Kant and the Platypus

Essays

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by Umberto Eco

Harcourt

Due/Published October 2000, 464 pages, paper

ISBN 015601159X

New in paper (F00)

What would happen if Kant met up with a duckbill platypus? Let's see, did you hear the one about the philosopher who went on his walk around Königsberg and came face to face with . . . never mind. Anyway, here is Eco at his imaginative best (and without the weight of some of his "thicker" novels) on matters of perception, epistemology, cognition--his favorite subjects--that emerge from a number of illustrative fables.

ContentsIntroduction

Ch. 1. On Being
1.1. Semiotics and the Something
1.2. An unnatural problem
1.3. Why is there being?
1.4. How we talk about being
1.5. The aporia of being in Aristotle
1.6. The duplication of being
1.7. The questioning of the poets
1.8. A model of world knowledge
1.9. On the possibility that being might abscond
1.10. The resistances of being
1.11. The sense of the continuum
1.12. Positive conclusions

Ch. 2. Kant, Peirce, and the Platypus
2.1. Marco Polo and the unicorn
2.2. Peirce and the black ink
2.3. Kant, trees, stones, and horses
2.4. Perceptual judgments
2.5. The schema
2.6. And the dog?
2.7. The platypus
2.8. Pierce reinterpreted

2.8.1. The Ground, qualia, and primary iconism
2.8.2. The lower threshold of primary iconism
2.8.3. Perceptual judgment
2.9. The grain

Ch. 3. Cognitive Types and Nuclear Content
3.1. From Kant to cognitivism
3.2. Perception and semiosis
3.3. Montezuma and the horses

3.3.1. The Cognitive Type (CT)

3.3.1.1. The recognition of tokens
3.3.1.2. Naming and felicitous reference
3.3.1.3. The CT and the black box
3.3.2. From CT toward Nuclear Content (NC)

3.3.2.1. Instructions for identification
3.3.2.2. Instructions for retrieval
3.3.3. Molar Content (MC)
3.3.4. NC, MC, and concepts
3.3.5. On referring
3.4. Semiosic primitives
3.4.1. Semiosic primitives and interpretation
3.4.2. On categories
3.4.3. Semiosic primitives and verbalization
3.4.4. Qualia and interpretation
3.4.5. The CTs and the image as "schema"
3.4.6. "Affordances"
3.5. Empirical cases and cultural cases
3.5.1. The story of the archangel Gabriel
3.5.2. CT and NC as zones of common competence
3.6. From type to token or vice versa?
3.7. The CT archipelago
3.7.1. Types vs. basic categories
3.7.2. Tiny Tim's Story
3.7.3. Quadruped oysters
3.7.4. CTs and prototypes

3.7.4.2. Some misunderstandings regarding prototypes
3.7.4.3. The mysterious Dyirbal
3.7.5. Other types
3.7.6. If on a Winter's Night a Driver
3.7.7. Physiognomic types by individuals
3.7.8. CTs for formal individuals
3.7.9. Recognizing SC"subscript 2"
3.7.10. Some open problems
3.7.11. From the public CT to that of the artist

Ch. 4. The Platypus between Dictionary and Encyclopedia
4.1. Mountains and mountains
4.2. Files and directories
4.3. Wild categorization
4.4. Indelible properties
4.5. The real story of the platypus

4.5.1. Watermole or duck-billed platypus
4.5.2. Mammae without nipples
4.5.3. A la recherche de l'oeuf perdu
4.6. Contracting

4.6.1. Eighty years of negotiations
4.6.2. Hjelmslev vs. Peirce
4.6.3. Where does the amorphous continuum lie?
4.6.4. Vanville
4.7. Contract and meaning

4.7.1. Meaning of the terms and sense of the texts
4.7.2. Meaning and the text

Ch. 5. Notes on Referring as Contract
Can we refer to all cats?
Referring to horses
The true story of the sarkiapone
Are there closed white boxes?
The Divine Mind as e-mail
From the Divine Mind to the Intention of the Community
Quid pro quo and negotiations
The strange case of Doctor Jekyll and the brothers Hyde
Is Jones mad?
What does Nancy want?
Who died on the fifth of May?
Impossible objects
The identity of the Vasa
On Ahab's other leg
Ich liebe Dich

Ch. 6. Iconism and Hypoicon
6.1. The debate on iconism
6.2. Not a debate between madmen
6.3. The arguments of the sixties
6.4. Dead ends
6.5. Likeness and similarity
6.6. Outlines
6.7. Surrogate stimuli
6.8. Back to the discourse
6.9. Seeing and drawing Saturn
6.10. Prostheses
6.11. More on mirrors
6.12. Chains of mirrors and television
6.13. Rethinking painting
6.14. Recognition
6.15. Alpha and beta mode: a catastrophe point?
6.16. From perceptual likeness to conceptual similarities
6.17. The Mexican on a bicycle

Endnotes
Works Cited
Index