion comes to us when we understand that the act of naming a difference is the creation of that spectrum. Between two differences, or between many discourses that may not connect (that he connects) if we are able to articulate a difference between them, then that difference appears. The difference between them is negligible, shrinking to nothing. If we however, do detect a difference then we can speak of it sideways, and that itself is a metaphor.
I think Eco should have encountered the work of Paul Ricoeur. It would have been interesting to see a conjunction between the two of them. Ricoeur is interested in the same things; although as a philosopher of language, a rhetorician, he approaches the formulation from a position of narrative… the root of which is metaphor. The connection of two unlike things is what metaphor is; and that generic connection can be what creates narrative, though the excuse of temporal displacement in which multiple events are strung together as one long “thing”, a string of causation that is complete only if it has all its parts.
But that may be a sideline. Eco eventually ends up in the position of generic objects, which gives us back to semiotics and signs. From there, he utilizes generic objects to set up identity and knowledge. For this, he could connect to Alain Badiou’s work in set theory, with the formulation of “naked” signs that are generic events… with their indiscernible aspect that allow them to be applied multiple times, anywhere without losing their connection to Truth. Once we get to this point, though we are only talking about icons, which are representations in themselves, without actuality. Their difference, their next step “down” is the hypoicon, which names the immediate first object, without representation but only the sensory form itself, which leaves us in limbo.
Perhaps this is why Eco did not write a conclusion. He had none. He could only leave us to our imagination as to how to connect the two. With the visual pun “Mexican on a bicycle” he leaves us to ponder the ambiguity of experience; that contextual changes or hypoiconic changes although different in type leads us with completely different understandings. While he wants to connect semiotics to philosophy (as an anterior buffering) and semiotics to cognition (as an internal marker of order, to relate sense datum to signs) he only at best manages a description. Never can we understand that connection without first naming it. And never can we name it without forcing it to become something other than what it might be otherwise, a way of plugging parts together. Not an easy task by any means for anyone to write about, and Eco does a great job of hammering through what could have been far much denser text.
I suppose this is what we get for being creatures of language. Language lets us model, but it only lets us model generics. When we subtract particularities from the object we get the generic, but adding those particularities back gets us identities, singletons which are unique and yet a different object. Mysterious that we can extract type from tokens and then speak only in types when talking about tokens. I forget where he says it, but we speak in generics even if we mean individual singletons. This is very much a root of racism, or an issue with categorization of how we can know anything, and the limits of what we know can be. And yet, often without really knowing, we are still able to speak and negotiate and navigate to come to new understandings, often without having to completely reconstruct the language we use at all.
This ability is very much a kind of miracle. I suppose then it is best that we can’t find that missing piece that lets us connect the old to new, or create new from old. Lest if we did find it, and examine it, we would end up losing our very ability to create new narratives, formulate new metaphors and ultimately give rise to new words. We would in fact, lose the ability to create new history.
This is very much the wonder I wish to look at, and Eco gives us a great if somewhat long (yet relatively simply written) narrative for which to guide us about pondering this miracle. 5 stars!
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