European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy

X-1 | 2018 Eco and Pragmatism

Claudio Paolucci (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/1082 DOI: 10.4000/ejpap.1082 ISSN: 2036-4091

Publisher Associazione Pragma

Electronic reference Claudio Paolucci (dir.), European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, X-1 | 2018, « Eco and Pragmatism » [Online], Online since 20 July 2018, connection on 26 September 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/ejpap/1082 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejpap.1082

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Symposia. Eco and Pragmatism

Three Pragmatist Legacies in the Thought of Umberto Eco Claudio Paolucci

Eco, Peirce, and the Pragmatic Theory of Signs Randall E. Auxier

Eco and Peirce on Abduction Francesco Bellucci

Duck or Rabbit? Umberto Eco’s Structural Pragmatics Valentina Pisanty

Pragmatic/Pragmatist Mind Eco’s Cognitive Semioticization of Qualia Martin Švanter

Semiotics and the Something A Pragmatist Perspective on the Debate on Realism Rossella Fabbrichesi

The Lost Trail of Dewey Eco’s Problematic Debt to Pragmatism Robert E. Innis

Who’s, What’s, I Don’t Know A Musement on Eco’s Pragmatism Lucio Privitello

Essays

Cognition as a Transformative Process Re-affirming a Classical Pragmatist Understanding Vera Saller and Donata Schoeller

Book Review

Peter OLEN, Wilfrid Sellars and the Foundations of Normativity London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 240 pages Gabriele Aleandri

Joseph MARGOLIS, Three Paradoxes of Personhood: The Venetian Lectures Hermann, Mimesis International, 2017, 146 pages Matthias Kramm

Peter OLEN & Carl SACHS (eds), Pragmatism in Transition: Contemporary Perspectives on C.I. Lewis London & New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 222 pages Sarin Marchetti

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Claudio Paolucci (dir.) Symposia. Eco and Pragmatism

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Three Pragmatist Legacies in the Thought of Umberto Eco

Claudio Paolucci

1. Eco and Pragmatism

1 Pragmatism was one of the greatest influences on Umberto Eco’s intellectual adventure. This influence can be seen not only in his philosophical work, but also in many of the ideas hidden behind his novels, which, as Eco himself had recently admitted by authorising the Library of Living Philosophers to extensively cover such a topic in the volume dedicated to him, are an important part of his philosophy. Or, perhaps, Eco’s novels should be called a “non-philosophy” that, in his line of thinking, constitutes a component of philosophy itself and of his entirely unique way of practising it (see Paolucci 2017a). Certainly, Eco always admitted the more than evident influence of Peirce on his semiotics and his thought. And his idea that semiotics was a decisive part of philosophy, if not the “contemporary form of philosophy” itself (Eco 1984; 2017) was influenced by Peirce’s thought. It is equally certain that different studies have concentrated on the relationship between Eco’s thought and that of Peirce (Proni 2015; Pisanty & Pellerey 2004; Paolucci 2017b and Auxier, in this volume), shedding light on the connections between them, from the more evident to least obvious and immediate. In addition, the numerous dialogues that Eco had always tried to put together with the greatest exponents of American philosophy inspired by pragmatism, from Quine to Putnam (see Eco 1984; 1997) on down to that with Richard Rorty,1 which even lead to an important book on “interpretation and over- interpretation” (Eco 2002), are just as evident.

2 However, Eco’s relationship with pragmatism was not limited to the single relationship with an author (however decisive it may have been for his thought), to the returning to a series of topics and problems, or to the dialogue with a group of philosophers that had always had great esteem for pragmatism. Quite to the contrary, in my opinion, Eco’s thought was radically pragmatist in its ways and intentions and, on a deeper

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level, even in its specific style of thinking. It is no coincidence that Eco owed many of his theoretical turning points to the pragmatists, and not just Peirce.

3 His meeting with Dewey, who Eco credits, in his philosophical autobiography, with his liberation from a certain way of thinking of Italian culture at the time, can stand in as an illustrative example.2 It is certainly worth reading this account in the words of Eco himself. I was interested in the study of aesthetics and, naturally, all beginners had to read the idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce. Even at that time I was beginning to think that Croce had not understood much about art, and in that sense I was rebelling against contemporary Italian culture, which still lay within the idealist camp. This was the reason why, in order to elude the influence of German idealist philosophers, who were mandatory reading for all Italian philosophy students, I (like many others of my generation) went in for French and Anglo-American philosophy. In my university years reading Dewey’s Art as Experience was a liberation for me. (Eco 2017: 6)

4 And it is from the ideas of Art as Experience that, through his meeting with Luigi Pareyson, Eco was able to manage the true revolution for aesthetics that The Open Work was first for Italian culture and subsequently for European culture (see Paolucci 2017a, chapter 4).

5 The discussion around semiotics is not much different. In order to criticise the Croce- derived idea of art as intuition, Eco was inspired by Pareyson’s idea of interpretation. For Pareyson, not only was art not an introspective intuition which exhausts itself in internal elaboration, whereas its technical-material externalization is completely accessory, as Croce used to think. But, according to Pareyson “artistic production is not the sudden outcome of a not otherwise defined intuition but is, rather, a process of trial and error, and the patient questioning of a preexisting material” (Eco 2017: 18).

6 It was then Peirce’s semiotics – anti-Cartesian essays and the works on abductive reasoning in particular – that Eco placed his trust in to further develop, epistemologically and cognitively speaking, all the points which were so decisive for him. And he always held great gratitude for the father of American pragmatism. According to Peirce: i) interpretation is a form of trial/error that has the shape of an abductive gamble and of the fallibility of a hypothesis; ii) interpretation as inference is the exact opposite of intuition, which is instead a “cognition that has not been determined by previous cognitions”; iii) the same “idea present to the mind,” whether this be a representative thought or internal introspection, is never an intuition at all, but rather a sign derived from hypothetical inference starting from some external state.

7 Eco turned these three points into the very cornerstones of his semiotics and never let go, even after the cognitive reflections of Kant and the Platypus, which would have been able to inspire a return to a certain pre-semiotic form of intuition (see Eco 2007; Paolucci 2015). The same idea of interpretation, which would then become the label for his way of practising semiotics (interpretative semiotics), comes from here, from these problems and from these reflections. The process-based approach to creation implies a similarly trial- and process-based notion of the response to the completed work, namely, its interpretation. This concept is central to Pareyson’s aesthetics precisely because he takes into account the interaction between a world of forms (be they natural or produced by human beings) and the presence of human interpretive activity. The notion of interpretation, in Pareyson’s view, is very broad and implies the enjoyment of the

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work of art, its possible performance, as well as its critique, and the translation of a text. Pareyson never quoted Peirce but the former’s concept of interpretation led to my being won over by Peirce’s notion of the interpretant, which (as we shall see) permeated my later semiotic approach. (Eco 2017: 18-9; original emphasis)

8 However, the relationship with pragmatism and with the pragmatists wasn’t necessary for Eco simply to incite revolutions and, thus, to accelerate thought towards something new and unexpected, but also to put the brakes on it, in order to reject intellectual models that, in the era Eco was writing in, were colonising the cultural world. Thanks to pragmatism, Eco used to refuse ideas which he certainly did not consider desirable, even if they were at the centre of the cultural world.

9 Among the many contenders, the most important example is that of “Deconstruction.” Eco was among the first to speak of “open work” and of the interpreter as a sort of co- author of the work itself. However, Eco was never willing to accept Derrida’s positions on these topics, and the most heated debate on his positions – in which Eco tried to refute Derrida’s theses – is seen in the interpretation of Peirce’s famous passage about “symbols grow” (CP 2.302), which Derrida had analytically commented on in Of Grammatology. Eco, who had dedicated the very essence of his semiotic theory of interpretation to the idea of “infinite semiosis,” appealed directly to the pragmatist idea of habit as a logical-final interpreter able to stabilise and dampen the interpretation, with the aim of not to acquiesce to the Derridean idea that Peirce was a precursor to the “deconstruction of the transcendental signified, which at one time or another would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign” (Derrida 1967: 54). In this regard, Eco carries over the Peircean definition of lithium, “what you are to do in order to gain a perceptive acquaintance with the object of the word” (CP 2.330) and insists on the transcendental role of the “community as an intersubjective guarantee of a non-intuitive, non-naively realistic, but rather conjectural notion of truth” (Eco 1990: 39).

10 There isn’t enough room here to go analytically through all the places in which the encounters with pragmatism and American philosophy were decisive in Eco’s work.3 For this, I’ll take another route and try to identify three large legacies of pragmatism which were central in Eco’s thought and which shaped and influenced his philosophy to its foundations. The three of Eco’s overarching ideas that are marked in their very essence by pragmatic legacy are: i) the non-separation of semantics and pragmatics; ii) the centrality of abduction for cognition and semiotic thought; iii) synechism, or rather, the continuity between mind and world that Eco was unwilling to allow on a theoretical level, but which he explicitly puts on stage in narration.

2. Semantics, Pragmatism and the Pragmatic Maxim

11 At first glance, it seems paradoxical to ascribe pragmatism’s legacy to the consideration of pragmatics as a part of semantics, seeing as the three-pronged division into syntax, semantics and pragmatics derives from Charles Morris’ interpretation of certain ideas coming from Peirce. And yet, Eco never loved Morris to the degree he viscerally loved Peirce and his pragmatism, and a few of Peirce’s ideas coming from the very foundation of pragmatism were the ground of Eco’s idea that pragmatics was part of semantics.

12 Personally, I’m firmly convinced that the non-separation of semantics and pragmatics is one of the most crucial ideas of Eco’s semiotic legacy, one which hasn’t been

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sufficiently considered and valued within a semantic landscape that uses Morris’ tripartition as a starting point, if not a true cornerstone. I am also convinced that Eco’s idea is the direct result of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, which, in A Theory of Semiotics, Eco applies to the most modern problems of cognitive semantics.

13 Peirce’s pragmatic maxim is in fact a theory of meaning: “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. […] There is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.” (CP 5.402).

14 In Seventies-era semantics, there was a tendency to enthusiastically distinguish between the meaning of a sign from its usage in language. Meaning wasn’t about usage, and usage was actually a question of pragmatics, not semantics. This division tended to create numerous further distinctions, which Eco used to consider entirely artificial, such as that between dictionary and encyclopaedia and that between “knowledge of language” and “knowledge of the world” (see Eco 1975; 1984). We will start with the latter distinction: according to the semantic theories that Eco was opposed to, a knowledge of the language (dictionary) would concern the fact that a bachelor is an “unmarried male adult,” while a knowledge of the world (encyclopaedia) would concern the fact that the author of this essay is a bachelor. According to Katz (1972), who is the author of a semantic theory that embodies the polemic goal of A Theory of Semiotics, encyclopaedic knowledge cannot be part of the meaning of a word since, as there are always new discoveries about the world (and thus new uses of words which have become the subject matter of common knowledge), this knowledge and these uses should be included in the semantic representation of a lexical item. For Katz, it was something that should not and must not be done, but, according to Eco (1975: 143-4), this was the very work of semantics itself. For this very purpose, in A Theory of Semiotics, Eco (1975: 152-72) tries to propose a semiotic model founded on “coding contexts and circumstances.” As we will now see, these codified contexts and circumstances represent those very “conceivable practical effects” that, according to Peirce, identify meaning.

15 Let me unpack this point a bit. Eco’s Reformulated Semantics Model (1975) inserts all of a sign’s accepted meanings, along with the contextual and circumstantial selections that make it possible for us to use it within concrete linguistic practices (usages), into the semantic representation of that sign. “Contextual selections” make it possible to activate the correct meanings in function of the other, co-existing meanings of the sign in question. Meanwhile, “circumstantial selections” make it possible to activate the correct meanings in function of the events and objects that co-exist in concrete linguistic practices. More generally, “the way to represent the meaning of a sign- vehicle x is ‘if x then, according to the following circumstances and contexts, the following interpretants will be activated’” (Eco 2017: 23). As such, the conceivable interpretative activity of the speaker, with the possible ways he could use language, becomes part of the semantic representation of a sign-vehicle, exactly like encyclopaedic knowledge, in its regularity, becomes a ineliminable component of semantics. It is a completely Eco-like way of interpreting the Peircean idea that, in order to determine the meaning of something, the conceivable practical effects must be determined.

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Thus, according to Eco, the circumstantial and contextual selections have nothing to do with the empirical contexts and the empirical circumstances in which a word is used. For Eco, meaning is not related in any way to empirical uses, with “the practical effects of signs,” but rather with the conceivable empirical uses, with the conceivable practical effects of signs, which Eco calls “the codes of contexts and circumstances.” It is clear how Eco is thinking here through Peirce’s pragmatism and not through its version by William James (Sini 1971; Maddalena, Calcaterra & Marchetti 2015). Meaning, in fact, does not consist in the identifiable practical effects of using a word. To the contrary, meaning consists in the conceivable practical effects, in other words (in Eco’s semantic terminology), in the coding of contexts and circumstances, and thus in the concepts of the possible uses of a sign that are culturally and conventionally considered more probable. The theory does not have to list and to structure all the possible occurrences of a given item but only those which are culturally and conventionally recognized as the more statistically probable. (Eco 1975: 110)

16 Eco does not dissolve meaning in its practical effects, just as he does not dissolve semantics in the empirical uses of speakers. Rather, he thinks that pragmatics, understood as a conceivable whole of the regularities of usage, is a constitutive component of meaning. For this reason, proper semantic representation must consider pragmatics to be a constitutive part of semantics itself. It is on this topic that Eco’s pragmatist inspiration is not only evident, but sows the seed of what in my opinion is one of the most important ideas of semiotic semantics.

3. Abduction

17 In Paolucci (2010; 2012), I have tried to reconstruct the profound evolution that the concept of abduction underwent within Peirce’s thought. Initially thought of as the inference of the minor premise of a “Barbara” syllogism starting from the major premise and the conclusion, abduction became, according to the mature Peirce, a “strange salad” able to hold together i) a “token-type” logical movement, ii) an analogical “token-token” movement, and iii) the art of fantasizing able to connect heterogeneous universes of experience that Peirce would call musement. In this latter form (that of the “strange salad”), abduction became for Peirce the true driving force behind the process of cognition, representing the very fulcrum of semiosis.

18 It is therefore no coincidence that Eco dedicated numerous years and many studies to capturing the complexity internal to Peirce’s concept of abduction, trying to classify its potential variants and to use them in every phase of his intellectual adventure, from philosophy to semiotics to novels. Let us take a look at how The Name of the Rose is an example based on this work on the idea of abduction.4

19 If I were to vote for a work of reference on these topics, I would not hesitate to choose “Corna, zoccoli, scarpe,” an article originally published in the anthology The Sign of Three (then republished in The Limits of Interpretation), that, in my opinion, is also one of the most extraordinary essays by Eco the philosopher and semiotician. According to Eco, the idea of abduction has to do with that form of reasoning and interpretive process in which, standing before an unknown, surprising event that requires explanation, one (fallibly) gambles that this event could be the case of a rule (see CP 2.624). If the abduction is verified, thus discovering that the unknown event is

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effectively the case of that rule, that event thereby stops being surprising. For Eco, abduction is therefore an example of reasoning through which the unknown is brought back to the known, and “rules are produced to be able to interpret” (Eco 1997, chapter 2). However, and this is the real interesting part, according to Eco, abduction is a sort of umbrella term, as there are different types that show up for different types of risks and benefits.

20 In “Corna, zoccoli, scarpe,” Eco provides one important classification, founded on a four-way partition. He calls the first type of abduction “hyper-codified.” In this form, the rule is given and it is even codified and attested to, for which the abductive reasoning is effectively resolved in a token-type relationship, in which the unknown event is interpreted as the token of a general type that represents the law.

21 The second type of abduction is “hypo-codified.” Here the relationship between case and rule is not codified and there are different possible rules, often equiprobable, which are made available to us by the semiotic encyclopaedia as a format of the “current knowledge of the world.” The example which Eco gives for this type of abduction is Kepler’s discovery of the elliptic nature of the orbit of Mars. When Kepler discovered the ellipticity of the orbit of Mars, he met a surprising fact (the initial positions of the planet), then he had to choose between various geometrical curves, whose number was not infinite, however. Some previous assumptions about the regularity of the universe suggested to him that he had to look only for closed not transcendental curves (planets do not make random jumps and do not proceed by spirals or sine waves). (Eco 1983: 207)

22 The third type is “creative” abduction, in which it is the rule itself that must be created ex novo. According to Eco, this type of abduction is found in all revolutionary discoveries, whether they are scientific, historic or literary. This type of abduction is interesting because the type is not given, but it must be in turn posed or constructed, making abduction a fallible way to construct rules in order to be able to interpret and make sense of unknown, surprising results.

23 However, the most extraordinary type of abduction, the one in which Eco strikes gold, is the fourth and final form, which Eco calls “meta-abduction.” It consists in deciding as to whether the possible universe outlined by our first-level abductions is the same as the universe of our experience. In over- and under-coded abductions, this meta-level of inference is not compulsory, since we get the law from a storage of already checked actual world experience. In other words, we are entitled by common world knowledge to think that, provided the law is the suitable one, it already holds in the world of our experience. In creative abductions we do not have this kind of certainty. We are making a complete “fair guess” not only about the nature of the result (its cause) but also about the nature of the encyclopedia (so that, if the new law results in being verified, our discovery leads to a change of paradigm). As we shall see, meta-abduction is not only crucial in “revolutionary” scientific discoveries but also (and normally) in criminal detection. (Eco 1983a: 207) Meta-abduction is abduction that has another abduction as its object and which presumes parallelism between worlds: it is first necessary to gamble on a possible explanation that creates a coherent story, which, however, we don’t know if it corresponds effectively to the facts at hand (abduction object). It is then necessary to gamble that this abduction, object of the first wager, outlines a possible world that one gambles will be the same world as reality (meta-abduction). For this, Eco (1983) talks about “a sick Spinozist universe” in which ordo et connexio idearum (the world outlined

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by our first abduction) idem est ac ordo et connexio rerum (the real world). Meta- abduction is the bet that the world we have hypothesized in our conjectures is one and the same as the real world. This parallelism between mind and world, which, as we will soon see, constitutes the very essence of Peircean synechism, is the mechanism that presides over the abductions of William of Baskerville and Jorge de Burgos in the extraordinary finale of The Name of the Rose. This further demonstrates that the relationship with pragmatism influenced Eco’s thought on every level, including narrative. Indeed, the prime example of meta-abduction for Eco can be found in detective stories. It is no coincidence, then, that when Eco writes his, he has Borges’ Death and the Compass in mind, which not by chance inspired the evil blind librarian who is the protagonist of the novel’s finale. To be sure that the detective’s mind has reconstructed the sequence of events and laws as they should have been, you have to harbor a profound persuasion that “ordo et connexio rerum idem est ac ordo et connexio idearum.” The movements of our mind that investigates follow the same laws of reality. If we think “well,” we are obliged to think according to the same rules that connect things among themselves. If a detective identifies with the mind of the murderer he can only get to the point to which the murderer gets. In this Spinozan universe the detective is not just the one who understands what the murderer has done (because he could not fail to do that, if there is a logic to the mind and things). In this Spinozan universe the detective will also know what the murderer will do tomorrow. And he will go to wait for him at the place of his next crime. But if the detective can reason this way, so can the murderer: who can do things in such a way that the detective goes to wait for him in the place of his next crime, except that the victim of the murderer’s next crime will be the detective himself. And this is what happens in “Death and the Compass.” (Eco 1983b: 170)

24 This is also the case in The Name of the Rose. Having understood that William of Baskerville had gambled that the murderer was following the “scheme of the Apocalypse” for his crimes, Jorge de Burgos begins following the scheme himself, even if all the previous murders were actually the result of chance and not an elaborate or preconceived plan.

25 Yet, according to Eco, there is one major difference regarding the force of meta- abduction when it operates within the real world or when it operates within the fictional world, as is the case in his novel. It is certainly possible to create meta- abductions in the real world as well, and Eco cites not only certain scientific discoveries as paradigmatic examples, but also historic discourse and conjectures from the history of medicine. However, unlike that which happens in the real world, a detective like Sherlock Holmes never makes mistakes and he never hesitates to meta-gamble that the world which he has charted out is the same as the “real” world, since he has the privilege of living in a world constructed by his inventor, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who constantly verifies all hypotheses. In the real world, on the other hand, there is nothing which corresponds to the author of a novel, unless one wants to assume the point of view of God, something which Eco is not willing to do and which had already consumed his distancing from the Christian thought of his teacher, Luigi Pareyson. Pareyson believed in the existence of a “creator” who authored the shapes of the world, analogous to the author of a novel, able to ensure the abductive reasoning of his “characters.” Precisely because he is unwilling to make this move, Eco feels the need to insist – consistently and on more than one occasion – that meta-abductions are dangerous and should always be verified empirically, just as wary researchers consistently try to do in criminal, medical or philosophical investigations.

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4. Synechism

26 From this topic, there is one more point of contact between Eco’s reflections and those of pragmatism. Peirce was convinced that all human beings have a sort of “lume naturale,” a natural instinct to guess correctly, as our brain evolved in accordance with things themselves. This leads to the most decisive metaphysical and epistemological idea from the mature Peirce, who considered it the very key of his own philosophical system (Maddalena 2009): the existence of continuity between mind and world. According to Peirce, the mind is the part of the world through which the world represents itself. It is not by chance that, like the mind, the world also tends to taken on habits, and thus has a “tendency to behave in a similar way under similar circumstances in the future” (CP 5.487). In this regard, Eco, analysing Peirce’s synechism and its relationship with pragmatism in The Role of the Reader, noted how the logical-final interpretant for Peirce always expresses “the same law governing the Dynamic Object.” This is why we have a natural instinct to guess correctly, as our mind follows the same laws according to which the world is itself organised.

27 However, even if he perfectly knew these ideas, Eco never wanted to follow in Peirce’s footsteps on this matter. He always professed disagreement both with the idea of a lume naturale and with the ability to guess correctly guaranteed by a mind that is naturally in harmony with the structure of things (Eco 1983b: 334-9). This is why, for Eco, meta- abductions were always “a worrying question” (Eco 1983a: 258). There is nothing in the structure of the world or in that of evolution that guarantees our conjectures. To the contrary, in Eco’s opinion, man is structurally devoted to falsity and error, constantly running the risk of remaining a victim of his own semiotic creations, which he uses to try to decipher the disorder of the world, but which often do nothing besides show him his own signs and references. This is the “force of falsity” that Eco always puts on stage in his novels. Starting from false ideas and incorrect conjectures, man is certainly able to discover many truths, but these discoveries are often the result of chance and error, just like those of William of Baskerville, who manages to truly discover the murderer of the abbey and his mysteries by following the false scheme of the Apocalypse.

28 Thus, as I tried to show in Paolucci 2017, for Eco, synechism is not a constitutive principle (as it was for Peirce), but rather a regulative one. We act “as if” our conjectures correspond to the structure of the real world. We would be unable to gain experience without this meta-abductive gamble. However, there is nothing in the structure of the world that guarantees the Spinozan parallelism that serves to secure our abductions, just as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did with those of Holmes. In the real world, unlike that of fiction, synechism is something that we tentatively try to impose on the world’s chaos in order to produce an order, without, however, any guarantee that this order actually exists. I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only thins man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand was the relation among signs. I arrived at Jorge through an apocalyptic pattern that seemed to underlie all the crimes, and yet it was accidental. I arrived at Jorge seeking one criminal for all the crimes and we discovered that each crime was committed by a different person, or by no one. I arrived at Jorge pursuing the plan of a perverse and rational mind, and there was no plan, or, rather, Jorge himself was overcome by his own initial design and there began a sequence of causes, and concauses, and of

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causes contradicting one another, which proceeded on their own, creating relations that did not stem from any plan. Where is all my wisdom, then? I behaved, stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe […] The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. (Eco 1980: 426)

29 This is why Eco finds it necessary to “laugh at the truth”: truth, being a form of correspondence between intellect and things on the one side and between the mind and the world on the other side, is a form of order that we try to impose on the world to gain experience. However, many other orders are possible. This is why it is always a good idea not to take just one too seriously. One order may seem to be particularly stable or reasonable to us, so we may think that this is the truth. However, according to Eco, the truth is often nothing other than an attested version of the world which is the effect of research that must never be interrupted, but which should always be entrusted to the uncertain logic of interpretation and conjecture.

5. This Issue

30 Insofar as in this piece I have tried to shine some light on three aspects that, in my opinion, are anything but banal in terms of the relationship between Eco and pragmatism, it is clear that the authors participating in this issue of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy will investigate the relationship between Eco’s thought and that of American pragmatist traditions from their own points of view.

31 For instance, Randall Auxier works on the relationship between Eco and Peirce, with special attention to semiotics, introducing an original interpretation of many ideas about this topic. Francesco Bellucci also works on a classic topic, that lies at the heart of the relationship between Eco and pragmatism: the idea of abduction and the justification of abductive reasoning. Bellucci argues that both Peirce and Eco solved this problem through the idea that the justification of abduction is itself abductive.

32 Also Valentina Pisanty deals with one major theoretical problem, the “keeping together” of Structuralism and Pragmatism inside Umberto Eco’s work. In order to account for that, Pisanty introduces the idea of bisociation, that, though never an item of Eco’s own philosophical toolbox, plays an important role in the creation of a possible/impossible graft between Structuralism and Pragmatism.

33 Conversely, Martin Švantner deals with the late Eco’s ideas on semiotics, connected to cognitive sciences and to the problem of qualia. In his view, Eco started to focus specifically on the problem of qualia mostly in his later period when he turned from the idea of almost universal theory of semiotics (as in A Theory of Semiotics) to cognitive realism (in Kant and the Platypus) with the help of more precise reinterpretation of Peirce’s concepts.

34 Also Rossella Fabbrichesi’s paper deals with a late idea of Umberto Eco’s production, negative realism. According to Fabbrichesi, Eco’s appeal to Peirce’s distinction between Immediate and Dynamical Object is contaminated by a common-sense interpretation of what ‘real’ is, which is note what Peirce had in mind with his distinctions.

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35 Robert Innis’ work challenges one main idea, which is also at the basis of this issue of the EJPAP. According to Innis, Umberto Eco’s relation to pragmatism as such is quite tangential if we ignore the pivotal role of Peirce in defining and supporting Eco’s explicit semiotic turn. Innis sees in the gradually lost of the trail of Dewey, that we have seen playing a pivotal role for the young Eco, a major problem and also indicates how Dewey’s work could have played a larger role in Eco’s mature aesthetic thought.

36 Finally, Lucio Privitello’s paper, “A Musement on Eco’s Pragmatism,” is so original, smart and entertaining that it is not worth to tell nothing else to the reader apart from the invitation to enjoy it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CALCATERRA Rosa Maria, (2017), Filosofia della contingenza. Le sfide di Richard Rorty, Genoa, Marietti.

ECO Umberto, (1975), A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

ECO Umberto, (1980), Il nome della rosa, Milan, Bompiani (English translation, The Name of the Rose, New York, Harcourt)

ECO Umberto, (1983a), “Corna, Zoccoli, Scarpe,” in Umberto Eco & Thomas A. Sebeok (eds), Il segno dei tre, Milan, Bompiani.

ECO Umberto, (1983b), Sugli specchi e altri saggi, Milan, Bompiani.

ECO Umberto, (1984), Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio, Turin, Einaudi.

ECO Umberto, (1990), The Limits of Interpretation, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

ECO Umberto, (1997), Kant e l’ornitorinco, Milan, Bompiani.

ECO Umberto, (2002), Interpretazione e sovrainterpretazione, Milan, Bompiani.

ECO Umberto, (2007), “The Threshold and the Infinity,” in Id., From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

ECO Umberto, (2017), “Intellectual Autobiography,” in Sara G. Beardsworth & Randall E. Auxier (eds), The Philosophy of Umberto Eco, Chicago, Open Court, 3-65.

KATZ Jerrold J., (1972), Semantic Theory, New York, Harper & Row.

MADDALENA Giovanni, (2009), Metafisica per assurdo. Peirce e l’epistemologia contemporanea, Cosenza, Rubbettino.

MADDALENA Giovanni, CALCATERRA Rosa Maria & Giancarlo MARCHETTI (eds), (2015), Il pragmatismo. Dalle origini agli sviluppi contemporanei, Rome, Carocci.

PAOLUCCI Claudio, (2010), Strutturalismo e interpretazione, Milan, Bompiani.

PAOLUCCI Claudio, (2012), “Abduzione e interpretazione. Abbiamo davvero ascoltato Peirce?,” in Ivan Pozzoni (ed.), Le varietà dei pragmatismi, Villasanta, Limina Mentis, 57-78.

PAOLUCCI Claudio, (2017a), Umberto Eco. Tra Ordine e Avventura, Milan, Feltrinelli.

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PAOLUCCI Claudio, (2017b), “Eco, Peirce, and the Anxiety of Influence: The Most Kantian of Thinkers,” in Sara G. Beardsworth & Randall E. Auxier (eds), The Philosophy of Umberto Eco, Chicago, Open Court, 251-278.

PEIRCE Charles Sanders, (CP), Collected Papers, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

PISANTY Valentina & Roberto PELLEREY, (2004), Semiotica e interpretazione, Milan, Bompiani.

PRONI Giampaolo, (2015), “Umberto Eco and Charles Peirce: A Slow and Respectful Convergence,” Semiotica, 206 (1/4), 13-35.

SINI Carlo, (1971), Il pragmatismo americano, Rome, Bari, Laterza.

NOTES

1. See Calcaterra 2017. 2. See Robert Innis’ paper in this issue for a detailed account on that. 3. I partially have done so in my book, Umberto Eco. Tra Ordine e Avventura (Paolucci 2017a). 4. Comparable examples could be made for all of Eco’s novels. On this point, see Paolucci (2017a, chapters 9 and 10).

AUTHOR

CLAUDIO PAOLUCCI University of Bologna c.paolucci[at]unibo.it

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Eco, Peirce, and the Pragmatic Theory of Signs

Randall E. Auxier

1. Introduction

1 The aim of the present essay is to examine the views of Charles S. Peirce and Umberto Eco with regard to signs and semiotics1 in order to assess their relation to Peirce’s mature pragmatism (after 1903). Such an assessment might be done in a number of ways, but taking the path of semiotics, apart from being an obvious approach, also reveals some interesting things about pragmatism itself. Both thinkers attempted to set out a truly general theory of signs, and ran into difficulties on similar points. By “truly general,” I mean a theory that covers all cases of meaning-generation, and while the theory may derive from generalizations that arise from particular experience, as human learning usually does, the truly general would not be dependent upon any given particular experience for its “validity” (although one hesitates to use that vexed word), or reference to the objective world. William James restricted the scope of pragmatism to what can be generalized from particular experience, but it is well known that Peirce would have none of that restriction, re-founding pragmatism to get around the nominalism implied by James’s view.

2 The responses of Peirce and Eco to the difficulties that arose in seeking a truly general theory of signs were quite different. Both Peirce and Eco were allergic to transcendental claims (the latter more than the former) of the Kantian stripe, but apart from that shared aversion, they had different ideas about possibility. Peirce was not averse to sincere metaphysics. Eco was mostly indifferent to metaphysics and treated it as an interesting language game, peculiar to philosophers (and other cults and secret societies). In addition, Eco was not obsessed with avoiding nominalism, while for Peirce no greater error – one is tempted to say “sin” – could be committed.

3 These differences are far-reaching. And yet, the differences are not so deep as to prevent us from thinking of both Peirce and Eco as pragmatists, and perhaps of a similar stripe. Most of the differences between Eco and Peirce can be found also as

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differences between Peirce and almost all others we regularly call “pragmatists,” especially James and Rorty. But Eco has some points of agreement with Peirce most others do not. None of the other standard pragmatists, apart from Charles Morris and Josiah Royce, could really be called a semiotician. Many doubt whether one ought to call either of these other two “pragmatists.” This overlap provides more reason rather than less to undertake a comparison of Eco and Peirce on this precise question.

4 My strategy will be to examine the goal of achieving a “truly general” theory of signs (in a sense to be explained). The results may be applicable to the question of whether we ought to think of Morris and Royce as pragmatists in any robust way, and in considering the matter, one thing that will come to light is that we probably would not call Peirce a pragmatist at all had he not invented the term.2 The historians of pragmatism have tended to acknowledge Peirce for the term and then to make either James of Dewey the most important point of reference. Thus, we will need to clarify the sense of the term in considering Peirce and Eco in light of this history.

2. Peirce and the Quest for a Truly General Theory of Signs

5 In making his theory truly general, explaining every occurrence of meaning wherever meaning is possible, Peirce was obliged to claim that signs are more than abstract terms and operators. Beginning in 1903, he metaphysicalized signs and began to identify Firstness with possibility. For Peirce (for most of his career) the sign had both a concrete and an abstract nature.3 As he matured, the concrete-functional aspect of the sign gradually diminished in his thinking about signs, but whether it completely disappeared is, as we shall see, a point of contention among Peirce scholars. In any case, throughout the vast majority of his life, Peirce held that the sign is abstract in its capacity to be related to other signs without any required reference to their genesis, while signs are concrete in their capacity to be related to empirical functioning.4 The former is semiotic determination of signs by other signs, while the latter is determination of the world by signs and of signs by the world. In the former case, “logic” (in the broadest, normative sense) is the operating system and the relations revealed are reflective in character. In the latter, the determination is epistemic and has to do with the way beliefs are formed and acted upon.

6 Hence, there are two modes of determination of the sign, one abstract and logical (what I call “operative”), and the other concrete and functional. The relation between concrete and abstract determination, prior to 1903, was an on-going problem for Peirce.5 I think 1903 marks a turning point due to Royce’s very specific influence on Peirce which, in this instance, was largely negative, teaching Peirce what he did not want to assert. Peirce and Royce had been in correspondence about logic between 1898 and 1903, and 1899 is when Royce’s The World and the Individual: Series One was published (from his Gifford lectures).6 Peirce’s review of that book (which appeared in 1900) makes very plain that he saw what others did not in Royce’s central claim: that the entire exercise was about the difference between which possibilities are “forced” upon our imaginations and which are not, when we make a knowledge claim.7 The full issue of possibility lies well beyond my current project, but it is crucial to note that over the next three years, Peirce adjusted his categories (yet again), and hence his “pragmatism” when he identified Firstness with possibility in 1903 (see below).8 No one else thought Royce’s

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project was about which possibilities are forced on our imaginations in knowledge claims (I read every review; Peirce’s is way off in a corner by itself). The claim that this is what Royce’s book was about will seem extravagant and adventitious to most readers of the book. Peirce was always an active reader, in the sense that he often saw what others did not, and sometimes it is doubtful whether what he saw was really in the text.

7 From 1900 to 1903, Peirce misunderstood Royce’s central claim. He believed that Royce critique of “realism” was an explicit critique of the sort of “realism” Peirce had been defending in correspondence with Royce and earlier. He was mistaken. Peirce’s was not the sort of view Royce had in mind, as Peirce later learned, but the mistake led to one of the most creative and interesting misreadings in the history of philosophy – something Eco would appreciate, playfully and profoundly. In his review of Royce’s book, Peirce therefore made up a criticism of himself that Royce never imagined, and began responding to that criticism (in the review and beyond), using Royce as a surrogate for the defender of the view.

8 The review was accompanied by correspondence with Royce (unfortunately only fragments survive – another point Eco would appreciate), which, if we can piece together with the published writings, creates an amazing, if unfinished, sketch of the movement from Peirce’s struggles with his categories and semiotics within the syllogism to his rejection of the syllogism and the creation of a truly general theory of signs (after 1903).

9 In short, Royce and Peirce corresponded until it dawned on Peirce that his own version of “realism” was not Royce’s target, but in the three years during which he had mistaken Royce’s intent, he had devised arguments he thought were Royce’s, but which were far better than Royce’s, and which obliged him to throw off classical logic and develop a truly general theory of signs. It is a great moment in the play of signs. The great critic of Peirce, unbeknownst to Peirce, was Peirce. It is like Eco’s Simone Simonini trying to catch a glimpse of the stranger in his house in The Prague Cemetery.

10 Peirce made numerous attempts to settle, in his own thinking, how these modes of determination (semiotic-abstract and epistemic-concrete) are related. The solution had to account for the efficacy of false beliefs and the metaphysical grounding of our capacity to form true beliefs in a self-correcting manner. What, in the end, is the relation between knowledge and meaning? Can one know what one cannot even make sense of? This question is peculiar to the pragmatic theory of knowledge, basically because pragmatists truly make knowing functional (in some sense), although clearly Peirce is not thinking about concrete “functioning” in the way James or Dewey did. For Peirce, fixing belief can be done in at least four ways, so tenacity and authority and a priorism are functional, but they are not self-correcting.9 Eco has obviously had a great deal of fun over the years creating narratives in which people never discover their errors. I will return to this point in the next section. For now, we see that Peirce has an unusual view. For most epistemologists, there is a tight relationship between meaning and knowledge. One cannot know what is meaningless, so the sets the “floor” of knowing. The ceiling is that one cannot know the full meaning of knowledge claim, because knowing a thing’s full meaning requires knowing all it implies for the future, and we are not ideally situated inquirers. For the latter, there would be a convergence of knowledge and meaning. For us, there is a floor and a ceiling to the act of knowing, but having meaning is not sufficient for scientific knowing. There must be doubt and resolution, which makes the meaning explicit and places it in a context of future self-

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correction. So meaning can be ubiquitous but it must be harnessed or gathered in order to become known, for Peirce. We can imagine it as a round-up and branding of the herd. Some of the beasts may remain on the range, unlocated by the cowboys, meaningfully chewing the cud, suitable for the market, but they won’t be part of the knowledge-herd.10 They are merely operationally suitable for hamburger or steak, but those in the herd are functionally hamburger already. Thus, knowledge, for a pragmatist depends on being herded. From 1867 onward, Peirce characterized this gathering of meaning as the rise from “substance” to “being,” from what might be predicated to what is predicated.11

11 After 1903 (perhaps due to the influence of Royce), Peirce shifted his interpretation of his categories and solved this problem by treating signs as determined only abstractly. He was unable to handle the question of concrete-functional determinations of meaning within the theory of signs after 1903 and so addressed these problems without appealing to the theory of signs (as he then understood it). Determinations of meaning became power of signs –and everything that exists is a sign, not just possibly, but actually. Obviously this move committed Peirce to the idea that everything that exists is meaningful. Its epistemic determination as a part of our knowledge has no influence on the meaningfulness of existing entities after 1903. Obviously Dewey, James, Royce, and Rorty would not allow meaning and knowledge to be separated this way, but Whitehead and Bergson (more explicitly sympathetic to panpsychism) would say, “yes, matter is effete mind,” or something similar. In any case meaning is unaffected by our knowing it in the sense that it is not dependent on that kind of determination in order to be, meaningfully. This toying with the independence of meaning from knowing is not usually associated with pragmatism, but it has to be considered in looking at Peirce’s mature pragmatism.

3. Eco’s Ideas about Signs and Meaning

12 Those who know Eco’s ideas about knowledge will already have anticipated my case in this section. Eco differed from Peirce on this point about (what I am calling) concrete and abstract determination of the sign only insofar as Eco was unwilling to claim that signs are capable of dealing with subjective functions (recalling my sense of the term “function”) – regardless of whether these functions be abstract or concrete. In short, what is under-determined is not the sign or the world, it is the subject’s world. Thus, with this one exception, Eco agreed, I think, with the pre-1903 Peirce that signs, themselves, do form a bridge from the abstract realm to the concrete by means of something like a “sign-function.” In Eco’s case, however, this is not taken to provide for us any adequate account of the self and its functions, whether it is doubting or resolving that doubt tenaciously, scientifically, a prioristically, or from authority. For Eco, you can be subjectively wherever you happen to be and the knowledge relation may function as it objectively does regardless of whether you are the knower. What others know or no one knows functions the same in determining you as an object regardless of your subjective condition.

13 As an example, Ecoʼs novel Foucaultʼs Pendulum (which was his favorite of his own novels) has its significant action centered around a cryptic piece of paper left in a publishers office by a mysterious man (who may or may not have been murdered after his one visit to that office – we never find out). The piece of paper contains what seem to

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be notations about a location and what was to be found there. The three main characters come to believe that these “instructions” were written long ago by some people who had hidden the esoteric documents of a secret society (which secret society is an open question). At a crucial moment in the story, the girlfriend of the main character snatches the piece of paper (to see what all the fuss is about) and she rather convincingly shows that all the signs fit together around the hypothesis that it is in fact just a grocery list. But it doesn’t matter. The action barrels on to the spectacular death of one of the main characters in spite of the revelation that the “secret” is no secret, just a grocery list. The main character, Casubon, becomes diffident, subjectively, about the meaning of the scrap of paper, and it makes no difference to the chain of objective determinations affecting him and his friend. Sign determinations and meanings function like this for Eco.

14 Being a pragmatist, I asked Eco once: “Was it just a grocery list?” His answer was “I donʼt know.” Of course, the list was his own creation, as an author. I was asking whether in creating the list he had purposely adjusted it for both groceries and directions. He knew what I was asking. I believe he could have gone further and said “I canʼt know.” How can Eco’s semiotic theory deal with (1) “I donʼt know” as a sincere answer to my query about his intentions? and (2) why do I think he can go further and say: “I canʼt know” as an authorial response to the same? Most importantly, (3) how would a pragmatic theory of knowledge that has made Peirce’s move after 1903 satisfy the constitutive question (and also, therefore the epistemological question) when the answer is either “I donʼt know” or “I canʼt know”?

15 I do not think that a conventional pragmatist (James, Dewey, Rorty) has anything interesting to say about this question because they refuse to radicalize the independence of meaning. Yet, I would insist, with Peirce, that the radical independence of meaning from situated acts of knowing is a genuine implication of any thorough-going pragmatism. Much to my disappointment, Royce also does not have anything interesting to say about this question. Only Peirce and Whitehead clearly recognized that meaning is a characteristic of possibility, not of actuality, and that every attempt to limit meaning to the actual undermines the future of knowledge.

16 It seems to me, as a pragmatist, that there is a fact of the matter, within the story, as to whether the cryptic piece of paper is or isn’t a grocery list. To give up on that claim is to abandon the presupposed history (the unity of action, in Aristotle’s terms) that governs the narrative. Foucault’s Pendulum is not science fiction or fantasy or magical realism, or any other genre that tampers with the three unities. The novel studiously observes all three unities. Hence, the piece of paper has a history that either does or does not include having been a grocery list. Either these characters have a true belief or a false belief, regardless of whether any of them is experiencing any doubt. The fact (in the story) is that the piece of paper functions entirely as such a valuable document, even if everyone (except the girlfriend) is wrong about it. Eco could have left that scene out and it wouldn’t have changed anything (except our level of understanding about the contingency of the interpretation of Casubon and his friends). Indeed, Eco need never have had the idea that it was a grocery list, and it still might have been one. But it seems very likely, to suspicious pragmatists, that the list started as a grocery list, and Eco knew it, and that is why he told us what the girlfriend saw. Yet, in this example, authorial intentions neither do determine the meaning here, nor can they. I think that

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accounts for Eco’s answer, which he delivered playfully. He had been asked that question many times before, I would wager. I didn’t get anything new from him.

17 But many people also asked him whether his novels were intended to exemplify his theories about language and intention. His answer to me about that question was that he didn’t set out to do any such thing, but yes, he can see why people see that tendency in the novels. Without dropping back into a subjective “intentionalist” stance about the text, he allows that common sense will inform us that the theories are his and the novels are his and we ought not be surprised if they bear certain similarities. This does not satisfy a suspicious pragmatist. If the pragmatist is a Deweyan or Jamesian or Rortyan, no satisfaction will ever be had from Eco because they will not accept his solution (see below).

18 But what if the suspicious pragmatist is a Peircean? For Peirce, Eco’s answer raises a further question, one which poses a difficulty for Eco, in my opinion. Indeed, Eco poses the problem himself in his discussion of types of forgeries, replicas, and fakes. This essay offers the situation in Foucault’s Pendulum, but made even worse. Having disconnected meaning and knowledge, as Peirce finally did (embracing “unlimited semiosis” in Eco’s terms, or a “truly general theory of signs” in my terms12), and seeing that fakes may never be identified as fakes, even though they are fakes (i.e., there is a fact of the matter), Eco asks “is a fake a sign?” (Eco 1990b: 184). He discusses “expressions” as incomplete signs, falling short of full-signhood for lack of Thirdness, but then Eco sets out the standard procedure for determining authenticity. Here, for our highest standards of knowing an original, an authentic original must be “a sign of its own origin” (Eco’s emphasis). Recognizing the clear circularity, for us, of this habit of “modern philology,” Eco says: If a fake is not a sign, for modern philology the original, in order to be compared with its fake copy, must be approached as a sign. False identification is a semiosic web of misunderstandings and deliberate lies, whereas any effort to “correct” authentication is a clear case of semiosic interpretation or of abduction. (Eco 1990b: 193; Eco’s emphasis) Thus, we see that the detaching of meaning from knowledge has also sacrificed self- correction in the semiotic process. The effect is to make abduction the ground of all interpretation, and the result is that all knowledge is, for us, guesswork. Now, for Peirce such a result would be disastrous for his pragmatism. For Eco it seems to be only a strange feature of the world. He is light-hearted about it. Oh well, so knowledge is one kind of meaning, and not an especially reliable one. But, having destroyed all possibility of satisfactory criteria for knowing whether a given artifact is a fake, Eco says that “even though no single criterion [nor combination of criteria] is one-hundred-percent satisfactory, we usually rely on reasonable conjectures on the grounds of some balanced evaluation of the various tests. Thus we cast in doubt the socially accepted authenticity of an object only when some contrary evidence comes to trouble our established beliefs.” (Eco 1990b: 200).

19 That sounds like Jamesian pragmatism, and like James’s (mis)understanding of how doubt operates (what Peirce objected to). But James would never detach meaning from truth in such a fashion, regardless of what Bertrand Russell may have charged him with doing. James was a nominalist, not a nihilist. Further, we must remember that Eco has a highly nuanced account of abduction, and he allows (with Peirce) that abduction pervades all inference (hence all knowledge), but not all semiosis. Meaning can occur (if that is the right word) without anyone knowing it, ever. Now, Peirce maintains both the

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self-correcting character of scientific knowing and the independence of meaning in his mature pragmatism, but he is chastened. The distinction between reasoning about meaning and reasoning about knowledge is sharply distinguished in a manuscript intended for Peirce’s Illustrations of the Logic of Science, as he tried for a final time (1909) to bring it into acceptable condition for publication. He thinks that when we reason about our states of consciousness, as a theory of knowledge requires, the subjective side of the task is almost impossible: The observation of what one is doing and suffering [such as doubt] in his inner consciousness – assuming that it can be done at all, which some shrewdly doubt – is certainly far more difficult than is, for example, the management of a high-power microscope so as to resolve the most difficult test-objects; and to do simultaneously the two things that it is requisite to do at the same time in order – while concentrating all one’s being upon a Reasoning, as one needs to do in order to discover new hypotheses at the same time – directly to observe what immediate consciousness (i.e., oneself, or that part of oneself that appears) does and suffers during that reasoning, is harder yet, by far. (Peirce 2014: 240-1)13 Thus, we see that the ubiquity of abduction wars with our efforts to catch a glimpse of ourselves as we move from doubt to resolution. We see Peirce moving away, as Eco did, from the subjective functioning of signs. This is not an adequation of the knowing subject to the reality known, and it is not simply the relief of inner doubts. These words were meant to be published alongside “The Fixation of Belief,” and the other essays that had been basic to his theory of knowledge. But the construct of the “ideally situated inquirer in the infinitely distant future” is maintained by Peirce at this late date, so that “unlimited semiosis” (as Eco calls it) can be a presupposition of his philosophy without abdicating knowledge. In a letter to Paul Carus in 1909, Peirce apologizes for not being able to bring his theory of knowledge into acceptable condition, but attacks the problem of possibility again, saying that knowledge consists of acceptability (in the interim) of a proposition, but that these propositions mix actuality and possibility. His new theory (plausibility, verisimilitude, and probability) is a mess, in my opinion (and in his own), but he comes out saying: As for the validity of the hypothesis, the retroduction [i.e., abduction], there seems at first to be no room at all for the question of what supports it, since from actual fact it only infers what may be, – may be and may be not. But there is a decided leaning to the affirmative side and the frequency with which that turns out to be an actual fact is to me quite the most surprising of all the wonders of the universe. I hope there are few men who are so often deceived as I. They surely cannot be many. Yet I could tell you of conjectures pronounced by me with a confidence I could not comprehend, and that were verified amazingly. I simply should not dare to tell them; I feel my credit would not support such tales. (Peirce 2014: 282) Peirce goes on to list a number of cases in the history of science in which Faraday, Galilleo, and Kepler guessed what was true. Thus, where self-correction has fallen into disuse, the unreasonable success of science, in finding the right hypothesis, stands at the heart of knowing in the past and in the future. Pragmatism becomes, therefore, an leaning toward the affirmative that says, “go ahead, make something up, and then let it surprise you.” I do not have to tell these readers that Eco wrote both novels and philosophy by making things up and then finding out they were true. Insofar as he gave in to the affirmative leaning, he was surely the sort of pragmatist Peirce was. I doubt that Eco read this letter to Carus, or the manuscript I cited above. But it isn’t necessary to say he did. He really did follow Peirce in the affirmative leaning.

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20 Eco realized he had to have a function that answered to Peirce’s ideally situated inquirer – or there would be no difference between him and Rorty (and every nominalist aesthete). Eco wanted a more robust pragmatism than James, Rorty, even Dewey (Eco liked Dewey’s aesthetics quite a lot). Eco’s pragmatism was a pragmatism of independent meaning and ubiquitous abduction. He wanted a truly general semiotics. In discussing Peirce’s theory of meaning, he said: In the framework of Peirce’s philosophy of unlimited semiosis, (i) every expression must be interpreted by another expression, and so on ad infinitum; (ii) the very activity of interpretation is the only way to define the contents of the expressions; (iii) in the course of the semiosic process the socially recognized meaning of expressions grows through the interpretations they undergo in different contexts and in different historical circumstances; (iv) the complete meaning of a sign cannot but be the historical recording of the pragmatic labor that has accompanied every contextual instance of it; (v) to interpret a sign means to foresee – ideally – all the possible contexts in which it can be inserted. Peirce’s logic of relatives transforms the semantic representation of a term into a potential text. […] In Eco 1976 (2.11.5) and 1984 (2.3) I have proposed a semantic model for the representation of the ideal content of indices (be they words, gestures or images) in an ideal situation of actual reference. (Eco 1990c: 213-4) Obviously, for my purposes, we will see Eco’s idea of growth as a substitute for self correction, his use of history and the “socially recognized meaning” as a substitute for the society of inquirers, the complete meaning of the sign foreseen operating as “the infinitely distant future” and the ideal content of indices as a substitute for ideally situated inquiry.

21 I do not mean to imply that Eco’s theory of meaning is exactly the same as Peirce’s. Elsewhere I have given a detailed discussion of the differences and similarities. Peirce and Eco approach this abstract/concrete duality of signs, and the theory of signs more generally, in quite different ways. The most obvious difference is that while Peirce's theory is triadic (revolving around sign, object and interpretant, with this latter bringing the sign-user into the formula), Eco’s is a modification of the dyadic theory of Saussure (which is built up entirely from the relation of sign and signified – no sign- user is considered14), but Eco’s dyad is operational, in my sense, and it is a difference that reaches to the core. For Eco, the fact of lying is more important than telling the truth, or attempting to tell the truth. As he says, “semiotics is in principle the discipline of studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used ‘to tell’ at all. I think that the definition of a ‘theory of the lie’ should be taken as a pretty comprehensive program for general semiotics.” (Eco 1975: 6-7; 0.1.3).

22 Part of the reason I began this paper by using the awkward phrase a “truly general” theory of signs is to distinguish it from “a pretty comprehensive program for a general semiotics.” At the level of function, i.e., sign-function, both Peirce and Eco sought to make out a truly general theory of signs. Although I believe the preceding discussion has made out in a general way the relation between Peirce and Eco, and I believe I have done so in a way that is suggestive of Eco’s pragmatism, it is still only a preliminary outline.

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4. Triadic and Dyadic Semiotics

23 I take Peirce and Eco to be the finest examples of their respective camps, and I really do think, although I do not wish to over-emphasize it, that their temperaments (to use James’s characterization) are fairly close to being opposites. Both are playful, but Peirce’s earnestness is very American. It is hard to sell such a viewpoint in the Old World. Still, I am confident that the limitations of these two theories accurately demonstrate and reflect the limits of semiotics more generally. Rather than trying to resolve the difficulties both Peirce and Eco have come up against, I propose that the theory of signs simply be restricted in such a way as to mollify the problem. I am eliminating the demand to resolve it. A pragmatic thesis guides the path forward: the theory of signs is capable of sufficiently accounting for the proper uses of language considered as a purely abstract (in the sense I have used that term above) phenomenon (i.e., appearance), but our difficulties begin when semiotics endeavors to consider any genetic or concrete (and therefore temporal) aspect of language. In short, semiosis happens at the level of possibility, not actuality. Meaning is the creature of possible relations and refuses to bow to actuality. That is why lies can go on forever and a truly general theory of signs loses its grip on knowledge, but pervades abduction. Thus, the limitation I propose for the theory of signs is that it should be restricted to being the theory of language considered abstractly. It should deal only with the way in which abstract signs are related to one another, and to their objects – that is, “objects” taken in the abstract sense, as a word among words; not in the sense of concrete, discretely existing individuals. As Eco’s example goes, we do not worry about actual peanuts and their relation to peanut butter when we study semiotics. We worry only about what can be used to lie, and thus to tell the truth.15 This latter distinction between the concrete and abstract senses of the word “object” is of crucial significance for my thesis about the path forward, and it very much follows the discussions of “Objekt” versus “ Gegenstand” one finds in Kant’s three critiques. However, a detailed discussion of this matter awaits a later essay.16

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AUXIER Randall E., (2006), “Introduction,” The Pragmatic Idealisms of Josiah Royce and John E. Boodin, as volume three of The Cambridge School of Pragmatism, John R. Shook & André De Tien (eds), 4 vols, London, Thoemmes-Continuum Books, ix-xxi.

AUXIER Randall E., (2009), “Due tipi di pragmatismo,” Discipline Filosofiche, special issue on “Epistemologie pragmatiste,” Roberto Brigati & Roberto Frega (eds), XIX (2), 27-43.

AUXIER Randall E., (2011), “Two Types of Pragmatism,” in Roberto Frega (ed.), Pragmatist Epistemologies, Lanham, Lexington Books, 187-205.

AUXIER Randall E., (2013), Time, Will, and Purpose: Living Ideas from the Philosophy of Joshia Royce, Chicago, Open Court.

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AUXIER Randall E. & Gary L. HERSTEIN, (2017), The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead’s Radical Empiricism, New York-London, Routledge.

DELEDALLE Gérard, (1990), Charles S. Peirce: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Susan Petrilli, Philadelphia, John Benjamis.

ECO Umberto, (1975), A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

ECO Umberto, (1983), “Horns, Hooves, and Insteps: Some Hypotheses on Three Types of Abduction,” in Umberto Eco & Thomas A. Sebeok (eds), The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 198-220.

ECO Umberto, (1988), Il pendolo di Foucault, Milan, Bompiani.

ECO Umberto, (1990a), “Abduction in Uqbar,” in Id., The Limits of Interpretation, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 152-62.

ECO Umberto, (1990b), “Fakes and Forgeries,” in Id., The Limits of Interpretation, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 174-202.

ECO Umberto, (1990c), “Semantics, Pragmatics, and Text Semiotics,” in Id., The Limits of Interpretation, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 203-21.

ECO Umberto, (2010), Il cimitero di Praga, Milan, Bompiani.

FISCH Max H., (1978), “Peirce’s General Theory of Signs,” in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Sight, Sound and Sense, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 31-71.

FISCH Max H., (1986) Peirce, Semeiotic and Pragmatism, Kenneth L. Ketner & Christian J. W. Kloesel (eds), Blomington, Indiana University Press, 321-55.

LANE Robert, (2007), “Peirce’s Modal Shift: From Set Theory to Pragmaticism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 45 (4), 551-76.

OPPENHEIM Frank M., (2005), Reverence for the Relations of Life: Re-imagining Pragmatism via Josiah Royce’s Interactions with Peirce, James, and Dewey, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 7-60.

PEIRCE Charles Sanders, (1931-1958), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols, eds Charles Hartshorne, et al., Cambridge, Harvard Belknap Press.

PEIRCE Charles Sanders, (1984), Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce. A Chronological Edition, Volume II, 1867-1871, ed. Edward C. Moore, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

PEIRCE Charles Sanders, (1986), Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce. A Chronological Edition, Volume III, 1872-1878, ed. Christian J. W. Kloesel, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

PEIRCE Charles Sanders, (2014), Illustrations of the Logic of Science, Cornelis de Waal (ed.), Chicago, Open Court.

ROYCE Josiah, (1899), The World and the Individual: Series One, New York, MacMillan.

SHORT Thomas L., (2007), Peirce’s Theory of Signs, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

ZEMAN Jay J., (1982), “Peirce on Abstraction,” The Monist, 65 (2), 211-29.

NOTES

1. [Note of the editor (the editor thanks Francesco Bellucci for his help). Peirce’s semiotic theory after 1903 can be found in the Logic Notebook (1905-1906; 1909), in the letters to Welby (1904;

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1908) and in the pragmatist papers (1905-1907). Auxier quotes (from De Waal’s edition) a 1909 text that, according to Peirce, had to serve as an introduction to the re-publishing of the “Illustrations” of 1877-1878. Many different versions of this introduction are called “Meaning” (for instance, MS 637, 630, 640, 652 etc.). The reference here is to the Harvard Lectures of 1903, when Peirce returns to pragmatism after the works of 1877-1878. See also The Monist’s pragmatist series (1905-1906).] 2. I have examined the question about Royce in detail elsewhere (see Auxier 2013, ch. 4). I have also done a generalized comparison of types of pragmatism in Auxier (2011; 2009). See also Auxier 2006. 3. I am employing the terms “concrete” and “abstract” in a fashion similar to Whitehead’s usage. I do this to avoid the word “mind,” since the term (as Peirce used it) will be too easily confused with subjectivity of a Cartesian sort. The question of “mind” in analyzing Peirce and Eco is an important one, but that is not my topic in this essay, so I set it aside by focusing on what is “concrete” and “functional” as contrasted with what is “abstract” and “operative.” For more on the role of abstraction in Whitehead’s sense, see Auxier & Herstein 2017. Peirce’s manner of defining abstraction in his “New List of Categories” (1867) is in keeping with my usage here, but I intend the term more broadly, inclusive of Peirce’s definition there. [Note of the editor. On Peirce’s idea of “abstraction,” see Zeman 1982.] 4. [Note of the editor. In his book Peirce’s Theory of Signs (Short 2007), T. L. Short claims that, according to the young Peirce of the anti-cartesian essays, a sign refers to its object only through the mediation of another sign (semiotic idealism). On the contrary, according to the late Peirce (in Short’s opinion, after 1885), a sign can refer to its object without mediation, as index is supposed to do. On the contrary, Auxier introduces here a different thesis: “As he matured, the concrete-functional aspect of the sign gradually diminished in his thinking about signs.” (p. 3). “After 1903 (perhaps due to the influence of Royce), Peirce shifted his interpretation of his categories and solved this problem by treating signs as determined only abstractly.” (p. 6). And a very different thesis concerns also the idea of “infinite semiosis”: “Having disconnected meaning and knowledge, as Peirce finally did (embracing ‘unlimited semiosis’ in Eco’s terms, or a ‘truly general theory of signs’ in my terms).” (p. 10). According to Short, it was the young Peirce to believe in unlimited semiosis, while, around 1907, Peirce would have put a limit to it through the idea of habit. Auxier challenges this idea here.] 5. Eco’s parsing of abduction (which dominates all knowing, for Peirce, as he reports) into creative abductions, meta-abductions, and over/undercoded abductions is actually one version of stating this problem. Other commentators have stated the struggle otherwise, but everyone agrees that Peirce himself was unsatisfied with his solution. I will present this problem in my own terms, but I think Eco’s essay shows he was keenly aware of the sort of problem I am describing. See Eco 1983. Eco repeats this favorite criticism of Peirce in Eco 1990a. It lies beyond the scope of this paper to make an argument for Peirce’s development. Generally I follow the course described by Deledalle 1990. Deledalle achieves an admirable perspicacity in this book by leaving aside complications about external influences on Peirce’s thinking, simply following the trail of development in Peirce’s writings and manuscripts. 6. For the history of their relationship, see Oppenheim 2005. As good as this treatment is, Oppenheim has overlooked some very important evidence and the implications. 7. See Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols. eds C. Hartshorne et al. (Cambridge, Harvard Belknap Press, 1931-1958), vol 8, p. 75 ff. (paragraphs 101-104; hereafter this collection will be cited as “CP” followed by the vol. and paragraph number, e.g., CP 8:101, and so forth). Here Peirce contrasts Royce’s view of possibility with his own (paragraph 102). 8. [Note of the editor. On the notion of “possibility” after 1903, see Lane 2007, who outlines an evolution of this concept after 1896.] 9. See “The Fixation of Belief,” 1877, W 3: 242-57; CP 5.358-87.

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10. I hope that readers will remember Eco’s entertaining use of the arguments about ruminants in his essay on Peirce, “Horns, Hooves, and Insteps: Some Hypotheses about Three Types of Abduction” (Eco 1983). 11. See “On a New List of Categories,” W 2:49-59; CP 1.545-59. 12. [Note of the editor. On the “truly general theory of signs,” a classic references is M. H. Fisch, “Peirce’s General Theory of Signs” (Fisch 1978; 1986).] 13. De Waal has done the scholarly community a tremendous service by compiling what this book would have looked like if Peirce had been able to finish it. His careful documentation of the full path from the 1877 manuscripts through to the last versions of the book are, in my opinion, the single most telling document published to date that demonstrates the development of Peirce’s thought. My statements in this paper about Peirce’s development are, I believe, in close keeping with what this book shows. 14. Eco very adeptly compares Saussure and Peirce right at the beginning of his own theory, and neatly praises Peirce while reducing him to Saussure in order to avoid dealing with subjectivity (See Eco 1975: 16-7; 0.5). 15. Ibid. 16. Unhappily, one needs also a temporal theory of language to supplement this version of semiotics, and I will not be able to address that here. I have written elsewhere about it.

ABSTRACTS

This paper aims to consider Peirce and Eco’s approach to signs and semiotics in order to assess their relation to Peirce’s mature pragmatism. Both thinkers attempted to set out a truly general theory of signs, and ran into difficulties on similar points. I show that the responses of Peirce and Eco to the difficulties that arose in seeking a truly general theory of signs were quite different. And yet, the differences are not so deep as to prevent us from thinking of both Peirce and Eco as pragmatists, and perhaps of a similar stripe.

AUTHOR

RANDALL E. AUXIER Southern Illinois University Carbondale personalist61[at]gmail.com

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Eco and Peirce on Abduction

Francesco Bellucci

1 One of the key concepts that Eco took from Peirce is that of “abduction,” or reasoning to an explanatory hypothesis. This concept is central to his foundation of a semiotic or interpretative semantics, one of whose component is a theory of inference, and especially of abductive inference. Though there is probably only one “official” place where Eco expounds his theory of abductive reasoning – the article “Horns, Hooves, and Insteps” in The Sign of Three – yet Eco’s theory is spanned over tens of papers and books, including his fictional books.

2 Eco’s fictional books have often been considered as, to say the least, “profoundly connected” with his scholarly work. But Paolucci has persuasively argued that not only Eco’s philosophical work influenced his fictional work, but also, and more crucially, that his fictional works are an integral part of his philosophy: “[t]he union of the theoretical and nontheoretical works constitute Eco’s philosophical legacy, his ‘philosophy’.” (Paolucci 2017a: 254). Moving from this assumption, this paper seeks to explore Eco’s philosophy of abduction moving from both his theoretical and his non- theoretical works, these two sides forming in fact an inextricable unity.

3 The Name of the Rose contains one of the best and most detailed accounts of Eco’s philosophy of abductive reasoning. Among the several abductions that the two main characters, William of Baskerville and Adso of Melk, perform in the course of the story, the abduction concerning the horse Brunellus in the overture of the book is certainly the most remarkable, if only because it is commented at length in the sequel of the book. The model of the Brunellus episode is to be found in the third chapter of Voltaire’s Zadig, in which Zadig abduces some of the features of the king’s horse that the royal officials are seeking.1 The Zadig episode is analyzed by Eco in “Horns,” where a typology of abductions is presented.

4 Eco took his notion of abductive inference from Peirce. Peirce’s mature (i.e., post-1900) theory of abduction comprises both an analysis of the abductive process of reasoning within the larger horizon of scientific inquiry, and a philosophical justification of this kind of reasoning. Both these aspects are present in Eco’s theory of abduction, and both are represented in the analysis of the Zadig episode offered in “Horns.” However, I shall argue, a “more Peircean” analysis of abductive reasoning than that given in “Horns”

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about Zadig is contained in the Brunellus episode in The Name of the Rose, because there Eco reproduces more accurately than he does with Zadig the Peircean model of scientific inquiry. As I will try to show, while Zadig’s horse abduction seems to be fashioned on Peirce’s early analysis of abduction (the data are signs, and particularly indices that form an icon, of the conclusion), William’s course of reasoning is more akin to Peirce’s mature analysis of abduction (a hypothesis is suggested by abduction from data as signs, and is subsequently explicated by deduction and verified by induction). The overture of Eco’s most famous novel is consequently a crucial component of Eco’s theory of abductive reasoning. Also, I will argue that, like Peirce, Eco solved the problem of the justification of abduction through the idea that this justification is itself abductive (meta-abduction in Eco, ur-abduction in Peirce).

5 The paper is organized as follows. The first section expounds the essentials of Peirce’s theory of abduction, and explains how Peirce moved from seeing abduction as a kind of reasoning (in his earliest writings) to seeing it as a stage of the larger process of inquiry (in his mature writings). The second section deals with the Brunellus abduction, and shows that, just like in Peirce’s three-stages model of inquiry, William’s abductions are explicated by deduction and verified by induction. The third section examines the problem of the justification of abductive reasoning (especially, but not exclusively, as discussed in “Horns”).

1. A Sketch of Abductive Logic

6 In his earliest writings on the three forms of inference (1865-1867) Peirce had explained abduction (at that time called “hypothesis”) as an argument in which the premises are an icon of the conclusion. More precisely, abduction is the transformation of a conjunctive term (which, like an icon, has connotation but lacks appropriate denotation, W1: 279) into a symbol on the principle that “the symbol which embodies any form [conjunctive term] is predicable of the same subjects as the form itself” (W1: 188), or in other words that any symbol that possesses any character also possessed by an object is itself a symbol of the object. As he explains in the 1867 “Classification” (interpolation in brackets mine): abduction is “an argument which assumes that a term [symbol] which necessarily involves a certain number of characters [conjunctive term, icon] […] may be predicated of any object [object] which has all these characters” (W2: 48). The substance of this doctrine, variously rephrased, can be found in the “New List” (1867, W2: 58), in “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” (1868, W2: 217-8), and in “Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis” (1878, W3: 326-7). The maturest version of this early theory is in the article “A Theory of Probable Inference” in the volume of Studies in Logic edited by Peirce himself in 1883, where Peirce explains induction and abduction as inversions of a valid deductive syllogism (W4: 416-23).2

7 Later in his life Peirce came to see that his early view of abduction was incorrect. In July 1910 he writes to Paul Carus that “the division of the elementary kinds of reasoning into three heads was made by me in my first lectures and was published in 1869 in Harris’s Journal of Speculative Philosophy. I still consider that it had a sound basis. Only in almost everything I printed before the beginning of this century […] I more or less mixed up Hypothesis and Induction.” (RL 77: 226-7 = CP 8.227). In the sketch of logical critics given in the Minute Logic Peirce says:

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Upon this subject [i.e. abduction], my doctrine has been immensely improved since my essay “On The Theory of Probable Inference” was published in 1883. In what I there said about “Hypothetic Inference” I was an explorer upon untrodden ground. I committed, though I half corrected, a slight positive error, which is easily set right without essentially altering my position. But my capital error was a negative one, in not perceiving that, according to my own principles, the reasoning with which I was there dealing could not be the reasoning by which we are led to adopt a hypothesis, although I all but stated as much. But I was too much taken up in considering syllogistic forms and the doctrine of logical extension and comprehension, both of which I made more fundamental than they really are. As long as I held that opinion, my conceptions of Abduction necessarily confused two different kinds of reasoning. (CP 2.102)

8 The two different kinds of reasoning that Peirce had conflated under the conception of abduction are abduction proper, which he now describes as the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis, and qualitative induction, which is an induction about characters. He now realizes that what he used to call “hypothesis” and “abduction” in his earlier writings has not a substantially different leading principle from induction: an abduction in the sense of 1865-1883 is, at bottom, an induction about characters rather than about things. Instead of reasoning about things in extension (enumerative terms, indices), as in induction, we reason about characters in comprehension (conjunctive terms, icons): instead of saying that the characters possessed by the sample are possessed by the whole, we say that something which possesses a sample of the characters of a thing possesses all the characters of that thing (i.e., is that thing whose characters it possesses). This second form of reasoning is properly called abductive or qualitative induction. Its leading principle is inductive, however, not abductive. So in the second Cambridge Conference of 1898 on “Types of Reasoning” Peirce declares: “I first gave this theory in 1867, improving it slightly in 1868. In 1878 I gave a popular account of it in which I rightly insisted upon the radical distinction between Induction and Retroduction. In 1883, I made a careful restatement with considerable improvement. But I was led astray by trusting to the perfect balance of logical breadth and depth into the mistake of treating Retroduction as a kind of Induction.” (R 441: 29-30). Both induction proper and the 1865-1883 form of reasoning called abduction are inferences from the sample to the whole. In the one the sample is taken in extension, in the other in comprehension. But all inference from the sample to the whole is essentially inductive. Abduction proper, also called “retroduction,” is not an inference from the sample to the whole; it is, rather, the process of reasoning by which we form an explanatory hypothesis.

9 The fundamental change in Peirce’s conception of abduction occurs in the decade that precedes the Minute Logic.3 In the 1901 article “On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents” (R 690 = EP2: 75-114) Peirce presents a view of the articulation of scientific discovery in which the three kinds of arguments occur as distinct stages of a typical scientific investigation. The first stage of inquiry is abduction. When we are confronted with facts contrary to our expectations, an explanation is called for: “the explanation must be such a proposition as would lead to the prediction of the observed facts, either as necessary consequences or at least as very probable under the circumstances. A hypothesis, then, has to be adopted, which is likely in itself, and renders the facts likely. This step of adopting a hypothesis as being suggested by the facts, is what I call abduction. I reckon it as a form of inference, however problematical

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the hypothesis may be held.” (EP2: 94-5). The “classic” formulation of the logical form of abduction is in the seventh and last Harvard Lecture of 1903: The surprising fact, C, is observed. But if A were true, C would be a matter of course. Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true. (EP2: 231 = CP 5.189)

10 The second step of inquiry is to trace necessary, or deductive, consequences from the hypothesis: “the first thing that will be done, as soon as a hypothesis has been adopted, will be to trace out its necessary and probable experiential consequences. This step is deduction.” (EP2: 95). By abduction we form the hypothesis that “there is reason to suspect that A is true”. By deduction we trace the necessary consequences of the hypothesis. These consequences are experimental predictions from the hypothesis, and are selected independently of whether or not they are known to be true. The requirement that the hypothesis be experimental is satisfied by following the pragmatic maxim: only those hypotheses are admissible which can be put to experimental test. Of course, the surprising fact which prompted the formation of the hypothesis in the first place (“C” in the Harvard example) is one of necessary consequences of the hypothesis, for were it not, the hypothesis could not be said to explain the facts (to say that the surprising fact is one of the necessary consequences of the hypothesis is to say that its explanatory syllogism is a valid one). But besides the surprising fact, from the hypothesis several other necessary consequences can be drawn, and this is necessary if we are to test the hypothesis.

11 The third stage of inquiry consists in the testing of the hypothesis through a testing of those predictions: Having, then, by means of deduction, drawn from a hypothesis predictions as to what the results of experiment will be, we proceed to test the hypothesis by making the experiments and comparing those predictions with the actual results of experiment. […] [When] we find that prediction after prediction, notwithstanding a preference for putting the most unlikely ones to the test, is verified by experiment, whether without modification or with a merely quantitative modification, we begin to accord to the hypothesis a standing among scientific results. This sort of inference it is, from experiments testing predictions based on a hypothesis, that is alone properly entitled to be called induction. (EP2: 96-7; original emphasis)

12 The operation of testing a hypothesis by experiment is induction. It consists in considering the predictions from the hypothesis, remarking what conditions should be satisfied in order for those predictions to be fulfilled, causing those conditions to be satisfied by experiment, and noting the result of the experiment. If the predictions are fulfilled, the hypothesis is inductively given a certain confidence. As Peirce remarks, in a 1901 article on “Hume on Miracles,” “it is not the fact predicted that in any degree necessitates the truth of the hypothesis or even renders it probable. It is the fact that it has been predicted successfully and that it is a haphazard specimen of all the predictions which might be based on the hypothesis.” (CP 6.527). The inductive character of the procedure of hypothesis verification derives from the fact that the predictions tested are a sample of all the predictions from the same hypothesis that could be tested.4 In other words, the third step of inquiry is the inductive generalization that what is found true of some predictions would be found true of all of them.

13 Let us take Peirce’s example of the ex-priest contained in one of the drafts of the Carnegie Application of 1902 (RL 75) in order to illustrate the three-stages process of

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inquiry: “Suppose, then, that, being seated in a street car, I remark a man opposite to me whose appearance and behavior unite characters which I am surprised to find together in the same person.” (RL 75: 163-4). A certain surprising combination of

characters, say characters c1, … cn, are found in the man sitting in front of Peirce in the

car. In order to reduce to some order this surprising fact (the occurrence of of c1, … cn), i.e., in order to explain them, he makes the hypothesis that the man is an ex-priest. The reasoning by which he form this hypothesis is abduction, and has the following form:

This man possesses the characters c1, … cn.

If he were an ex-priest, he would possess the characters c1, … cn. Therefore, there is reason to suspect that he is an ex-priest.

14 In order to test this hypothesis, Peirce has to draw from it predictions that can be tested empirically, at least in principle. Thus two further steps follow abduction in the process of scientific inquiry. The second step is deduction, and consists in drawing predictions (which are necessary, or deductive, consequences) from the hypothesis. For example, if the man is a priest, he should be tonsured: This man is an ex-priest. Ex-priest are tonsured. Therefore, this man is tonsured.

15 This is deduction, and by deduction predictions are made. The prediction that the man will be found to be tonsured, which is a sample of all the necessary consequences of the hypothesis, has now to be put to test by induction. To test the prediction Peirce has to make an experiment: “I say something to him calculated to make him take off his hat. He does so, and I find that he is indeed tonsured.” (Ibid.). Peirce can thus conclude that the man is an ex-priest on the basis of the induction that as this prediction is verified so must all the predictions drawn from the same hypothesis. In other words, the third step of inquiry is the inductive generalization that what is found true of a sample of the predictions will be found true of all of them. As Peirce writes in the Minute Logic, “induction is an argument which starts out from a hypothesis, resulting from a previous abduction, and from virtual predictions, drawn by deduction, of the results of possible experiments, concludes that the hypothesis is true, in the measure in which these predictions are verified” (CP 2.96).

16 In Peirce’s mature view of the logic of scientific inquiry, the three forms of inference are not merely three distinct modes of reasoning each characterized by its own leading principle; also, each belongs to a different stage of scientific inquiry. As he would later write, “There are three kinds of reasoning based upon as many utterly distinct purposes and principles. They are severally used in the three logical stages of research.” (R 756: 1 c. 1906). To signalize their double nature (both stages and kinds) in his later writings Peirce prefers to speak of “grades” (R 843, 1908), or even “orders” (R 752, 1914), rather than simply of “kinds” of reasoning.

17 We make abductions in order to explain surprising facts, but the “abductive moment” is only the first part of inquiry: “Retroduction does not afford security. The hypothesis must be tested.” (CP 6.470). Abduction is for the sake of verification. Its conclusion does not say “A is true,” but “there is reason to suspect that A is true,” that is, “it is worth inquiring whether A is true.” So Peirce writes to Lady Welby in 1905: [The] “interrogative mood” does not mean the mere idle entertainment of an idea. It means that it will be wise to go to some expense, dependent upon the advantage that would accrue from knowing that Any/Some S is M, provided that expense

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would render it safe to act on that assumption supposing it to be true. This is the kind of reasoning called reasoning from consequent to antecedent. […] Instead of “interrogatory,” the mood of the conclusion might more accurately be called “investigand,” and be expressed as follows: It is to be inquired whether A is not true. The reasoning might be called “Reasoning from Surprise to Inquiry.” (Peirce to Welby, July 16, 1905, RL 463; original emphasis)

18 By abduction a hypothesis is suggested. The conclusion of abduction, which contains the hypothesis, is not in the indicative but in the interrogative mood: it advances the hypothesis not as true, nor as a mere idea, but as an idea worth investigating in order to determine its truth. Abduction is not an isolated form of reasoning, but is embedded within the larger horizon of inquiry, because a hypothesis is first put forth by abduction, and then verified by induction (through verification of its observable deductive consequences). Scientific inquiry is a “dialectic” between abduction and induction, which are the beginning and the end of hypothetical thinking, and which are connected by the gateway of deduction.5

2. Brunellus and Other Horses

19 According to Eco’s analysis in “Horns,” Zadig infers the features of the horse that the royal officials are seeking through imprints, symptoms and clues.6 Here is Zadig’s own explanation: With respect to the horse of the king of kings, you must know that as I was walking along the roads in that same wood, I perceived the marks of a horse’s shoes, all at equal distances. “There,” I said to myself, “went a horse with a faultless gallop.” The dust upon the trees, where the width of the road was not more than seven feet, was here and there rubbed off on both sides, three feet and a half away from the middle of the road. “This horse,” said I, “has a tail three feet and a half long, which, by its movements to right and left, has whisked away the dust.” I saw, where the trees formed a canopy five feet above the ground, leaves lately fallen from the boughs; and I concluded that the horse had touched them, and was therefore five feet high. As to his bit, it must be of gold twenty-three carats fine, for he had rubbed its bosses against a touchstone, the properties of which I had ascertained. Lastly, I inferred from the marks that his shoes left upon stones of another kind, that he was shod with silver of eleven pennyweights in quality. (Voltaire 1910: 60)

20 The marks of the horse’s shoes are imprints, but the fact that the imprints are all at equal distance is a sign (a clue) that the horse has a perfect gallop. The fact that the dust upon the trees is rubbed off on both sides at a distance of three feet and half from the middle of the road is a sign (a symptom) that the horse has a tail of that length. The leaves fallen from the boughs are a sign (a symptom) that the animal is five feet tall. The gold on the touchstone is a sign (a clue) that the horse has bosses of gold twenty- three carats. And finally, the silver on the pebbles is a sign (a clue) that the shoes of the horses are shod with silver of a certain quality. Collectively, these signs form an icon of a horse with certain characters. The signs themselves are indices (clues, symptoms, and imprints), but collectively they depict a horse, and are therefore the icon of a horse. According to the early Peirce, in abduction the premises are an icon of the conclusion.

21 The king’s official asks Zadig whether he has seen the king’s horse passing that way. As Eco observes, “Voltaire is not explicit on this point, but let us suppose that Zadig has turned over in his mind many alternative hypotheses and has definitely chosen the final one only when he has met the men of the Court looking for a horse” (1983: 213).

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When the official asks Zadig whether he has seen the king’s horse, this becomes for Zadig the confirmation that his horse hypothesis was correct. Only at that point those signs become for him the icon of the king’s horse. But Zadig does nothing in particular to put his hypothesis to test.

22 William of Baskerville’s horse abduction is of the same type as Zadig’s. But William’s also features several further elements which deserve some commentary. While he and Adso are toiling up the path around the mountain that leads to the abbey, they see an “agitated band of monks and servants” (NR 22). When one of them, the abbey’s cellarer Remigio of Varagine, introduces himself to the visitors, William says: The horse came this way and took the path to the right. He will not get far, because he will have to stop when he reaches the dungheap. He is too intelligent to plunge down that precipitous slope […] it is obvious you are hunting for Brunellus, the abbot’s favorite horse, fifteen hands, the fastest in your stables, with a dark coat, a full tail, small round hoofs, but a very steady gait; small head, sharp ears, big eyes. He went to the right, as I said, but you should hurry, in any case. (NR 23)

23 And here is William’s later explanation to Adso: At the crossroads, on the still-fresh snow, a horse’s hoofprints stood out very neatly, heading for the path to our left. Neatly spaced, those marks said that the hoof was small and round, and the gallop quite regular – and so I deduced the nature of the horse, and the fact that it was not running wildly like a crazed animal. At the point where the pines formed a natural roof, some twigs had been freshly broken off at a height of five feet. One of the blackberry bushes where the animal must have turned to take the path to his right, proudly switching his handsome tail, still held some long black horsehairs in its brambles. You will not say, finally, that you do not know that path leads to the dungheap, because as we passed the lower curve we saw the spill of waste down the sheer cliff below the great east tower, staining the snow; and from the situation of the crossroads, the path could only lead in that direction. (NR 24)

24 Unlike Zadig, for whom the officials’ question is the confirmation that the hypothesis that he had formed upon the basis of indices that collectively form an icon is correct, for William the fact that the men appear “agitated” is a further sign that contributes to the formation of the Brunellus hypothesis. The appearance of the “agitated band” is for him a sign that they are seeking something. The imprints suggest William that a horse had passed that way, and their orientation is a sign (a clue) that the horse was heading to the right. The shape of the hoofs is a sign (a clue) of the “nature of the horse,” while the distance between them is a sign (a clue) that the horse has a perfect gallop. The broken twigs are a sign (a symptom) that the animal is five feet tall. The color of the hairs that the horse left on the blackberry bushes is a sign (a symptom) that the horse is black. And the fact that the cellarer in person is part of the “agitated band” is a sign (a clue) that the horse is considered to be the finest of the abbey. Just like Zadig, who can infer the royal horse’s appearance before apprehending that in fact the king’s horse is sought, William can infer the horse’s appearance before knowing what the men are after. But unlike Zadig, for whom the interrogation of the official is the verification of the horse hypothesis, William is prepared to offer his Brunellus hypothesis before being addressed by the monks.

25 However, William’s reasoning differs from Zadig’s under a more fundamental respect. The presence and the shape of the imprints, the hairs left on the bushes, and the broken twigs allow him to reconstruct some of the features of the horse. But the

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description that he offers to the cellarer cannot be explained only in terms of what he has actually seen. Hence, Adso’s question: “Yes,” I said, “but what about the small head, the sharp ears, the big eyes …?” “I am not sure he has those features, but no doubt the monks firmly believe he does. As Isidore of Seville said, the beauty of a horse requires ‘that the head be small, siccum prope pelle ossibus adhaerente, short and pointed ears, big eyes, flaring nostrils, erect neck, thick mane and tail, round and solid hoofs.’ If the horse whose passing I inferred had not really been the finest of the stables, stableboys would have been out chasing him, but instead, the cellarer in person had undertaken the search. And a monk who considers a horse excellent, whatever his natural forms, can only see him as the auctoritates have described him, especially if” – and here he smiled slyly in my direction – “the describer is a learned Benedictine.” (NR 24) As we noticed, from the observed, surprising fact that the cellarer in person is taking part in the chase William infers that the horse is thought to be the finest of the abbey. We could express this piece of abductive inference in the Harvard scheme: (I) The surprising fact that the cellarer himself is taking part in the chase for the horse is observed. But if the horse that has escaped were considered to be the finest of the abbey, the cellarer himself would take part in the chase. Hence, there is reason to suspect that the horse is considered to be the finest of the abbey.

26 Now, the conclusion of (I) is in its turn the premise for the further inference, call it (II), that William makes as to the characters of the horse: from the fact that the horse is the finest of the abbey (conclusion of I, premise of II) William infers that it should be believed by the monks to possess the characters (small head, sharp ears, and big eyes) that, according to the authority of Isidore of Seville, make of a horse a fine horse. What kind of inference is it and what is its logical form?

27 According to Bondanella, with (II) “William has clearly gone beyond the boundaries of any empirical investigation – he has begun to make broad hypothetical inferences rather than to deduce from logical premises […] William has become a semiotician employing a method that is far closer to the abduction discussed by Peirce or Eco himself than to the logical deductions we associate with real-world detectives or a host of fictional investigators.” (1997: 108). Bondanella is right that (II) is not the kind of inference usually employed by detectives. But he is wrong that the inference in question is abductive. For one thing, some confusion is caused by a terminological distortion. As variously observed (cf. Sebeok & Sebeok 1983; Truzzi 1983), despite of Sherlock Holmes’s classical exposition of the “Science of Deduction” in A Study in Scarlet (1887, I, 2), the kind of reasoning that Conan Doyle’s detective typically employs is abductive, not deductive. As Holmes, William of Barskerville too speaks of deduction,7 but there is reason to suspect that in this case Eco is deliberately ignoring the Peircean distinction between deduction and abduction in order to more effectively suggest the inter-textual parallel with Holmes’ “deductions” (which are actually abductions). And we have seen that William’s inference from the signs found on the path to the features of the horse sought by the monks is abductive, not deductive. Most of William’s inferences are in fact abductive. But (II), as we shall see, is not.

28 In order to explain the difference between Zadig’s and William’s equine abductions, DelFattore has made appeal to the conception of “creative abduction”: [W]hile Zadig’s description of the king’s horse is confined to what the physical evidence suggests, William’s description of the abbot’s horse includes a creative

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abduction based on his knowledge of how various authorities describe the ideal horse and on his belief that monks rely more heavily on authority than on the evidence of their own senses. Thus William states that the horse has a small head, large eyes, and pointed ears – not because he has found physical evidence to suggest that the horse has these qualities but because he invents a horse based on what he guesses the monks believe about it. (DelFattore 1988: 131)8

29 It is time to introduce Eco’s typology of abduction: (i) an overcoded abduction is an abduction in which the rule which, if true, would render a result (surprising fact) a case of that rule, is given automatically or semi-automatically; (ii) a undercoded abduction is one in the which the rule is selected from a set of equiprobable rules available in the encyclopedia; (iii) a creative abduction is one in which the law must be invented ex novo; (iv) a meta-abduction is an abduction about first-level abductions (H 206-207). I shall not be particularly concerned with the first three items of this typology, but I will discuss the fourth in the next section. Determining whether (II) is an abduction or not is a more basic problem than determining which kind of abduction it is.

30 If (II) were a form of abduction, it should explain some surprising fact. Now, what is the surprising fact concerning the monks’ belief that those horses are beautiful which possess a small head, sharp ears, and big eyes? That the monks so believe (on good authority) is not a fact that demands explanation, but the rule that is in William’s possession, which he applies to something that would be explained by that rule, if the latter were true. As a rule, it is available in William’s encyclopedia, and thus if (II) were abductive, the reasoning in question should rather qualify as undercoded, not creative abduction (contra DelFattore). Since the rule connects beauty and specific anatomical features, that which is explained by the rule should consequently be either that Brunellus is a fine horse (in fact, the finest of the abbey), or that he has certain features. But this latter cannot be the fact that demands explanation, for it is not something that William could have observed. Nor is in inferable from what he did observe. What he did observe is that the group includes the cellarer. From this, we have seen, he infers by (I) that the horse sought must be the finest of the abbey. This is the fact that falls under the rule. If we attempt to put (II) into a logical form, the result is the following: (II) The monks believe that a fine horse must have a small head, sharp ears, and big eyes. The monks of the abbey believe that Brunellus is a fine horse. Therefore, the monks believe that Brunellus has a small head, sharp ears, and big eyes.

31 (II) is a clear example of syllogistic or deductive reasoning, as it applies a general rule to a case in order to obtain the result as conclusion. It may be said in weak sense to “explain” the case (second premise), in the sense that it makes it plain what that case involves. But the inference, so reconstructed, is deductive, not abductive (of either kind).

32 Is William performing a piece of deductive reasoning, then? In a sense, he is. But this piece of deductive reasoning is, precisely as in Peirce’s three-stages model of scientific inquiry, the gateway between the hypothesis that forms the conclusion of a previous abduction and the testing of that hypothesis by means of the testing of its deductive consequences. William is not merely deducing the consequences of an idea arrived at by means of abduction. He is deducing the consequences of that idea in order to put that idea to experimental test. Once the necessary consequences of the hypothesis are drawn, William – just like the Peircean scientist – has to make an experiment to verify that hypothesis.

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33 In the case of Brunellus, the experiment consists in enriching the description of Brunellus, which he has obtained by abductive reasoning from facts (the observed signs on the path) with characters which are not abduced from observed facts, but which are rather deduced from the conclusion of a previous abductive reasoning (conclusion of I). In so doing, William pretends to be performing an abductive reasoning from observed facts, while he is actually testing one of the hypotheses suggested by a previous abduction. The “amazement” with which the cellarer and the monks look at William after he describes Brunellus so accurately is the result of the test. It proves not that Brunellus really has a small head, sharp ears, and big eyes, but only that the monks so believe. And in fact William is careful to point out to Adso that the hypothesis to be tested does not concern the real horse, but only the monks’ idea of it: “I am not sure he has those features, but no doubt the monks firmly believe he does.” By adding to his description of the horse characters that he could not have abduced from observed facts, William proves that the hypothesis suggested by abduction – that the horse is the finest of the abbey – is a correct one. If it were not, the cellarer could have objected that, though William’s description of Brunellus is correct as far as color, height, gallop, etc. are concerned, yet it is flawed in respect to size of the head and eyes and shape of the ears. The fact that the cellarer is “amazed” at William’s accurate description is the inductive test of the validity of a hypothesis entertained on completely different grounds (i.e., on the ground that only the finest horse of the abbey would prompt the cellarer in person to take part on the chase).

34 The testing of the hypothesis is inductive in the authentic Peircean sense. The characters that William mentions in his description of Brunellus (small head, sharp ears, big eyes) are a sample of all the characters that Isidore (and, following his authority, the monks) believe a fine horse should possess (small head, sharp ears, big eyes, flaring nostrils, erect neck, thick mane and tail, round and solid hoofs). William may therefore be said to make the inductive generalization that what is found true of the predictions actually put to test (by including in his description of Brunellus a sample of the characters available in the encyclopedia) would be found true of all of them. Recall Peirce’s characterization of induction quoted above: “induction is an argument which starts out from a hypothesis, resulting from a previous abduction, and from virtual predictions, drawn by deduction, of the results of possible experiments, concludes that the hypothesis is true, in the measure in which these predictions are verified.” (CP 2.96). The inductive generalization performed by William consists in starting from a hypothesis resulting from a previous abduction (I), and from virtual predictions, drawn by deduction, of the results of possible experiments (II), concludes that the hypothesis is true in the measure in which those predictions are verified (the monks’ assent to the conclusion of II).

35 “Books [Isidore’s included] are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.” (NR 316). Abduction is for the sake of inductive verification. This is true also of the first, observation-laden abductions that William makes on the basis of the signs found on the path. When the monks and the servants reappear at the turn of the path leading the horse by its halter, William can verify his hypotheses as to the color, height, gallop etc. of the animal by looking at the animal itself; verification in this case simply consists in the direct perception of the horse. William is very clear about this point: “my intellect’s hunger was sated only when I saw the single horse that the monks were leading by the

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halter. Only then did I truly know that my previous reasoning had brought me close to the truth.” (NR 28). But while he can verify color, height, gallop, etc., he cannot verify the size of the head and eyes and the shape of the ears of the animal by direct perception, because that hypothesis does not concern the real features of the real animal, but only what the monks believe the animal’s features to be. And while the former hypotheses are verified by the direct perception of the horse, the latter cannot be so verified, and can only be verified by deducing predictions from it and putting those predictions to test by including them into the description of the animal that is offered to the astonished cellarer.

36 In the overture of The Name of the Rose, Eco gives us a splendid sketch not simply of the abductive mode of reasoning, but of the entire, three-fold process of scientific inquiry that Peirce has theorized in his later writings. In Peircean terms, William’s method is hypothetical-deductive in the sense that his hypotheses are first suggested by abduction, then developed by deduction, and finally verified by induction. The Zadig episode can hardly be said to be modeled on the Peircean, three-fold analysis of inquiry, because in this episode the only verification is the verification of the horse hypothesis, but nothing is deduced from the hypothesis to be subjected to inductive verification. Zadig does nothing in particular to verify his horse hypothesis. In this respect, while Zadig’s horse abduction seems to be fashioned on Peirce’s early analysis of abduction (the data are signs, and particularly indices that form an icon, of the conclusion), William’s course of reasoning is more akin to Peirce’s mature analysis of abduction (an hypothesis is suggested by abduction from data, and is subsequently analyzed by deduction and verified by induction).

3. Meta-Abduction and the “Bottom Question of Logical Critics”

37 The fact that abduction is the first stage of inquiry is not yet an argument for the justification of the abductive mode of reasoning, although it may furnish an insight as to the elements that may enter into some such argument.

38 William is, of course, acutely aware of the problem of the justification of abduction. In looking retrospectively to his fortunate Brunellus hypothesis, he says to Adso: in the case of the horse Brunellus, when I saw the clues I guessed many complementary and contradictory hypotheses: it could be a runaway horse, it could be that the abbot had ridden down the slope on that fine horse, it could be that one horse, Brunellus, had left the tracks in the snow and another horse, Favellus, the day before, the traces of mane in the bush, and the branches could have been broken by some men. I didn’t know which hypothesis was right until I saw the cellarer and the servants anxiously searching. Then I understood that the Brunellus hypothesis was the only right one, and I tried to prove it true, addressing the monks as I did. I won, but I might also have lost. The others believed me wise because I won, but they didn’t know the many instances in which I have been foolish because I lost, and they didn’t know that a few seconds before winning I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t lose. (NR 305)

39 The Brunellus hypothesis was correct, but it could have been wrong. Abduction is fallible:

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“I work on things of nature. And in the investigation we are carrying out, I don’t want to know who is good or who is wicked, but who was in the scriptorium last night, who took the eyeglasses, who left traces of a body dragging another body in the snow, and where Berengar is. These are facts. Afterward I’ll try to connect them – if it’s possible, for it’s difficult to say what effect is produced by what cause. An angel’s intervention would suffice to change everything, so it isn’t surprising that one thing cannot be proved to be the cause of another thing. Even if one must always try, as I am doing.” “Yours is a difficult life,” I said. “But I found Brunellus,” William cried, recalling the horse episode of two days before. “Then there is an order in the world!” I cried, triumphant. “Then there is a bit of order in this poor head of mine,” William answered. (NR 207)

40 The fact that the conclusion of an abductive inference may be true does not prove that abduction is valid. Properly speaking, abduction proves nothing. It only offers a coherent representation of the world (“a bit of order in this poor head of mine”), without yet establishing that the world itself is coherent. In fact, several of the hypotheses that William advances in the course of the story will turn out to be wrong. That the Brunellus hypothesis was correct is not a proof of the validity of the mode of reasoning by which that hypothesis was reached. In order for abduction to be valid we should need to postulate an order in the world; but, as William confesses at the end of the story, “I behaved, stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe” (NR 488). The abductive reasoner pursues a representation of order, but this does not yet mean that the world is in fact as ordered as it is represented to be.

41 What is the justification of abduction, then? Eco’s theoretical answer to this question is in “Horns.” After having presented his three kinds of abduction (overcoded, undercoded, and creative), Eco adds a fourth kind, which he labels “meta-abduction.” Meta-abduction “consists in deciding as to whether the possible universe outlined by our first-level abductions is the same as the universe of our experience” (H 207), i.e., whether the “order in the head” (world as represented) is the same as the “order in the world” (world as is independently of being represented). Eco explains his notion of meta-abduction through the Zadig example. Zadig “does not possess the scientific certainty that his textual hypothesis is true: it is only textually verisimilar. Zadig pronounces, so to speak, a teleological judgment. He decides to interpret the data he had assembled as if they were harmoniously interrelated.” (H 213; original emphasis). Zadig does not know that his hypothesis (that the king’s horse is such-and-such) is true. He only acts as if it were true.

42 Paolucci (2017a; 2017b) has convincingly argued that Eco’s solution is at bottom Kantian: the abductive reasoner acts as if the representation of the world yielded by abductive reasoning were isomorphic to the world itself. Abductive reasoning is in this sense governed by a regulative, not a constitutive principle. A constitutive judgment or principle is one that determines its object, while a regulative judgment or principle does not determine its object, but only determines the rule for the determination of the object. Thus, in mathematics an analogy or proportion is always constitutive, for once three terms are given, the fourth is given as well; in philosophy, by contrast, an analogy is merely regulative: once three terms are given, what is given is not the fourth term, but only the relation of the three terms to the fourth, that is, what is given is only the rule to find that fourth term in experience (A179-180/B222-223). Thus, the synthetic a priori “mathematical” principles of pure understanding are constitutive, while the synthetic a priori “dynamical” principles are merely regulative. A constitutive

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proposition describes the world. A regulative proposition prescribes what we ought to think about the world (A509/B537).

43 According to Eco, the leading principle of abduction, and thus its justification, is regulative, not constitutive. If it were constitutive, any abductive representation of the world would ipso facto be true, i.e., would perfectly correspond to the world. But nothing guarantees that the world is isomorphic to the representation of it: in abduction we merely act as if our representations were isomorphic to the world, without however thereby asserting that the world is in fact as it is represented to be. This is the meta-abduction that underlies every possible abduction: we reason abductively as if abduction were a valid form of reasoning, and thus we proceed upon the meta-abduction that the world represented in our first-level abductions is the same as the world of our experience.

44 The notion of meta-abduction is Eco’s Kantian solution to the problem of the justification of abduction. As such, it precisely corresponds to Peirce’s, as we shall now see. According to the late Peirce, the question of the justification of the several kinds of reasoning is a problem of “logical critics” (the central, and fundamental, department of logic, which follows speculative grammar and precedes methodeutic, cf. R 478, 1903). The justification of deduction is not, properly speaking, a problem of logic (RL 75: 12-3, 1902). All deductive reasoning is mathematical reasoning, and mathematical reasoning for Peirce is not subject to logic (CP 2.191). A piece of deductive reasoning is mathematically valid before being logically valid. Deductive logic depends on mathematics; it is in fact applied mathematics, i.e., mathematics applied to logic (CP 4.228, 4.233, 4.240, 1902). Deduction is valid because it is mathematically valid.

45 Induction is valid because it is auto-corrective. Though any single induction may go wrong, yet inductive reasoning – reasoning from a sample to the whole – pursues a method whose continual and repeated application will yield correct representations more often than wrong, and therefore will in the long run approximate complete truth. For Peirce that is real which is represented in a true representation, and truth depends not on this or that representation but only on the representation that will be yielded in the long run by scientific (i.e., inductive and abductive) investigation, and which is therefore independent of particular and individual representations. The justification of induction – as that of abduction, as we shall see – assumes the reality hypothesis, i.e., that there is a way things are, independent of the representation. But how things are depends on how we will be led to represent them (if investigation is protracted far enough), because the real is nothing more than the object of a true representation.9

46 The problem of the justification of abduction is “the bottom question of logical Critic” (EP2: 443, 1908). Peirce’s solution to the bottom question of logical critics is the following: The logical justification of Retroduction […] is as follows. In the first place, we certainly do thoroughly believe and cannot help so believing, do what we may, that some reasonings are sound. For we can free ourselves of a belief only by reasoning ourselves out of it, and to do this is to believe that some reasonings are sound. Now although it is, of course, one thing to believe a proposition, no matter how thoroughly and firmly, and quite another for the proposition to be true, yet practically for the believer they are one and the same. For if his belief is perfect he thinks he is sure it is true and between that and his thinking it is true there is no practical difference. We must and do admit, therefore[,] that some reasonings are sound. But to say this is to say that some instinct or natural impulse to believe is in conformity with the real nature of things; and the only question is how far that

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conformity extends. This can only be ascertained by sampling; and the process of sampling will consist in taking Retroduction after Retroduction and testing the truth of each by as large a sample of its consequences as can conveniently be obtained. This justifies Retroduction, which simply puts that process of testing into practice for single Retroductions; and there is nothing in the justification that cannot be learned from indubitable external observation and equally indubitable reasoning. (R 637: 13-4, Oct. 1909)

47 Here, as in other coeval writings,10 Peirce maintains that the validity of abduction is grounded upon the more fundamental abduction, which we may call ur-abduction, that nature is explainable. Let us attempt to spell out the details of his argument. The argument is based upon the premise that some reasoning is sound. This premise is something that we cannot doubt. For we actually have direct experience of sound inferences, and thus doubting that some reasoning is sound would amount to doubting something of which we have direct experience. According to Peirce, such a doubt would only be a feigned doubt. But though it is unscientific and unphilosophical to suppose that any particular fact will never be doubted, yet “we cannot go behind what we are unable to doubt” (W3: 14). In logic we must begin with some belief which is not subjected to doubt (though it may be doubted in the future), and mere pretense to doubt “can result in nothing but a show of demonstration of things really taken for granted” (W2: 189; cf. W2: 212). Thus, logic requires that we admit that some reasoning is sound.

48 But this admission amounts to the admission that, in some cases at least, we truly know things as they really are. This is nothing more than a hypothesis: the hypothesis that we truly have some power of knowing things, that we have a power of abduction. In Peirce’s terms, the hypothesis is that we have “some instinct or natural impulse to believe […] in conformity with the real nature of things.” As another passage from Peirce’s 1908 “Neglected Argument” recites, “[t]here is a reason, an interpretation, a logic, in the course of scientific advance; and this indisputably proves […] that man’s mind must have been attuned to the truth of things in order to discover what he has discovered. It is the very bed-rock of logical truth.” (EP2: 444). The hypothesis that man has an instinct to truly represent reality is the fundamental hypothesis of scientific inquiry, “the bed-rock of logical truth.”

49 Now, this fundamental hypothesis, like every hypothesis, must be put to test to see whether and to what extent it is verified. Once the existence of sound reasoning, i.e., of reasoning by which we truly know reality, is admitted, the only question that remains to be settled is how far that knowledge extends, i.e., how far the hypothesis can be verified (“the only question is how far that conformity extends”). Now, as we know from previous discussion, a question concerning the truth of a hypothesis can only be answered by induction. Therefore, the extent to which we have a power of truly knowing real things by abductive reasoning is determined by checking how far our abductions are successful or have been successful in the past. And since the history of science provides us with abundant examples of successful abductive inferences, the fundamental abduction or ur-abduction that we have a power of abduction is verified, at least in some measure, by the history of science: “since all modern science depends ultimately on this method, its history furnishes such a sample of intelligent hypotheses, that a student of that history must be blind not to see that man’s mind has a certain power of divining the truth.” (R 638: 14-5). The history of science is as it were the ur- induction that verifies the ur-abduction that we have a power of abduction, just like

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single inductions verify single abductions (“simply puts that process of testing into practice for single Retroductions”).

50 For Peirce the justification of abductive reasoning lies in the fundamental hypothesis, or ur-hypothesis, that we have a power of truly knowing things by means of abductive reasoning. As with every hypothesis, this ur-hypothesis must be verified, and is verified through an argument from the history of science (ur-induction). Abduction is therefore directly justified through an ur-abduction, which in its turn is verified inductively: the justification of abduction is for Peirce directly abductive, and indirectly inductive.

51 It should now be clear to the reader that what I call Peirce’s ur-abduction is precisely Eco’s meta-abduction. As the latter consists in the abduction that that the world represented in our first-level abductions is the same as the world of our experience, so the former consists in the ur-abduction that our abductions are sound. In both cases, the justification consists in admitting a regulative, not a constitutive principle of reasoning. As for Eco the abductive reasoner acts as if the representation of the world yielded by abductive reasoning were isomorphic to the world itself (meta-abduction), so for Peirce the abductive reasoner acts as if the ur-abduction that we can truly know real things were a sound one.

52 According to Paolucci, there is a fundamental difference between Peirce’s and Eco’s theories: while for Peirce there is continuity (synechism) between mind and matter, between thought and world, for Eco no such continuity is possible; for Eco “there is nothing as the structure of the real that allows us to choose one interpretation rather than another […] The power of falsehood is not the lume naturale and the constitutive principle of synechisim is invalidated on a semiotic level.” (Paolucci 2017a: 263; original emphasis). For Eco, that which for Peirce is a “constitutive” principle of logic is only “regulative”: “although we know that the order of the world does not necessarily correspond to that of thought, we must proceed as if this correspondence existed. [...] This then is a synechism that is not constitutive (as in Peirce) but only regulative of our inferences and interpretations.” (2017a: 270-1; original emphasis).11 According to Paolucci, it is not within the domain of Eco’s theory that the constitutive continuity between representation and world represented is to be found, but only within the distinct and yet related domain of narrative: “Eco is prepared to allow this synechistic order only in those world-models constructed by ‘narrative’ and not in the real world: novels contain things that do not exist in the world, that is to say, a certain correspondence between the conjectures of interpretation and the world-model.” (2017a: 267; cf. also 2017b, ch. 10).12

53 As far as Eco’s theory of abduction is concerned, Paolucci’s argument is certainly persuasive and revealing. However, I would tend to see the distance between Eco and Peirce on matters abductive as less pronounced than Paolucci seems to think. The crux of the matter concerns, as I believe I have shown, not the analysis of abductive reasoning but the nature of the philosophical justification of it. If Peirce’s solution to the “bottom question of logical critics” consisted in the stipulation of a constitutive principle of abductive soundness, then Eco’s position would really differ from Peirce’s. But as I have argued above, Peirce’s justification of abduction is directly abductive (and, therefore, indirectly inductive), for it is directly based on the ur-hypothesis or ur- abduction that our abductions are sound, and indirectly on the inductive verification of such ur-abduction through an argument from the history of science (ur-induction). This, far from being an affirmation of the constitutive nature of abduction’s principle,

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is rather a clear statement that that principle is merely regulative. If the validity of abduction were grounded by Peirce on some form of deductive reasoning, we would be justified in holding that such a justification would make the principle of abduction constitutive. For in that case, the world would necessarily (i.e., deductively) be as we would represent it to be. This is not Peirce’s idea of the justification of abduction. For him abduction is valid because it “is the result of a method that must lead to the truth if […] it is possible to attain the truth. Namely we must assume the human mind has a power of divining the truth, since if not it is hopeless even [to reason].” (R 276: 39, 1910). We must “assume” that reality can truly be known by abductive reasoning, that is, we must assume the fundamental hypothesis, or ur-hypothesis, that our abductions are sound. Just as for Eco, for Peirce although we know that the order of the world does not necessarily (i.e., deductively) correspond to that of thought, we must proceed as if (i.e., on the hypothesis that) this correspondence existed.

54 Paolucci rightly emphasizes the fact that for Peirce the existence of an epistemological isomorphism between the order of representations and the order of things is only a special case of the metaphysical isomorphism between mind and matter, which Peirce had illustrated in the 1890-1892 Monist “metaphysical project” (W8: 84-205) in the context of an exposition of his “synechistic metaphysics.” Now, synechism is for Peirce a regulative, not a constitutive, principle of logic: “a regulative principle of logic requires us to hold each thing as continuous until it is proved to be discontinuous” (R 398: 11, 1894, emphasis added); “Synechism is not an ultimate and absolute metaphysical doctrine; it is a regulative principle of logic, prescribing what sort of hypothesis is fit to be entertained” (CP 6.173, 1902, emphasis added). Hypotheses are fit to be entertained which involve continuity rather than discontinuity (CP 6.169), and therefore since “the synechist maintains that the only possible justification for so much as entertaining a hypothesis is that it affords an explanation of the phenomena” (CP 6.171), the fact that many of our abductions have been successful has to be explained by the synechistic hypothesis that world and thought are continuous with each other. But this synechistic hypothesis is, indeed, a hypothesis, not a fact: it does not make world and thought continuous with each other, but prescribes how to proceed in our scientific investigations: we must proceed on the assumption that things are continuous rather than discontinuous, that world and thought are continuous with each other, and thus that our thoughts can really grasp how the world really is.13

55 He is most clear about this in a draft of the third Lowell Lecture of 1903: Kant has a famous distinction between constitutive principles and regulative principles. A constitutive principle express[es] what is so, whatever that may mean. A regulative principle expresses how you must think about a matter in order to attain your purposes, whether it be so, or not. For example, in a hand of whist, when only three rounds remain to be played and you have the lead, you must think of the cards as lying so that it will be possible for you to win the odd trick, although you have no evidence that it is so. (R 462: 40, 1903; original emphasis)

56 In any game of cards there is an element of abduction. Namely, the player has to make the hypothesis that a certain configuration of cards is in the other players’ hands or covered on the table. The player does not know what the configuration of the cards is, but must play as if that configuration were known. Abduction is grounded on a regulative principle of logic.

57 If Peirce’s synechism were an ultimate and absolute metaphysical doctrine, for example the doctrine that mind and matter are continuous with one another, then we would be

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justified to hold that Peirce’s justification of abductive reasoning amounts to a constitutive form of synechism. But Peirce is very clear that his synechism is a regulative, not a constitutive, principle of logic, which merely prescribes to act as if matter and mind were continuous with one another, and therefore, in abductive reasoning, as if our abductions were sound.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BELLUCCI Francesco, (2017), Peirce’s Speculative Grammar. Logic as Semiotics, New York & London, Routledge.

BONDANELLA Peter, (1997), Umberto Eco and the Open Text, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

COHEN Michael, (1988), “The Hounding of Baskerville: Allusion and Apocalypse in Eco’s The Name of the Rose,” in M. Thomas Inge (ed.), Naming the Rose. Essays on Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Jackson, Mississippi, University Press of Mississippi.

CONAN DOYLE Sir Arthur I., (1887), A Study in Scarlet, London, Ward Lock & Co.

DELFATTORE Joan, (1988), “Eco’s Conflation of Theology and Detection in The Name of the Rose,” in M. Thomas Inge (ed.), Naming the Rose. Essays on Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Jackson, Mississippi, University Press of Mississippi.

ECO Umberto, (1976), A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press (T).

ECO Umberto, (1979), Lector in fabula, Milan, Bompiani (LF).

ECO Umberto, (1980), The Name of the Rose, trans. by W. Weaver, St. Diego, Harcourt (or ed. Milan, Bompiani) (NR).

ECO Umberto, (1983), “Horns, Hooves, and Insteps. Some Hypotheses on Three Types of Abduction,” in Umberto Eco & Thomas A. Sebeok (eds), The Sign of Three, Bloomington, Indiana University Press (H).

FANN K. T., (1970), Peirce’s Theory of Abduction, The Hague, Nijhoff.

GINZBURG Carlo, (1983), “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” in Umberto Eco & Thomas A. Sebeok (eds) The Sign of Three, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

GOUDGE Thomas A., (1940), “Peirce’s Treatment of Induction,” Philosophy of Science, 7 (1), 56-8.

KRUIJFF Geert-Jan, (2005), “Peirce’s Late Theory of Abduction: A Comprehensive Account,” Semiotica, 153, 431-54.

NIINILUOTO Ilkka, (1999), “Defending Abduction,” Philosophy of Science, 66 (Supplement), 436-51.

PAOLUCCI Claudio, (2010), Strutturalismo e interpretazione, Milan, Bompiani.

PAOLUCCI Claudio, (2017a), “Eco, Peirce, and the Anxiety of Influence: the Most ‘Kantian’ of Thinkers,” in Sara C. Beardsworth & Randall E. Auxier (eds), The Philosophy of Umberto Eco, Chicago, Open Court, 251-77.

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PAOLUCCI Claudio, (2017b), Umberto Eco, Milan, Feltrinelli.

PEIRCE Charles S., (1787-1951), A Harvard manuscript (Charles S. Peirce Papers, MS Am 1632, Houghton Library, Harvard University) as listed in Richard Robin, Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1967) (R); (RL) refers to letters that are listed in the correspondence section of Robin’s catalogue.

PEIRCE Charles S., (1932-1958), Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols, edited by C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, and A. Burks, Cambridge, Harvard University Press (CP).

PEIRCE Charles S., (1982-2009), Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, 7 vols, edited by. E. Moore, C. J. W. Kloesel et al., Bloomington, Indiana University Press (W).

PEIRCE Charles S., (1998), The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, edited by the Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington, Indiana University Press (EP2).

PIETARINEN Ahti-Veikko & Minghui MA, (2016), “A Dynamic Approach to Interrogative Construal of Abductive Logic,” IfCoLog Journal of Logics and their Applications, 3 (1), 73-104.

REILLY Francis E., (1970), Charles Peirce’s Theory of Scientific Method, New York, Fordham University Press.

SEBEOK Thomas A. & Jean UMIKER-SEBEOK, (1983), “‘You Know My Method’: A Juxtaposition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes,” in Umberto Eco & Thomas A. Sebeok (eds), The Sign of Three, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

SHORT Thomas L., (2010), “What Was Peirce’s Objective Idealism?,” Cognitio, 11 (2), 333-46.

TIERCELIN Claudine, (1998), “Peirce’s Objective Idealism: A Defense,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 34 (1), 1-28.

TRUZZI Marcello, (1983), “Sherlock Holmes: Applied Social Psychologist,” in Umberto Eco & Thomas A. Sebeok (eds), The Sign of Three, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

VOLTAIRE, (1910), Zadig, And Other Tales, trans. by R. B. Boswell, London, Bell and Sons.

NOTES

1. In its turn, the model of the horse episode in Zadig was the ancient oriental tale of three brothers who “abduce” the exterior aspect of a camel without having seen it. The tale was included in the XVIth century collection Peregrinaggio di tre giovani figliuoli del re di Serendippo (Venice 1557, translated from Persian into Italian by Christopher the Armenian); see Ginzburg (1983: 124-6). 2. On Peirce’s early, semiotically-oriented analysis of abduction see Bellucci (2017, ch. 1). 3. See Fann (1970: 28). On the difference between Peirce’s early and late theory of abduction see Paolucci (2010: 155-60); on the late theory see Kruijff 2005. 4. Cf. Reilly (1970: 62). 5. Cf. Niiniluoto, “the conclusion of abduction states that there are reasons for pursuing a hypothesis […] or finding a hypothesis testworth” (1999: S441). On the “interrogative” model of abduction see Pietarinen & Ma 2016. It has to be observed that the sequence abduction- deduction-induction reflects the categorial sequence firstness-secondness-thirdness. This ordering may have been influenced by the principle of categorial subdivisibility, according to which in any triadic subdivision into firsts, seconds, and thirds, there is one first, two seconds, and three thirds. Deduction, being second, has two sub-types (probable and necessary), and

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induction, being third, has three (crude, qualitative, quantitative). Thus he writes in the Logic Notebook: “If my present view, held for four or five years, is right that Abduction Deduction Induction [are] Primarian, Secundarian, and Tertian, then there ought to be two types of Deduction & three of Induction.” (R 339: 196r, 1901). However, the 1902 ordering corresponds to neither the 1867 ordering – in which induction was indexical and thus connected with the second category, while deduction was symbolic and thus connected with the third – nor to Peirce’s later semiotic taxonomies – in which again induction is connected with the second category and deduction with the third; cf. R 339: 285r (1906). On Peirce’s oscillations as regards the correspondence between the kinds of reasoning and the categories see Bellucci (2017: 206-11, 319-20). 6. In the Trattato, in the context of his theory of sign production, Eco considers imprints, symptoms, and clues as signs produced by means of “recognition”: “In order to be considered as the functive of a sign-function the object or event must be considered as if it had been produced by ostension, replica or invention and correlated by a given kind of type/token-ratio.” (T § 3.6.2; original emphasis). In symptoms and clues the type/token-ratio is facilis (the expression-token is accorded to an expression-type according to a code), while in imprints the ratio is difficilis (the expression-token is directly accorded to its content, either because no expression-type exists or because the expression type is identical with content-type, cf. T § 3.4.9). In “Horns” this typology is used to explicate Zadig’s inferential moves. 7. Cf. “An hour ago I could expect all horses, but not because of the vastness of my intellect, but because of the paucity of my deduction,” NR 28 (emphasis added); cf. also NR 96, 209, 354. 8. See also Cohen (1988: 67), in the same volume. 9. The best work on Peirce’s theory of induction remains Goudge 1940. 10. Cf. the following passage: “This kind of reasoning [abduction] is justified by two propositions taken together. One is that man’s mind which is a natural product formed under the influences which have developed Nature (here understood as including all that is artificial,) has a natural tendency to think as Nature tends to be. This must be so if man is ever to attain any truth not directly given in perception; and that he is to attain some such truth he cannot consistently, nor at all, deny. The other proposition is that no other process of deriving one judgment from another can ever give any substantial addition to his knowledge; so that, if he is to reason at all, we must assume that this kind of reasoning succeeds often enough to make it worth while; since it certainly is not worth while to leave off reasoning altogether.” (R 876: 3); cf. also R 905 (1908); R 841-3 (1908); R 328 (n. d.). 11. Although the name of the detective hero of The Name of the Rose (William of Baskerville) is a clear reference to the princeps nominalium (William of Ockham), it would be improper to ascribe to Eco a form of nominalism on the basis of his theory of the justification of abduction. As Paolucci has persuasively argued, Eco was by no means a nominalist, but a realist and a pragmatist of the Peircean stripe: the Latin sentence that closes The Name of the Rose (“stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus”) should not be taken as a profession of nominalism on Eco’s part, but as Adso’s puzzlement about the sense of the story that he has just narrated; see Paolucci (2017b: 156-9). 12. One is tempted to see a connection between Eco’s idea of a “narrative consistency” of abductive reasoning and his semiotic theory of possible worlds. See LF, ch. 8. 13. It may be objected that Peirce’s doctrine of “objective idealism,” namely “that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws” (CP 6.25), seems to imply that synechism is a constitutive and not a regulative principle. But Peirce is equally clear that this doctrine has the status of a hypothesis. Thus in a 1890 “Sketch a New Philosophy” he writes: “The only possible way of explaining the connection of body and soul is to make matter effete mind, or mind which has become thoroughly under the dominion of habit, till consciousness and spontaneity are almost extinct.” (W8: 22). The doctrine of objective idealism is an explanation, i.e. the

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explanation of why matter and mind, world and thought, are as connected as they appear to be. Qua explanation, this doctrine is a hypothesis, for the only manner of explaining anything is by means of abductive reasoning. And qua hypothesis, this doctrine constitutes a regulative principle. On Peirce’s “objective idealism” see Tiercelin 1998 and Short 2010.

ABSTRACTS

This paper argues that Umberto Eco had a sophisticated theory of abductive reasoning and that this theory is fundamentally akin to Peirce’s both in the analysis and in the justification of this kind of reasoning. The first section expounds the essentials of Peirce’s theory of abduction, and explains how Peirce moved from seeing abduction as a kind of reasoning to seeing it as a stage of the larger process of inquiry. The second section deals with one of Eco’s paradigmatic examples of abduction, i.e., William of Baskerville’s abduction concerning the horse Brunellus in the overture of The Name of the Rose, and shows that, just like in Peirce’s three-stages model of inquiry, William’s abductions are verified by means of deduction and induction. The third section examines the problem of the justification of abductive reasoning, and argues that both Peirce and Eco solved this problem through the idea that the justification of abduction is itself abductive (meta-abduction in Eco, ur-abduction in Peirce).

AUTHOR

FRANCESCO BELLUCCI University of Bologna francesco.bellucci4[at]unibo.it

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Duck or Rabbit? Umberto Eco’s Structural Pragmatics

Valentina Pisanty

1. Bisociation

1 You either see the duck or the rabbit. Attention flickers from one perceptual matrix to the other, without any possible synthesis between the two, in a way that resembles the incongruous effects produced by a verbal double entendre or indeed any other kind of humorous device. The point I shall be discussing in this paper is whether and to what extent Umberto Eco’s Semiotics – a lifelong attempt to combine “the devil and holy water,” as he once jokingly defined Structuralism and Pragmatism – maintains the same unstable and oscillatory equilibrium between conflicting matrices that is proper to ambiguous figures and humorous thinking. To do so I shall summon a concept that, though never an item of Eco’s own philosophical toolbox, provides a suitable key to access his peculiar patterns of thought. Bisociation: “the perceiving of a situation or idea, L, in two self-consistent but habitually

incompatible frames of reference, M1 and M2. The event L, in which the two intersect, is made to vibrate simultaneously on two different wavelengths, as it were. While this unusual situation lasts, L is not merely linked to one associative context, but bisociated with two.” (Koestler 1964: 35; original emphasis)

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Figure 1: Bisociation (Koestler 1964: 35)

2 In his study on The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler famously analysed the common mechanism underlying three mental activities that, according to him, epitomize the heights of creative thought: Humour, Scientific Discovery and Poetic Invention. In all three the spark of creativity is generated by the surprising encounter of two “self-

consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference, M1 and M2” that intersect in a given point (L). In the rabbit-duck example, L coincides with the graphic marks that may be interpreted both as rabbit attributes (say the ears) and as duck attributes (the beak) without, however, being interpretable simultaneously as both. In scientific discovery, the point of junction corresponds with a familiar element (say the branch of a tree that a chimp unthinkingly chews on) that may be reframed in terms of a different pattern of behaviour (ripped from the tree, it could become an instrument with which to reach a distant banana). In poetic invention L is what some semiologists would call an “isotopic connector,” for example a polysemic word that may trigger a variety of semantic frames.

3 Although each bisociated matrix is per se compatible with L, attempts at condensing them in a single self-consistent super-matrix are hindered by the habit of considering them as reciprocally unrelated. Yet the interpreter itches for some form of amalgam or

unitary composition: the elegant way M1 and M2 both fit in L suggests that it might be possible to do so. Bisociation lasts for as long as the synthesis is prefigured but not yet reached. Like Tzvetan Todorov’s effet fantastique (Todorov 1970) its interval is that of a state of hesitation. What determines the difference between Scientific Discovery and Humour (the case of Poetic Invention is more difficult to pin down as it shares traits of both domains) is whether or not it is indeed possible to retrieve or construct a consistent juncture of the apparently unrelated frames: Eureka! and laughter are alternative outcomes of the same interpretive conundrum.1

4 The manifold ways in which the concept of bisociation (though never referred to as such) appears in Eco’s academic and literary corpus is so striking that we could safely consider it as one of the most prominent features of his mode of thinking, as well as one of his favourite objects of study. To start with, his texts are ridden with examples of word-play, mots d’esprit, nonsense rhymes, self-voiding texts, optical illusions, ambiguous and impossible figures such as Penrose’s devil’s fork, analysed by Merrell (1981), that Eco (1990) uses to exemplify the concept of impossible possible worlds: a

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perfect case of clash between incompatible matrices. Not to mention his passion for duck-billed platypuses, unicorns, hypatias and other hybrid creatures that populate his imaginary landscape. Creative metaphors, portmanteau words and mixed idioms belong to more or less the same realm of open possibilities, serendipitous encounters and unexpected short-circuits between distant frames. His obvious attraction for perceptual, linguistic and intellectual juxtapositions is also testified by the attention he devotes to Abduction as a key-concept of interpretive Semiotics, where – following Peirce – he puts the emphasis on the interpreter’s ability to bring together hitherto unrelated segments (the farther the better) of the Global Encyclopaedia. An ability that Eco himself applies to his numerous analyses of various communicative artefacts, from avant-garde art to popular literature, where the gist of his method often coincides with an unexpected encounter of conceptual frames (hence his famed capacity to mingle high- and lowbrow culture in all the domains of his multi-faceted activity). Finally, bisociation plays an important role in the creation of some of Eco’s most innovative theoretical contributions – starting from the concept of Encyclopaedia, possibly at the very core of his semiotic theory – insofar as they almost invariably result from a graft between separate and sometimes conflicting philosophical paradigms.

5 In the next few paragraphs I shall examine some of these implants, in a bid to show how, in a Structuralist framework such as the one that hegemonized the semiotic scene in the Sixties and Seventies, Pragmatism plays the part of the second, colliding matrix that sparks off Eco’s bisociations. For each, the question will be whether the clash produces self-consistent theoretical amalgams, or whether some degree of contradiction inevitably remains to generate the abovementioned duck-rabbit effect. I shall then analyse the heuristic role that such (for the time being hypothetical) residual incongruities play in a Semiotic theory that thrives on the self-voiding logic of humorous short-circuits.

2. Sign Functions and Semiosis

6 Judging from the bibliographical references in his published essays, Eco’s first encounter with Peirce dates back to sometime around the late 1960s/early 1970s, between La struttura assente (1968), where Peirce’s name does not yet appear, and Segno (1973), which includes the Collected Papers in the bibliography. Possibly suggested by Roman Jakobson’s 1953 puzzling definition of Peirce as “one of the greatest pioneers of structuralist linguistic analysis” (now in Jakobson 1963 [1992: 7]), the idea that Peirce’s Pragmati(ci)sm may be considered as the other face of Saussurean Linguistics plays a crucial role in Eco’s attempt at formulating “a Unified Semiotic Theory of Signs” (Eco 1973: 20) suitable for the study of both linguistic and nonlinguistic (iconic, indexical, natural…) signs and sign systems.

7 The intersecting point (L) between the two self-sufficient Semiotic paradigms is clearly the very term Sign, or semeion, which both Peirce and Saussure choose as the defining element of their new disciplinary fields. But the problems arise as soon as the common link is intentionally and extensionally defined: though somehow similar, the Peircean and Saussurean concepts of Sign are by no means identical, nor do the phenomena they refer to overlap completely. The first is triadic, inferential, mental and exceedingly inclusive, while the second is dyadic, conventional, rigorously linguistic and of very limited extension if compared to its pragmatist counterpart. How to integrate the two

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perspectives – what to select in each, what to leave out, and how to translate one in terms of the other – is the first scientific challenge that Eco, along with other semiologists who agree with his comprehensive approach, is faced with.

8 Right from Segno (and through A Theory in Semiotics, The Role of the Reader, Semiotics and Philosophy of Language, The Limits of Interpretation, down to Kant and the Platypus) Eco’s tendency is to consider Peirce’s definitions as the most satisfactory descriptions of the semiotic device, in line with a longstanding philosophical tradition that dates back to Aristotle, the Stoics and St. Augustin, as well as with the everyday uses of the word (Sign as symptom, clue, footprint, omen…). Hence his attempts to englobe the linguistic sign (roughly Aristotle’s and Peirce’s Symbol) in a wider picture, at first through a series of bold approximations (see diagram below), then by alternatively (i) taming or watering down some of the most irreducible characteristics of Peirce’s Sign/ Interpretant/Object triad that prevent it from being trimmed down to Saussure’s Signifiant/Signifié,2 or by (ii) loosening the structuralist prerequisite of a tight pre- existing convention by admitting cases of radical (= codeless) interpretation in the realm of semiotics.3

Figure 2: The Semiotic Triangle (Eco 1973: 26)

9 As the clash between structuralism and pragmatism becomes more acute in Eco’s hybrid theory, the notion of Sign is replaced by two different and seemingly opposite concepts. The first, which derives from the ultra-structuralist approach embodied, more than by Saussure’s Cours, by Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena (1943), dissolves the concept of Sign in the myriad of oppositional relations that make up the two planes of language, Expression and Content, in an overall algebraic relation between the elements of the sign-function. From a strictly formal and immanent point of view, the entity we normally call Sign is but “the manifest and recognizable end of a net of aggregations and disintegrations constantly open to further combinations. The linguistic sign is not

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a unit of the system of signification; it is, rather, a detectable unit in the process of communication.” (Eco 1986: 21). And if – as Hjemslev would have us believe – any process of communication presupposes a system of signification (a code or a language), the sum total of whose possible combinations is virtually included in the folds of its structure, it follows that the contingent and provisional manifestations of such an abstract system become supernumerary entities within a rigorous theory that aims at explaining how any (existing or possible) language works.

10 At the same time, Eco follows Peirce’s lead by absorbing the static notion of Sign in the incessant flow of semiosis that constitutes the very essence of thought in action. According to the criterion of interpretability at the core of the pragmatist paradigm, “a sign is only a sign in actu by virtue of its receiving an interpretation, that is, by virtue of its determining another sign of the same object. This is as true of mental judgments as it is of external signs.” (CP 5.569; original emphasis). And since an interpretation – be it mental or externally expressed – is itself a sign in progress, it will in turn trigger another interpretation (an uttered sentence, a silent thought, or indeed any other internal or external representation referring to the same Object as related to the original Sign), and so on, in a potentially endless string of Sign/Interpretations (= Interpretants) whose sum total coincides with the totality of an individual’s mental existence (“the symphony of our intellectual life,” CP 5.397).

11 As a cognitive element, the Peircean Sign is therefore the node or intersection point of a bundle of synapses – interpretive habits or Interpretants – that link up to other nodes, and so forth, in an open-ended process that may remind us of a (more or less disciplined) stream of consciousness, while maintaining a connection with the Object (“something else”) that sparked off the previous links in the chain of Interpretants. Sometimes these Interpretants assume the form of perceivable behaviours (external signs such as somatic expressions, gestures or linguistic utterances) which may in turn become the focus of other interpreters’ semiosic activities. Although Peirce is not particularly interested in the communicative aspects of semiosis, within his framework there is nothing to prevent an individual from expressing the results of her musements and inquiries through external signs, thus sharing them with other members of the interpretive community. Culture begins when the Interpretants are made public.

12 Here is where Eco’s bisociations light up. Once a certain connection between Signs is registered and made public, it acquires a cultural status that differentiates it from all other private chains of Interpretants. If the shared connections prove to be collectively advantageous under some respect or capacity – if they contribute to making the world a more intelligible or predictable place, if they enable people to perform certain tasks, if they promote social cohesion, etc. – they become more and more deeply engrained in the interpretive habits of that specific community. This is how an originally audacious hypothesis may undergo a process of standardization that little by little turns it into a semi-automatic interpretive habit shared by different members of the community.4 It is also how a given behaviour (say an angry expression combined with a raised fist) may lose its original iconicity and become progressively stylized, insofar as the interpretations it triggers depend less and less on the inferential acumen of the single receivers and more on the overcoded Interpretants that the Sign is publicly associated with.5

13 By focusing entirely on this category of public Interpretants, Eco brings his Semiotic research back on the culturalistic tracks that were proper to Structural Linguistics.

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Whatever happens in the mind of a single interpreter, the only aspects of her cognitive activity that are semiotically relevant are those that could be made accessible to other members of the cultural community, or even to members of other communities, provided some form of cultural exchange between the two is underway. In any case, what is left out of the semiotic field are the idiosyncratic connections that only the single interpreter would be able to activate on the exclusive grounds of her private experiences (unless, of course, such experiences were made public through the production of external signs).

14 In this perspective, Saussure’s arbitrary relation between the two faces of a sign- function could be reframed in terms of an overcoded interpretation whose cultural crystallization has invested the relation between the Interpretant and its Sign with the status of an almost biconditional rule (not just “if fire, then smoke” but also “if smoke, then [most probably] fire”). The cumulative effect of this over-codification is a relation of near equivalence (fire ≅ smoke) whose application requires only a minimal inferential effort on the interpreter’s part. In other words, near equivalence is a specific form of semi-mechanical, almost compulsory inference. And even in the relatively few cases in which the equivalence is established a priori, through a convention stricto sensu rather than a progressive sedimentation of successful interpretive habits6 (i.e., when a linguistic institution decrees, by means of a metasemiotic instruction, “from now on let x ≡ y”; for example let three blows of the whistle ≡ end of match), the application of such a conventional rule is never totally automatic inasmuch as it is context-sensitive and needs to be fine-tuned to the specific circumstances in which the rule is summoned.7

3. Dictionary and Encyclopaedia

15 Having agreed to the inferential (triadic) nature of all semiotic activity,8 Eco goes back to the structuralist idea that a system of signification virtually entails all its possible communicative outcomes. A strong advocate of the combinatory logic of cultural production (“Let no one say that I have said nothing new: the arrangement of the subject is new,” Eco 1976),9 he is fascinated by all historical attempts – no matter how abortive – to put into practice the principles underlying the Lullian Ars Magna (1305). Just like Lully’s rotating discs produced hundreds of permutations on the basis of a limited number of combinatory units, other more or less utopic efforts to crack the ultimate codes of human sign- and sense-production are based on the search of a handful of primary elements whose possible arrangements or derivations produce a vertiginous quantity of complex meanings. Leaving aside the gallery of heroic failures collected by Eco in his 1997 monograph on the search of the perfect language, the attempts he is most interested in are Dictionary-based semantic models such as Porphyry’s tree, Katz and Fodor’s generative semantics (1963) and – especially – Hjelmslev’s glossematics (1943).

16 Dictionary semantic models share the common belief that the incalculable number of existing and/or conceivable sentence- and word-meanings in any given language may be boiled down to a closed set of defining traits. Be they universal categories, innate ideas, essential properties, semantic markers or figurae, the basic quality of such allegedly primary elements is their capacity to generate more complex linguistic or conceptual contents by way of sheer combination. No surplus of meaning is

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attributable to the accidental information that comes from experiences of the outside world (you don’t need to have seen a cow to grasp the linguistic meaning of the word “cow”): a set of self-sufficient recursive rules applied to the primary elements of a closed system allows for the generation of a multitude of Content Units. Which means that all possible Content Units are virtually contained in the immanent grammar or matrix that generates them: the Code of all codes, no less.

17 In accordance with this line of reasoning Hjelmslev believes that, within the structure of any given language, it is possible to “analyse the entities that enter the unrestricted inventories purely into entities that enter the restricted inventories” (Hjelmslev 1943: 71). Granted that for every natural language the huge variety of articulated expressions may be reduced to a manageable repertoire of twenty or thirty phonemes whose possible combinations unleash the immense expressive power of that language, it should be possible to apply the same recursively analytical procedure to the other linguistic plane in order to identify the ultimate building blocks of all possible meanings. The advantage offered by Dictionary models is that they suggest “a sort of molecular landscape in which what we are accustomed to recognize as everyday forms turn out to be the result of transitory chemical aggregations and so-called ‘things’ are only the surface appearance assumed by an underlying network of more elementary units” (Eco 1976: 49): a perfect realization of the wildest Structuralist dream. The disadvantage is that they don’t work.

18 Eco (1976 and 1986) spends much time and energy demonstrating their logical and epistemological untenability. More than strictly necessary, as a matter of fact, considering the immediately persuasive arguments with which it is possible to prove that there are no semantic equivalents of phonemes, that the two planes of language are not isomorphous, and that even if “female bovine” were a satisfactory definition of “cow” (which it is not), there would be no reason to believe that “female” + “bovine” belong to a more restricted inventory than the one hosting the allegedly more complex Content Unit “cow.” Yet Eco delves deep into the combinatory logic of Dictionary semantics before dismissing it as defective. He explains the details of each theory with scrupulous attention, as if complying with its method, absorbing its rationale and hoping that the system will work after all. Only when the theory betrays its most evident flaws does he decree its failure to fulfil the expectations it created. The disproportionate efforts Eco devotes to his Anti-Porphyry, Anti-Katz and Fodor and Anti-Hjelmslev polemics suggest that these orderly models exert an intellectual appeal on him that goes beyond the mere mechanism of refutation.

19 Neither is it enough to attribute Eco’s passion for defectively airtight systems to his thomistic background, on the one hand, or to his acquired distrust towards all forms of “strong thought,” on the other. Beyond or beneath the biographical explanations lies the author’s typically bisociated pattern of thinking. In a well-told joke, the punchline comes after a longwinded preparatory phase in which the listener is made to feel comfortable with the assumptions of an apparently self-consistent (and often self- assertive) frame. Likewise, Eco builds up familiarity and expectations regarding Porphyry’s Tree and its derived models so that, when the reader is finally caught up in the paradigm’s logic, the collision with an incompatible counter-logic may release the humorous effects of an overwhelming contradiction.

20 What, then, is the second frame whose sudden impact opens a breach in the sealed logic of Dictionary semantics? Whenever Eco wants to explode the pretentions of an all-

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too-orderly sense structure, he confronts it with the worldview of a candid layperson who relies on sensible experience as the ultimate source of truth-judgements. A good example may be found in Kant and the Platypus (“Tiny Tim’s Story,” Eco 1999: 186-91), where a five-year old’s description of water – something that you put your hands under when you wash them with soap, that is wet and has no shape but goes around all over the place, that is in rivers and bathtubs, etc. – pulls the rug under the analytical definition of water as transparent liquid. The child’s radical empiricism collides with the adult’s rationalist approach. As if puncturing an overinflated balloon, it voids the dream of a perfect taxonomy of its ontological raison d’être. If the way we normally think resembles Tiny Tim’s (who associates each word with an open list of first-hand experiences), then the grandiose masterplan of splitting linguistic meanings down to their primary elements (and then sorting them in a tidy treelike structure) suffers from a cultural fallacy that we may legitimately laugh about, possibly because it says more about our psychological need for closure and order than about the way things really are and work. Closed, organized systems vs. Open, chaotic experiences: this is the first bisociation that Eco calls into play when introducing the concept of Encyclopaedia.

21 The next step – which differentiates a purely humorous device from an act of scientific discovery – consists in trying to merge the two divergent frames into one. The link between Openness and Closeness is provided by the concept of Interpretant. Like Koestler’s resourceful chimp, Eco rips the Interpretant – as it were – from the Peircean jungle and grafts it onto structuralist componential analysis, in a bid to infuse life in the sterile denotative and connotative markers through which Dictionary models fail to break down the meaning of words in their simpler components. Insofar as they always open up the Sign to something new, Interpretants introduce an element of creative happenstance in the course of semiosis, while recouping a vital connection between Signs and the outside world. At the same time, however, they may be thought of as relatively stable nodes of (albeit feebly) structured systems, considering the overcoded nature of the semiotic habits they tend to embody. In other words, Tiny Tim’s definitions of water are, yes, idiosyncratic, unstable and disorganized, as you would expect from a child whose knowledge of the world is still sufficiently disentangled from the conditioning of social institutions. But the adult’s remarks and questions – Maybe it’s that red thing in the stove that burns? Is it damp like fruit? So it’s not a solid thing like bread… And if it’s not solid, what is it? etc. – nudge his private Interpretants towards culturally beaten paths, so that little by little he gets used to opposing water to fire, dampness to wetness, liquids to solids, and so on. By conforming to other people’s expectations Tim will eventually become a fully-fledged member of his linguistic and interpretive (= cultural) community.

22 Being a member of a cultural community means knowing how to trigger more or less the same Interpretants as most other members presumably would in the same given circumstances. A standardised network of interpretive habits – Eco (2014) refers to it as the Average Encyclopaedia – guarantees a certain degree of automaticity in communicative exchanges, with the obvious adaptive advantage of minimizing misunderstandings within the group. And since the impulse to categorize seems to be part and parcel of human nature, the common Interpretants tend to cluster in the hierarchic and differential patterns that are dear to Structuralist semantics: havens of (local and provisional) Order carved out of the garble of the Global Encyclopaedia.

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4. Immanence and Interpretability

23 By grafting the Peircean Interpretant onto structuralist componential analysis Eco tries, as it were, to introduce a Carbon-based molecule in the inorganic chemistry of sememes. His revised semantic model (1976: 105-20) overcomes some of the aporias of componential analysis through the introduction of contextual and circumstantial selections that register the Interpretants most frequently associated to each specific sign, be it a word, an image, a gesture, or any other. Given the indefinitely open array of effects that a word such as fisherman could produce when inserted in specific communicative contexts, and granted that some contexts are more selective than others, any average English speaker is expected to know that normally this Content Unit is associated to a range of probable discourse situations; namely, discourses having to do with recreational or commercial fishing, angling or trawling, etc., where each contextual selection triggers some of the possible fisherman Interpretants while it narcotizes other less relevant ones. But the choice of which Interpretants are to be considered relevant is not entirely up to the speakers or the listeners of every single utterance. An overall Encyclopaedic network regulates the different sense-paths that may branch off the common sememe they all derive from.

24 Hence the idea that a sememe is in itself an embryonic text. You just have to pronounce the word fisherman (or draw a picture of a fisherman, or mime the act of fishing…) to evoke a certain number of situations where, on the basis of previous communicative experiences, members of your semiotic community are most likely to expect such a sign mentioned. Your mental associations may be idiosyncratic and autobiographical, but even the more personal synapses are largely influenced by culturally acquired interpretive habits (I, for instance, am inclined to link the word to Pinocchio’s Green Fisherman as well as to the lyrics of Paul Simon’s Lincoln Duncan, but I don’t expect you to do the same). The point is: are these habits already embedded or condensed in the Sign as such, as in a pre-Big Bang situation? Or would it be more appropriate to represent the expanding sememe as a public repertoire of interpretations that come and go according to the various uses people make of them? What, for example, happens to the sememe fisherman when Jesus calls his apostles to be fishers of men, the brothers Grimm publish the popular tale of the Fisherman and his Greedy Wife and a XIXth century English chemist invents a popular brand of candies he calls Fisherman’s Friends? These are all Interpretants of the same sign and, sure, they all exploit some of the Interpretants previously attributed to fisherman to create new semantic amalgams that, in turn, are registered by the Encyclopaedia and may thus affect further interpretations. But how correct is it to consider such creative expansions as part of the sememe’s structural matrix, rather than as something that just happened to it under certain unpredictable circumstances? The difference between the revised semantic model (still rooted in the Structuralist tradition) and the cognitively inspired Q-model lies precisely in this: as Eco opens up to interpretive semiotics, the short-circuits between different nodes of the Global Semantic Space become ever more erratic and the spectrum of possible textual expansions of each sememe seems to explode in all directions.

25 Allowing that the Global Encyclopaedia is a semiotic postulate that may never be described in its complex totality Eco does not, however, give up on the structural analysis of at least local portions of the Encyclopaedia. In The Role of the Reader he spells

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out the concept that his previous essays only hinted at: the meaning of a sign – or a text – resides in the indefinitely expandable sum total of the effects (or Interpretants) the sign produces or may potentially produce in someone, and therefore in the open series of its possible interpretations. This is an explicit reformulation of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, and it apparently transfers the responsibility of meaning construction from the sign as such to the interpreters’ activities: whatever people do with a word, a sentence, an image, a gesture, etc., the sum total of their sign-driven actions constitutes the meaning of that sign. Yet according to Eco there have to be ways to (a) predict the spectrum of activities that a sign may produce on its interpreters; (b) distinguish between relevant and irrelevant interpretive activities, i.e. between interpretations that deserve to be (and indeed stand a chance to be) included in the sign’s expanding meaning and totally idiosyncratic uses that have little or nothing to do with or to add to that public meaning. That is why in the Italian version of The Role of the Reader (Lector in fabula, 1979a) he makes a distinction between first- and second-generation textual theories. The former deny the possibility of “disambiguating” a sign or a text independently from the effective situation in which it is delivered and/or received and, consequently, they deny the legitimacy of any attempt to study language as a structural system that precedes its discursive actualizations. Instead, second-generation theories try to achieve “a wise amalgamation between the two possibilities [thus establishing] points of contact between the study of language as a structured system [and the study] of speeches or texts as products of a language that was or is currently spoken” (Eco 1979a: 13; my translation).

26 As usual, Eco’s puzzle is how to put together pieces taken from different and seemingly incompatible sets. The key he picks to try to unlock the conundrum is the idea that “a sememe is in itself an inchoative text and a text is an expanded sememe.” In Eco’s words, it is “the Cardanic joint that can unite the semiotics of a code to the semiotics of texts and speeches” (Eco 1979b: 49).

27 Derived from Peirce, this concept primarily refers to the pragmatist maxim according to which “to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might result from the truth of that conception – and the sum of these consequences constitute the entire meaning of the conception” (Peirce 1905, CP 5.9). In other words, the many lines of conduct that may conceivably arise from the fact of having grasped an idea make up the meaning of the corresponding sign: see, for example, the meaning of Lithium, which Peirce identifies with all the chemical reactions that scientists may produce in a laboratory in reference to that substance they call Lithium. In this light, the meaning of a term includes the indefinite number of propositions that could legitimately contain such term, along with the indefinite number of synapses the term and its expanded propositions could trigger, and the indefinite number of behavioural responses they could elicit. Not just now, but in any conceivable future: a very hazardous concept, if you consider it from a nominalistic perspective, since it implies that, over and beyond the arbitrary nature of linguistic signs, there lies some unattainable yet efficient regularity of nature that assures the continuity of each chain of Interpretants.

28 But Peirce is not the only author Eco is thinking about when he formulates his maxim. The other explicit reference is to Greimas (1973: 174), quoted by Eco right before he brings Peirce into play: “As Greimas asserted, a given semantic unit such as ‘fisherman’ carries a potential narrative program in its sememic structure: ‘the fisherman

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[intended as a thematic role] holds within it, evidently, all the possibilities of its doing, all that one can expect from it in terms of behaviour’.” (Eco 1979a: 19; my translation).

29 Whether Peirce and Greimas are pointing to roughly the same concept is by no means evident. One the one hand there seems to be an unexpected family resemblance between the two (another bisociated link?). Could the common denominator be rooted in a profound logical and/or grammatical intuition that overcomes the obvious division between Peirce’s interpretive realism and Greimas’s methodical constructivism? This is Eco’s bet. The key to virtual sememe expansions is hidden somewhere between Peirce’s “Logic of Relatives” and Tesnières’s “Dependency Grammar” (which inspired Greimas’s “Actantial Structure”), and possibly much further back to Francis Lodwick’s XVIIth century attempt to break down the (allegedly universal) content of verbs such as to fish to the frames of action they imply.10 What do these disparate theories have in common? The idea that a single semiotic element possesses valencies or empty slots that predispose it to form certain types of conjunctions with other elements; that, according to the types of bonds it is capable of forming with other elements, it may unfold one or more predictable lines or patterns of action: the skeleton of a story or, rather, of a range of potential stories; and that these proto-stories are somehow outlined in the sign itself, in a way analogous to the indefinite number of life forms made possible by a given genetic code. A sort of Aristotelean entelechy drives each sign towards its self- fulfilling actualizations, as though the sign’s interpreters were but the contingent agents of an inbuilt transformative process, “from being in posse or in germ” (Peirce, Century Dictionary, 1889: “Entelechy”) to its actual forms of existence, partial and imperfect as these may be.

30 On the other hand, however, it is clear that Greimas and Peirce are considering different aspects of the semiotic phenomenon. In line with the Hjelmslevian principle of Immanence (a sign system may be theorized as a purely linguistic, self-subsistent entity), Greimas refers to a specific, synchronic state of language within whose closed structure the item fisherman (itself a bundle of coordinated semantic traits) may be combined with a great variety – but not all – other lexemes to form a vast array of possible narrative syntagms. There are many things the semantic system allows a fisherman to do, including swimming, drowning, drinking, singing, dancing, belching and sleeping… – but not flying. Not because (fisher)men are empirically unable to fly (a fact that is linguistically irrelevant), but because the system of the English language does not contemplate this combinatory option. According to Greimas, the range of possible textual expansions is pre-determined by the affordances of the lexeme’s narrative grammar. And even when – as in Jesus’ fishers of men – the word is used metaphorically to mean something that is literally incongruous, the figure of speech is made possible by the linguistic compatibility between the deep semantic structure of the metaphorical vehicle and that of its tenor (hunters of men would not have done the job).

31 Instead, Peirce’s pragmatic maxim (hinged on the principle of Interpretability) has nothing to do with the grammar of a particular state of language: his conception of meaning is that of a dynamic and ongoing process whose only limits are set by the constrictions of logic and of reality. The strings of Interpretants that make up the meaning of a word may escape in n directions, according to the more or less adventurous paths followed by members of the community of interpreters, and the possible expansions of the concept of fisherman (or fish, or water…) are not established

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in advance by the rules of a nomothetic institution. Rather, a process of natural (or cultural?) selection picks out those Interpretants whose consequences yield the most beneficial effects, i. e. the ones that are most liable to turn the world into a more predictable or liveable or manageable environment, i.e. (from Peirce’s scientific perspective) the ones that in the long run prove to be truer, or at least less false than others.

5. Possible and Impossible

32 What does Eco have in mind when he says that “a sememe is a virtual/inchoative text”? That sense is tightly packed within the narrative, discursive and grammatical structures of a coded unit (such as Greimas’s thematic role: the fisherman as a matrix of possible stories), regardless of whether the sense-paths the code virtually contains are effectively actualized in the course of semiosis? Or that semiosis is born free and then restrained by the Noes of experience which determine the sum of “practical consequences [that] might result from the truth of that conception”? It is impossible to decide. All the more so if we extend the scale of Eco’s principle from the textual expansions of a single sememe (the number of sentences that could contain the term fisherman) to the possible interpretations of a single text (the number of ways one could read Moby Dick). Sometimes Eco leans towards the structuralist option, as when – in order to defend the “rights of the text” against the uncontrolled intentions of its deconstructive readers (Eco 1990) – he outlines the concept of intentio operis (that which the text “intends” to say) as the structural matrix capable of generating all possible interpretations. Other times he favours the pragmatist approach, as when he defines the same intentio operis in negative terms (much like Peirce describes our inferential relation with reality) as something that manifests itself indirectly whenever a particular reading collides with the literal evidence which may be drawn from the text. 11

33 Both solutions are per se insufficient for the purposes of the encyclopaedic-inferential theory pursued by Eco. Greimas’s thematic role is not designed to explain what happens when someone interprets a text.12 But Peirce’s pragmatic maxim does not describe the culturally determined structures within and against which most communicative acts are performed. Yet neither aspect may be overlooked by a theory that aims at accounting for what actually happens when someone tries to make sense of the world (and the texts that inhabit it) through the specific cultural filters that regulate her system of expectations, as well as through the cognitive procedures that make any interpretation possible.

34 “How is it possible for the two points of view to coexist?,” asks Eco (1999: 251) almost a quarter of a century after A Theory of Semiotics. Still grappling with the question that set off his semiotic inquiry, the answer he arrives at in Kant and the Platypus is anything but conclusive. The result of the preceding reflections is that they must coexist, because if we choose one of them only, we cannot account for our way of knowing and expressing what we know. It is indispensable to make them coexist on a theoretical level, because, effectively speaking, on the level of our cognitive experiences we proceed so that we run – if the expression does not seem to reductive – with the hare and hunt with the hounds. The unstable equilibrium of this coexistence is not (theoretically) syncretistic, because it is on the basis of this happily unstable

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equilibrium that our understanding proceeds. […] In the process of understanding, the structural moment and the interpretative moment alternate and complement each other step by step. (Eco 1999: 251-3; original emphasis)

35 Eco’s argument may at first seem circular: the two points of view coexist because they have to (cf. “Why is there Being rather than nothing? Because there is,” Eco 1999: 17; original emphasis). Is this a case of what Peirce (CP 5.382-3) would call a priori reasoning? Perhaps. But Peirce also says that when science fails, the a priori method is the next best option, “since it is then the expression of instinct which must be the ultimate cause of belief in all cases” (CP 5.383). In want of a better explanation, Eco follows the instinct telling him that order and adventure (cf. Paolucci 2017), categorization and observation, recognition and invention, and all the other bisociated matrices we have discussed in this article are complementary opposites referring to the two forces that, together, drive all semiotic activity. Rather than considering the duck/rabbit (now hound/hare) effect as an undesirable outcome of his theory, he reframes it as the ultimate object of semiotic investigation. If the theory oscillates from one perspective to the other without reaching a satisfactory synthesis, it is because that “happily unstable equilibrium” is the proprium of human understanding.

36 But if bisociation is within semiosis itself, engrained in our way of making sense of things, then any attempt at theorizing it in a scientifically consistent way (rather than maintaining it in a state of humorous suspension) meets the obvious hitch of being itself a semiotic activity, based on the same self-contradictory logic it is trying to grasp. A bisociated mind trying to make sense of its being bisociated is reminiscent of the paradoxical situation, described by Eco (1999: 320-1), of a third prosthetic eye attached to the tip of the index finger and pointed towards the other two. What would one see? The mind boggles. “Would we see the index finger with the eyes in our head, or the eyes in our head with the index finger? Once more, either we go by zones of focus (we imagine, alternately closing the eyes in our head and the eye in our finger) or we slip in complete imaginative confusion.”13

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Figure 3: Penrose’s Devil Fork/Impossible Trident

37 Notice how this hypothetical solution – the alternation between two self-consistent yet reciprocally incompatible visions – is in turn akin to the way Eco (1994: 100 and 1999: 318) defines the concept of possible impossible worlds. With reference to Penrose’s trident (analysed by Merrell 1981), he observes that, whereas the overall two- dimensional figure describes an impossible three-dimensional whole object, each partial 3-D object that may be conjured up by covering one of the two sides of the dotted line is in fact in itself possible. The intermediate area is compatible with both – hence its ambiguity. Like Koestler’s bisociated matrixes, the two possible partial objects become impossible only when merged into one.

38 But impossible with respect to what logic? The question will not go away. Maybe such an object could exist in some different world, and it is only because of our intellectual incapacities that – so far – we have been unable to conceive it. The perverse pleasure that we take in analysing the self-voiding logic of such possible impossible worlds is that of our cognitive defeat. A defeat that keeps challenging our scientific imagination: who knows, one day we might be able to “redesign our brain” (Eco 1999: 427) in order to solve the overall puzzle. In the meantime all we can do is to keep trying with the one we have. “Therefore I hold that when we refer to inconceivable entities, we behave as if, on being faced with our ‘white box,’ we were to peep into it by alternately lifting opposite sides of the lid for a few millimetres.” (Eco 1999: 321). Is this a description of what Eco’s structural pragmatics does with the possible impossible object that is semiosis?

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

ECO Umberto, (1968), La struttura assente, Milan, Bompiani.

ECO Umberto, (1973), Segno, Milan, Isedi.

ECO Umberto, (1976), A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

ECO Umberto, (1979a), Lector in fabula, Milan, Bompiani.

ECO Umberto, (1979b), The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

ECO Umberto, (1983), “Horns, Hooves and Shoes,” in Umberto Eco & Thomas A. Sebeok (eds), The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

ECO Umberto, (1986), Semiotics and Philosophy of Language, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

ECO Umberto, (1990), The Limits of Interpretation, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

ECO Umberto, (1997), The Search of the Perfect Language, New York, HarperCollins.

ECO Umberto, (1999), Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, New York/San Diego/ London, Harcourt Brace & Company.

ECO Umberto, (2004), “Combinatoria della creatività,” conference held in Florence for the Nobel Foundation, [umbertoeco.it/CV/Combinatoria%20della%20creativita.pdf].

ECO Umberto, (2014), From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation, Cambridge, Massachusetts/London, Harvard University Press.

GREIMAS Algirdas J., (1973), “Les Actants, les Acteurs et les Figures,” in Sorin Alexandrescu, Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, Claude Chabrol, Algirdas J. Greimas, Pierre Maranda, Siegfried J. Schmidt & Teun A. Van Dijk (eds), Sémiotique narrative et textuelle, Paris, Larousse.

HJELMSLEV Louis Trolle, (1943), Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, Madison, Wisconsin University Press.

JAKOBSON Roman, (1963 [1992]), Saggi di linguistica generale, Milan, Feltrinelli.

KATZ Jerrold & Jerry FODOR, (1963), “The Structure of Semantic Theory,” Language, 39, 2, 170-210.

KOESTLER Arthur, (1964), The Act of Creation, New York, Penguin.

MERRELL Floyd, (1981), “On Understanding the ‘Logic’ of Understanding: A Reincarnation of Some Peircean Thought,” Ars Semiotica, 4.1, 161-86.

PAOLUCCI Claudio, (2013), Strutturalismo e interpretazione, Milan, Bompiani.

PAOLUCCI Claudio, (2017), Tra ordine e avventura, Milan, Feltrinelli.

PEIRCE Charles Sanders, (1931-1966), The Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, 8 vols., C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss & A. W. Burks (eds), Cambridge, Harvard University Press

PISANTY Valentina, (2015), “From the Model Reader to the Limits of Interpretation,” Semiotica, 206, 37-61.

PISANTY Valentina, (2017a), “Che c’è da ridere? Eco e i Protocolli dei Savi Anziani di Sion,” Il verri, 63, Le letterature di Eco.

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PISANTY Valentina, (2017b), “The Sememe as a Virtual Text,” in Bent Sorensen & Torkild Thellefsen (eds), Umberto Eco in His Own Words, Berlin, De Gruyter-Mouton.

QUINE Willard van Orman, (1969), “Foreword,” in Lewis David, Convention: A Philosophical Study, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, i-xii.

TODOROV Tzvetan, (1970), Introduction à la littérature fantastique, Paris, Éditions du Seuil.

TRAINI Stefano, (2005), Le due vie della semiotica. Teorie strutturali e interpretative, Milan, Bompiani.

VIOLI Patrizia, (2001), Meaning and Experience, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

VIOLI Patrizia, (2017), “Encyclopedia: Criticality and Actuality,” in Sara G. Beardsworth & Randall E. Auxier (eds), The Philosophy of Umberto Eco, Chicago, The Library of Living Philosophers.

NOTES

1. “When two independent matrices of perception or reasoning interact with each other the result […] is either a collision ending in laughter, or their fusion in a new intellectual synthesis, or their confrontation in an aesthetic experience. The bisociative patterns found in any domain of creative activity are tri-valent: that is to say, the same pair of matrices can produce comic, tragic, or intellectually challenging effects.” (Koestler 1964: 45; original emphasis). 2. “I propose to define as a sign everything that, on the grounds of a previously established social convention, can be taken as something standing for something else.” (Eco 1976: 16; original emphasis). 3. “A general semiotic theory will be considered powerful according to its capacity for offering an appropriate formal definition for every sort of sign-function, whether it has already been described and coded or not. So the typology of modes of sign-production aims at proposing categories able to describe even those as yet uncoded sign-functions conventionally posited in the very moment in which they appear for the first time.” (Eco 1976: 5). 4. Cf. Eco 1983 and 1986 on undercoded and overcoded abductions. 5. See Eco 1976 on the different modes of Sign-production. 6. Whether the words of a language are the outcome of a process of standardization or of a stipulated convention is not a problem that Eco dwells on extensively, in accordance with the 1866 linguistic ban on the discussions regarding the origins of language. However, he does occasionally seem to slant towards the first hypothesis, for example when – in the last page of The Search of the Perfect Language (1997) – he mentions Ibn Hazm’s argument against the idea that different languages were born from convention: “if so, people would have to have had a prior language in which they could agree about conventions.” Notice the similarity between this Xth century objection and Quine’s 1969 “vicious regress” argument in his forward to Lewis’ Convention, p. xi. The difference, of course, is that Ibn Hazm believed that historical languages derived from an original language which included all the others. 7. See Eco 1976 on contextual and circumstantial selections. 8. “Inferential processes (mainly under the form of Peircean abduction) stand at the basis of every semiotic phenomenon.” (Eco 1986: 8). 9. On the combinatory logic of cultural innovation see also Eco 2004. 10. See Eco 1997 on the search for the perfect language. 11. On the ambiguities of the concept of intentio operis, see Pisanty 2015. 12. Regarding this point, cf. Violi 2017: “The very idea of the sememe as a virtual text is quite close to Greimas’s thematic roles. But there is a key difference. Simplifying substantially, we could say that Greimas’s theory is a theory about how text is structured, while Eco’s is a theory of

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knowledge and interpretation. More precisely, Eco’s is a theory about how our general cultural knowledge is organized and how we use it in order to interpret the world and the various texts that inhabit it.” 13. Regarding the same puzzle, Eco (1999: 427) also writes: “It would seem difficult to handle two images at the same time; perhaps it would be necessary to close the two normal eyes when the third is in use, but I’m not sure this would be enough. The most reasonable conclusion is that the innovation would make it necessary to redesign our brain.”

ABSTRACTS

In this paper I will discuss the extent to which Umberto Eco’s Semiotics maintains the unstable and oscillatory equilibrium between conflicting matrices that is proper to humorous thinking and ambiguous figures such as the famous duck-rabbit illusion and Penrose’s impossible trident. To do so I shall summon the concept of bisociation (Koestler 1964): though never an item of Eco’s own philosophical toolbox, bisociation plays an important role in the creation of some of Eco’s most innovative theoretical contributions, insofar as they result from a possible/impossible graft between Structuralism and Pragmatism. For each, the question will be whether the implant produces self-consistent theoretical amalgams, or whether some degree of contradiction inevitably remains to generate the abovementioned duck-rabbit effect. I shall then analyse the role that such residual incongruities play in a theory that thrives on the self-voiding logic of humorous short-circuits.

AUTHOR

VALENTINA PISANTY University of Bergame valentina.pisanty[at]unibg.it

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Pragmatic/Pragmatist Mind Eco’s Cognitive Semioticization of Qualia

Martin Švanter

1. Eco’s Pragmatic Turns

1 There are (at least) two “pragmatisms” in Umberto Eco’s works about semiotics. The first is rather close to traditional “pragmatics” (Eco 1976: 102) – this perspective is in general close to the semiotic analysis of the use of language through its cultural and communicative functions. As Eco observes, I have always defined semiotics as a logic of culture and I still stick to this definition. However, cultural processes change and I think that today semiotics should take into account new phenomena such as the Web as a maximal encyclopedia (with all the problems concerning how to filter information – which means defining the notion of interpretation again) and new kinds of communicative intercourse such as social networks and so on. Communication with virtual partners implies a reformulation of pragmatics. (Eco in Kull & Velmezova 2014: 539)

2 This perspective has its theoretical base mostly in Eco’s theory of codes and his conception of sign-function as presented in his Theory of Semiotics (1976) and in his semiotic critique of the theory of speech acts and encyclopedic representation based on “pure” semantics in Semiotics and Philosophy of Language (1984). The most important perspective in these “early” texts is that semiotics is the interdisciplinary study of the logic of the system of the culture and its “lies,” e.g., propaganda and/or ideology (cf. Eco 1970). Eco’s tendency, perhaps influenced in this way by Roman Jakobson’s pioneering works synthesizing disparate paradigms of sign theory, was mostly to re- interpret, interconnect, and in some way overcome some topics from Peircean semiotics (e.g., the notion of interpretant) and “continental” schools of (post) structuralist semiology which are traditionally focused on the formal system of language and its possible extrapolation to the whole of given culture (cf. Eco 1976: 14-5; 21-8). In other words, his attempt was to build a “truly general” semiotics and (in Semiotics and Philosophy of Language) unite unfortunately often disparate fields of analytical philosophy and semiotics. One part of this grand project was to pragmaticize

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structuralist semiology (and also various types of formalisms, cf. Eco 1999: 290) on the basis of a re-interpretation of Hjelmslev’s glossematics (in Theory of Semiotics) which consequently led Eco to explore the possibility of analysis of “semiosic atoms,” basic units of semiosis (cf. CP 5.484), in the fashion of reinterpreted Greimas’ structural semantics. The frame, which promised to overcome these paradigms and also further develop Peirce’s conception of abduction, was Eco’s own theory of codes (in Semiotics and Philosophy of Language).

3 These topics did not completely disappear in Kant and the Platypus (1999) – Eco’s persuasive examples1 are mostly taken from the field of cultural pragmatics, Eco is still searching for “semiosic primitives” (Eco 1999: 144). Pragmatics is for him still prior to syntactics and semantics – but the emphasis in the field of general semiotics substantially shifted. Human cognition, which is not only understood from the social/ cultural perspective predominant in Eco’s “early and middle” works, is much more influenced by Peirce’s concepts of mind, consciousness and cognition. In Kant and the Platypus, Eco proposes his version of semiotic cognitive realism – the main attempt of this text is to explore one of various parts of this synthetic and eclectic but original perspective. Eco’s creative semiotic and pragmatic conception of qualia as “bricks of our cognition” is grounded in his reinterpretation of C. S. Peirce.

2. Semiosic Primes

4 Analysis of basic units of semiosis, elementary units of meaning, remain in Eco’s later work. In Kant and the Platypus, these elementary primes are not only Hjelmslev’s figurae (cf. Eco 1984: 21nn) or Greimasian semes, but have various forms depending on various discourses which “constitute” them. Primes can be considered in the dimension of epistemology (and its pragmatic/inferential modes of codes), cognition (as forms of primary iconicity and indexicality), or general ontology, which is the most basic form (as in the case of qualia). Therefore, Eco in Kant and the Platypus, is mostly interested in basic function of the dynamic object, which plays the role of something purely “first,” and that object’s two-fold character. On one side, this object (which is represented by various sets of immediate objects represented by given representamens and interpretants, cf. CP 2.274) is “really efficient but not immediately present […]” (CP 8.343), and also it is the mode of the object that determines icon by “virtue of its own internal nature” and index by “virtue of being in a real relation to it” (CP 8. 355). This mode of objectivity involves the “thing” as such, or relatively (through a series of interpretants of immediate objects) knowable “thing-in-itself” and a guarantee of the possibility that semiosis can be infinite, but not completely “unlimited” (there is a possible “limitation” given by the dynamic object). Conversely, as Eco has proposed in his pragmatic (not so much pragmatistic) re-interpretation of Peirce, the “[d]ynamical Object is what drives us to produce semiosis. We produce signs because there is something that demands to be said. To use an expression that is efficacious albeit not very philosophical, the Dynamical Object is Something-that-sets-to-kicking-us and says ‘Talk!’ to us – or ‘Talk about me!’ or again, ‘Take me into consideration!’.” (Eco 1999: 14).2 Eco then postulates (due to this character of dynamic objects that forces its recipient to some semiosic action) two forms of “immediate representation” of dynamic objects – “semiosic primitives.” These primes also retain a kind of double character: on one side they can be considered as having rather kind of dyadic

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character, being connected on the most basic level (action/reaction/immediate attention3) to primary indexicality (Eco 1999: 14-5); on the other side, in case of primary iconicity (Eco 1999: 100-12nn) they are rather monadic, simple, connected to firstness, and Eco considers them as starting points or primum, which is “at the origin of all subsequent inferential processes” (Eco 2014: 563) and therefore the starting point of every (more or less complex) interpretation. These primes are, in addition to qualia, basic forms of Eco’s theory of cognition, which form this perspective to be seemed as a basic and first level from which the interpretation grows. But as we will see, Eco’s scheme of semiotic/pragmatic interconnetion between cognition and interpretation is not as that simple. For Eco, the basic semiosic (analyzable by meta-semiosic theory and therefore semiotics) units, are qualia, usually defined as properties of sensations and perceptual states4 that give them their specific, qualitative or phenomenal character (Shoemaker 1991: 507; cf. Lewis 1929; CP 6.222).5

3. Semioticization of Qualia

5 In Eco’s view on the field, the problem of qualia is connected to the problem of Peirce’s notion of “ground” and “firstness,” and goes hand in hand with his postulation of semiosic primitives (therefore with Eco’s interpretation of dynamic object) and through these concepts we can explain perceptual (and also more complex – interpretative and inferential) processes. Qualia are “bricks” for the construction of Cognitive Types (Eco 1999: 155), which mediate between the concept and the manifold of the intuition” (Eco 1999: 130), and they are here to stabilize our perceptive acts.6 What do these interconnections mean?7

6 A semiotic exploration of the idea that every phenomenal state of mind inheres some amount of qualia presents an epistemological problem. Qualia can have a double character: on one side, they can be mistaken for qualities as such, therefore being seen as somewhat similar to the Platonic idea of highest genera (and the idea that pure quality has some presupposed organization), on the other side, they should be considered as specific, roughly speaking “realized” or “embodied,” qualities in a specific phenomenal state, therefore as a kind of “secondness.”8 Therefore Eco has asked: “Is this primum a primum in absolute terms or is it a primum for me, at that moment, and (to use a Peircean expression) is it such only in some respect or capacity?” (Eco 2014: 663; original emphasis).

7 On Peirce’s view, “[t]here is a distinctive quale to every combination of sensations so far as it is really synthesized” (CP 6.223). He said further that “in quale-consciousness there is but one quality, but one element. It is entirely simple” (CP 6.231). As Sandra B. Rosenthal observes, [t]his [...] is not meant to imply that we build up perception from atomic qualia. What is immediately recognized as given, though expressed in language, is epistemologically prior to language. And, what is given as the percept is not a “collection” of atomic qualia, but rather a gestalt or relation of qualia. Our immediate recognition of the date of sense is not of atomic qualia. Rather, the recognized content is a unitary percept or “feeling tone” which, Peirce holds, has its own distinctive quale, a unitary quale or experienced content which is analyzed rather than synthesized in the process of recognition. (Rosenthal 1994: 100) Rosenthal further illustrates this tension (between pure quasi-Platonic ideality and existence in phenomenal states) in conception of quale – for Peirce each quale is

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monadic in a specific (quasi-Leibnizian) notion – it is in itself what it is for itself, and does not refer to any other (CP 6.224). Qualia “in themselves” are “absolutely simple” and “absolutely free” (Rosenthal 1994: 101). On the other side they are “here” to be kind of (“rhematic”) guaranty for further possible (inferential) “comparison”: in the first of third as qualisigns; in the first of second of third as “proto-propositions” – dicisigns; or in the second of second of third as material propositions etc. – because “comparing consciousness does pronounce them to be alike. They are alike to the comparing consciousness, though neither alike nor unlike in themselves.” (CP 6.224). As Rosenthal concludes, “[t]he repeatability of qualia, then, is itself a product of the synthesizing activity of consciousness acting upon unique qualia. […] Such a characterization leads Peirce to speak of Firstness in terms of qualities of feeling.” (Rosenthal 1999: 100-1), deploying firstness in epistemological and ontological terms, compared to the strictly psychological or cognitive sense. On the contrary, Eco’s analysis is guided rather by the cognitive dimension of qualia. It seems that for Eco the most important is the idea, that qualia as feelings have this capacity which forces us (the consciousness) to specific action, as he noted: “Peirce himself made clear, even after recognizing that my senses have been deceived, I cannot say that I have not experienced (let alone ‘that I have not known’!) a sensation of redness or excessive heat. Going back to the housewife with her sheet, she might say: ‘A short time ago, after having made my first over-hasty perceptual inference, I entertained the belief [(a cognitive fact)] that I had experienced a sensation of whiteness’.” (Eco 2014: 662). On the other hand, qualia are not the same as percepts, which have a structure and combine a number of sense qualities. The problem is that, for Eco, Peirce’s Ground can be seen as the “degenerated” or rather “quasi-structured” kind of firstness which (for Peirce) cannot be in principle “degenerated,” because “[f]irst is simple and devoid of structure. But every percept has a First which is the single impression created by the total ensemble of its elements. Moreover, if a single sense quality of a percept is prescinded from all the rest and is considered by itself, such a quality is a First.” (Murphey 1961: 395). Eco’s point of view is different: although qualia are monadic and “first and simple” but (similar to semiosic primitives) cause specific kind of actions (therefore they are in this sense not quit causally “impotent”), as he states: “Peirce is swinging between two notions: in one sense, as we have seen, the Ground is an idea, a skeleton plan, but if it is such, it is already an Immediate Object, a full realization of Thirdness; in another sense it is a Likeness that does not resemble anything. All it says to me is that the sensation I feel is in some way emanated by the Dynamical Object.” (Eco 1999: 103). Eco’s pragmatic deterritorialization of Peirce’s categories starts with the reinterpretation of ground9 mentioned above which in his view seems to be simply equal to the firstness, iconicity and qualia, and primarily to the dynamic object, that forces us to “say that something is there” and “[f]rom that moment interpretation may begin, but forward, not backward” (Eco 1999: 100). As he simply puts it, “I think that, when Peirce says the Ground is a quality, he means to say what philosophy still defines today as the phenomenon of qualia” (Eco 1999: 100). But for Peirce the ground is more an “analytical term” (the ground is “pure abstraction, reference to which constitutes a quality or general attribute,” CP 1.550),10 which is in his later conception of semiotics is abandoned or “dissolved” in other aspects of semiosis (Letter to Lady Welby). In Grammatica Speculativa (CP 2.228), ground takes on a bifurcated character – (i) the ground of signification, which in this conception perhaps means that every sign-

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relation has to be based on specific reference to quality, which is represented by given quale (“what is,” cf. CP 1.55) of specific sign-relation, and (ii) a contra-intuitive “sort of idea“ which is to be: [...] understood in a sort of Platonic sense, very familiar in everyday talk; I mean in that sense in which we say that one man catches another man’s idea, in which we say that when a man recalls what he was thinking of at some previous time, he recalls the same idea, and in which when a man continues to think anything, say for a tenth of a second, in so far as the thought continues to agree with itself during that time, that is to have a like content, it is the same idea, and is not at each instant of the interval a new idea. (CP 2.227)

8 Eco explores both these sides of the ground or, in his view, character of quale: on one side, there is something that has qualitative character of the firstness that is the possibility of correlation and relation of future form of signification and, on the other side, it has this every-day communicative character. This character is truly (!) “platonic”: if we want to “catch” (not necessary yet “understand” – that is why we can speak about “primary indexicalism”) another man/woman idea, we have to have some kind of proto-knowledge (ability to perceive and synthetize) of what he/she is talking about in the sense of emotional intepretants – there is a “tone” of his/her voice (and therefore “primary iconism”), which takes my attention instead of, e.g., bird singing (“primary indexicalism”), which later generates more complex forms of inferences, and therefore communication. We can see here clear analogy to Eco’s conception of Cognitive Type (and mere possibility for referential competence and felicitous reference, cf. Eco 1999: 155).

9 The importance of qualia for Eco is that they highlight the fact that in primary (absolutely simple) intuition there is no “starting point,” but – in the same way of firstness – there is a general predicate of many different objects, which, given its “purity” and “simplicity” cannot be in principle criticized, i.e., for Eco, qualia are “not rational, yet capable of rationalization” (cf. CP 5.119). Eco analyzes qualia in this manner – as mediators between perceptual (and other following) judgment and “tone of cognition”: he defines them as being resistant to all possible criticism. Peirce “is telling us not that the sensation of red is ‘infallible’ but that, once it has been, even if we then realize that we were wrong, it is still beyond doubt that it has been […].” (Eco 1999: 102). Eco follows the aforementioned Peircean concept of “comparing consciousness” based on relational possibility which qualia can “rise”; a housewife sees: [a] freshly washed sheet as extremely white but then, after comparing it with another, admits that the second is whiter than the first. […] Peirce would have told us that the housewife initially perceived the whiteness of the first sheet (pure “tone” of awareness); then, once she had moved on to the recognition of the object (Secondness) and had begun a comparison full of inferences (Thirdness), discovering that whiteness is manifested by degrees, she could state that the second sheet is whiter than the first, but at the same time she could not cancel the preceding impression, which as a pure quality has been […]. (Eco 1999: 102)

10 Eco sees the problem in comparison and gradation, [h]ow is it that a pure quality (Firstness), which should be the immediate and unrelated point of departure of all subsequent perceptions, can function as a predicate, and therefore already has been named, if semiosis is established only in Thirdness? And how is it, all knowledge being inference, that we have a point of departure that cannot be inferential, since it manifests itself immediately without even having been discussed or denied? (Ibid.)

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11 Eco’s pragmatic answer is that, “we must liberate […] the concept of likeness from the concept of comparison” (1999: 103), which Eco demonstrates with the example of icon (as a sign determined by dynamic object by the virtue of its own internal nature), which is a phenomenon “that founds all possible judgments of likeness, but it cannot be founded on likeness itself” and therefore is not a mental image (Eco 1999: 103).

4. Mind as Composition of Three Universes of Experience with the Accent on Its Pragmatic Dimension

12 Eco’s understanding of qualia is novel because of its two-fold character; in the first place they are considered to be firstness-based aspects of mentality, and in the second place they are gaining some kind of communicative character. In the complex understanding of consciousness Eco proposes in Kant and the Platypus, qualia play an important and irreplaceable role as fundamental bases of cognitive types. If we sum up Eco’s cognitive re-intepretation of Peirce’s categories, the phenomenal state is first composed of general potentiality (cf. CP 6.187), which has “the innocence of firstness,” but it is Eco’s still partially “cultural” (cf. Eco 1999: 5) point of view which allows him to avoid Peircean absolute idealism of the “thinking universe” (cf. Stjernfelt 2007: 43) or the “magic idealism à la Novalis” (Eco 2014: 671) restricted by the “nature” of given “Umwelt” or the set-up of cognitive types of concrete phenomenal state. The “Umwelt” is the mixture of social and natural – as Eco has shown in marvelous examples Marco Polo’s inductive observation of the unicorn/rhinoceros, or Montezuma’s complex investigation of a horse – in the former, Marco had to make the token of a type more complex, but it did not lead to the revolution of paradigmatic vocabulary in contemporary zoology; in the latter, the example of gradated interpretation went from points of experience to Molar Content. This dimension of general potentiality of cognition is restrictive in this specific sense – historically, socially and ontologically. Trivially put – conquistadors did not arrive by Boeing, they were Christians, i.e., had a specific worldview (as did the Aztecs), and most importantly, their horses were not flying. They could possibly breathe fire (there are signs – of primary indexicality – of panting and neighing), but could not fly. In other words, the sphere of ontology returns to old Platonic/Aristotelian postulations of the possible incompatibility of the proposition and reality (“Theaetetus also cannot fly”), but Eco’s view avoids these problems with the help of his mixture of semiotic cognitive realism and pragmatic/ cultural point of view (based on re-interpretation of Peirce and Kant), which enables him also to avoid traditional philosophical problems connected to idealistic or empirical perspectives. The semiotic perspective here is simple – the inferential process (and therefore the connection of language and reality) differs due to the dimension of interpretation, or interpretive discourse – of cognition, nucleus and molarity. On the other hand, these discourses are not constructed only socially by the semiologic system, but by a quasi-foundation in “embodied” qualities of perceptual semiosis, which is “not when something stands for something else but when from something, by an inferential process, we come to pronounce a perceptual judgment on that same something and not on anything else” (Eco 1999: 126). This general potentiality has some aspects of Peircean firstness, but does not overlap with it – a basic presupposition for another complex dimension of mental states (inferential

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processes), by advancing to Peircean firstness, this hypothetical potentiality can be articulated more specifically.

13 The second dimension from which mental states are composed of is therefore factuality, which is closer to Peirce’s secondness, because it represents the dynamism, rhythm and inevitable temporality of cognitive process. Perceptual semiosic mind is not a “static state,” but due to the first dimension it is always a series of options, a field where qualia are still inherent to produce meaning (cf. Eco 1999: 274) which has to be based on this “brute force” of “existence or constant struggle” of objects, which are “kicking” our attention and demand more or less complex responses. Therefore, there is no privileged stream of consciousness, no Cartesian theatre. There are only realized options and qualitative “environment,” which may or may not be acknowledged in concrete situations.

14 There is also a third dimension which is molar articulation, i.e. words: this sheet is not only “extremely white,” but this washing machine is better, and this detergent has better chemical structure – we can see here clearly one of many aspects of “Ecoistic” pragmatism – some of “bricks” of cognitive types can be the base (“blending” punctual cognitive acts with semantics and pragmatics) for future complex rules or laws. In this post-Peircean perspective, Eco suggests his semiotic/cognitive/pragmatic model of consciousness which consists of qualities (which are necessary but not literally “essential”), facts/existence, and propositions and arguments about these situations/ facts/premises/propositions. Eco has presented a provocative teleological and temporal model of semiosic mind.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHUMLEY Lily Hope & Nicholas HARKNESS, (2013), “Introduction: Qualia,” Anthropological Theory, 13.1-2, 3-11.

CHURCHLAND Paul M., (1984), “Subjective Qualia from a Materialist Point of View,” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, vol. 2, 773-90.

ECO Umberto, (1970), “Codes and Ideology,” in Camillo Olivetti (ed.), Linguaggi nella societa` e nella tecnica, Milan, Ed. Comunità, 545-57.

ECO Umberto, (1976), Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

ECO Umberto, (1984), Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

ECO Umberto, (1999), Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, London, Secker and Warburg.

ECO Umberto, (2014), “The Threshold and the Infinite Peirce and Primary Iconism,” in Id., From Tree to Labyrinth : Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 653-82.

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KULL Kalevi & Ekaterina VELMEZOVA, (2014), “What is the Main Challenge for Contemporary Semiotics?,” Sign Systems Studies, 42, 4, 530-48.

LEWIS Clarence I., (1929), Mind and the World-Order, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons.

MURPHEY Murray, (1961), Development of Peirce´s Philosophy, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

PAOLUCCI Claudio, (2017), “Logic of Relatives and Semiotics in Peirce. From the ‘Subject-Predicate’ Inferential Structure to the Synechistic Topology of Interpretation,” in Vít Gvoždiak & Martin Švantner (eds), How to Make Our Signs Clear. C.S. Peirce and Semiotics, Leiden, Brill, 36-58.

PEIRCE Charles S., (1867-1913), Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 1-6, edited by Charles Hartshorne & Paul Weiss, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1931-1966. Vols. 7-8 edited by Arthur Burks, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1958. (Cited in text as CP.)

ROSENTHAL Sandra B., (1994), Charles Peirce’s Pragmatic Pluralism, Albany, SUNY Press.

SHOEMAKER Sydney, (1991), “Qualia and Consciousness,” Mind, 100, 399, 507-24.

STJERNFELT Frederik, (2007), Diagrammatology: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology and Semiotics, Berlin, Springer Science & Business Media.

NOTES

1. Kantian schematism and Peirce’s semiotics are often challenged by Eco’s “punctual” and colorful examples. The “example” and “punctum of the example” (e.g. of Platypus) itself are one of many topics of Eco’s narration in Kant and the Platypus (cf. Eco 1999: 7). 2. Cf. Paolucci (2017: 48): “For Peirce, the emergence of firstnesses through their reciprocal opposition (secondness), is an event (CP 6.200), that is, a singularity, a point in which something happens.” As Eco has emphasized (Eco 2014: 662): “[F]or Peirce the three categories are not cognitions but formal structures that found the possibility of all cognition (in this sense Peirce was a Kantian), or they are not kinds of experience but pure forms that make up experience. Therefore, if a sensation of redness is an example of Firstness or, in one of the examples I provided at the time, the burning I feel when I touch a hot coffeepot, this Firstness in itself is still nothing from the point of view of my cognitions (a ‘mere maybe’), and I recognize it as a burn from the coffeepot only if it is immediately placed in relation to Secondness and Thirdness.” 3. Cf. Eco (1999: 145): “When we feel on the arm or the hand the presence of a foreign body, no matter how small, occasionally without even looking (and sometimes the interval between perceptual hypothesis and motor response is infinitesimal), either we use the other hand to squash something, or we prime the index finger with the thumb to flick something away. Usually we squash when we have assumed (even before having decided, because our safety depends on the speed of our reflexes) that the presence is a mosquito or some other bothersome insect, and we flick the body away when we assume it is vegetable or mineral waste. If it is decided that we must ‘kill,’ it is because a feature of animality in the foreign body has been noticed. It is a primary recognition, preconceptual (in any case prescientific), having to do with perception and not with categorial knowledge (if anything, it orients categorial knowledge, it offers itself as a basis for interpretation at higher cognitive levels).” (Cf. Eco 2014: 663). 4. “[A]sensation of redness, a burning feeling, the whiteness of a sheet.” (Eco 2014: 662). 5. “It is frequently argued that the phenomenological or qualitative features of our sensations will never be satisfactorily reduced by a purely materialistic neuroscience. They constitute, it is often said, a permanent barrier to the reductive aspirations of physicalism.” (Churchland 1984: 773).

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6. In Kant and the Platypus Eco distinguished Cognitive Types, which are built from qualia – when I touch the hot coffee pot and burn my hand, it is very probable that I will withdraw my hand from it in the future (or if Claudio will kick me – “with no reason” in the knee, I will be aware of him next time) – my behavior will be in this sense “typical,” constructed from experienced, “punctual” qualia. Eco’s point is that this “typicality” (which is articulated and public, therefore it is a kind of set of interpretants and/or habits) cannot be experienced or “followed,” if there is no starting point based on “feeling” or “tone” – even if this “feeling” was an illusion etc. These cognitive types produce “meaning”, or in better words (because are not necessary connected to mental experience): Nuclear Contents (NC), i.e. more complex habits. As Eco has noted, NC “suppl[y] criteria or instructions for the identification of one of the tokens of the type (or rather, as they say, for the identification of the referent). I use ‘identification’ instead of ‘recognition’ because I should like to reserve the latter term for cognitive phenomena strictly dependent on a previous perceptual experience, and the former term for the capacity to identify perceptually something about which we still have no experience. I identified an alligator, the first time I saw one on the banks of the Mississippi, on the basis of the instructions that had been supplied to me previously through words and images. That is, the NC of the word alligator had been communicated to me.” (Eco 1999: 393). Third of this scheme is Molar Content, which represents most complex “cerebral” habits – as e.g. in the case of scientific/encyclopedic knowledge and its (meta)categorization (e.g. alligator as the the object of zoology), cf. Eco (1999: 142nn). 7. Firstly, it is important to say that in Kant and the Platypus Eco brightly avoided dramatic discussion of philosophers of mind about qualia and “qualophilia.” His analogy of Peircean consideration of the connection of “ground,” “quality” and “judgment” is quite distant from the discussions between as D. Dennet, C. McGinn, T. Nagel, P. Churchland etc.; at least Eco used very different (more old “fashioned” – Peircean and Kantian) vocabulary and his “solution of qualia” is also very distant from empirical point of view of “empirical” neurophilosophy (presented by contemporary philosophers as e.g. J. Prinz). 8. Therefore the interpretation of this problem as “firstness is a quality, secondness is quale and thirdness is qualisign“ (as proposed by Chumley & Harkness 2013: 5) is at least very simplistic. 9. Cf. Eco (1999: 62; original emphasis): “In the Ground the object is seen in a certain respect, the attention isolates one feature. In purely logical terms, it is evident that if I predicate the blackness of ink, I do not predicate its liquidity. But if we were to cleave to the logical value of the Ground, we would not get very far. At most we would find ourselves once more among examples that seem to confuse our ideas rather than clarify them, prisoners of compulsive Peircean triadism. Moreover, the choice of the term Ground is not one of the happiest: it suggests a background against which something is set, while Peirce’s view was that it was probably a something set against a background that was still indistinct.” 10. Cf. (CP 1550): “Reference to a ground cannot be prescinded from being, but being can be prescinded from it.”

ABSTRACTS

The paper deals with the problem of qualia in the context of Umberto Eco‘s semiotics. I propose that Eco started to focus specifically on the problem of qualia mostly in his later period when he turned from the idea of almost universal theory of semiotics (e.g., in Theory of Semiotics) to cognitive realism (in Kant and the Platypus) with the help of more precise reinterpretation of

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Peirce’s concepts. Eco’s view of the problem of qualia is closely connected to his understanding of cognitive processes of understanding leading from cognitive type to molar content – understanding qualia as “semiosis primes,” which are the fundamental base of the possibility of all signification, therefore as a base of cognitive types. On the other hand, qualia are considered to be a base of cognitive types; thus we should regard them as having every-day communicative character. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore this specific two-fold understanding of qualia in the context of Eco’s and Peirce’s semiotic.

AUTHOR

MARTIN ŠVANTER Faculty of Humanities. Charles University svantner.m[at]seznam.cz

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Semiotics and the Something A Pragmatist Perspective on the Debate on Realism

Rossella Fabbrichesi

“I think that the almost obsessive subject of my work has been that of how we come to know the world.” (Eco 2004: 193)

1. Being and Reality

1 Since 2010 the philosophical arena has seen the rise of a new battle – maybe, the most ancient battle that philosophy has fought. It is the problem of the status of reality. More precisely, the aim of this battle has been to defend the Existence of Reality against those who have argued that “reality” is only a mode of speech and interpretation. As is known, many important philosophers, both Italian and foreign, have taken part in this battle, and obviously agreements, negotiations, or even unbridgeable differences have emerged. It is also known that it is Maurizio Ferraris who started the debate (first and foremost against himself, namely, against the interpreter of Nietzsche deeply rooted in the hermeneutic and Vattimian faith1), with various volumes and articles, and then with the pugnacious Manifesto of New Realism.2 My intention in this paper is to enter this debate in order to raise a different sort of question, not whether reality exists or doesn’t exist – a strongly commonsensical and therefore not deeply philosophical position – but what we do, what we want to obtain, when we use terms such as ‘real,’ ‘objective,’ ‘given.’ In pragmatist fashion, I would like to ask the same question that Peirce asked 150 years ago: what effects does our belief in reality produce? As Peirce wrote, when we deem something ‘real,’ we mean that that something can cause a certain belief capable of producing relevant practical effects.3 Real things lead me to do certain actions and not others. Thus, the problem of realism must be addressed accordingly: what are the conceivably practical habits and behaviors that the belief in the existence of reality produces? The problem is then to distinguish true beliefs (that is, those beliefs that remove doubt and allow me to act with

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confidence) from false beliefs (that is, purely fictional beliefs with no effective grasp on the world)4.

2 There is no need here to rehash the terms of this well-known debate. Rather, my main purpose here is to sketch Umberto Eco’s position, which stands out as usual for its argumentative subtlety and composure. My aim is, then, to try to reconstruct the pragmatist matrix of Eco’s thought and to show how realism could benefit from being put in dialogue with a different philosophical framework, namely, from being reinterpreted in light of the pragmatism of Peirce and of Eco’s reception of that tradition. At the same time, I will highlight some elements that Eco has overlooked, due to his focus on Peirce’s semiotics and not on his broader philosophical, phenomenological, and pragmaticist philosophy.

3 Ferraris aptly describes his ‘new realism’ in the following words: there are unamendable facts that deserve respect and deference.5 These facts are not interpretable, they simply are. His polemical target is not idealism, but the postmodern constructionism whose noble and long genealogy goes from Kant to Goodman and Foucault through Nietzsche and pragmatism.6 As Eco will rightly point out, the fuse arming the realist fire is the will to turn to ashes the Nietzschean statement, “There are no facts, only interpretations,”7 a view that Ferraris himself explained and endorsed at one point.8

4 But let’s focus on Eco. It is important to stress that Eco came to an original philosophical position already at the end of the 1990s in his Kant and the Platypus, a position neither obsequious to the hermeneutical theses prevalent at that time, nor naively realist. Eco proved to be not only the father of Italian semiotics but also a philosopher in his own right, one of the most lucid and original of our recent history. The first chapter, entitled “On Being,” is a treatise on metaphysics, ontology, gnoseology, and also philosophical semiotics – or interpretative semiotics, as he preferred to say following the suggestions of some of his interpreters.9 This treatise, which could be rightly read as a refined interpretation of Aristotle, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Peirce and the Medievals, curiously hasn’t been read or quoted by professional philosophers, maybe because professional philosophers might be sometimes a somewhat self-referential caste slow at welcoming outsiders. Nevertheless, the first chapter is full of considerations capable of putting in their corner even the wariest of philosophers – above all, his friend Gianni Vattimo, who is gracefully demolished in these pages. I will try now to be up to the problems that were addressed there.

5 As Heidegger put at the beginning of Being and Time, being is the oldest philosophical problem and at the same time the most neglected. While things are different, they all are, as Aristotle already remarked. Thus, Aristotle continued, being is said in many ways. Leibniz would claim later, followed by Heidegger, that the most radical question philosophy has ever asked is “Why is there being rather than nothing?”

6 Eco begins from here and shows with keen lucidity and supreme reasonableness that actually this is not a radical question because, even if we wanted to assume that the verb being is involved in every proposition (but Sapir and Whorf have already casted some doubt on this, by proving that the languages of some ‘primitive’ peoples do not use the copula or terministic references10) it remains true that it cannot be dialectically opposed to anything else, to the nothing, because it designates ‘what there is,’ the untrascendable horizon that allows us to speak of anything, the ‘that,’ as James used to

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say, and not the ‘what’ that qualifies it with different attributions and qualifications. “Therefore, there is being because we can pose the question of being, and thus being comes before every question, and therefore before any answer and every definition.” (Eco 2000: 19). It is a term with “an unlimited extension and a null intension” (ibid.: 10; original emphasis). Spinoza, appropriately quoted by Eco a few pages later, wrote: Substance (which is the modern name for being) is causa sui, is infinite, incircumscribable, its essence implies its existence, it is self-explanatory, it is expression of all its modes etc. Eco translates in the following way: “being is its own fundamental principle.” (Ibid.: 20). In it we speak, even though we can never speak about it thematically, simply because we are expressions of it, internal modalities, pure affections, as Spinoza has taught once for all. Being (which, contrary to Heidegger’s conviction, doesn’t throw in the world, which does not reveal or hide, which is neither clearing or concealing, but is rather the “amniotic fluid” (ibid.: 18) in which life, every life, is made possible) can be identified with the beings (or entities). In Spinozian terms: the substance is nothing else than its modes, and it is possible to say “that it is a totality that includes not only what is physically around us but also what is below, or inside, or around or before or after, and founds it and/or justifies it” (ibid.: 11). This is a crucial passage, perfect for what I am trying to claim here: being surrounds and penetrates us, it is natura naturans and natura naturata, foundational and founded at the same time, it is inscribed and circumscribed,11 it is not more outside of us than inside of us, because every thing is, despite the differences (in a certain way, it is even if it is not). We should not think then, as Descartes did, that we are ‘spiritual’ substances in a world of ‘material’ substances; rather, we are the (only, indivisible, infinite) Substance, as Spinoza put it. Being doesn’t lie before us waiting to be known; it is rather the inexhaustible source of all possible intelligibility and attribution. We should be careful, then, as Eco in Ch. 1.3 reminds us, that the problem of being cannot be reduced to that of the external world; the latter is a topic constructed by metaphysical reason, the former concerns the primary evidence (iconic-perceptive for Eco) that something is given. If I am in the world, the world is not perceived immediately as external, present in front of me, in front of an ‘I’ understood as an interiority (think about the infant, who knows nothing about these distinctions); if I am in the world, I am the world, tout court. The I is not a spectator who looks at the world out there as from a window, Calvino wrote: “the I is world that looks at the world.”12 “All this should immediately make clear that the problem of being cannot be reduced to the problem of the reality of the world. Whether what we call the outside World, or the Universe, is or is not, or whether it is the effect of a malign spirit, does not in any way affect the primary evidence that there is ‘something’ somewhere.” (Eco 2000: 18).

2. The Sign, the Immediate Object, and the Dynamical Object

7 My problem is the following: why should we call this pure That, this pure Being, a ‘Something’ (Eco 2000: 12)? Already in the choice of the word one highlights the what (some-thing) that inhabits it: the something expresses the alleged what of the ‘being,’ not the pure that of its being there. It is true that Eco explains that in order to speak of the being we have to bend it to our linguistic categories, that being becomes a philosophical problem the moment that we speak of it (thus the ecstatic evidence of the

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being is lived as a pure experience, but is inevitably said with the words of human discourse, in which the original ‘purity’ is lost). Thus, that being is Something is highlighted in Ch. 1.1 through Leibniz’s famous statement (in the form: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’).

8 What I would call the kenosis, the lowering, of being, continues in the same chapter through the identification of being with Peirce’s Dynamical Object (the “real” object that is “causation” or “influence” (EP2: 409) of the signifying character of the sign) and, finally, with that Something that Eco ironically defines “Something-that-sets-to- kicking-us” (Eco 2000: 14), where the use of Heidegger’s esoteric hyphened writing style is supposed to win the philosophers’ attention. The Something says “Talk!” to us – or “Talk about me!” or again, “Take me into consideration!” (Ibid.); it is, above all, a problem of perceptual evidence, and it is for this reason that the book is devoted in large part to the problem of perception and iconism. The Dynamical Object is thus what compels us to begin the process of semiosis, it is the Something that demands to be given a place in our language.

9 Why is this interpretation not fully satisfactory? What in it seems to make the beautiful insights of the outset somewhat weaker? I believe the answer is the following: here the Being, understood as Something, is understood after the form of a Thing, above all External – a thing that activates some indexes, some reactions, some ‘primary attentions’ – an external objectuality that produces, determines, accelerates the engine of the production of signs. In other words, we have already passed the phenomenological level in which we encounter what is given the way it is given: we are at the level of the Ego vs Non-Ego, as Peirce would say.13 Perhaps it is true that Peirce, in a certain phase of his life, considered the process of production of semiosis as generated by a real “object,” external to the architecture of signs, according to the canonical model sketched by Massimo Bonfantini in his Introduction to Semiotica (Bonfantini 1980: xxxv). However, as I will try to show, the distinction between Immediate Object and Dynamical Object is internal to the play among the categories and was not modeled after the Kantian phenomenon-noumenon framework: for Peirce, reality as a whole, or being as incircumscribable and all-penetrating event, cannot be grasped, perceived, or given if not as a sign. A sign produced in relation to an object, to a Something, following Eco, but through the mediation of an Interpretant, which remains, in my view, the real engine of the unlimited semiosis. There is no doubt that Peirce writes explicitly that the sign is determined by an Object and determines an Interpretant (CP 8.343), which seems to suggest that there is a process according to which the sign is always produced by a terminus a quo that resides within the horizon of experience. Yet, it is also true that in On a New List of Categories (EP1: 1-10) the interpreting representation is the one that mediates and at the same time establishes the possibility of referring to mediated terms, so that without its intervention there would be no “unification” of the “manifold of Substance itself” (to follow the terminology of the New List), or no “significance” by putting “together the different subjects as the sign represents them as related” (CP 8.179). It is the triadic relation, activated by the interpreting sign, which makes visible a Dynamical and objectual pole. It is in the semiotic circle that the distances between sign and object become evident, while being always recomposed through the mediation of the interpretant.

10 By remaining faithful to the pragmatic maxim, we can say that the meaning of a sign lies in its appeal to an Interpretant, especially a Final Logical Interpretant, that is, a

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habit. The meaning of a sign resides in its conceivable effects, in its being directed to a terminus ad quem, which can be conceived, as we have seen, as a Dynamical Object, understood however as what is gained at the end of a potentially limitless semiotic process (CP 8.183), and not as something that is supposed to be in front of me waiting to be faithfully mirrored.14 The object is the “cause” of the sign only insofar as it is found as the purport (CP 5.429, 5.412) of the same sign, which has the form of a pragmatic habit of response. We could say that the immediate object is dynamized at each semiotic-interpretative step, tracing a parabolic trajectory (from the cause to the purport and back) which keeps moving the interpretative horizon more and more beyond the limits already achieved.

11 My intention here is to play Eco against himself: in his early writings, the referent – in complete agreement with Peirce’s thought (which is different from de Saussure precisely on this point!) – was considered of little or no importance for semiotics, since a semiotics worthy of its name should have not occupied itself with problems such as the status of reality, external things, facts, or givens, considered as extra interpretationem. For things, facts, givens, were to be considered only as signs internal to the linguistic and semantic practices that denoted and connoted them now in a certain way, now in another. The first paragraph of the first chapter of Le forme del contenuto is entitled accordingly “L’equivoco del referente (The Misunderstanding of the Referent)” (Eco 1971) and warned against the confusion, caused in part by Frege’s analyses, between meaning and referent. If a semiotic science existed, it would have been to deal with the signs independently from their relations to objects (ibid.: 31).

12 We can certainly say that Eco’s thought, just like Peirce’s, has evolved from an early semiotic-hermeneutical and definitely conventionalist phase (I don’t want to call it idealistic, as Maldonado said in the debate on iconism, see Fabbrichesi (2017: 312-3); Eco would have been offended by this, but not Peirce, given that he spoke of idealrealism), to a more realistic phase. Nevertheless, the problem remains: either we consider being as a primum that cannot be articulated, which not only surrounds and fills with awe our outlook on the creation, but also inhabits it from inside and feeds its need to find a meaning, or we consider it as a force that resists our attention, that compels it in this or that direction, which says many ‘No’s’, and highlights its own difference from our interpretations (above all the wrong ones). In other words, either being is the whole, or it is that part of the being there that is before me while I examine it. But being, in a perspective such as Peirce’s, is not divided in distinct realities, it is never a difference: on the contrary it is diffused continuity, a synechistic substance that, like Spinoza’s, doesn’t imply dualisms between matter and mind, inside and outside, yes and no. The problem is not whether to admit the referent in semiotics; rather, the problem is to recognize the philosophical and metaphysical dimension of semiotics. As Paolucci reminds us, “the notion of habit founded in synechism transcends all distinction between the dynamic object and the immediate object, between mind and matter, between the semiotic order of ideas and the ontological order of things, thereby invalidating their differences in nature” (Paolucci 2017a: 262). 15 “Ordo et connexio idearum idem est, ac ordo et connexio rerum” (Spinoza, Ethica, II, Prop. 7).

13 The ‘idem’ brings us back to iconicity, which plays a fundamental role in Eco’s book on Kant and in his entire production. We could say that being, seen from this perspective, is the place of a primary iconism, of a correspondence already perfectly realized, as we

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read in Eco (2000, Ch. 2.8.2). Every being reveals a “protosemiotic disposition” to encounter, even a sort of Medieval adaequatio, an aptitude to adapting not to what is external to it, but what is its own.16 Perceptual processes and primary acknowledgment processes are rooted in this disposition to the encounter with the world – what Peirce defined as a form of tropism toward truth, or lume naturale – and are certainly related to the synechistic philosophy of the late Peirce. I have dealt with the problem of iconism in my contribution to the Library volume (Fabbrichesi 2017). I refer to this work only because Eco responded to what I wrote there by noting that before 2017 “I had not connected my idea of primary iconism to that of negative realism, or at least it had not seemed as clear as it does to me now” (Eco 2017: 329).17

3. Negative Realism and Pragmatism

14 Let’s follow now this important direction on the path of realism, what Eco has called “negative realism.” If we go back to Kant and the Platypus, we find a central section in Ch. 1 entitled “Semiotics and the Something.” Contrary to the trenchant statements of Le forme del contenuto, the referent now seems to acquire a fundamental role also for semiotics. What is that something that compels us to produce signs? What is the terminus a quo that forces us to enter the world as linguistic and symbolic animals? While semiotics deals primarily with the terminus ad quem that we cast in all the possible encyclopedic modes of our speech, it cannot nevertheless overlook, as Eco reminds us, the inquiry into that something that awakens our attention by imposing itself as a novelty and an exception to our consolidated systems of reference. However, again, didn’t we say that being cannot be articulated, that it has unlimited extension and no intension, and that it can be identified with “what is below, or inside, or around or before or after, and founds it and/or justifies it” (Eco 2000: 11)?

15 Maybe it does not make much sense to distinguish something a quo and something ad quem outside the semiotic chain, or to separate the strike that sparks the semiotic process from the construct of its signifying referent. In fact, these aspects are distinct, but only at the phenomenological and not at the ontological level.18 The process of semiosis is an unlimited process, which has no beginning (a quo) nor end (ad quem), and in which every interpretant becomes in turn a new sign within a new semiotic chain that moves the reference-object always a little further on – “this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into action between pairs” (CP 5.484). Maybe when we speak of the Something that kicks us we are putting ourselves at a different level from that of the pure Being (which for Peirce is pure Firstness), or of pure Semiosis (Thirdness); maybe here we are dealing with Secondness (the Non Ego opposed to the Ego, cf. 5.57). Only in this light, I submit, what follows acquires a more complete sense and remains more faithful to Peirce’s thought, so many times invoked by Eco.

16 Always in the same chapter we read: “A Dynamical Object drives us to produce a representamen, in a quasi-mind this produces an Immediate Object, which in turn is translatable into a potentially infinite series of interpretants and sometimes, through the habit formed in the course of the interpretative process, we come back to the Dynamical Object, and we make something of it.” (Eco 2000: 13; my emphasis). This idea is elaborated in connection with negative, or “minimal,” realism, as Eco writes in his late works and eventually in the intellectual autobiography contained in the Library posthumous volume: “I also think that my notion of a minimal realism can be

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translated in terms of the philosophy of Peirce. As I have already said, for Peirce every one of our inquiries, as well as our perceptual explorations of the surrounding world, is elicited by a dynamical object. We do not know it if not through immediate objects, which are signs and their interpretants, and the series of interpretants never stops, producing a process of unlimited semiosis. However, by producing these interpretants we grow a habit, that is to say, an ability to act upon surrounding reality, and the proof that a given series of interpretants works is given by the fact that through our habit we can modify reality. If we do not succeed in this enterprise, the very possibility of a failure means that there is something controlling and limiting our interpretations.” (Eco 2017: 54; original emphasis). Even more clearly, Eco writes: “The process of unlimited semiosis stops when we produce a habit, that allows us to come to grips with the reality (the Dynamical Object).”19 (Eco 2017: 46). The second emphasis is mine (but the first is Eco’s!): the main problem is that of prehension between thought and reality, as Whitehead used to say.

17 So, it is with respect to pragmatism especially that we find a promising line of research for better explaining Eco’s theory of negative realism.

4. Being and Doing

18 I try to formulate the issue in the following way, by emphasizing the quotations that I have just read: Being is not a substantial Something; it is neither static nor “external.” Being coincides with doing,20 as Eco just told us in his quotation from Kant and the Platypus (ibid.: 13). The transaction with the world does not produce a belief in ‘things,’ obtained through propositional representations; rather, it enables certain possible actions in a certain context of experience. Peirce already explained this in a crystal- clear passage on the logic of propositions: “The peculiarity of this definition [of the word lithium] is that it tells you what the word lithium denotes by prescribing what you have to do in order to gain a perceptual acquaintance with the object of the word.” (CP 2.330). It turns out, then, that the habit is the only ‘real’ (Dynamical!) thing with which we have to deal. “The definition of belief [by Bain] is that upon which a man is prepared to act” (EP2: 399), wrote Peirce, by adding that pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary to that definition. Belief and action, thought and fact have a very tight connection, characterized by continuity and simultaneous identity: practice is thus the primum, the form of life within which we speak, act, and gain certainties. Objects and subjects, contexts of knowledge and languages are given only within these practices. The Interpretant is for Peirce the pragmatic habit of response that through its use guarantees the comprehension of a meaning, or the truth and reality of what we know.

19 Note that I am not claiming that real objects do not exist; rather, I am saying that they appear in my perceptual field and awaken my attention only in reference to their possible (and conceivable) use. I want to repeat here the famous example of the psychologist Lurija, quoted by Ong in a famous book.21 The Soviet scientist asked a farmer about the distinction between log, ax, and saw. The farmer, after struggling to understand the question, responded that they were actually one and the same thing because they were involved and used in a single action: “The saw will saw the log and hatcher will chop it.” Objects are never given apart from the practices in which they are involved.22 Eco reminds us of this point when he repeats Richard Rorty’s example of the screwdriver, also contained in his intellectual autobiography. Richard Rorty, in a

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public talk at Cambridge University, denied that the use made of a screwdriver to tighten screws is imposed by the object itself since we can also use it to open a package. Eco objected that “a screwdriver can also serve to open a package but it is inadvisable to use it for rummaging about your ear […] There is something in the conformation both of my body and of the screwdriver [again the adaequatio as foundation of primary iconism!] that prevents me from interpreting the latter at my whim.” (Eco 2017: 48). Shortly after, he claims that even the most radical of Nietzscheans will never deny the physical presence of a table before me, even though he will add maybe that it becomes object of knowledge and speech only if it is interpreted as desk, as object of autoptic dissection, as ensemble of atoms, and so on. He also notes: “I agree but my objection is that this table cannot be interpreted as a vehicle that can be used to travel from Manhattan to Poughkeepsie.” (Eco 2017: 48-9).

20 This is where the topic of negative realism becomes crucial. “Getting back to Rorty’s screwdriver, my objection did not deny that it can permit manifold interpretations […]. A screwdriver responds positively (so to speak) to many of my possible interpretations but in certain cases it says ‘no.’ This sort of refusal opposed by the objects of our world is the basis of my prudent idea of negative realism.” (Eco 2017: 51; emphasis mine). I have underlined the pragmatic word “respond”: the screwdriver has to respond to my solicitations and my conduct has to be practical and effective in relation to my purport. As I said earlier, my practice with that tool has to be translated into a habit, capable of optimizing and changing my transaction with the world. Eco’s realism is clearly a pragmatic form of realism.

21 I go back now for a moment to Kant and the Platypus, where the incipient theses of negative realism appeared in the claim that there are some lines of resistance of being, a claim that is amply rehashed, confirmed, and developed in the final autobiography (Eco 2017: ch. xv). Eco’s position on this point is well known: being has a hard core, understood not as an inner kernel that at some point, after much digging, we will manage to unveil, but as a fault line, as possibility of flow, as in the grain of wood or marble. It is a disposition to be read or framed in a certain way, a mening, as Hjelmslev says, rather than a meaning; a sense, for sure, but more understood as a direction that cannot be overlooked when we try to understand the Something. Eco reminds us that Hjelmslev accepted the word ‘purport’ as the English translation of his mening. This is not surprising for us, given the fundamental role that the idea of purport plays in Peirce’s pragmatist thought: the pragmatic maxim was in fact meant to exactly clarify a sign’s rational purport.23 The lines of resistance are lines of propensity, as Eco adds in a work quoted by Paolucci.24 Maybe being, Eco remarks, does not have one sense, but many; maybe it does not imply compulsory directions, but certainly certain directions remain dead ends (Eco 2000: 53). Being says very clear No!s. A screwdriver resists being used as a Q-tip. A table refuses to roll on the highway to Milano. “Let us try rather to identify some lines of resistance, perhaps mobile, vagabond, that cause the discourse to seize up […] That being places limits on the discourse through which we establish ourselves in its horizon is not the negation of hermeneutic activity: instead it is the condition for it.” (Eco 2000: 50; original emphasis).

22 Here, being is not the incircumscribable “that,” but it is something like a hindrance for thought and language, a schism – Peirce used to speak of a “Non-Ego, the strange intruder, in his abrupt entrance” (CP 5.53), which suddenly stretches apart from the Ego, which is simply the expected idea suddenly broken off, something that appears in

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place of the expected object. However, as I mentioned earlier, Eco is always very subtle and is aware of this change of direction. Did I say earlier that being always presents itself positively and that the nothing is the effect of language, while now I state that being opposes clear No!s to our thought and conduct? Not quite: a closed door is a No! for those who want to force it, but it can also be a Yes for those who want to keep some privacy or protect from an intruder. “To us who capriciously would like to live on, death appears as a limit, but for the organism it arrives when things go exactly as they must.” (Eco 2000: 56).

23 Being never tells us no, except in our metaphor. “Simply, faced with a demanding question on our part, it does not give the answer we would have wished.” (Ibid.) It is always a problem of expectation and surprise (Brioschi 2015), of practices that are more or less confirmed by experience, of regularity or discontinuity in interpretation. It is worth noting that in his writings on synechism Peirce warns us that it is always based on a discontinuity that we can grasp the underlying continuity (cf. CP 6.168).

5. Reality as what Awaits in the Future

24 We are now pushed back to the problem of practice. Reality as objectivity does not exist in itself independently from the framework based on which, for instance, ‘real’ is a good and productive idea – this is so more for the scientist than for the shaman. Peirce himself reminds us that the term and concept of being (ens) is the result of a strenuous metaphysical work over the centuries. Real “is a conception which we must first have had when we discovered that there was an unreal, an illusion; that is, when we first corrected ourselves” (EP1: 52). And he adds: it is that “ens” that will conform to the object of research in the long run, the truth of public inquiry, which doesn’t belong to the private idiosyncrasy. “The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you.” (Ibid.). Not independent, however, from thought “in general,” from “public” truth, or from the truth of the community that makes a certain belief true.

25 Don’t we have here, however, a twofold theory of the real, namely, real understood as what will be confirmed as terminus ad quem and real as what says no to our incorrect interpretations (or terminus a quo)? We have already reached a similar impasse when discussing Eco’s account of the classification of objects in Peirce’s semiotics. Now, in conclusion, we have the opportunity to clarify these seeming contradictions by appealing to Peirce’s phaneroscopy and by stressing again that the fault line is such only from a phenomenological, not ontological, point of view.

26 The study of the phaneron, or phenomenon of experience (which is not the same thing as the study of ‘reality,’ as any philosopher knows and as Peirce underlines; it is the immediate evidence we experience every day of our life25) leads us to find in it three aspects that, although different, are absolutely indistinct. Let’s take the example of an earthquake that bursts into my life unexpectedly, an example of hard, unamendable, brute reality, not an interpretation! It happens as pure sensation; it is a quality without relations, pure experience, neither subjective nor objective, an original and emerging Firstness (I am thrown around and I can’t even ask what is going on); however, it also happens as shock, constraint, Secondness (here’s the intrusion of brute reality: I am bleeding, I hurt) and as laborious cognitive mediation (I understand what is going on: it

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is that cataclysmic event usually called ‘earthquake.’ They have told me about it multiple times, but now I’m living it on my skin, poor me!). It is then a problem of ‘prehension’ of what happens in terms of complex categories, in which First is not prior from the chronological point of view, but from the point of view of the structure of experience – experience in its immediate and spontaneous dimension. Here Peirce presents to us a semiotics built upon phenomenology, not a realist/empiricist ontology. For this reason, when I refer to the existence of “real facts” (it was a real earthquake!), I am already working at a different level, the level in which I reflect upon the experience I have had and give a name to it. I have undergone the shock against the events, against the Non-Ego, as Peirce says; let’s call it simply “existence,” an affair of blind force, a Dynamical reaction (cf. CP 1.329). But the encounter with “reality” has a different nature: it has an interpretative, segnic, relational nature.26

27 Thus, Peirce distinguishes being as Secondness from being as Thirdness (besides pure and unrelated Firstness). Existence is the brute fact that resists (CP 1.431), it is the acting and being acted upon by something that is forced upon us: this is the meaning of the word “real,” Peirce writes in What is a Sign? (EP 2: 4-5). 27 But the real is not only what exists in the mode of brute opposition, which tells us blunt No!s where we would like to be welcomed, where we have to reconfigure our conceptual orders to sustain the interruption of the “strange intruder” that generates surprise and bewilderment. Real is also “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate” (EP1: 139), “the normal product of mental action and not [the] incognizable cause of it” (EP1: 91), it is the cause of belief with all its sensible effects (EP1: 137); in one expression – these are all quotations from Peirce’s 1868-1878 writings on his cognitive and pragmatist semiotics – reality “is an event indefinitely future” (EP1: 64). We could say that Peirce distinguishes brute existence hic et nunc from the persistence of the habits – but both these experiences live together, are insistent, in one and the same phaneron or crystal of apparent visibility.28

28 We find in these reflections the play between Immediate and Dynamical Object that accompanies the semiotic considerations of the late Peirce: if the Dynamical Object is the real object as purely existent, as the cause of the semiotic process, the Immediate Object is the real object as determined through precise semiotic forms. Nevertheless, there is no way to grasp the former apart from the mediation of the latter. Reversely, as Eco observes, the latter can be constituted by semiotic interpretations so crystalized to become substantial “inveterate habits” (CP 6.613). In this sense, it appears as something ‘given’ and dynamically elusive. This datum may well be a result (of another interpretation) but will, in any case, be a present extra-interpretationem event. “Precisely because one supports a theory of interpretation, it is necessary to admit that something is given to be interpreted.” (Eco 2007: 463; original emphasis). In a synechistic perspective, then, there is a circularity between interpretations and givens; in a phenomenological perspective it is possible to distinguish events (not facts) of different nature, which however remain different aspects of the same whole of experience.

29 Let me now move to the last step of my argument. In trying to find a precise definition of the term ‘real’ Peirce uses a terminology that we could explain in the following way: reality is a habit of expectation, capable of being dynamically organized and of placing one’s meaning into the indefinite future. This means that the real is what life has forced me to recognize, but also what my habits of expectation lead me to hope will happen in the long run. In a 1904 letter to James (CP 8.284, see also 8.330), Peirce

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remarks that according to “pragmatic idealism” (namely, the true idealism), “reality consists in the future” (ibid.). I define this process, he says, “mellonization,” from the Greek mellon: the being about to do, to be, or to suffer. “I mean that operation of logic by which what is conceived as having been is conceived as repeated or extended indefinitely into what always will be (or what will some day be…).” (Ibid.). “Therefore to say that it is the world of thought that it is real is, when properly understood, to assert emphatically the reality of the public world of the indefinite future as against our past opinions of what it was to be.” (CP 8.284; my emphasis).

30 Those who are familiar with pragmatism will recognize here the same terms of the pragmatic maxim, or rather of pragmaticism: what is the meaning of a belief? It is to produce “a tendency – the habit – actually to behave in a similar way under similar circumstances in the future” (CP 5.487; original emphasis).29 I also like to think about it (always relying upon the possible meaning of the word expectation) as a habit of hope: the hope that the community of Interpreters will continue to reasonably interpret the given event as ‘real’ above any assignable limit. In this sense, and only in this sense – my comment has nothing polemical against Ferraris’s Manifesto, but wants rather to integrate it – we owe “respect” to this class of ‘facts’ because they ‘charitably’ offer themselves to our interpretation and because we can nourish the faith that our interpretation can be true (cf. CP 2.655).

31 Peirce would agree with Eco entirely on the ideas of surprise and resistance as bases for our experience of being. However, Peirce would invite Eco to refrain from separating the real as Secondness from the real as Thirdness, the real as surprise (CP 5.51ff) from the real as expectation (CP 5.53-57).30 They are two different qualities of experience, which lead to the formation of habits, namely, two different but interconnected ways of being affected; nevertheless, both are and the process of knowing is constituted in the constant transit from one to the other (together with Firstness, cf. CP 5.91). Experience is a continuity in actu while our thought is used to working with Cartesian categories: Cartesian thought works as the ax and separates, distinguishes, univocally defines reality and thought, external and internal, sign and object. The weakness of the debate on realism lies in its assumption. We should not refer to the ‘external reality’ as to a fundamentum inconcussum, but rather to our daily experience. As Peirce explains, in this light, acts, and not facts (opposed to interpretations), would appear as real; not the facts, but the habits, the practices connoting the power to act of every being in the universe, as Spinoza would put it.31 The Something is complex and categorially diversified; to lose one of its qualities is to lose the totality of the phenomenon of experience.

32 As the farmer observed by Lurija reminds us, log, saw, and ax (or, in Eco’s terms, being, something, and sign) are not different events: they are the same event, offered in its different experiential tones. Therefore, we shouldn’t trust the rigid distinction that our language projects on ‘real’ things, distinguishing the bearer of the name from its actions; rather, we should conceive of our commerce with the world through the lenses of the unity of our practices and of the context of acknowledgement in which their ‘reality’ is shaped and structured, ready to start the journey toward the future of infinite semiosis.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

BONFANTINI Massimo, (1980), Introduzione. La semiotica cognitiva di Peirce, in C. S. Peirce, Semiotica, Turin, Einaudi.

BRIOSCHI Maria Regina, (2015), “Il concetto di realtà secondo Peirce: tra attesa e sorpresa,” in Massimo A. Bonfantini, Rossella Fabbrichesi & Salvatore Zingale (eds), Su Peirce. Interpretazioni, ricerche, prospettive, Milan, Bompiani (“Il campo semiotico”).

CALCATERRA Rosa Maria, (2015), “Reality in Practice,” Esercizi Filosofici, 10, [www2.units.it/ eserfilo/].

CALVINO Italo, (1983), Palomar, Turin, Einaudi.

DELEUZE Gilles, (1968), Spinoza et le problème de l’expression, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit.

ECO Umberto, (1971), Le forme del contenuto, Milan, Bompiani.

ECO Umberto, (2000), Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, trans. Alastair McEwen, New York, Harcourt.

ECO Umberto, (2004), “A response by Eco,” in Charlotte Ross & Rochelle Sibley (eds), Illuminating Eco: on the Boundaries of Interpretation, Burlington, Ashgate Publishing Co.

ECO Umberto, (2007), “La soglia e l’infinito. Peirce e l’iconismo primario,” in Claudio Paolucci (ed.), Studi di semiotica interpretativa, reprinted in Dall’albero al labirinto, Milan, Bompiani.

ECO Umberto, (2012), “Di un realismo negativo,” in Mario De Caro & Maurizio Ferraris (eds), Bentornata realtà. Il nuovo realismo in discussione, Turin, Einaudi.

ECO Umberto, (2013), “Su un realismo negativo,” in Massimo A. Bonfantini (ed.), Quale realismo?, Milan, ATI Editore.

ECO Umberto, (2017), “Intellectual Autobiography,” in Sara G. Beardsworth & Randall E. Auxier (eds), The Philosophy of Umberto Eco, Chicago, The Library of Living Philosophers, Open Court.

FABBRICHESI Rossella, (2017), “Eco, Peirce, and Iconism: A Philosophical Inquiry,” in Sara G. Beardsworth & Randall E. Auxier (eds), The Philosophy of Umberto Eco, The Library of Living Philosophers, Open Court, Chicago, followed by U. Eco, Reply to Rossella Fabbrichesi.

FERRARIS Maurizio, (1988), Storia dell’Ermeneutica, Milan, Bompiani.

FERRARIS Maurizio, (2011), “Nuovo realismo FAQ,” Nòema, 2, [riviste.unimi.it/index.php/noema].

FERRARIS Maurizio, (2014), Manifesto of New Realism, Albany, New York, Suny Press.

JULLIEN François, (1992), La propension des choses. Pour une histoire de l’efficacité en Chine, Paris, Éditions du Seuil.

MADDALENA Giovanni, (2017), “Scientific and not Scientistic: The Rich Realism of Pragmatism,” Rivista di storia della filosofia, n. 3 (“Pragmatism. Some New Ways of Thinking for an Old Name,” edited by Rossella Fabbrichesi, in collaboration with Maria Regina Brioschi), 401-14.

NIETZSCHE Friedrich, (1998), On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. by D. Smith, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

NIETZSCHE Friedrich, (2005), La volontà di Potenza, ed. by M. Ferraris & P. Kobau, Milan, Bompiani.

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ONG Walter J., (1982), Orality and Literacy, New York, Routledge.

PAOLUCCI Claudio, (2015), “Logica dei relativi, semiotica e fenomenologia. Per un Peirce non- standard,” in Massimo A. Bonfantini, Rossella Fabbrichesi & Salvatore Zingale (eds), Su Peirce. Interpretazioni, ricerche, prospettive, Milan, Bompiani (“Il campo semiotico”).

PAOLUCCI Claudio, (2017a), “Eco, Peirce, and the Anxiety of Influence: The Most Kantian of Thinkers,” in Sara G. Beardsworth & Randall E. Auxier (eds), The Philosophy of Umberto Eco, Chicago, The Library of Living Philosophers, Open Court.

PAOLUCCI Claudio, (2017b), Umberto Eco, Milan, Feltrinelli.

PEIRCE Charles Sanders, (1931-1958), Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 1-6, C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss (eds.). Vol. 7-8, A. Burks (ed.), Cambridge, Harvard University Press. (I quote with the usual abbreviation CP followed by the volume and paragraph number.)

PEIRCE Charles Sanders, (1992-1998), The Essential Peirce, vol. 1-2, edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel and The Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press. (I quote with the usual abbreviation EP followed by the volume and page number.)

SINI Carlo, (2009), Ethics of Writing, trans. by S. Benso & B. Schroeder, Albany, New York, Suny Press.

STANGO Marco, (2015), “La logica del riconoscimento ontologico in Charles S. Peirce,” in Massimo A. Bonfantini, Rossella Fabbrichesi & Salvatore Zingale (eds), Su Peirce. Interpretazioni, ricerche, prospettive, Milan, Bompiani (“Il campo semiotico”).

WHORF Lee Benjamin, (1964), Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, edited by John Carroll, Cambridge, MIT Press.

NOTES

1. Cf. the substantial study Storia dell’Ermeneutica (1988) and his important edition (with P. Kobau) of F. Nietzsche, La volontà di potenza (2005). 2. Cf. Ferraris 2014. 3. C.S. Peirce, How to Make Our Ideas Clear, in EP1: 136-8. 4. See, for a pragmatist interpretation of the theme of realism, Calcaterra 2015 and Maddalena 2017. 5. Cf. Ferraris 2014, Ch. 1 and Ferraris 2011. 6. As Ferraris makes clear in the Manifesto (2014: 4-15), his polemical targets are the postmodern ironization, the desublimation, or emphasis on the desire and the drives of the body, and above all the de-objectification leading to the skeptical and relativistic doubt toward any project of ontological foundation. Some consequences are the identification of being and knowledge, namely, the confusion between ontology and epistemology, and the rejection of the non- negotiability of that aspect of reality ‘out there’ that seems to stubbornly constrain our action. 7. Cf. Nietzsche 2005, aphorism 481. On this see Eco (2017: 46). 8. Ferraris edited an edition of The Will to Power, from which Nietzsche’s statement is taken (cf. n. 1). 9. Paolucci 2017b has amply underlined this aspect. 10. Cf. Whorf 1964. 11. The reference is to Nicholas of Cusa’s polygon, so dear to Eco. Cf. La soglia e l’infinito (Eco 2007: 484).

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12. Cf. Calvino (1983: 116). 13. Cf. CP 1.332. The fact that Peirce speaks of two types of object has to do with the determination of Secondness, in Peircean phaneroscopic terms. Immediate Object is “the Object as represented in the sign,” the idea (CP 8.314), what we know about the sign through “collateral experience” (ibid.); the Dynamical Object is instead defined as the Real Object. With respect to the latter, Peirce clarifies that “perhaps the object is altogether fictive, I must choose a different term”; as a consequence, Peirce will refer to it as “something which, from the nature of things, the Sign cannot express, which it can only indicate and leave the interpreter to find out by collateral experience” (ibid. ; original emphasis), or, following the definition of ‘real’ present in the 1878 writings, “the Object in such relations as unlimited and final study would show it to be” (8.183). 14. Maybe the problem can be framed as Eco does (2017: 48; original emphasis): “I do not believe that even the most fundamentalist followers of weak thought really think that there are no facts at all since to make an interpretation one must have something to interpret, and if the series of interpretations has no final terminus ad quem it must have at least a terminus a quo – a starting point that, however matters stand, we can call a fact.” 15. In this sense, Eco distances himself from Peirce, as the authors explains a few lines above: “This is the original Peircean Kantianism of Umberto Eco: interpretations and signs show the world in a certain respect but the world continues to oppose its form to the semiotic form of determination, imposing limits on that which can be said on a semiotic level (negative realism).” (Ibid.: 260). I thank Claudio Paolucci for bringing to my attention this point in a private conversation. 16. This is in line with Peirce, for whom iconicity predisposes to the encounter and to the adequation what emerges from the same ground (cf. CP 2.278). That is to say, it is not the case that there is a field of various events and then the appearance of a likeness between two of them. What is given primarily is the relation, the internal relation, namely, the iconic relation; it is the ground that allows an other (a correlate, an object) to emerge, which in particular respect, order or quality shows itself to be the same (a sign for likeness). As a pure possibility of reference, iconicity is given as a relation that is neither comparative (namely, Secondness) nor interpretational (Thirdness); it does not specify concrete objects but paves the way for their individuation and constitution. It is not the sign that resembles the object ‘out there’; it is the object that announces itself and becomes meaningful in the relations allowed by sign substitution. 17. Eco concluded in his usual caustic tone: “And so Fabbrichesi’s essay has made an original contribution to my understanding of my own ideas.” I would like to point out here that my contribution to the Library volume, in which iconism and negative realism are in fact not connected, was written between 2010 and 2011, when Eco’s position on the matter had not been fully clarified yet. Eco will spell out his position is a series of following papers: “Di un realismo negativo” (2012), and “Su un realismo negativo” (2013). 18. Or at the phaneroscopic level, as Peirce says, namely, at the level of the phaneron, the phenomenon of experience cf. CP 1.284, 304. 19. Eco continues: “At this moment we realize that our interpretations were good and we have reached some truth even though such a certainty is mitigated by the awareness that every discovery of a truth is subject to the principle of fallibilism. Such an underlying notion of truth is at the basis of my idea, as I have already said, that while it is not possible to say when an interpretation is correct or is the only possible, it is always possible to say when it is untenable.” (Ibid.) 20. It is worth noting that this is Spinoza’s position (the substance is potentia agendi, Ethica I, prop. 34), emphasized in Gilles Deleuze’s reading (Spinoza et le problème de l’expression, 1968), and

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also Nietzsche’s position (On the Genealogy of Morals, 1998, Ch. I, 13): “There is no ‘being’ behind the doing, acting, becoming. ‘The doer’ is merely invented after the fact – the act is everything.” 21. The text by Walter Ong to which I refer is Orality and Literacy (1982). I rely here on the version often quoted by Carlo Sini, for instance in Ethics of Writing (2009: 18). 22. This interpretation is put forth by Carlo Sini in several works, for instance Sini (2009, part II). 23. In opposition to James, who stressed the empiricist, non-realist (in the Medieval sense) side of the maxim, Peirce wrote: “It must be admitted in the first place that if pragmaticism really made Doing the Be-all and the End-all of life, that would be its death. For to say that we live for the mere sake of action, as action, regardless of the thought it carries out, would be to say that there is no such thing as a rational purport.” (CP 5.429; see also 3.402, 428, 238, 453, 460). 24. Paolucci (2017a: 259 and n41). La propension de choses is the title of an interesting volume written by the French sinologist François Jullien (1992), devoted to the subject of efficacy and action in China, absolutely comparable in my view to the pragmatist tradition. 25. “By phaneron I mean the collective total of all that is in any way or any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not.” (CP 1.284). 26. “Reality means a kind of non-dependence upon thought, and so it is a cognitionary character, while existence means reaction with the environment, and so it is a dynamic character.” (CP 5.503; original emphasis). 27. “The sense of acting and being acted upon, […] is our sense of the reality of things.” (Ibid.). 28. Cf. the etymology of the word phaneron: what is evident in its brightness. 29. See also CP 5.538: “Let’s use the word habit […] in which it denotes such a specialization, original or acquired […] that he or it will behave, or always tend to behave, in a way describable in general terms upon every occasion that may present itself of a generally describable character.” See also the definition of pragmaticism in Issues of Pragmaticism (EP2: 346): “The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all general modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all the possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol.” 30. See on this Brioschi (2015: 86-9). The volume containing the essay by Brioschi (Su Peirce. Edited by Bonfantini, Zingale, and Fabbrichesi) is the last text that Eco decided to publish in his series “Il campo semiotico.” All the editors, including myself, were very grateful to Eco for this. Moreover, the presentation of the book was one of Eco’s last public interventions. It is even more important – in light of the reading developed in the present paper – to notice that in that occasion Eco expressed much appreciation for Brioschi’s essay and for her interpretation of Peirce’s realism. On these topics, see also Stango 2015 and Paolucci 2015. 31. We should not forget that the pragmatic maxim wants to suggest a new way to define and ascertain the meanings of concepts: not according to the Socratic “What is it?,” but according to the (Spinozian) point of view “What can be done with it in order to obtain knowledge of it?” The earlier example of lithium is crucial here (CP 2.330).

ABSTRACTS

My intention in this paper is to contribute the debate on “realism” in order to raise a different sort of question: not whether ‘reality’ exists or does not exist, but rather what effects does the belief in this or that reality produce (as Peirce put it 150 years ago). I will turn to Eco’s later

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thought, and to his support for a form of ‘negative’ realism, and try to demonstrate how his appeal to Peirce’s distinction between Immediate and Dynamical Object is affected by a common- sense interpretation of what ‘real’ amounts to. Peirce in fact distinguished between the “existence” of facts and their “reality.” The former implies a dynamic of blind force, a dynamical reaction. Yet, “reality consists in the future” (CP 8.284), in the public recognition of what it always will be, or we hope will be, in the long run (Peirce uses the word “mellonization”). In Eco’s work, though, the Being or the Real, seen as pure Something, is understood after the form of a Thing, above all External, which simply says many ‘No’s. Peirce’s pragmaticism leads us further on, concentrating on the concept of habit that is also detectable in Eco’s analysis. We could say that Peirce distinguishes brute existence hic et nunc from the persistence of habits. Acts and dispositions to act, and not facts (as opposed to interpretations) appear as real; and it is in this respect that I think we can find a promising line of research for better explaining Eco’s theory of realism.

AUTHOR

ROSSELLA FABBRICHESI University of Milan rossella.fabbrichesi[at]unimi.it

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The Lost Trail of Dewey Eco’s Problematic Debt to Pragmatism

Robert E. Innis

1. A Problematic Debt

1 Umberto Eco’s philosophical project, which culminates in the development of a systematic and philosophically relevant semiotics, has a perplexing and problematic debt to and link with pragmatism in its many forms. Indeed, his apparent relation to pragmatism as such is in fact quite tangential if we ignore the pivotal role of Peirce in defining and supporting Eco’s explicit semiotic turn. Eco’s appropriation of Peirce was highly selective. It focused predominantly, as one would expect, on central foreground features of Peirce’s theory of signs: the schemas of sign functions, the nature of interpretants, problems surrounding iconism, and, perhaps most importantly, the heuristic fertility of Peirce’s notion of semiotic openness or infinite semiosis for a theory of the interpretation of texts, primarily linguistic but also in an extended sense with respect to aesthetic ‘texts’ in general.

2 Peirce’s metaphysical categories play a negligible role in Eco’s world view, which was expressed already in his early works, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (1988) [hereafter: ATA] and The Open Work (1989) [hereafter: OW]. In these two books much is made of the emergent picture of a decentered cosmos, permeated by forces of cosmic drift that marked the putative radical break with the classical and medieval and even early modern world view. Eco saw the work of James Joyce as a prime linguistic-aesthetic exemplification of the nature and scope of the bewildering effects as well as implications of this turn in our world picture – or at least of our Western world picture rooted in classical Greek philosophy and the type of aesthetics systematized by Aquinas, even if not completely exemplified in other Medieval reflections on art and beauty of a broader phenomenological scope, which Eco examined in his Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, with which I will not be concerned in this essay.

3 However, looked at as a philosopher, Eco did not utilize the analytical tools or engage the full range of concerns of the whole pragmatist tradition to develop a distinctively

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‘pragmatist’ semiotics or even a ‘pragmatist’ aesthetics or ‘pragmatist’ account of experience. The themes of the Jamesian philosophical project of a radical empiricism, with its wide range of concerns extending, developing, and modifying the philosophical thrust of his great Principles of Psychology and mirroring in existential and experiential detail Peirce’s ‘vitally important questions,’ and the descriptive thickness of Mead’s attempt to develop a nuanced pragmatist social psychology, which is clearly linked with a social semiotics and the social matrices of the formation of the semiotic self, play no meaningful role in Eco’s work.

4 Nevertheless some strong links to John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) [hereafter: AE] in Eco’s first two books provoke reflection and can help us situate Eco’s relation to pragmatism. But Dewey plays no important thematic or explicit role in Eco’s work thereafter. Such an absence raises a question about a ‘path not taken’ or a ‘lost trail’ in Eco’s philosophical wanderings and on any attempt to link him, as a philosopher, with pragmatism as a whole, which is not by any means identical with, or represented by, Peirce. Such a situation is all the more perplexing in light of Eco’s remark in his autobiography about the essential formative and liberatory role of Dewey’s Art as Experience in freeing him from the Idealistic premises and tendencies of the Italian philosophical and aesthetic thought of his student days, exemplified in various degrees in the work of his teacher, Luigi Pareyson.

5 Paradoxically, there are substantive links of a phenomenological order between Pareyson and Dewey, once one gets past their different metaphysical premises with their religious implications. Eco’s ‘secular’ turn is paralleled by Dewey’s naturalistic turn, but Dewey turned it into a kind of existential empowerment without the hint of a perhaps not unjustified nostalgia that lingered in Eco. Dewey’s picture of the universe was of a “moving unbalanced balance of things” (Dewey 1925: 341). In such a world, Dewey writes in Human Nature and Conduct, we are in need of objects and symbols that grasp and hold our consciousness, giving us a sense of “encompassing continuities with their infinite reach” and of the “enduring and comprehending whole” (Dewey 1922: 226). But, practicing a kind of pragmatist hermeneutics of suspicion, Dewey warns against attachment to symbols “which no longer serve, especially since men have been idolators worshiping symbols as things,” even if in these symbols there is still “some trace of a vital and enduring reality” (1922: 226). It is sentiments such as these, a sentiment of ‘cosmicity’ informed by a religious naturalism that Eco saw latent in certain sides of Dewey’s Art as Experience although he distanced himself from it on the philosophical and existential plane.

6 Art as Experience appears to be the only major work of Dewey that Eco read, or at least cited, although there are allusions in Kant and the Platypus (1999) [hereafter: KP] to Dewey’s connection with a ‘transactional’ theory in the psychology of perception and to the Peircean background to his ‘detranscendentalized’ notion of ‘warranted assertion.’ The lack of any serious engagement with Dewey outside of the contexts of Eco’s first two books is a pity. In certain important respects Dewey’s pragmatism, which itself was not developed without adverting to Peirce, can extend, enrich, and even recontextualize both Eco’s ‘presemiotic’ early work and his predominantly Peircean later investigations of perception, language, meaning, art, and social forms, themes that were the focal points of Dewey’s own life long reflections.

7 Clearly, I cannot fully engage all these topics in the course of one essay. Instead, I will trace the links, both historical and systematic, connecting Dewey’s experience-based

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pragmatist aesthetics with Eco’s ultimate framing of the task of aesthetics in semiotic terms. Eco himself in A Theory of Semiotics (1978) [hereafter: TS] wrote that one of the tasks of semiotics was to deal with “the genesis of perceptual signification” at the lower thresholds of experience “where referents are no longer confronted as explicit messages but as extremely ambiguous texts akin to aesthetic ones” (TS 167). Dewey formulated his fundamental principle in the following way: “The thing most fundamental to esthetic experience [is] that it is perceptual.” (AE 222). When Dewey claimed that it is “to esthetic experience […] the philosopher must go to understand what experience is” (AE 278), the aim was not just to understand it, but to be challenged by it. What a work of art does, Dewey argues, is to “concentrate and enlarge an immediate experience […] the meanings imaginatively summoned, assembled, and integrated are embodied in material existence that here and now interacts with the self. The work of art is thus a challenge to the performance of a like act of evocation and organization, through imagination, on the part of the one who experiences it.” (AE 277).

8 Perception, signification, and interpretation are inextricably linked. This is the Deweyan thread whose wandering lines in Eco I will trace in the following discussion.

2. Deweyan Threads in The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas

9 In The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, in the chapter, “The Formal Criteria of Beauty,” discussing the notion of proportion or consonantia in Aquinas, Eco writes: […] proportion is based upon the vital reality of form […]. It does not signify something static and crystallized in a motionless perfection, but rather a dynamic unity. It is a dynamic unity because it involves a combining of living forces which do not annul or rigidify themselves when they combine; rather, they confer life upon a type of activity whose value derives from their several vigorous and operative energies. The result is one of unity in variety, a unity which does not constrict the multiplicity of movement but merely regulates it and directs it to its end. (ATA 95)

10 A reader may be shocked by what follows in what could be considered a kind of Urtext of Eco’s intellectual career since it comes from a philosophical tradition so different from that in which this still readable and admirable book on Aquinas arises. It is a long passage from John Dewey’s Art as Experience. Here is the text cited by Eco. There is an old formula for beauty in nature and art: Unity in variety. Everything depends upon how the proposition “in” is understood. There may be many articles in a box, many figures in a single painting, many coins in one pocket, and many documents in a safe. The unity is extraneous and the many are unrelated. The significant point is that unity and manyness are always this sort or approximate it when the unity of the object or scene is morphological and static. The formula has meaning only when its terms are understood to concern a relation of energies. There is no fullness, no many parts, without distinctive differentiations. But they have esthetic quality, as in the richness of a musical phrase, only when distinctions depend upon reciprocal resistances. There is unity only when the resistances create a suspense that is resolved through cooperative interaction of the opposed energies. The “one” of the formula is the realization through interacting parts of their respective energies. The “many” is the manifestation of the defined individualization due to the opposed forces that finally sustain a balance. (AE 166)

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11 Eco then comments on the preceding passage by offering a Deweyan gloss on or affirmation of one of Aquinas’s core insights. But such an interpretation contravenes one of his objections to Neo-scholastic attempts to see things in Aquinas that are not there or to use them for their own (misguided) purposes. Eco’s book is in fact not just an historical reconstruction but in a way just as much a selective validation of aesthetic concepts in Aquinas which, as it turned out, bordered on Dewey’s framework. Eco writes: It seems to me that formal proportion, as defined by Aquinas, has precisely these dynamic characteristics, just because it is proportion in an organism which exists, which lives. There is a dynamic tension which causes matter and form to combine in the individual, and a dynamic tension which transports essence into the excitement of existence. If we leave the plane of metaphysics, we still find a dynamic tension among the parts of things, and between subject and object in cognition. All proportion is dynamic, because it is the coefficient of perfection, the coefficient of existence. (ATA 96)

12 There are no other references to Dewey in this book. But there are echoes of central Deweyan themes throughout Eco’s reconstruction of Aquinas’s aesthetics: form, relation of energies, distinctive differentiations within the art work, the creation of suspense, the notion of esthetic quality, reciprocal resistances, cooperative interaction of opposed energies, defined individualization, balance, and so forth. Other Deweyan notions appear in a different format, but not linked explicitly to him. One familiar with Dewey’s Art as Experience has a lingering uneasiness about the neutrality of Eco’s historical reconstruction of Aquinas’s aesthetics.

13 For example, in the discussion of Aquinas’s opusculum, De Mixtione Elementorum, Eco thinks that its import transcends the context in which Aquinas developed his thoughts about bodies composed of other bodies or elements. In such bodies, Eco writes, paraphrasing Aquinas, the qualities of the simpler bodies are “turned toward and absorbed into a new quality which belongs properly to the new mixed body and is dependent on its form.” Such qualities, as Eco puts it, “survive as a continual alignment of the active ‘virtues’ of the simple bodies” (ATA 96). The notion of ‘active powers’ or “dynamic energies, which subsist and remain active” in the ‘mixed body,’ is actually the source of its life, or what Susanne Langer called its ‘livingness.’ The pivotal notion is ‘formal dynamism,’ a fusion or integration of form and energy. This is the mark of every “organism that exists, whether natural or artistic, spiritual or sensible” (ATA 97). Such a remark is a mélange of different terminological frames. Eco’s foregrounding of such a notion is perhaps not in itself an anachronism, but the use of the term ‘organism’ in an aesthetic context is likely influenced by his reading of Dewey. This is made even more likely by what follows. Speaking of proportion, looked at transcendentally, as having an infinity of analogues, Eco writes: “Every existent, beautiful in that it possesses existence, can present us with new and unsuspected types of proportion. The possible proportions are infinite in number, both in the world of nature and in art.” (ATA 97). This is what Dewey is referring to in his remark that an art work is a “unique transcript of the energy of things of the world” (AE 189). Art, Dewey writes, “intercepts every shade of expressiveness found in objects and orders them in a new experience of life” (AE 110).

14 Later, in the chapter on the aesthetic visio and the ‘peace’ that marks it, Eco writes of a “balance of energies” inducing a peace that on the epistemological level means “the total delight of a contemplative perception which, freed from desire and effort,

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experiences love of the harmony which the intellectual judgment has shown to it” (ATA 200). As to balance of energies, Dewey writes that the “final measure of balance or symmetry is the capacity of the whole to hold together within itself the greatest variety and scope of opposed elements” (AE 184). The love of a harmony is love of a particular quality of experiencing, a quality that is a Peircean ‘tone.’ Eco, arguing against Maritain’s neo-Scholastic reconstruction of Aquinas, denies that this experience is something that occurs prior to the labor of abstraction which would, according to Maritain, introduce an extraneous intellectual element into the aesthetic visio. According to Eco, seemingly following Aquinas but perhaps also indicating his own position at that time, “aesthetic pleasure is total and complete because it is connected with a cessation of the efforts of abstraction and judgment. It signifies, not an absence, but a cessation, of effort. It is a sense of joy and triumph, of pleasure in a form that has been discerned, admired, and loved with a disinterested love, the love which is possible for formal structure.” (ATA 200; original emphasis). But it is puzzling that at this point Eco has recourse to Pareyson and not to Dewey, who in many contexts engaged this issue or the frameworks in which this issue is discussed.

15 Eco cites a fine passage from Pareyson at this point, although he could have cited any number of passages from Dewey. Here is the Pareyson passage: Interpretation has two aspects. On the one hand, it is an active process intended to grasp the true meaning of things, to fix the meaning in an image that is penetrating and exhaustive, to give it a shape that is vigorous and adequate […] This process tends toward a state of quietude in which it stops and rests; and this is, precisely, the second aspect of interpretation. For on the other hand, interpretation means quietude and stasis – the quiet discovery and success, the stasis of possession and satisfaction […] The eye, which before this was sharpening its gaze, now just looks and admires, intent, satisfied. It rests with pleasure upon the whole and upon its parts, happy to have discovered the law of coherence which gathers everything into a definite totality. It is contented at having understood the heart and nerve center and the nature of the breath which animates the form which it has put to the question. (ATA 200, citing Estetica 161-2)

16 Eco draws a conclusion from this that the question of the aesthetic in Thomas Aquinas “seems to have a paradoxical form […] in light of modern aesthetics” (ATA 200), although it is not clear which part of modern aesthetics he is referring to. Intellectual knowledge, he claims, is the generative matrix of Aquinas’s conception of the distinctively aesthetic visio. Aquinas, Eco argues, takes beauty not to be the fruit of psychological empathy nor of the imaginative transfiguration of the object – as if this polarity exhausts the alternatives. Rather the roots of beauty for Aquinas are to be found deep in the knowledge of being. “And so, intellectual travail is a necessary pathway to the knowledge of beauty.” (ATA 201). This comment foreshadows the intellectual turn in Eco’s own framing of the discussion of aesthetics in A Theory of Semiotics, where the Deweyan focus on experiential processes passes unnoticed and unexploited in favor of ‘high’ theory.

17 Aesthetic visio, for Aquinas, is, Eco rightly says, “an act in which I apprehend a formal reality” (ATA 190). For Aquinas, Eco writes, formal reality is perceived precisely as a structure (ATA 190) with a splendor and clarity for us who engage it. For Aquinas beauty is “a state of equilibration between a perfect object and the intellect” (ATA 191, cited after M. Febre, “Metafisica de la belleza,” Rivista de filosofia, 7, 1948, 91-134). Beauty is apprehended when we contemplate formal structure in an ecstatic and fruitful moment quieting other instrumental and existential urgencies. Eco here

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seemingly combines the expository and the argumentative, since this is one of Dewey’s principal claims. Indeed, is there not perhaps an echo of Dewey’s distinction between the art product and the art work in Eco statement that aesthetic visio is the “aesthetic actuation of an ontological perfection which was aesthetic only in potential” (ATA 191)?

18 What exactly is the aesthetic visio, clearly a theme posed by Eco on his own? It is neither sensation nor pure abstraction but rather “apprehension in which we grasp some principle of organization of the sensible. Beauty involves both form and a material together” (ATA 192). Indeed, while “aesthetic value is rooted in the concreteness of things” (ATA 193) Eco remarks that within the limits of Aquinas’s philosophy there is no “intuition of form in the sensible. In fact the scope for movement within his philosophy is extremely limited” (ATA 194; original emphasis), even though Eco’s first allusion to Dewey as a gloss on Aquinas seems to indicate something else. Eco is striving, in spite of himself, to show dynamic elements in Aquinas both on the level of interpretation and on the level of the constitution of the object that is apprehended aesthetically. And moreover, on Aquinas’s principles, there is some indirect knowledge of the singular by reflection upon the phantasm (see pages 195-6 in ATA for Aquinas texts). Aquinas’s thesis, as formulated by Eco, is that “aesthetic seeing does not occur before the act of abstraction, nor in the act, nor just after it. It occurs instead at the end of the second operation of the intellect – that is, in the judgment.” (ATA 196; original emphasis).

19 The first operation of the intellect is the apprehension of a quidditas, an ‘essence’ or ‘quiddity,’ what a thing is to be. The grasp of properties, accidents, and relationships incidental to the thing’s essence follow. The intellect, according to Aquinas, “accordingly […] must necessarily either combine one apprehension with another or separate them” (ST I 85 54c). So, as Eco points out, we have as secondary originary acts of the intellect operations of joining and separating, the marking out of properties, accidents, and contexts and, on the Scholastic principles of Aquinas, as Eco puts it, “it is only in the act of judgment that I can determine whether a proportion measures up to my capacity to experience it and to my psychological needs, and whether it also conforms with (say) the laws of music and is adequate to what its nature demands” (ATA 198), hard as it is to think of Aquinas speaking of ‘psychological needs.’ But, in a remarkable comment, Eco writes that “every intellectual endeavor which culminates in judgment has, in some degree, an aesthetic outcome” (ATA 198), distinctive qualitative feel.

20 As a matter of fact we can find parallel passages in Dewey that make the same points. And clearly the effort of aesthetic abduction has the same type of outcome, as Peirce also pointed out. So, it is an interesting question of why Eco had subsidiary recourse to Pareyson as a supporting text on the matter of the aesthetic visio and not the deeply pragmatic approach exemplified in Dewey’s Art as Experience.

21 How deep was his reading of Art as Experience at the time he was writing his Aquinas book? This question is not meant so much as a criticism as noting a lost opportunity to increase the sense of pragmatist linkages with materials that lay ready to hand and were from time to time alluded to.

22 Consider, as examples, the following Dewey texts in light of the putative double operation of the intellect in Aquinas and of Eco’s criticism of Maritain and the scholastics as to the relationships between aesthetic visio and the nature of the links

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between abstraction, interpretation, perception, and the swing and sway between activity and passivity in the aesthetic encounter. Here is the first text: We say with truth that a painting strikes us. There is an impact that precedes all definite recognition of what it is about. As the painter Delacroix said about this first and preanalytic phase, “before knowing what the picture represents you are seized by its magical accord.” This effect is particularly conspicuous for most persons in music. The impression directly made by an harmonious ensemble in any art is often described as the musical quality of that art. (AE 150)

23 The second text ‘rotates’ the theme and bears upon the issue of combination and separation. Even at the outset, the total and massive quality has its uniqueness; even when vague and undefined, it is just that which it is and not something else. If the perception continues, discrimination inevitably sets in. Attention must move, and, as it moves, parts, members, emerge from the background. And if attention moves in a unified direction instead of wandering, it is controlled by the pervading qualitative unity; attention is controlled by it because it operates within it. (AE 196; original emphasis)

24 Eco’s Aquinas book has clearly an ambiguous place in his intellectual career and especially in development of the aesthetic side of his later work. It has minimal explicit references to Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics, although there are background resonances in his analyses. Of special note is his minimizing the role of claritas in Aquinas. This is strange in light of his claim about the importance of Dewey’s perceptual orienting of aesthetics and of the emphasis on dynamic powers in Aquinas. To be sure, Eco intended the Aquinas book to be an intellectual reconstruction, to place Aquinas correctly and solidly in his time. At the same time his selective allusions to Dewey and to Pareyson seem to follow, albeit schematically, the same hermeneutic logic he was antipathetic toward in the neo-scholastic appropriations of Aquinas. Eco offers us a compact summary of the preceding discussion. Let us take stock. The beauty of an object is identified, in Aquinas, with its perfection, its fullness of being. It is the coefficient of this perfection that the object be subject to the transcendental law of proportion, because of which it is an organism with a structure, and the structure corresponds to a particular order. In its purely formal aspect – the aspect which is of interest in aesthetics – a perfect object is an object which has integrity and proportion, and nothing more is required. Its form is complete, ontologically ready to be judged beautiful. To speak of the ‘resplendence’ of the form is simply a figure of speech for referring yet again to integrity and proportion, the wholeness of which saturates and coordinates the constituent parts. (ATA 119)

25 In fact, the saturating and coordinating factor is what Dewey called the unifying felt quality of a work of art resident in its perceptual supports, giving it its resplendence. When Eco remarks that “Scotist theory brings us to a new aesthetic world” (ATA 207) with its foregrounding of haecceitas, a notion that deeply influenced Hopkins and also Joyce, and is clearly operative in Aquinas, one wonders why, as in the earlier pages, there is such a hesitation to make further linkages. But it is clear that the Deweyan background, while present, is faint in Eco’s first work.

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3. Poetic Language as Exemplar: Transaction and Expression

26 Dewey appears more extensively and explicitly in The Open Work, first in the chapter, ‘Analysis of Poetic Language,’ in the opening section on Croce and Dewey, where Eco is speaking in his own voice. The opening theme is the inner logic or aim of a work of art “to be an inexhaustible source of experience” and to originate a continuous stream of new aspects as it is engaged. It generates, ideally, “a series of meanings that expand at every new look” (OW 25). Croce, Eco remarks, thought of artistic representations as reflections of the cosmos with a claim to a kind of totality such that it incorporates “the entire drama of reality” (cited on p. 25) – clearly not explicitly in detail but in potentia with a network of implications it gives rise to or can unfold without limit. This is the way, Eco says, to understand Croce’s statement that “a true artistic representation is at the same time itself and the universe, the universe as individual form, and the individual form as universe” (cited on p. 25). The concentrated image embodies a feeling, Eco says, having a distinctive quality, a ‘lyrical’ quality in Croce’s conception. But, Eco objects, Croce had no theoretical framework with adequate philosophical tools to explain its nature. We have a specific type of pleasure in undergoing the experience of the work of art but cannot explain the mechanism that realizes it.

27 Eco then pivots to Dewey, who expressly had distinguished himself from Croce’s idealism. Eco frames the issue as the “conditions of aesthetic pleasure” (OW 25) and the way of explaining their mechanism. He foregrounds some well known central texts from Dewey’s Art as Experience, although it is not clear that he is aware of their source in Dewey’s work, namely in James’s Principles of Psychology which constantly lurks in the background. Croce’s sense of a totality, Eco claims, refers to, in Dewey’s words (AE 198), “this sense of the including whole implicit in ordinary experiences,” something also carried by a work of art which is a meaningful whole or theme embedded in a field and enveloped by an aura of resonances at the receding margin. Indeed, for Dewey, the focal and explicit objects of the foreground of experience are surrounded, or accompanied, as Dewey says (AE 198), by “a recession into the implicit which is not intellectually grasped. In reflection we call it dim and vague,” qualities of an experience prior to what Eco calls, with hyperbole, the “categorical rigidity imposed on us by reflection” (OW 25). Eco cites Dewey to the effect that the essence of art lies in its power to evoke and emphasize “this quality of being a whole and of belonging to the larger, all-inclusive, whole which is the universe in which we live” and then, perhaps alluding to one of Dewey’s own remarks, that there is a religious dimension inspired in us by aesthetic contemplation. But it is a religious naturalism purged of supernaturalism and dogmatic certainties, a topic I have explored before in some detail in my ‘The Reach of the Aesthetic and Religious Naturalism’ (Innis 2012).

28 In experience we are engaged in various modalities with only parts or sectors or regions of the field, linked to, or lured toward, them by various interests that create what James called the various ‘universes of meaning’ or ‘multiple realities’ that are extricated out of the flux of experiencing by various acts of ‘abstraction.’ These interest structures are embedded in, or even constituted by, what Dewey called ‘problematic situations’ that initiate inquiry in the most general sense of that term. In any ‘situation,’ a technical term in Dewey’s philosophy, “the undefined pervasive quality of an experience is that which binds together all the defined elements, the objects of

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which we are focally aware, making them a whole” (AE 198). The recognition of the theoretical centrality of this undefined pervasive quality Dewey considered to be Peirce’s most important philosophical discovery. This theme I have discussed in my essay “The ‘Quality’ of Philosophy: On the Aesthetic Matrix of Dewey’s Pragmatism” (Innis 2011).

29 Eco admits that Dewey’s aesthetics has naturalist, though not positivistic, foundations, even though Eco hints at that when he writes that “on the threshold of the cosmic mystery, Dewey seems to be afraid of taking the last step that would allow him to dissect this experience of the indefinite into its psychological coordinates and declares his failure” (OW 26). Here is the text he cites from Dewey: “I can see no psychological ground for such properties of an experience save that, somehow, the work of art operates to deepen and to raise to great clarity that sense of an enveloping undefined whole that accompanies every normal experience” (AE 199), a position derived from Dewey’s appropriation of James’s theme-field-margin schema of the stream of consciousness. Eco thinks Dewey gives up too quickly, that he had in fact already clarified the premises for such an explanation in earlier pages of Art as Experience, but he strangely does not cite or allude to these pages, one of which certainly contains the following passage. We unconsciously carry over [a] belief in the bounded character of all objects of experience (a belief founded ultimately in the practical exigencies of our dealings with things) into our conception of experience itself. We suppose that experience has the same definite limits as the things with which it is concerned. But any experience, the most ordinary, has an indefinite total setting. Things, objects, are only focal points of a here and now in a whole which stretches out indefinitely. This is the qualitative “background” which is defined and made definitely conscious in particular objects and specified properties and qualities. (AE 197; original emphasis)

30 From the epistemological side, which is rooted in Dewey’s model of experiencing, Eco characterizes Dewey’s theory of knowledge as transactional. “Dewey offers us a transactional conception of knowledge that becomes particularly suggestive when set side by side with his definition of the aesthetic object. The work of art, for him, is the fruit of a process of organization whereby personal experiences, facts, values, meanings are incorporated into a particular material and become one with it.” (OW 27; original emphasis). This is what Dewey called ‘fundedness’ and is a central key to Dewey’s approach to expression, which is not a predominantly ‘subjective’ process. Eco cites Dewey to the effect that art is the “capacity to work a vague idea and emotion over into terms of some definite medium” (AE 82), which is, in the later semiotic Eco, the expression plane. An art work’s expressive power, as Dewey put it, is dependent upon “meanings and values extracted from prior experiences and funded in such a way that they fuse with the qualities directly presented in the work of art” (AE 104).

31 Eco’s apt citations of Dewey indicate that he is quite aware of the interlinking of Dewey’s aesthetic concerns. Continuing with the theme of expression, which plays an important role in A Theory of Semiotics, Eco cites the following text which contains in nuce the core of Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics: […] the expressiveness of the object of art is due to the fact that it presents a thorough and complete interpenetration of the materials of undergoing and of action, the latter including a reorganization of matter brought with us from past experience […] The expressiveness of the object is the report and celebration of the complete fusion of what we undergo and what our activity of attentive perception brings into what we receive by means of the senses. (AE 108)

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32 As to ‘matter’ brought, from past experience, there is a footnote in which Eco cites Art as Experience (AE 128), which in a way takes us back to the assimilation of mixed elements notion in the Aquinas book: “[…] the scope of a work of art is measured by the number and variety of elements coming from past experiences that are organically absorbed into the perception had here and now.” This means that the work of art is defined by internal relations, making up a systematic whole, but defined in perceptual terms marked by pertinence and relevance. Perception in this way becomes ‘thick’ in that we cannot just pass through it to something else. It is marked by form. Eco cites the following text: “[…] to have form […] marks a way of envisaging, of feeling, and presenting experienced matter so that it most readily and effectively becomes material for the construction of adequate experience on the part of those less gifted than the original creator.” (AE 114). In a text not cited by Eco Dewey claims that “form is a character of every experience that is an experience […] Form may then be defined as the operation of forces that carry the experience of an agent, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment.” (AE 142, Dewey’s italics).

33 This operation of forces is something that is both done and undergone, a delicate balancing of activity and passivity that make up the poles of our encounters with the world, a process of transactions that permeate and fuse both poles. Knowledge, Eco writes, alluding beyond Art as Experience to “other texts by Dewey” (OW 27) which are not cited, is a […] difficult process of transaction, of negotiation: in answer to a given stimulus, the subject incorporates the memory of past experiences into the current one and, by so doing, gives form to the experience in progress – and experience that is not only the recording of a Gestalt already existing as an autonomous configuration of reality (or, for that matter, a subjective positing of the object), but that it is the result of our active participation in the world, or, better yet, the world that results from this active participation. Thus, the moment of totality (the experience of the aesthetic moment as an openness of knowledge) could very well lend itself to a psychological explanation, the absence of which makes Croce’s accounts, and in part Dewey’s, somewhat suspect. (OW 28)

34 Strangely enough, the first part of this text is almost a gloss on Dewey famous 1896 paper on the ‘reflex arc’ as well as on Dewey’s paper on the “Does Reality Possess Practical Character?” from the James Festschrift. These papers, especially the 1896 paper, inform all of Dewey’s later work, showing experience to be a widening gyre of doings and undergoings on multiple levels. Eco shows, however, an implicit, although somewhat confused, affinity with the inner logic of Dewey’s work when he remarks that he (Eco) is dealing with the “very conditions of knowledge, and not just the aesthetic experience,” unless he adds, aesthetic experience is “the liminal condition of all knowledge, its primary and essential phase, which is quite plausible but not exactly pertinent at this stage of our investigation” (OW 28). But, as far as I can see, Eco progressively moved toward a more explicitly ‘upper threshold’ framework that foregrounded cultural units, the subject of semiotics, as the access points to the various forms of transaction and their modelling, including aesthetic transactions, which Dewey very emphatically ‘pushed down.’ In Kant and the Platypus he admitted, with reference to Innis (1994), that this ‘top down’ approach, while clearly a valuable heuristic device in A Theory of Semiotics, could perhaps not do full descriptive justice to the dynamic play of forms that make up the experiential field.

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35 In the chapter, “Analysis of Poetic Language,” in The Open Work that is the focus of our attention at this moment, Eco says that his investigation “will be limited to the process of transaction between a perceiving subject and an aesthetic stimulus” and specifically to the subject’s reaction to language as a paradigmatic artifact, the analysis of which can be extended, mutatis mutandis, to other art forms. Eco relies on hints from Jakobson to distinguish the characteristics of aesthetic language and to abolish the absoluteness of the distinction between the emotive and the referential use of language. Here I can only summarize Eco’s account, keeping the focus on its links with pragmatism in general and Dewey in particular. The aesthetic lessons from reflecting on language as aesthetic stimulus is that the aesthetic stimulus is not purely referential. Its denotatum is global, while the stimulus itself is composed of an integration of signifying components which do not signify separately but belong to a field. “Form is perceived as a necessary, justified whole that cannot be broken […] the addressee must then rely on his capacity to apprehend the complex signification which the entire expression imposes on him. The result is a multiform, plurivocal signified that leaves us at once satisfied and disappointed with this first phase of comprehension precisely because of its indefiniteness.” (OW 36-7). Eco speaks of a “harmonic background” of memories, perceptual habits, and so forth that enters into “the chain reaction that characterizes every conscious organization of stimuli, commonly known as ‘form’” (OW 37). Such a chain reaction is clearly not linear but more a whorl of tendencies that catch us up and that are able to “stimulate certain zones of our sensibility that previously remained untouched” (OW 38). Aesthetic value is not eternally objective and immutable or immune to transactional processes, whose matrices and surrounding conditions are not able to be specified purely in aesthetic terms. “The truth of the matter is that aesthetics is unable to give an exhaustive explanation of certain aesthetic phenomena, even when it can allow for their plausibility. The task, then, falls to psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and all those other sciences concerned with cultural changes.” (OW 39). There is nothing in such a statement that contravenes a pragmatist approach to aesthetics, especially as developed by Dewey.

36 Eco summarizes his argument in the following way, which exemplifies a grasp of deep pragmatist principles: The foregoing argument has, I hope, demonstrated that the impression of endless depth, of all-inclusive totality – in short, of openness – that we receive from every work of art is based on both the double nature of the communicative organization of the aesthetic form and the transactional nature of the process of comprehension. Neither openness nor totality is inherent in the objective stimulus, which is in itself materially determined, or in the subject, who is himself available to all sorts of openness and none; rather they lie in the cognitive relationship that binds them, and in the course of which the object, consisting of stimuli organized according to a precise aesthetic intention, generates and directs various kinds of openness. (OW 39)

37 That is, generates a spiral of interpretants on the affective, actional, and ideational levels. But Eco makes no reference to these dimensions in Dewey, which mirror the Peircean schema, without explicitly citing them.

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4. Aesthetic Value and Two Kinds of Openness

38 Openness for Eco is the very condition of aesthetic pleasure (OW 39). This pleasure on Deweyan grounds is the felt outcome arising from a sense of completion, of having an experience that is satisfying in itself and intrinsically meaningful, apart from instrumental contexts. Clearly, Eco asserts, the multi-leveled structure of an art work shows that it cannot be “a univocal, unambiguous communication” (OW 39). Multimodal plurisignification is inherent in the aesthetic stimulus and is ‘realized’ in the transaction. Dewey speaks of the art product becoming the art work in the experience of the perceiver or interpreter. In this sense all aesthetic stimuli are ‘open,’ just as all processes of semiosis are open. If, on Peircean grounds, we really believe that consciousness is a chain of signs generating a complex trail of interpretants, all sign configurations are ‘open.’ They are ‘realized’ in accord with the forms of interpretants to which they give rise: affective, energetic, and logical, to use what is perhaps Peirce’s most basic and aesthetically relevant analytical schema. There is, moreover, a ‘rich’ ambiguity that is grounded in the material embodiment of the art work and a ‘weak’ ambiguity that comes from mere confusion, lack of clarity or structure.

39 At the same time Eco admits that “semantic plurality is not enough to determine the aesthetic value of a work” (OW 41), a remark made with reference to Joyce but clearly extendible to other non-linguistic art forms. Indeed, while speaking of Finnegans Wake, although with wider implications, Eco states the ambiguity of the signs in an art work “cannot be separated from their aesthetic organization: rather, the two are mutually supportive and motivating” (OW 40). The ‘total organization of the art work’ in Eco’s consideration is the determinant of the “density of its resonance and its provocative power” and not just its “semantic plurality” (OW 41) when we are dealing with an open work or the desire to create one. Such a plurality is dependent upon a “background of references and suggestions, thereby increasing their echoes” (OW 42). This is the fringe or margin constituting part of the Deweyan ‘fundedness’ that marks the forestructures of all experiential transactions and especially those with deliberately plurivocal communicational intent. Incorporation into the “right form” is necessary to engender the “fundamental openness proper to all successful artistic forms” (OW 42), including the openness resulting from our experiences of being interrupted by ordered forms that show themselves ‘strange’ to our antecedent systems of expectations. Eco picks up this dimension in A Theory of Semiotics. Order introduces disorder in order to introduce new forms of order. Indeed, a pragmatist aesthetics would make this process a basic principle for the development of consciousness, with no intent of discarding previous forms of order. They remain ordered contexts that present permanent possibilities of reexperiencing by being informed by the later experience of otherwise structured and ordered forms. Fundedness leads to and grounds a ‘fusion.’

40 Disorder in communication is disorder, then, only in relation to a previous order (OW 58), where the “quotient of imagination” embodied in a ‘disordering form’ is its aesthetic measure and source of its novelty. When Eco speaks of the “full resonance of the poetic word” such an expression does not apply just to poetry, but to the experiential plenitude or fullness of the aesthetic form, including, it must be admitted, the elegant brevity of a Haiku or miniatures of all sorts, examples also used by Dewey. A pragmatist aesthetics, rooted in perception, clearly recognizes, along with Eco, Moles’s notion of a difference threshold crossed by a novel art work, a difference registered first

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of all in the sense of a novel quality with dynamic tendency, a tendency toward “ controlled disorder, toward a circumscribed potential […] the germ of formativity present in any form that wants to remain open to the free choice of the addressee” (OW 65; original emphasis), grasped in a dialectics of oscillation that establishes transactional rapport.

41 Transactional rapport “constitutes the very processes of perception and reasoning” (OW 71) whose openness can be extended to “every perceptual and intellectual process” (OW 71). Such processes occur in stages and highlight aspects of their engaged field “that lend themselves to an interaction with the dispositions of the subject” (OW 71), dispositions of multiple kinds: affective, behavioral, conceptual/logical. Eco states that art deliberately provokes “incomplete experiences” so as to arouse “our natural craving for completion” (OW 74), which Dewey saw epitomized in our grasp of art and in forms of attending outside of instrumental contexts. The natural craving for completion is prolonged by the rich ambiguity and informational fullness of a work of art that counteracts psychic inertia and its promise of a recovered order instead of the pressing task of engaging a new order, which takes its place alongside other orders, challenging, modifying, enriching them. According to Eco we are in the case of the explicitly open work not so much concerned with a prediction of the expected as with an expectation of the unpredictable. This should be seen as a kind of aesthetic pragmatic maxim, but, in light of a pragmatist aesthetics, it is not restricted to the types of art works foregrounded and engaged by Eco.

42 Eco in The Open Work was clearly caught between his own philosophical transitions and perplexities and a search for analytical means to resolve them, whether in a relatively randomized appropriation of certain elements from Dewey’s Art as Experience and maybe other absorbed but not cited Dewey articles or elements from the contemporary post-Gestalt tradition in psychology that supported the transactional psychology he thought needed to underpin an aesthetics that recognized the implications of the concept of the open work. For Eco “only a psychology concerned with the genesis of structures can justify this tendency of contemporary art” (OW 80-1), namely, of enjoying “both the equiprobability of all the systems and the openness of the process as a whole” (OW 80). Indeed, “[…] today’s psychology seems to pursue its explorations in precisely the same directions taken by the poetics of the open work” (81). The open work is a concept fully consonant with a pragmatist aesthetics, which views art works and the aesthetic dimensions of experience as spiraling out of the various ‘vortices of consciousness’ marking Dewey’s ‘live creature’s’ involvement with the world.

43 Eco’s psychological resources reconstitute in slightly different terms the descriptive framework informing Dewey’s Art as Experience. He appropriates the conceptions of fluctuation, of perception as a commitment in which a percept is “none other than a temporary stabilization of a sensible configuration,” “a fluctuating perceptual whole” which has attained a “right form” (OW 81). Dewey had stated that one of the functions of art is to show that objects must not have or be assumed to have stable properties and that art explores the lability of forms, the various forms of appearing, what Eco called “the very perishability of all patterns and all schemes” (OW 83). On Deweyan terms it is not just contemporary art that is to be seen as, as Eco puts it, “fulfilling a precise pedagogical function, a liberating role” (OW 83). Dewey ascribes this function to art itself in all its forms. The discourse of contemporary art that Eco takes as the paradigm of breaking free of the closed world of classical and modern art is not alone in its

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efforts “to represent modern man’s path to salvation, toward the recognition of his lost autonomy at the level of both perception and intelligence” (OW 83). Art as Experience shows on practically every page that a fully developed experiential approach to art underlies all forms of art when the encrusted layers of mere perceptual and affective habits are broken through and experience is allowed to follow its dynamic toward novelty, following the upsurge of world process itself.

44 So Eco is right in The Open Work to emphasize, as pragmatist aesthetics does, the perceptual matrices in which the aesthetic encounter takes place. The encounter involves on both the creative and the experiential side grouping into specific forms, the unification of experiences that are unfolding in time on both the individual and social levels. He brings Dewey back into the discussion by citing one passage of Dewey: “We have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment. Then and only then is it integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of experience from other experiences […] In an experience, flow is from something to something.” (AE 42-3; original emphasis). Dewey does not think, no more than Aquinas does, that we can live our lives in a constant state of experiential fulfillment, an unbroken sequence of ‘an experiences.’ Being absorbed in an art work or in an experience of nature punctuates everydayness in a way that a mountain range arises from a plain. ‘An experience’ is a contrast term as well as an evaluative term, but it is not meant to characterize all experiences such that its everyday instrumental character would be found lacking in value. But it is also the case that certain dominating structures of everydayness block the possibilities of having experiences run their course to fulfillment, precisely the criticism Dewey made of the excesses of industrial capitalism and its savaging of the environment, both urban and natural, individual and social. What Eco writes about plot applies to Dewey’s point: it is “the search for, and the establishment of, a coherence, a unity, an order in the midst of chaotic diversity” (OW 111).

45 Eco writes that “clearly, what we find most interesting in Dewey’s definition of experience is not so much the organic nature of the process (the interaction between the subject and its surroundings) as its formal aspect: the fact that he sees it as an accomplishment, a fulfillment” (OW 111; original emphasis). This is not quite right. Eco gives the impression that an experience is something that we do, that it is an achievement due to effort and can be produced by thematic control. However, one of the central themes of Dewey’s aesthetics is the undergoing side, the being caught up in a process that is not something that we do. There is rather an emergent quality on the receptive side to such an experience in that it confronts us and engages us, even against our will. In fact, on Dewey’s account, it is the constant interlinking of undergoing and doing that marks the dynamic spiraling circuit of behavior, a Deweyan echo in Eco’s discussion. This involves constant adjustment. On the creative side Dewey is also insistent on the emergent nature of the form that arises from the various resistances that the medium puts up. The notion of resistance also marks the secondness that confronts us, marking a kind of degree of difficulty, although Dewey does not explicitly use Peircean terminology at this point in his aesthetic theory. Rather, he reconstitutes and exemplifies it, with nuance and descriptive thickness, as I have shown in “Dewey’s Peircean Aesthetics” (Innis 2014).

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5. Linking Dewey to Form as Social Commitment

46 Eco also engages Dewey in the chapter “Form as Social Commitment” in The Open Work where the opening theme deals with the double-faced nature of alienation. His discussion involves a serious, maybe even inexplicable, misunderstanding of Dewey’s point even if the theme was also central to Dewey’s aesthetic critique of modern social forms, as I have examined in a chapter on the pragmatist critique of technology in my Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense (Innis 2002). As to alienation, Eco follows the lead of the difference and polarity between the two German words, Entfremdung and Verfremdung as residing in the consequences of the universal process of objectification understood in the differently weighted senses given to that term in Hegel and Marx. Alienation ‘in’ the objectified world implies a self-renunciation, a becoming ‘other’ in a world of objects that one oneself has made and being made ‘subject’ to its powers. Alienation ‘from’ the objectified world means that one cannot see oneself in such a world, treating it as external to us, an evil, even if necessary, that we have to contend with but with the hope that ultimately we can ‘wash our hands of it’ by some way of destroying it. So we have alienation as self-loss or self-absorption in an objectified world and alienation as critical self-distancing from the objectified world with the hope or expectation of dominating it whether by one’s own actions or some external intervention.

47 It within the focus of the kind of alienation attendant upon every act of objectification that Eco introduces references to Dewey’s Art as Experience into the analysis. Eco thinks there is a permanent tension involved in the Hegelian/Marxist notion of alienation ‘in’ an object or object world, a tension that can be eliminated “both in action and awareness, but not forever” (OW 127). As a matter of fact there is a Hegelian background to the web of concerns that informs Dewey’s philosophical project and also a bearing on the dichotomy of (a) the beautiful soul and (b) “the subject’s joyful dissolution in the object” (131). Embodiment in objects, the extension of corporeality into object is, Eco rightly says, the “very condition of homo faber” (132). Indeed, Dewey writes in Art as Experience (AE 286) that “the self is created in the creation of objects” and moreover “in every experience we touch the world through some particular tentacle; we carry on our intercourse with it, it comes home to us, through a specialized organ” (AE 199) with each medium having its own efficacy and value and also different effects upon the acting subject.

48 So, it is strange that Eco thinks that Dewey is at the opposite extreme of the beautiful soul’s refusal to get its hands dirty. He wrongly ascribes to Dewey the position that the integration of man and nature can be full, so that there is exuded a putatively universal “feeling of harmony and fulfillment” (133). Here is the text he cites from Dewey: Every experience is the result of interaction between a live creature and some aspect of the world in which he lives. A man does something: he lifts, let us say, a stone. In consequence, he undergoes, suffers something: the weight, strain, texture of the surface of the thing lifted. The properties thus undergone determine further doing. The stone is too heavy and too angular, not solid enough; or else the properties undergone show it is fit for the use for which it is intended. The process continues until a mutual adaptation of the self and the object emerges and that particular experience comes to a close […] [The] interaction of the two constitutes the total experience that is had, and the close which completes it is the institution of a felt harmony. (AE 50)

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49 The next paragraph gives Eco’s gloss, which is woefully inadequate and misleading. Eco writes: “The tragic suspicion that a relationship with an object may fail precisely because it succeeds too much is absent from Dewey’s philosophy. For Dewey, an experience can fail (that is, fail to be a full-fledged experience) only when between the person and the object there is a polarity that cannot be resolved by integration; when there is integration there is experience, and an experience can only be positive.” (OW 134). But in fact Dewey’s position is quite otherwise.

50 Dewey’s text is normative, not descriptive. Felt harmony with self and other is the goal of human experience in its individual and social forms, but Dewey’s aesthetics with its distinction between normal experience and an experience presupposes that the ineluctable resistances that mark our lives in a world filled with peril and perpetual perishing can never be permanently overcome. The ideal is not total integration – a utopian phantasy – but the institution of frameworks and matrices of perception and action that correspond to the constraints of our lives in time. Dewey is neither unrealistically optimistic nor depressingly pessimistic but rather, in line with pragmatist principles, melioristic. He is not fearful that embodiment leads inevitably to alienation.

51 Here are two texts where the double tendency in Dewey’s ‘aesthetic critique’ of the technological world is exemplified. The first text has a positive tone. Where the worker produces in different industrial conditions from those which prevail today, his own impulsions tend in the direction of creation of articles of use that satisfy his urge for experience as he works. It seems to me absurd to suppose that preference for mechanically effective execution by means of a completely smoothly running mental automatisms, and at the expense of quickened consciousness of what he is about, is ingrained in psychological structure. And if our environment, as far as it is constituted by objects of use, consisted of things that are themselves contributory to a heightened consciousness of sight and touch, I do not think any one would suppose that the act of use is such as to be anesthetic. (AE 266-7)

52 The second text has a more critical tone. The mechanical stands at the pole opposite to that of the esthetic, and production of goods is now mechanical. The liberty of choice allowed to the craftsman who worked by hand has almost vanished with the general use of the machine. Production of objects enjoyed in direct experience by those who possess, to some extent, the capacity to produce useful commodities expressing values, has become a specialized matter apart from the general run of production. This fact is probably the most important factor in the status of art in present civilization. (AE 344)

53 So, in one sense, while Eco is right to speak of “ascetic” stratagems “to safeguard my freedom while implicating myself in the object” (135), maybe the best formulation of his point would be ‘aesthetic’ stratagems, not just to protect oneself from the consequences of embodiment but to further and control its processes.

54 This is precisely what Dewey proposed. Embodiment is double process of self-formation and world-formation. When Eco writes that “every successful form rests on the unconscious translation of amorphous matter into a human dimension” (OW 156), we can read this is light of his and Dewey’s foregrounding of form on all levels of our existence. In this sense ‘form as social commitment’ is an essential linking notion that connects Eco’s analytical mode, even if only implicitly, to one of the most fundamental principles of Dewey’s aesthetics and political theory.

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55 What Eco says about avant-garde poetics is paradoxically also the task carried out by Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics: to “provide us with the imaginative categories necessary to move more easily in this world” (OW 150). Both argue that the continuous flux of existence and the ‘sea of objectivity’ (Calvino) cannot be met with passive adherence or be opposed by relying on an uncritical “ideal human standard of measurement” (OW 150). The new human standard of measurement, which Eco saw needed, is precisely the model grounded in the tracing, with an aesthetically normative eye, of the development of forms of experiencing which Dewey aimed at, exploiting James’s insights and also Peirce’s theory of quality. Speaking of the flux of existence with its emergent islands of order of various sorts is, as both Eco and Dewey would agree, already to begin to judge it. In judgment we alienate ourselves from it and as a result “take the first step toward repossessing it” (OW 151).

56 Eco, as would perhaps be expected, sees literature as an especially powerful means of expressing “our relationship to the object of our knowledge, and our concern with the form we have given the world, or the form we have failed to give it” (OW 157). Eco says about the artistic process quite generally that it “tries to give form to disorder, amorphousness, and dissociation.” It is “the effort of a reason that wants to lend a discursive clarity to things” (OW 157), which aesthetics, as an analytical discipline operating in the mode of theory and not exemplification, also achieves. Dewey, a persistent searcher for discursive clarity, writes in the chapter on ‘Art and Civilization’ in Art as Experience in a passage that could have been written by Eco: Words furnish a record of what has happened and give direction by request and command to particular future actions. Literature conveys the meaning of the past that is significant in present experience and is prophetic of the larger movements of the future. Only imaginative vision elicits the possibilities that are interwoven within the texture of the actual. (AE 348)

57 The development of Eco’s semiotics gives an implicit primacy to language and literature and indeed Dewey himself is in agreement, though Eco makes no references to Dewey on this subject. Dewey, for his part, writes that “the art of literature […] works with loaded dice; its material is charged with meanings they have absorbed through immemorial time. Its material thus has an intellectual force superior to any other art, while it equals the capacity of architecture to present the values of collective life.” (AE 244).

58 The ‘loaded dice’ of literature and of the languages that support it is another one of the parallels and links between Dewey and Eco and clearly, independently of Dewey’s compact and rich discussion of literature, a major source of Eco’s notion of the open work and then later of the infinite semiosis engendered in the processes of sign production in general and texts in particular. These topics are systematically explored with mature Peircean tools in the section, ‘Peirce Alone,’ in the chapter on ‘Unlimited Semiosis and Drift’ in The Limits of Interpretation. There Eco notes that Peirce’s synechism with its principle of ontological continuity means that there is always a further determination of the perceptual and other continuums, including the great continuum of language, whose richnesses are explored and exploited by Joyce and celebrated in The Aesthetics of Chaosmos.

59 But after The Open Work the trail of Dewey in Eco’s work becomes very faint and marginal. There are references to a transactional account of perception in Kant and the Platypus which I mentioned earlier. There is one at least third hand reference, through

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Putnam, to James’s contention that “knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of theories, knowledge of theories presupposes knowledge of facts.” The references to Peirce make up almost a half column in the index of Kant and the Platypus and are strewn throughout the text but clearly involved in Eco’s return to the problem of iconism. But Kant and the Platypus has minimal aesthetic relevance and even less to determining Eco’s relation to pragmatism. He is speaking to a quite different audience and with quite different resources. Still, in concluding this examination of key aspects of Eco’s relation to pragmatism, it is necessary to look, albeit briefly, at the section on ‘Aesthetic Text as Invention’ in A Theory of Semiotics to see whether in this pivotal work of Eco taking up the lost trail of Dewey could have enriched and maybe even reconfigured this ‘breviarium aestheticum’ that nevertheless still remains of heuristic value for understanding both Eco’s aesthetic framework, clearly semiotic, and its relation to Dewey’s pragmatist approach.

6. Pragmatist Dimensions of the Aesthetic Text as Invention

60 Eco clearly formulates the general matrix of his approach to aesthetics in A Theory of Semiotics by exploiting the notion of ‘text,’ a distinctively semiotic theme. There are nevertheless illuminating points of intersection between his schema and Dewey’s model of aesthetic experience. Eco’s hope is that such a semiotic approach to ‘aesthetic texts’ may help to throw light on “many problems that traditional philosophical aesthetics has left unsolved” (TS 261). He does not specify what he means by the blanket term ‘traditional,’ which Dewey’s experience-grounded and explicitly pragmatist aesthetics definitely is not.

61 Eco returns in A Theory of Semiotics to Jakobson’s well-known foregrounding of the ambiguous and self-focusing nature of the sign-configurations of poetic language. Eco follows, as we have seen, Jakobson’s claim that ambiguity arises from violating the rules of the code, including forms of stylistic ambiguity, in that an expression can be ‘grammatical’ yet not ‘normal.’ Ambiguity, on Eco’s account, can “function as a sort of introduction to the aesthetic experience” (TS 263). It does not produce more disorder or confusion but urges or stimulates an interpretive effort (actually, it involves ‘difficulty’) in that it ‘resists’ us, clearly a hermeneutic manifestation of Peircean secondness. While Dewey, as he remarks in his 1946 essay, ‘Peirce’s Theory of Linguistic Signs, Thought, and Meaning,’ does not find the Peircean theory of categories a ‘happy’ one, he does recognize felt resistance as a multi-leveled factor in the art work that interrupts us and blocks our passing through it to something else. Resistance on the aesthetic plane involves the material ‘thickening’ of the sign-configuration or the breaking of an interpretive habit, which may not be able to be systematically controlled or even formulated.

62 Ambiguity on the expression plane entails ambiguity on the content plane. Eco follows the Russian formalists in arguing that there is beyond the felt sense of resistance a shock¸ a feeling of a break, such that the receiver of the aesthetic message is forced to reconsider “the entire organization of the content” (TS 263). Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics recognizes this aesthetic as well as existential phenomenon: that art works ‘make strange’ and, in instances of the sublime, elicit a sense of bewilderment by increasing “the difficulty and the duration of perception” (TS 264, citing Viktor

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Shklovsky 1917), an apt characterization of one of Dewey’s fundamental principles. Just as a deep quarrel with an old friend can force us to reconsider a lifetime of closeness, the encounter with art works can do the same. Dewey saw art as wiping away the film that covers objects and episodes and making us see them as if for the first time, creating a particular perception through the art work as revealing that the perception of objects is always an ‘open’ process that both stabilizes forms of perception through the material configuration of the art work and destabilizes them by revealing new properties and aspects. But it is to the formalists that Eco turns here and not to Dewey and the pragmatists. The Deweyan phenomenology of experience, with its roots in James and Peirce, offers us important ways of understanding the phenomenon that the formalists developed from a rather different angle.

63 Without mentioning Dewey Eco foregrounds the centrality of rhythm and of rhythmic violations, a topic central to Dewey’s analysis of aesthetic experience. Eco once again follows Victor Shklovsky: “aesthetic rhythm consists of a prosaic rhythm that has been violated […] it is a question not of complex rhythm but of violation of that rhythm and of a violation such that it cannot be predicted; if violation becomes the rule, it loses the force that it had as an operational obstacle.” (Shklovsky 1917; cited TS 264). It is precisely the violation of the expected, a break in background rhythm that makes the art work (text) become self-focusing, with a rhythm of its own, and thereby “directs the attention of the addressee primarily to its own shape” (TS 264; original emphasis), that is, its form.

64 As to the role of rhythm, Dewey writes, “Esthetic rhythm is a matter of perception and therefore includes whatever is contributed by the self in the active process of perceiving” (AE 167-8), that is, it is a funded process, rooted in the body. It is an “ordered variation of energy” and “variation is not only as important as order, but it is an indispensable coefficient of esthetic order” (AE 169). Rhythm is “rationality among qualities” (AE 174), a form of aesthetic rationality. Indeed, “art operates by selecting those potencies in things by which an experience – any experience – has significance and value […] Order, rhythm and balance, simply means that energies significant for experience are acting at their best.” (AE 189). Rhythmic crises quite generally punctuate “the stream of living” (AE 12), destabilizing and unbalancing. Art and aesthetic experience further processes of stabilizing and balancing while also introducing movement away from the encrustations of habit. Rather than reifying art, Dewey holds that “art is a quality that permeates an experience; it is not, save by a figure of speech, the experience itself. Esthetic experience is always more than aesthetic. In it a body of matters and meanings, not in themselves aesthetic, become esthetic as they enter into an ordered rhythmic movement toward consummation.” (AE 329; original emphasis). At no point in his discussion of aesthetics in A Theory of Semiotics does Eco allude to Dewey’s ideas about rhythm, although Dewey is listed in the bibliography of Trattato generale di semiotic but not in A Theory of Semiotics. At the same time Eco says nothing that contravenes the thrust of Dewey’s work and his brief foregrounding of it is a motivation to investigate what a semiotic aesthetics, with its emphasis on sign-configurations, can contribute to the study of rhythm. Dewey’s absence at this point in Eco’s discussion provokes reflection on his claim about the important influence of his reading of Art as Experience.

65 As to the fundamental role the “lower levels of the expression plane” play in art and aesthetic experience (TS 264; original emphasis), they deserve, Eco says, a semiotic

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explanation, themes taken up in Kant and the Platypus but with minimal aesthetic discussion. Here Eco opens up the important issues of prethematic microstructures, inner textures of materials, qualitative feels, and senses of pertinence and salience that inform and constitute a “whole series of hypostructures” (original emphasis) which clearly exist on the perceptual stratum. James and Dewey would have been of great help here, as would others working out of different traditions, such as Polanyi’s account of tacit knowing and subsidiary awareness, which I have discussed elsewhere. Eco speaks of how we are to conceive the “unshaped continuum” as being structured into a set of cultural units segmented by a kind of syntactic system that gives rise to a “structured set of signal-units” (TS 266). As he conceives it, “the stuff of which the sign- vehicle is made is the continuum from which the expression form has cut out its expression units” (TS 266). Dewey’s great rich and dense chapters on the ‘substances’ of the arts bears directly on this whole domain, which Eco formulates primarily with the help of Hjelmslev’s schemas.

66 However, such a way of putting it seems to imply that this involves an action on the expression form rather than the expression form itself emerging out of the artist’s striving to find an appropriate support of what one wants to express. The continuum itself has expressive possibilities that ‘fit’ the content, having a kind of ‘rightness’ or ‘affinity.’ This appears to be the point of Dewey’s masterful reflections on the mediums or ‘substances’ of the various arts, their material underpinnings. But, even on the semiotic level, is there not some danger of speaking of “expression units” as if they could make up some sort of ‘vocabulary’? At the same time Eco is certainly right when he claims that “in the aesthetic text the matter of the sign-vehicle becomes an aspect of the expression-form” (TS 266; original emphasis), informed by what Peirce called its material quality. A task for a pragmatist semiotic approach to the aesthetic is to explore how far down the field of hypoforms goes within the domain of ‘significations,’ especially ‘affective’ significations. Eco also does not advert to the notions of an aura, fringe, and so forth that Dewey, following James, explored, notions that permeate Art as Experience. He gestures toward microstructures, but his basis is far from the analytical tools derived from pragmatism. Although he is right to admit ‘lower levels’ of signification and communication, he has constant recourse to linguistic examples. Should he not be talking about a pre-thematic field of habits of attending that shift according to apprehended centers and arrays of pertinence and salience that he discussed in all too brief fashion in Kant and the Platypus?

67 As to the question of what type of relation exists between “the further segmentation of the token matter of a given sign-vehicle and the further segmentation of the expression plane of an entire semiotic system” (TS 268; original emphasis), Eco rightly considers this a process of pertinentization “of those aspects of the expression-continuum that have up to now been considered as ‘hyposemiotic stuff’” (TS 268). A pragmatist aesthetics would certainly agree that “a work of art performs a semiotic redemption of its basic matter” (TS 268) and does so by a process of infinite pertinentization, a process recognized by Dewey and James and indeed is implicit in Peirce’s theses on indeterminacy, including perceptual indeterminacy. Eco strangely claims that “as long as semiotics continues to develop, the continuum will be further segmented and therefore better understood: the aesthetic experience provides a special opportunity for increasing this understanding” (TS 269; original emphasis). Surely it is semiosis, including aesthetically pivotal perceptually focused semiosis, that continues to develop, with semiotics being the reflection upon its processes. Analysis of processes of

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semiosis such as aesthetic semiosis are second order processes. The task is to find the appropriate set of broadly pragmatist analytical categories that are able to encompass the tension between perception and semiosis in the aesthetic dimension of life. It may be asked whether Eco ever satisfactorily gave an account of this matter. I have discussed elsewhere ways of doing this (see references).

68 For Eco the well-known surplus of expression is paralleled on the part of the addressee by a vaguely sensed surplus of content, a surplus still aroused even when the surplus of expression is not “consciously grasped” (TS 270). Eco admits that one might be tempted to think that a work of art communicates too much and as consequence does not communicate at all, casting as a result a magic spell “that is radically impermeable to all semiotic approach” (TS 270). Eco retorts: […] a work of art has the same structural characteristics as does a langue. So that it cannot be a mere ‘presence’; there must be an underlying system of mutual correlations, and thus a semiotic design which cunningly gives the impression of non-semiosis. (TS 271; original emphasis)

69 Eco writes that the art work as structure of mutual correlations has achieved “a new status as a super sign-function” (TS 271; original emphasis). I think that Dewey’s perception-based organic notion of an art work with mutual levels and systems of interacting energies also recognizes many underlying systems of mutual correlations, but the reference to langue shows Eco’s commitment to an underlying semiotic model based on language and the notion of a text. Such a model, while suggestive, is not sufficient and even Eco refers to “structural characteristics” rather than affirming that art works belong to language-like systems. Art works can be, and certainly, are sign- configurations, but they do not rely on coded systems of differential markers in the way language-like systems do. Dewey’s aesthetic model is complemented richly by such a model as Susanne Langer developed, which bound together feeling, perception, and signification in a powerful account of the genesis and nature of an art work.

70 Peirce and Dewey show that it is the qualitative uniqueness of every work of art that gives rise to and support its array of appropriate interpretants. This is in fact a process of abduction, accompanied by a kind of hypothetical tension, felt as a distinctive quality, aroused, for example, by a piece of music, but also possessed by all art works in different degrees. Eco writes that there occurs in the aesthetic encounter a ‘release’ of a “strong and complex feeling” (TS 274) but also a sense of being engaged, even opposed, by an ‘other’ that is communicating some ‘sense’ to us. So, Eco is right to say that art produces further knowledge and does not merely elicit an arbitrary set of individual feelings. Affective interpretation means recognizing not just how one is affected but whether one’s feeling-response is appropriate to the form (perhaps an echo of the remarks about music in Eco’s discussion of music in Aquinas). In the aesthetic encounter we are pulled into a game of intertwined interpretations and accompanying experiences, as I have discussed elsewhere (Innis 2007). We are pulled ‘inside’ the art work to dwell in it, being caught up in it through progressive processes of apprehending and differentiating the material qualities and the resultant ‘tone’ of the work. An art work makes us aware of new semiosic possibilities and trains not just semiosis at the upper levels but the lower thresholds of experience itself out which art emerges as the transfiguration of matter into sense.

71 Eco writes: “Like a large labyrinthine garden, a work of art permits one to take many different routes, whose number is increased by the criss-cross of its paths.” (TS 275).

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Eco is right to follow Peirce in arguing that all forms of inference are in play in the ‘reading’ or ‘perceiving’ of an artwork and that aesthetic abduction, in one sense, “consists in proposing certain tentative codes in order to make the author’s message understandable” (TS 275). But a pragmatist aesthetics, such as developed by Dewey against the background of James and Peirce, with its focus on constructive experiential participation in the play of elements both broadens and diminishes the notion of code to one of differentiated systems of interpretive habits on the affective, actional, and ideational levels both personally and socially. These make up the schema of ‘forestructures’ or dimensions of the aesthetic encounter and correspond to the schema of Peircean interpretants. They are ‘filled’ or ‘generated’ in the actual encounter, where there is always a permanent tension between fidelity and freedom (TS 276), a tension exemplified in the ‘open work’ but constitutive of all art works that reveal new thresholds of sense.

72 We walk in the labyrinthine garden of art, and we follow a variety of paths which are predefined even if we choose, under restraints, the actual itinerary. Dewey’s aesthetics bears in multiple ways upon Eco’s theme of the open or indeterminate nature of an art work. His pragmatist aesthetics shows art works to be grounded in meaning-structures that at all levels are perceived and not separable from their sense, no matter what their signifying support structure should be. As Dewey writes: “[…] there are other meanings that present themselves directly as possessions of objects which are experienced. Here there is no need for a code or convention of interpretation; the meaning is as inherent in immediate experience as is that of a flower garden.” (AE 89).

73 Such a contention by Dewey, looked at in light of the preceding tracing of the lost trail of Dewey in Eco’s work, is not so much a refutation of Eco’s aesthetic model and its perceptual and social underpinning, as a pointer to what further paths in determining the pragmatist dimensions of Eco’s work, beyond the Peircean, could profitably be pursued.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DEWEY John, (1896/1998), “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” in Larry A. Hickman & Thomas M. Alexander (eds), The Essential Dewey, vol. 2, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

DEWEY John, (1922/1983), Human Nature and Conduct, Critical Edition, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press.

DEWEY John, (1925), Experience and Nature, Critical Edition, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press.

DEWEY John, (1931), “Affective Thought,” in Id., Philosophy and Civilization, New York, Henry Holt.

DEWEY John, (1931), Philosophy and Civilization, New York, Henry Holt.

DEWEY John, (1934/2008), Art as Experience, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press (cited as AE).

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DEWEY John, (1935/1998), “Peirce’s Theory of Quality,” in Larry A. Hickman & Thomas M. Alexander (eds), The Essential Dewey, vol. 2, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

DEWEY John, (1946), “Peirce’s Theory of Linguistic Signs, Thought, and Meaning,” Journal of Philosophy, 43.4, 85-95.

ECO Umberto, (1978), A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press (cited as TS).

ECO Umberto, (1988), The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. by Hugh Bredin, Cambridge, Harvard University Press (cited as ATA).

ECO Umberto, (1989), The Open Work, trans. by Anna Cancogni, introduction by David Robey, Cambridge, Harvard University Press (cited as OW).

ECO Umberto, (1991), The Limits of Interpretation, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

ECO Umberto, (1999), Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, trans. by Alastair McEwen, New York, Harcourt (cited as KP).

ECO Umberto, (2014), From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation, trans. by Anthony Oldcorn, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

HICKMAN Larry A. & Thomas M. ALEXANDER (eds), (1998), The Essential Dewey, vol. 2, Bloomington, Indiana University Press (cited as ED).

INNIS Robert E., (1994), Consciousness and the Play of Signs, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

INNIS Robert E., (2002), Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense: Language, Perception, Technics, University Park, The Pennsylvania State University Press.

INNIS Robert E., (2007), “Dimensions of an Aesthetic Encounter,” in SunHee Kim Gertz, Jaan Valsiner & Jean-Paul Breaux (eds), Semiotic Rotations: Modes of Meaning in Cultural Worlds, Charlotte, Information Age Publishing, 113-34.

INNIS Robert E., (2009), Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

INNIS Robert E., (2011), “The ‘Quality’ of Philosophy: On the Aesthetic Matrix of Dewey’s Pragmatism,” in Larry A. Hickman, Matthew Caleb Flamm, Krzysztof Skowronski & Jennifer A. Rea (eds), The Continuing Relevance of John Dewey: Reflections on Aesthetics, Morality, Science, and Society, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 43-60.

INNIS Robert E., (2012), “The Reach of the Aesthetic and Religious Naturalism: Peircean and Polanyi Reflections,” Tradition and Discovery, 38/3, 31-50.

INNIS Robert E., (2013), “Peirce’s Categories and Langer’s Aesthetics: On Dividing the Semiotic Continuum,” Cognitio, 14.1, 35-50. Reprinted in Journal Phänomenologie, 45/2016, 20-34.

INNIS Robert E., (2014), “Dewey’s Peircean Aesthetics,” Cuadernos de Sistemática Peirceana, Bogatá, Centro de Sistemática Peirceana, 139-60.

INNIS Robert E., (2016), “Energies of Objects: Between Dewey and Langer,” in Das Entgegenkommende Denken, Berlin, Springer Verlag, 21-38.

INNIS Robert E., (2018), “Peirce and Dewey Speak about Art: Quality and the Theory of Signs,” To appear in Semiotica, special issue on the relevance of Peirce’s later theory of signs.

PAREYSON Luigi, (1954), Estetica. Teoria della formatività, Turin, Edizioni di Filosofia.

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SHKLOVSKY Viktor, (1917), “Art as Device,” now in Theory of Prose, trans. by Benjamin Sher, Normal, Illinois, Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.

ABSTRACTS

Umberto Eco’s philosophical project, which culminates in the development of a systematic and philosophically relevant semiotics, has a perplexing and problematic debt to and link with pragmatism in its many forms. Indeed, his apparent relation to pragmatism as such is in fact quite tangential if we ignore the pivotal role of Peirce in defining and supporting Eco’s explicit semiotic turn. But Eco claimed that John Dewey’s Art as Experience, the foundation of a distinctively pragmatist aesthetics, was a major factor in his early philosophical movement away from certain premises of the aesthetic tradition that held sway during his student days. Eco engages Dewey in surprising and enlightening ways in his early books, but the trail of Dewey is gradually ‘lost.’ It is this trail, wandering through different contexts, that I follow in this paper. I also indicate how Dewey’s work could have played a larger role in Eco’s mature aesthetic thought and that we should see the absence of Dewey to represent a lost opportunity for emphasizing and enriching the pragmatist side of a semiotic approach to aesthetics.

AUTHOR

ROBERT E. INNIS University of Massachusetts Lowell and Aalborg University Denmark rinnis41[at]gmail.com

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Who’s, What’s, I Don’t Know A Musement on Eco’s Pragmatism

Lucio Privitello

“As a rule it is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live; most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.” (Marcel Proust (1981 [1919]), “Within a Budding Grove – Place-Names: the Place,” Vol. 1, Remembrance of Things Past, p. 706). “Thirdness pours in upon us through every avenue of sense.” (C. S. Peirce, “The Nature of Meaning,” 7 May 1903, EP2: 211).

1. Retroduction

1 In the beginning was the guess, and in the end there is habit; two edges of a living continuum. To begin is to take a guess, while simultaneously being supported in this play of abductive inference by culture and human interests (habits, or perhaps what some call “pertinences”) that have had, and continue to have, influence as a “living idea,” a mediated presentation on the guessing process tied and pulled along to a world from which it sways from similar weaves.1 Welcome to Thirdness. And this is the work of retroduction; “spontaneous conjectures of instinctive reason,” as Peirce would say. We start somewhere, with something, but that is always in the sum-of-things (summa rerum). […] it must be confessed that if we knew that the impulse to prefer one hypothesis to another really were analogous to the instincts of birds and wasps, it would be foolish not to give play, within the bounds of reason; especially, since we must entertain some hypothesis, or else forgo all further knowledge than that which we have already gained by that very means. (Peirce, “The Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (1908), EP2: 443-4, original emphasis; see also EP2: 217-21)

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2 By stating “that which we have already gained by that very means,” we have a guess-in- knowledge as accumulated “historical truth,” to which the later Peirce (in 1913), equates with “faith in common-sense and in instinct.”2 Such is the nature of retroduction. It is “the deliberate yielding of ourselves to that force majeure, – an early surrender at discretion, due to our foreseeing that we must, whatever we do, be borne down by that power, at last […] a surrender to the insistence of an idea […] irresistible […] imperative.”3 Synechistic pertinence.

3 And what insistent idea may that be? In this case it is the relation of Eco to some variety of pragmatism.4 Peirce plays into this heavily, as do the roots and fruits, and indefinability of Pragmatism, mentioned in sections 1 and 2. Eco’s connection to pragmatism will, as it has already, open the flood gates to waves of ologi’s and isti’s,5 as happens in most retroductive inquiries; geology, evolution, and explanatory sciences (as Peirce saw it). Each one “theaters of controversy,” of exquisite staging, scores, scenic talents, histories, and hybrid iterations. Yet, the most hy-bri[d]vidi of them all is philosophical and cultural scholarship, if not philosophical commedia, and now perhaps even the Eco-sophical. Many claim to be ricostruzionisti, masterfully deflecting objections as to whether or not they can be held to certain proposed notions if questioned as ologo, when, at best, they were merely proposing a reading as ista.6 In this case it was Eco’s ista ricostruzionista (with a chef’s dash of ologo) reading of “iconismo primario” that gives rise to questions regarding this Peircean reassessment as we shall see in section 2. Section 3 will change tone and open up to a darker voice, and a few issues in Eco’s writing (or not) on the “comic,” particularly his essays “Pirandello Ridens,” and “The Comic and the Rule.”

2. Who’s: Wright, Green, Peirce

4 As the nursery to the birth of American pragmatism, old Cambridge, in the early 1870s, had “The Metaphysical Club.” Therein, but dramatically narrowed down for the purpose of this brief study, we find Chauncey Wright (1830-1875), and Nicholas St. John Green (1830-1876). Some believe that Green championed and extended Bain’s definition of belief in a legal and practical level, and can be considered an uncle of pragmatism. Of course, in the middle of all this there was Peirce who preached his principle, calling it “Pragmatism.”7 It was in this nursery that Wright, the other (more bizarre) uncle of pragmatism, most likely discussed what he called a “Philosophy of Habit.” This was, in his eyes, initially to supplement utilitarianism, so actions more closely serve the real ends of nature, and the economy of life, as “quantity in worth, dignity, or rank.”8 Utility was thus a principle that we regard as a standard, internally considered, in Wright’s words, by “how steadily we can think under strong feeling, or how strongly we can feel with clear thoughts.”9 Notice the already budding grove of synechism. We can imagine the conversations where Wright, Green, and Peirce, would exchange on these considerations, and where Wright, as Peirce mentioned, acted as the “boxing-master whom we, – I, particularly, – used to face to be severely pummeled.”10 Boxing masters are the ‘damndest of rationalists,’ as James once described Wright to G. H. Palmer. For Wright, more of an empiricist and critical nihilist, habit was not about the common effectiveness of motives in proportion to everyday usefulness or reasonableness, but as reliant on just, natural inclinations, that he referred to as ‘fixed habit,’ “an integrant part of a system of dispositions which, as superintending, so far as it goes, the whole of

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the conditions of human life, and leading to the conservation of the whole, itself included, is what we call conscience […].”11 Peirce expresses a similar thought in noting that “intellectual power is nothing but the facility in taking habits and in following them in cases essentially analogous to, but in non-essentials widely remote from, the normal cases of connections of feelings under which those habits were formed.”12 Further, and even closer to Wright’s general views, Peirce stated that “the pragmaticist does not make the summum bonum to consist in action, but makes it to consist in that process of evolution whereby the existent come more and more to embody those generals which were just now said to be destined, which is what we strive to express in calling them reasonable” [or “concrete reasonableness” as he later stated] (Peirce CP5: 433; original emphasis). Echoes of Wright’s cosmic weather and “counter-movements” (see Wright 1971a: 177, 74).

5 The influence of Wright is clear, especially his view where “nothing justifies the development of abstract principles in science but their utility in enlarging our concrete knowledge of nature […] [as] working ideas – finders, not merely summaries of truth” (Wright 1971: 56). Or further, “we do not inquire what course has led to successful answers in science, but what motives have prompted pertinent questions” (Wright 1971: 48), and that the “questions of philosophy proper are human desires and fears and aspirations – human emotions – taking an intellectual form” (Wright 1971: 50). One can easily notice Peirce ironing out his positions with the ghost of Wright in his article “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), as the “essence of belief is the establishment of [a rule of actions, or, say for short] a habit,”13 carried further into his later 1895 “Of Reasoning in General,” and again in the 1905 piece, “What Pragmatism Is,” and his 1907 “Pragmatism.” It is in his sixth Harvard lecture from May 7, 1903, entitled “The Nature of Meaning” that we see how close to Wright he came: This Faculty [Insight] is at the same time of the general nature of Instinct, resembling the instinct of animals in its so far surpassing the general powers of our reason and for its directing us as if we are in possession of facts that are entirely beyond the reach of our senses. It resembles instinct too in its small liability to error; for though it is wrong oftener than right, yet the relative frequency with which it is right is on the whole the most wonderful thing in our constitution. (Peirce, EP2: 217-8)

6 Peirce never abandoned this view. In one of his last writings, from September-October 1913, we hear again about “human intellectual instincts,” and how Peirce “select[s] the appellation ‘instinct’ in order to profess [his] belief that the reasoning-power is related to human nature very much as the wonderful instincts of ants, wasps, etc., are related to their several natures” (Peirce EP2: 464). It would be difficult indeed to get closer than this to pragmatism’s “instinctive attraction to living facts” (Peirce CP5: 44).

7 In 1873 (after the breaking up of the Metaphysical Club), Wright was knee-deep in working on the article “Evolution of Self Consciousness.” He points out how the term “rational” (or “scientific”) is “knowledge [that] comes from reflecting on what we know in the common-sense, or semi-instinctive forms, or making what we know a field of renewed research, observation, and analysis.” This does not neatly divide the minds of humans and non-human animals, but only, as he writes, “divides the knowledge produced by outward attention from that which is further produced by reflective attention.” This amounts to how, in humans, images act as signs to govern lines of thought, reasoning, and research, whereas “with reference to the more vivid outward signs, they are, in the animal mind, merged in the things signified, like stars in the light

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of the sun” (Wright 1971: 207, 209).14 In his 1913 unpublished piece, Peirce is also clear about his synechistic view, contra Bacon’s despair that “Nature far exceeds the subtlety of the human mind.” This is explained with an example from an experience he had with the then Professor of Greek at Harvard, E. A. Sophocles, who, as Peirce stated, “was a curious observer of many other things than the habits of aorist infinitives.” For Peirce the colligation of one fact to another related fact has a person combine these as a surprising third fact, and there, “though [Peirce] say[s] that is it by instinct that he draws the inference [retroduction], [he] nevertheless admits that he may be very much mistaken [negative realism?], just as such animals as dogs and ants are sometimes betrayed by their instincts […] yet the instincts of more intelligent mammals, birds, and insects, sometimes undergo modification under new experience” (Peirce, EP2: 467; original emphasis). And here Peirce recounts the story of the toad that lost one eye, was near starvation due to missing his prey, but regained (retooled) his aim, after a few weeks. Notice again the echoes of Wright: Command of signs, and, indeed, all the volitional or active powers of animals, including attention in perception, place it in relation to outward things in marked contrast with its passive relations of sensation and inattentive or passive perception. The distinctness, or prominence, in consciousness given by an animal’s attention to its perceptions, and the greater energy given by its intentions or purposes on its outward movements cannot fail to afford a ground of discrimination between these as causes, both of inwards and outward events, and those outward causes which are not directly under such control, but form an independent system, or several distinct systems of causes. This would give rise to a form of self-consciousness more immediate and simple than the intellectual one, and is apparently realized in dumb animals. (Wright, “Evolution of Self- Consciousness,” 1971: 224)

8 Peirce maintains his view on instinct (clearly against species solipsism) throughout his intellectual development, and from his 1898 lecture “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life” we read, “thus reason, for all the frills it customarily wears, in vital cases, comes down upon its marrow-bones to beg the succor of instinct” (EP2: 32). Wright’s position is written all over this. In the same lecture he pushes it further by adding how reasons are “excuses which unconscious instinct invents to satisfy the teasing ‘why’s’ of the ego.” Much later (in the autumn of 1913) we find Peirce returning to this view, where “Reason is a sort of instinct,” and laments that we have been blind to the “just authority of instinct” (EP2 472; original emphasis). In-between these dates, and from a letter from 1908 to Lady Welby, we find how Icons, when referred to interpretants are “Suggestives” “assuring their interpretants by ‘Instinct’” (EP2: 481).15

9 Somewhere within this tangle one can again take up and press Eco’s idea of “primary iconism.” The Peircean use of the term “assuring” (very Third indeed), in this instance would serve as a way to clarify what Eco mistakenly believes is a primum, under the idea of “primary iconism,” but is instead, in the semblance of a moment, a history (or habit) of “pertinences” rolled into one.16 This history of pertinent recognition is the very recursiveness of “degenerate” Thirdness.17 The most degenerate Thirdness is where we conceive a mere Quality of Feeling, or Firstness, to represent itself to itself as Representation. Such, for example would be Pure Self-Consciousness, which might be roughly described as a mere feeling that has a dark instinct of being a germ of thought. This sounds nonsensical, I grant. Yet something can be done toward rendering it comprehensible. (Peirce, EP2: 161)

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10 Any personal experiential habitus is already sub specie vinculum to degenerate Thirdness. What we gather from the letters of Wright, which would have made up many discussion topics, is that the intuitive and non-intuitive boils down to an issue of logic, not psychology, and more precisely that “cognitions which cannot be analyzed by introspection are called intuitions [or] data, axioms, [and] premises of logical processes […] but no amount of introspection can analyze a cognition down to the bare, unrelated data of senses […] this would be to dissolve all of the links which bind sensuous impression to consciousness […]” (Wright 1971: 128). Here is Wright against any primary iconism, molar, molecular, or for the expressed purposes of an interpretive kick in the pants. Similarly, no amount of pertinence, and no amount of “pertinentizzazione di un soggetto interpretante che ritaglia un piano enciclopedico di pertinenza”18 can begin a series, due to pertinence (or levels of pertinence) being always-already a tremor from within a concrete historical series from which, even subsumed under a personal aspect, is Likeness experientialized, or as Peirce would have it, the “capacity for experience” (EP2: 8, original emphasis; CP1: 307). Pertinence, like belief, is a ready-made cluster of belief-formations, where a person does not act on one belief, or one pertinence.

11 Eco’s reference to Giorgio Prodi’s “Signs and Codes of Immunology” (1988), well as Prodi (1977), is a tempting by-path to revisit, and to entertain some type of Wright- Darwin connection, but, alas, Wright, with Bacon, would say they are no more than “anticipations of the mind.”19 Let us recall a cornerstone in Peirce’s architectonic: “Thirdness pours in upon us through every avenue of sense.” (EP2: 211).20 Yet even to this, Wright’s harsh rebuttal can be heard: “It is possible that laws exist absolutely universal, binding fate and infinite power as well as speech and the intelligible use of words; but it is not possible that the analytic process of any finite intellect should discover what particular laws these are.” (Wright 1971: 229).21 Peirce did not forget this lesson, and took it with him as a shield against the unknowable, and medusian “thing- in-itself.” With this in mind, what sense does Eco’s citation from De docta ignorantia, II, ii, of Nicola Cusano even amount to, if not a couched nod to the tough critical skeptico- nihilism of Chauncey Wright? (See Eco, “La soglia e l’infinito,” 2007: 172. See also Fabbrichesi 2017: 321.) Perhaps Cusano’s citation is best re-written as, “The infinite Form can only be received in a burst of laughter.”

12 Before moving on to section 2, let us return for a moment more to Old Cambridge, and recall Peirce’s debt to Nicholas St. John Green. Green was a “skillful lawyer and a learned one [with] his extraordinary power of disrobing warm and breathing truth of the draperies of long worn out formulas was what attracted attention to him everywhere.”22 And further, Peirce saw in Green “an overflowing spirit of good- fellowship, and a Rabelaisian humor, without the Rabelaisian cynicism.”23 That is some praise coming from Peirce. I believe that Eco would have welcomed, and deserved, the same description, and praise.24 As was mentioned earlier, Green championed and extended, as Peirce saw it, Bain’s definition of belief, viz., “that upon which a man is prepared to act,” from a legal anti-formalist position, along with his anti-nominalist approach to causes (proximate or remote). In all this, Green can be considered an uncle of pragmatism, if Bain’s definition (whether Green indeed had him in mind), was its grandfather. From his legal training, teaching, and practice, Green was an example of how purpose, and following through on purposes, are the basis and means of world- making-meaning rooted in outcomes of the actions involving belief. I agree with

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Menand (2001: 225), that Green was more influenced by, and was probably citing (as he did in his Notes, and Reviews) the works of Judge James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894), and in particular, A General View of the Criminal Law in England (1863) in his statements on belief. Nevertheless, Green’s position as a legal scholar and widely cultured teacher made way for an understanding of how laws (and legal practices) are products (results) of social practices, setting Green on the front lines of the scission between legal formalism and legal realism.25

13 It would not be difficult to image the discussions between Green, Peirce, Wright, (and Holmes), upon the statements that “the desire to act and the desire to act successfully are ultimate facts in human nature,” and that “without belief men cannot act,” and that “belief is [not a passive reception of external facts] but an active habit involving an exertion of will.”26 Closer textual evidence can be gleaned from Green’s articles, and notes and reviews from 1869 to 1876, and we can continue to imagine how similar problems and positions could have been brought up in discussions at The Metaphysical Club, (their last meeting held sometime in mid-late November 1872).

14 In his review, “Power of the Will Over Conduct” Green states: “There is always a tendency to act out an idea. […] This tendency is something distinct from, and something often acting in opposition to the will. It acts with a strength proportioned to the vividness of the idea [and] a multitude is enough to show that the tendency, in spite of reason or the will to act out an idea, is not an exception but a universal rule.” (Green 1933: 168). In the review, “The Maxim that a Man is presumed to Intend the Natural Consequences of his Acts,” Green gives a few examples where this maxim, considered a presumption of fact for the jury to consider, was clarified and supported as such by James Fitzjames Stephen, who Green cites from General View of the Criminal Law of England: Proof that a man’s body has gone through a set of motions usually caused by a certain state of mind raises a presumption that they were so caused in the particular case at issue […] because it recognizes the fact that every action consists as such of inward feelings and outwards motions, the motions forming the evidence of the feelings […] the way in which, in fact, he did move is the only trustworthy evidence on the subject, and consequently is the evidence to which alone (in all common cases), the jury ought to direct their attention. (Green 1933: 192)

15 There are other examples of Green’s clear-headedness, his view of the practical service of judgments, and, as Peirce, noted, his “extraordinary power of disrobing warm and breathing truth of the draperies of long worn out formulas,” the most notable being his article, “Proximate and Remote Causes” (Green 1933: 1-17), where we read: Nothing more imperils the correctness of a train of reasoning than the use of metaphor […] the phrase “chain of causation,” which is a phrase in frequent use when this maxim is under discussion, embodies a dangerous metaphor […] causes are pictured as following one upon the other in time, as the links of a chain follow one upon the other in space. There is nothing in nature which corresponds to this. Such an idea is a pure fabrication of the mind. (Green 1933: 11)

16 Wright would have agreed. He similarly questioned the usage of the term “belief,” stating that, “what is called ‘belief,’ as to what it is, as well as to what are the true grounds or cause of it, would, if the meanings of the word were better discriminated in common usage, be settled by the lexicographer; for it is really an ambiguous term” (Wright 1971: 249). Even more, “reverence, or the want of it, has quite as much influence on men’s beliefs, or professions of belief, as proofs and disproofs have” (Wright 1971a: 206). Peirce was also working out these problems which, in 1886, he

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called the “associational determinations of belief,” and how daily life is full of these, and how it is best to allow these “inferences” (unconscious, preconscious) their day and not engage them by some “hypochondriac logic.”27

3. What’s: Primarily, Iconically, Peirce

17 Three texts by Eco will be mentioned in this section; Lector in Fabula (1979: 27-49), Kant and the Platypus ([1997] 2000: 99-122), and “La soglia e l’infinito” (Eco in Paolucci, 2007: 145-76). Peirce’s statement, “Thirdness pours in upon us through every avenue of sense” (EP2: 211), will once again serve as a stern recursive sign-post. In Kant and the Platypus, where he took up reinterpreting Peirce’s iconism, Eco sways under the sublime firmament of Parmenides’ rendition of “Being,” (that should have been placed under “The questioning of the poets” section 1.7), because Eco did not account for the legislative roots, aim, and language of Parmenides’ poem, or the Eleatic legislator’s particular way of figuring limits to signs (and naming) un-becoming for the public truth of just-Being. Parmenides’ does not emulate due to a negative ontology, nor does he present an abstraction, but rather a quality of feeling, as Peirce would see it; and there, “nothing is truer than true poetry” (EP2: 193, see also 194). Parmenides’ fragments were written in a style so they could have been recited, as were Charondas’, or sung as were Zaleucus’ laws. Solon also put his lawmaking tenants in poetic form. Add to this that “The first has nothing to do with the One of Parmenides […] nor any other unities that are talked about in philosophy; for these are really unities of totality, and so imply plurality” (Peirce W5: 304). Back to Thirdness we come, and to where “Law is the revealing of being” (Plato, Minos 317b).28

18 Somewhat like Peirce’s shift in 1885, Eco’s shift in 1997 was (back, or forwards) to speculative philosophy proper. Peirce, due in part to his encounter and review of Royce’s Religious Aspect of Philosophy,29 and Eco due to recalibrating his past works and positions regarding the cognitive, semiotic, forms of narration, the unclassifiable, the encyclopedia, reference, negotiation, Peirce, and his encounters with the figures and fierce debates on iconism. In a way, this was Eco presenting his work as a conceptual platypus flying in the face of easy schematizing (though aiming at one), due to his use, critique, and composition of an enormous range of figures and themes in the history of philosophy, without forgetting how it all re(as)sembles a story.

19 In Kant and the Platypus, Eco is wrestling with Peirce, as a veritable Jacob. Eco states his position against Pericean synechism by how we could ever “aspire to a thought that is so complex (but organic at the same time) that it can explain the complexity (and the organicity) of the world of our experience, or natural world […] [and in this case] the thought presumes to proceed by given rules (and found in the making of the thought itself) that for some reason are the same (still unknown, however) as those of the ‘natural’ world that it thinks” (Eco 1985: 334-5, original emphasis; see also Eco 2000: 120-2, 255-6). In Peirce we find a rebuttal that goes beyond spilling black ink: Let the clean blackboard be a sort of diagram of the original vague potentiality […] I draw a chalk line on the board. This discontinuity is one of these brute acts by which alone the original vagueness could have made a step towards definiteness. There is a certain element of continuity in this line. Where did this continuity come from? It is nothing but the original continuity of the blackboard which makes everything upon it continuous. (Peirce, CP6: 203)

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20 Here we catch the difference between Eco’s negative realism, otherwise called contractual realism, minimal realism, or temperate realism, (depending at what miraculous stage of interpretation one finds themselves), and Peirce’s “process realism,” or where realism and synechism are bounded and object of semiotic investigations.30

21 Would this be close enough to the Eco’s hard core of being (zoccolo duro dell’essere), or to the endless wrapping of hard-wired (cable-optic) lines of resistance (“linee di tendenza”), best translated as “lines of tendencies”?31 If so, then Eco is set back to explain how, in fact, this heterogeneity can be traced, or de-marcated, if there is not some form of isomorphism, or mutual influence.32 This issue can be further developed by returning to the idea of habit in Peirce, and how Eco leaves it nearly untouched, by a rather Proustian-like “momentary intermission of Habit.” This is this perhaps due to Eco previously having “put something of [himself] everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and [he] can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal’s Pensées in an advertisement for soap.”33 Or is it rather, because it is “well known that you can make Peirce say anything you want according to how you approach him” (Eco 2000: 399 n.26)?34 If that is the case, so much then for the limits of interpretation, or gesturing about when a given interpretation is blatantly wrong, aberrant, or untenable, and farewell to the hope of any internal textual coherence. What then will Peirce’s text not allow, and what could even be invalidated as false? Of course, if Eco is rewriting Peirce as a riconstruizionista, and is picking through some of the actual phases, textual histories, and history within which the works of Peirce navigated, he is varying Peirce, spirit, letter, and philological knots, and approaches the threshold of a novel. Somewhat like a Baudolino, Peirce is abandoned to a perpetual renovation and restoration of his beloved Arisbe. Then, just about anything goes. In the end, Eco grew a habit of reinterpreting Peirce, a “heavy curtain of habit,”35 (another strike against any primary iconism), and this is what we must deal with, whether or not it shrouded or revealed the reality of Peirce’s surrounding world. What we have is Eco’s production of possible worlds of his own expectations and interpretative cooperation, reminding us more of his work on the fable. Perhaps this is how Peirce’s texts lends the reader a way to be managed in their anticipatory interpretative hopes, and incorporates them at a discursive level, playing in turn to a world as/in a story.36

22 The production of a habit is through an interpretant. That is clear, and accepted by Eco, but that should signal (how final, or not, is debatable), that the possibility of guessing is met “by qualitative standards, [themselves] habitually constructed over time, based on the ethical (Secondness) and, in turn, the esthetic (Firstness)” (Tschaepe 2014: 124). This is supported by the assessment of Gilmore (2006: 318) regarding the primacy of Peirce’s aesthetics, which was what Peirce called “the secret of pragmatism” (CP5: 132, 1903). The secret of pragmatism involves the idea that logic, as well as ethics, ultimately depends on aesthetics. That means that we think ultimately by feeling. “We feel by a unity before we understand it.” (CP5: 132).37 Coming up against Eco’s admiration for Peirce’s work of perpetual interpretation (or revisable interpretations), we do find how he desires Peirce to speak. “What I shall do is try to say how I think Peirce should be read (or reconstructed, if you will); in other words I shall try to make him say what I wish he had said, because only in that case will I manage to understand what he meant to say.” (Eco 2000: 99).38 In Eco’s renditions, like so many trompe l’œil, there are perhaps some areas where we can believe we are looking through the

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expertly painted window, but it can never be painted as reflecting our own shadowy image looking through and back. At least there is something in front of us, and that we can, at times, be mistaken.39 Eco is in an incessant battle in finding coordinates for Peirce’s terms due to the tension between the unreachable encyclopedic model, and the more economical under-certain-aspects model of how an Immediate Object focuses the Dynamic Object (see Eco 1979: 38-40). It would then appear that the state of Peirce’s writings (articles, lectures, letters, notes, and drafts), were in themselves a ready-made intermediate hermeneutical space. There is no overarching Peircean text, only elaborate segments, mostly rethinking, rewritings, and re-expositions. This would then call for the historian within Eco’s early work to rise again, and similarly (with a touch of philology), as he did with the work of Aquinas’s aesthetics, do with Peirce’s texts; that is, have him placed in his own time, considered as a representative of his period, and how his ideas are seen as part of a problematic peculiar to that period (see Eco 1988: vii-viii, and Marenbon 2017: 78-9). But that would be too much the work of an “ologo.”

23 Eco’s “La soglia e l’infinito” (Paolucci, 2007: 145-76), shows us something of what Peirce believed was an example (a segment in this case) of the long-run (or sufficient investigation) of a community of investigators. This is exemplified in how Eco was in an earnest dialogue with Paolucci’s measured and just criticism of the rendition of primary iconism.40 Added to this dialogue we also find Eco’s use of the work of Fumagalli (1995) on Peirce’s intuitionist turn after 1885, and the more recent encounter and discussion had with Achille Varzi on issues of de dicto and de re boundaries conditions. Each of these dialogue scenes, and one should also add Mameli (1997), come under, and are fitted into, Eco’s own clarifications of his “Rilettura di Peirce,” (translated heavy-handedly as “Peirce Reinterpreted”) in Kant and the Platypus (2000: 99-122). It is best to think of Eco’s encounter as a “rereading.” That would be a more appropriate de re type of tracing of boundary conditions, seeing how potentially indebted he had been to Peirce. Eco moves on the field of scholarship, viz., ologi, isti, and ricostruzionisti, leave him in the same de re boundary condition with Peirce’s texts, to which Eco seeks to free himself as a captive ologo, and to reemploy (in act) Peircean themes (primary iconism), under his fully developed, and pertinence-fixed “cognitive bias.” We can answer Paolucci’s question, “Com´è possibile essere peirciani ed echiani allo stesso tempo?”41 (“How is it possible to be peircians and echians at the same time?”) in the negative: we can’t, and why bother? On Eco’s own reading, Peirce, “una persona di senno,” had his own pertinence-fix cognitive bias, or what Peirce would call “voluntary habits.” His cosmology was a major one. That was where intelligibility is a structure of the universe, and where “there is something in nature to which the human reason is analogous” (EP2: 193), which is how the “ultimate intellectual interpretants must be some kind of mental effects of the signs they interpret” (EP2: 431). He also had his logic, mathematics, the logic of history, and historical investigations. Peirce explains this clearly in his 1907 “Pragmatism” manuscript, under “Variant 2” (EP2: 421-33, see also 549-50 n49).

24 By what surrounding reality (Peirce’s surrounding world) would Eco then have the ability to act upon if the habit produced retains none of the reality (textually speaking) due to making Peirce say what Eco wished he had said? What stops would habit have, what lines of resistance (tendencies), what dynamical object could there be, and what final interpretant exist? With Rabelais, we must admit that “privatio praesupponit habitum” (“lack presupposes a previous habit”). One must then await a reasonable Pericean

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encyclopedia (and history), and one in which Eco’s previous interpretive sign-paths will also be part and parcel. But on pain of betraying Eco’s view of the encyclopedia, that by its very nature as situated knowledge needs to remain local to circumstances and instances, how would a Maximal Encyclopedia fair in light of Peirce’s extraordinary span of texts, rewritings, and letters that make up his semio-cosmological philosophy system? No doubt an Eco-inspired novel awaits, where theory and narration, the said and the shown become the place of truth. Until then whither an Eco-Peircean pragmaticism, due to how “ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of affectability. In this spreading they lose intensity […] but gain generality and become welded with other ideas.” (CP6: 104, and 301). What would count as our percept in this case, and what would, in Peirce’s words, “prescribe what you are to do in order to gain a perceptual acquaintance with the object of the world” (CP2: 330)?

4. I Don’t Know: the Comic

25 In pure play (or “musement”), one could draw a similarity between the comic character Henry Russell, and his final practical joke played on his relatives in the British film Laughter in Paradise (Zampi 1951, 93 mins.), and Eco’s response (now ghost of a distant author) to Donald Phillip Verene: At a certain point I gave up and decided (with comical resolution) not to write [a book on the comic] in expectation that after my death there would appear several doctoral dissertations on what the unwritten work of mine would have been like. (Verene, if he has nothing better to do, would make an excellent candidate for that undertaking …). (Eco 2017: 179)42

26 I extend this similarity not only to the issue of Eco and the comic, (and his “critical mission of parody”), but to what he has left us to ponder from his vast encyclopedia, now part of Peirce’s homogeneously connected three Universes.43 With an irascible indexical gesture, Eco has us look again at something, rethink, rework, and do (perhaps contrary to some of our own entrenched habits and character traits), and in the end, we come out having learned, (picked up habits of conduct44), transforming our lives a bit, learning how to laugh at our own all-too-serious hunt for truth, and becoming more playful, so “to make truth laugh.”45

27 But for this to happen, as joyous as it could be, is a sure-fire way to muddy the claims of primary iconism as advanced, defended, and elaborated by Eco, and to question if Firstness can even figure any something at all, except as the tone of its own laughter that is another irascible indexicality of the darkness of the pure dream of chance. While this might sound to be under the influence of Bataille, with a touch of Cioran, it prepares us for encountering Pirandello; that contortionist of human interactions and habits.

28 In “Pirandello Ridens,” originally a conference paper delivered in 1968, (Eco 1994: 163-73), we are shown how this child of Sicily is actually supremely humorless, shielding his own humor, or smirks, from his land’s Medusian stare. This is partly due to an island that twists the comic and humor from the forge of Hephaestian tragedy, if not from a ripe provincialism. The laughter from Pirandello’s plays (and stories) are merely the sounds of how spirit is gasping for air from the smoke and ashes of its own making. Perhaps this can be linked to the “suspension of the suspension of disbelief” that Eco mentions, that acts as perpetual doubt, undermining any code, and plunging

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humor into the dark corner of sarcasm, ridicule, and the caricature of habit. This can be a sticking point to a pragmatic account of a semiotics of humor. There is a failure, and disregard of pragmatic competence in Pirandello’s non-theory theory of humor, and that is reflected in the failure of any deep cooperation as soon as a cultural grid is even faintly established. The failure of creating something out of the knotted Pirandellian world is that it does not (or refuses to) acknowledge that any original expectation has not been fulfilled, because the original itself was a fake. The ur-joke is on it.46 In Pirandello’s Sicily, there is no patience with a resolved habit (Thirdness) that is less than death. And so, there is no Cratylism between truth and its laughter, yet their folk etymology labors constantly, yet fruitlessly, for an iconic remodeling of language, landscape, and world.47 Could this be one aspect of why Eco became resolved that a complete and theoretical definition of humor is best left alone? If the intent of Dorfles to analyze the “mechanisms underlying every kind of humor” failed, Eco was not one to blindly follow suit.48 Or is it because the process of “detachment” or “alienation” is just too entrenched within Pirandello, that there is a lack of that something to be detached from? Put in a Peircean way (but against two of his “Four Incapacities”), “Pirandello Ridens” begins to uncover how the absolutely in-cognizable (detachment in detachment, or meta-ostranenie) feigns an intuitive grasp of what it posits as already lost.49 Perhaps this meta-detachment comes within the comic to retroduce what “knocks at the portal of my soul and stands there in the doorway,”50 but more often times than not, our understanding ends up being greeted by a “strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing.”51 In humor there is a threshold, but no liminal, and this is how humor frequently passes beyond the comic, due to the lack of a standard of measure with sympathy that has only the sky as a limit to its cruelty. It is clear that Pirandello’s laughter (or smirk), contrary to Eco’s open and giving “maieutic of possibles” (maieuta dei possibili), is apocalyptic, thus suspending any and all dialectical play between order and adventure and remaining a maieutic of impossibilities.52

29 What happens when we turn to Eco’s “The Comic and the Rule”? This is another text on the comic that emerged from a symposium presentation. The comic jeopardizes the rule(s) because there can be no examination or confirmation of the nature of the rule as there is in tragedy. This is another version of “don’t ask confirmation from the author!” A spectator would say: “do not teach me my joy, or laughter, especially when I am not sure of the dimensions caught-up in my laughter.”53 To do so would also be to overturn a semiotic rule by asking the comedic author, and posit a rule-above that can be grasped besides the effects it produces (fallible or infallible hilarity included). This would also strain the pragmatic competence to reproduce a code for the effects that would mix comedic sense from an array of aspects (social, textual, perceptual, etc.), without defining a ground upon which the mixing occurs. At best, the comic is the haunting of tychism’s quiet synechistic homology. At worst, the comic displays something in which the work of interpretation has come to an end; a vengeful agapistic nihilism. In either case we have a most fragile liaison that we guardedly carry forwards, and back, between natural world and posited world, and where the “as if” clings to its hope of commensurability even when it is as f’d as can be.54 The comic plays devilishly with a fathomless bisociation: the constitutive and the regulative, real-ideal. Comedy’s very staging feigns both.

30 “The Comic and the Rule” leaves us with a surprise. It was an “opening of the door” in the experiential “humorous mechanism of symposia” (and let us admit, scholarship

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itself). This is where we can hear Eco’s actual sense of humor, and his profound lesson for us all.55 From his vast experiences through many decades, venues, fields, friendships, and mentoring, we see how these arenas, where tentative and slow meekly measured transgressions poised as would-be rules, become the undoing of any unquestioned lofty rule, and thus where comic timing reveals the spaces where the what that is le propre de l’homme belongs: somewhere between chorus-less tragedy and medieval farce. Behold the commedia of philosophy. Yet, as a warning, and in the words of Eco’s beloved Peirce, just months before his death, we hear: “I also realize that in these times and as long as I shall live, it is those who know the least and who can least continue [to be] patient who are able to decide how matters shall be conducted.” (EP2: 475).

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NOTES

1. On the issue of guessing see the following works of C. S. Peirce: R 692.29, EP1: 287, EP2: 25, 108, 217, 443-4, CP1: 118, CP5.47, 173, 586, 591, and 603-4. On Peirce’s use of “living idea,” or a law that governs mental phenomena, and “general idea [as] the mark of habit,” (original emphasis) see CP6: 152, CP7: 498, and CP6: 141, and CP5: 181 on the abductive suggestion. See also Gilmore (2006: 314-5, 318). 2. Peirce EP2: 446. If one follows through with this citation there is a close parallel, as we shall see, with Chauncey Wright’s investigative positions. Peirce continues, “This brings him, for testing the hypothesis, to taking his stand upon Pragmaticism, which implies faith in common- sense and in instinct, thought only as they issue from the cupel-furnace of measured criticism. [The Neglected Argument] is the First Stage of a scientific inquiry, resulting in a hypothesis of the very highest Plausibility, whose ultimate test must lie in its value in the self-controlled growth of man’s conduct of life.” Peirce’s reflections on history (a lacuna in Eco’s appropriation) needs revisiting. See Miller 1971, and Esposito 1983. 3. See Peirce, “The First Rule of Logic,” EP2: 46-7. Here too we see how in 1898, Peirce was, in ways, carrying on Chauncey Wright’s examples of the philosophy of education and pedagogy that Peirce actually experienced face-to-face in discussions, questions, and exchanges in Cambridge as part of The Metaphysical Club. For a brief foray into Wright on education see Privitello (2005: 627-49). See also Eisele (1964: 51-75) on Peirce’s philosophy of education, with emphasis on mathematics.

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4. For a clear, brief, and historical framing of Eco’s position in Italian pragmatism see Maddalena (2014: 11-2). 5. On the mention of “ologi” and “isti” see Eco’s “La soglia e l’infinito,” in Paolucci (2007: 147). 6. Could one level a similar criticism to Eco, that Eco once leveled against Croce, that is, being “a past master at dismissing problems by defining them as pseudo problems”? In this case the terms of criticism are much more refined, as Eco masterfully displayed in “La soglia e l’infinito.” See also Eco (1994: 163). 7. See Peirce, “The Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (EP2: 448) for his description of the event. 8. Wright (1971a: 287; original emphasis). 9. Wright (1971a: 224). 10. Peirce (EP2: 399). Though Peirce held Wright in high regard, he seemed to have favored Green’s approach, and used Wright, “that acute but shallow fellow,” “as a whetstone of wits,” Perry (1964: 292). 11. Wright (1971a: 288; original emphasis). See how Peirce develops this in “Pragmatism,” July- August 1907, EP2: 431n49, and in EP2: 448. 12. Peirce SW 152, “The Architecture of Theories” (1891). 13. Peirce SW 121. 14. See also Wright (1971: 211-2), and Wright (1866: 264). For a recent, albeit brief take on this relationship between Wright and Peirce on signs, see Parravicini (2009: 270-1), and Parravicini (2012: 195-8). 15. See also Peirce’s “Qualitative Logic” of 1886 where “unconscious and uncontrolled reasonings […] often truer than if they were regulated […] [show] the usual superiority of instinct over reason, and of practice over theory” (W5: 327). 16. See Eco (2000: 161), Eco (2012: 98), and Eco (2017: 48) for his use of “pertinence” from Luis Prieto (1975), and “affordance” from Gibson (1979). 17. See Eco (2007: 160-1, 172, 176 n.12), and Paolucci (2007: 35-7). But here we may heed the sentiments of Wright who in his final known letter from September 1, 1875, felt that “written words are rivets and chains by which our freedom is fettered, our mood pinioned, and our Protean lives set in false, because fixed posture […]” Wright (1971a: 355). Here we can also place Peirce’s 1910 statement, in agreement with Papini, that pragmatism “cannot [or should not] be defined” (CP6: 490). 18. “Pertinence-zation of an interpretant subject that samples an encyclopedic delineation of pertinence.” See Paolucci (2007: 36-37), and Eco in Paolucci (2007: 160, 172). 19. See Eco (2000: 108-9), and Wright, “The Genesis of Species” (1971: 131-2, 135-6). 20. In his fifth lecture at Harvard, 30 April 1903, Peirce first stated how “Generality, Thirdness, pours in upon us in our very perceptual judgments, and all reasoning […]” (EP2: 207). 21. Thirty-four years after Wright’s death, Peirce censured James for “look[ing] up to far too much” to Wright “who probably entrapped you in his notion that in some part of the universe one and one perhaps does not make two […]” (Perry 1964: 292). 22. Peirce (EP2: 399). See also Frank (1954) for an excellent, and very detailed study on Green’s influence on Peirce, and Holmes. 23. Peirce (W3: 210). 24. On the issue of laughter in Eco (to which I will turn to in section 3), see Paolucci (2017a: 138-65, esp. 159-65). 25. See Giovanni Tuzet (2011) for a fascinating study on legal judgment as a model for philosophical analysis, as well as Kellogg (2013) for upshots from the influence of Peirce (and perhaps Green) on O. W. Holmes Jr. 26. These citation are from James Fitzjames Stephen’s A General View of the Criminal Law (1863: 242).

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27. Peirce (W5: 327-8). For a later definition of “belief” see Peirce (EP2: 12). 28. Even though Eco (2000: 20) believes that most intimately, and initially, “being is not a philosophical problem.” This should have been further elaborated when discussing Parmenides’ poem. 29. Peirce’s encounter and review of Royce’s text (that prodded him to his major views in Guess at the Riddle), was followed by his encounter and review with R. Perrin’s Religion of Philosophy, T. K. Abbott’s translation of Kant’s Introduction to Logic, John Fiske’s The Idea of God, as well as Clifford’s Common Sense in the Exact Sciences, where Peirce even cited F. E. Abbot’s yet unpublished Scientific Theism (a major influence on the riddle, sphinx, and guessing writ cosmologically). With all this, Peirce was no doubt inspired again to take up his place in high philosophy. See Peirce (W5: xxxvi-xxxvii, 221-34, 254-6, 257, 258-9, and 260-1). See also Fisch (1986: 235-8). 30. For the term “process realism” I am indebted to Sandra Rosenthal’s excellent article “Meaning as Habit: Some Systematic Implications of Peirce’s Pragmatism,” The Monist, 65, 2, “The Relevance of Charles Peirce,” April, 1982: 230-45. On the issue of ground, and leaving black ink for a blackboard [chalkboard] see Eco (2000: 61, 64-5, 99-106, 113). The blackboard [chalkboard] is “percept”-like, attending-motivation, not a sterile backdrop. 31. See Eco (2012: 106-9) and Eco (2000: 50, 54). I imagine that Eco would have enjoyed his closeness to Green (and Holmes). In Green he would have approved that “all things in nature, all things external, all idea, all sensations, all emotions, shade into each other by imperceptible degrees. No absolute lines can be drawn. Things are separated from one another by a debatable ground.” Green (1933: 166-7). In “Di un Realismo Negativo” Eco is close to this legal-pragmatist view in his mentions of limits, and of how “il nostro linguaggio sfuma nel silenzio [di fronte] alla morte,” and how “la scienza [deve] rivedere persino l’idea di leggi che parevano definitivamente adeguare la natura dell’universo.” All to say that “noi elaboriamo leggi proprio come risposta a questa scoperta di limiti, che siano questi limiti non sappiamo dire con certezza, se non appunti che sono dei ‘gesti di rifiuto’ […]” (Eco 2012: 106, 109). Holmes would add: “Legal, like natural divisions, however clear in their general outline, will be found on exact scrutiny to end in a penumbra or debatable land. This is the region of the jury, and only cases falling on this doubtful border are likely to be carried far in court.” (Holmes [1881] 1991: 127). Eco is thus closer to Green (and Holmes) than to Peirce, when it comes to his variety of pragmatism. This is due to the work of narration as to what is the case aspect in legal proceedings, which when expertly supported by precedent cases, laws, and facts, (and rhetoric) indeed rises to a many times frightful, and sometimes relief of an ordo et connexio rerum idem est ac ordo et connexio idearum. In another life, Eco would have been a marvelous lawyer of eristic Ersatz. 32. The recent work of Claudio Paolucci (2017: 251-77), “Eco, Peirce, and the Anxiety of Influence: The Most Kantian of Thinkers” is crucial to unpack for a measured and valid critique of Eco’s use and abuse of Peirce, as is his most recent text, Umberto Eco: Tra Ordine e Avventura, Paolucci (2017a: see esp., 34-6, and 191-214). See also Paolucci (2007: 31-7). Another rich example to be studied, and that gives a way to link primary iconism and negative realism (even in Eco’s own eyes), is Rosella Fabbrichesi’s excellent chapter: “Eco, Peirce, and Iconism: A Philosophical Inquiry” (2017: 305-24). Something I noticed in Fabbrichesi’s admirable study (see 2017: 308, 308n9, and 322n9), for which I will blame William James first all, is a misuse of the terms the “that” and the “what” to explain how primary likeness could ever be between them [a relation!?]. These terms are not James’ distinction, but an example of how his facile re-appropriations tend to muck-up stricter theory. As he once transmogrified the term “pragmatism,” lifted Wright’s use of “cosmic weather” as internal weather in The Will to Believe, and here we have an example of his freebooting from F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality ([1893] 1969), where in much stricter terms, and in a long and compelling argument (beyond the scope of this present study), there would be no intelligible reconstruction without discrepancy of the feeling from the felt, the subject from the universe (or Absolute), and hence, no way to defend or explain Eco’s examples,

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without actually yielding to the stronger ontological hypothesis, or to Bradley’s strain of prag- mysticism, or better, of a Schelling-Peirce cosmogenesis. William James did it again; he remains one of the most charming of all philosophical bricoleurs. On the many letters between James and F. H. Bradley, see Bradley (1999, and 1999a). While James mentioned C. S. Peirce to Bradley on Jan. 3, 1898, (1999: 165), there is no mention of Peirce in the Bradley Papers. I speak here as an “ologo.” 33. Proust, “The Fugitive,” (1981 3: 553-4). 34. In 1914, a few months before his death, Peirce wrote “first […] I have never published a complete volume of my own, but only detached articles; second, that I have never published anything except to record my observations of facts, or to present reasonings that I had long and critically considered; and third, that I have never put forth anything in my own name unless it was either quite new, as far as I was aware, or else have new reason for believing what others had denied” (Peirce “An Essay towards Reasoning in Security and Uberty,” EP2: 469). 35. Proust (1981 3: 554). 36. See Eco (1979: 207, 40, 40n6, and 39), where he cites Peirce at length from CP2: 519, 520, and CP6: 401. 37. See Ibri (2016: 601). See also Anderson (1984: 466). 38. See Eco (2017: 96) where he calls for extrapolating a thinker’s thought from his writing, and “extrapolating the things he did not say explicitly, but could not have failed to think.” 39. To run with this all the way into the “unity of Infinite Thought,” see Josiah Royce (1958 [1885]: 384-435), chapter XI, “The Possibility of Error.” 40. For an engaging critique of Peirce’s categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness (but beyond the present scope of this article) see Hartshorne (1964: 455-75, esp., 456-60). 41. See Paolucci (2007: 34). For an answer by Paolucci we have: “Il lume naturale di Peirce e la ‘forza del falso’ in Eco traccino il punto di distanza più grande tra semiotica di Peirce e quella di Eco […].” Paolucci (2017a: 201). 42. I do not consider the film Laughter is Paradise to be an example of great comedy, though it is pleasant enough. It featured Audrey Hepburn’s first professional appearance on film (43 seconds long), as well as the seasoned Alastair Sim. The parallels between the details of the character Henry Russell (the practical-joker), and Eco, go only as far as asking another to follow through on a task (after their demise), that for family members in the plot of the film pushed them outside of their sad entrenched natures, and once surprisingly successful, transformed, and looking forward to an other-worldly inheritance, are seen laughing at themselves (transformed once again, and even more deeply), when they realized the final prank was directed at their own very enlightened carnivalization. 43. See Peirce, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” in (EP2: 435-8), and Letter to Lady Welby, 23 December 1908 in (EP2: 478-9). 44. This is where I see Eco’s pragmatic legacy, that is, his working within what Peirce stated was “the only way to complete our knowledge of it [a living comprehension of the meaning of a concept] is to discover and recognize just what general habits of conduct a belief in the truth of the concept (of any conceivable subject, and under any conceivable circumstances) would reasonably develop [and] what habits would ultimately result from a sufficient consideration of such truth” (EP2: 448). Indeed, “the only assumption upon which [we] act rationally is the hope of success” (W2: 272). The rest, to this day, is mere transmogrification, and pragmatischisms. 45. Eco (1983: 491; original emphasis). See Eco (2017: 179) for his reply to Verene, and his mention of parody. 46. I am thinking here of the work of Hofstadter and Gabora in Attardo (1994: 226, 358), that speaks of how the ur-joke “embodied a ‘local’ logic […] a distorted, playful logic, that does not hold outside of the world of the joke.” But in Pirandello’s Sicily, and his treatise on humor, this even strains to hold inside its very own world. Peirce can again help us understand a

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Pirandellian-Sicilian view of history where he writes: “If you complain to the Past that is wrong and unreasonable, it laughs. It does not care a snap of the finger for Reason.” (CP2: 84). 47. See Attardo (1994: 154-5, 173) for this issue of folk etymology. See also Fabbrichesi (2017: 321n8). 48. See Dorfles (1968). 49. See Eco (1986: 277) where he states: “Humor then would be excessive in metalinguistic detachment.” A Pirandellian tragi-comedy of errors in detachment can be seen in Andrea Camilleri’s description of the fate of Pirandello’s ashes. See “Camilleri e lo strano caso delle ceneri di Pirandello,” Intervista di Angelo Melone, Ripresa di Maurizio Tafuro e Leonardo Meuti, Montaggio di Elena Rosiello, in RepTv, la Repubblica.it, 27 Giugno 2017. 50. Peirce (CP7. 619). 51. Kant, ([1790] 1952: 199; original emphasis), The Critique of Judgment, Book II. Analytic of the Sublime, § 54. This can be pushed into the direction of questioning any differences between legitimate/illegitimate interpretations if opened up to the multifarious niches of comedic styles and examples where reader/listener and author/comedian are, so to speak, sliced from the same particular instance of public life, and thus of accepted reasonableness. This would be “critical reasonable” enough, it seems. See Eco (1986: 125-32). 52. See Paolucci (2017a: 144, 163). Another study awaits comparing Eco’s view and use of laughter and the use and descriptions of laughter in Dostoevsky’s psychological realist writings. Perhaps Eco’s not writing a treatise on comedy can be compared to Dostoevsky’s truncated work of a comic epic, of which we have only one episode entitled “Uncle’s Dream.” One must turn to Dostoevsky’s Raw Youth (Podrostok), to see how “a man can give himself away completely by his laughter, so that you suddenly learn all of his innermost secrets.” With that we must add a dash of Catullo: “Risu inepto res ineptior nulla est” (Carmina, XXXIX, 16). And so, doubt can only be substituted by laughter, if and only if the laughter is steeped from a profound immersion in nature and cultures, both as orders and adventures. The rest is the mere quivering, twitter- fingers, and the giggling of i coglioni (see Paolucci 2017a: 10-1). 53. This would be similar to what Koestler (1964: 36; original emphasis) believed was the presence of conflicting rules that “were merely implied in the texts,” but if we dare expose, or explain, or “make them explicit [we] have destroyed the story’s comic effect.” This is what Eco refers to in “The Comic and the Rule” by the “social or intertextual ‘frame’ or scenario already known to the audience, you display the variation, without, however, making it explicit in discourse” (1986: 272). 54. Perhaps here we need to turn to Wittgenstein and imagine a book of philosophy that would be written entirely in the form of jokes, and ask: “why do we feel a grammatical joke to be deep? (And that is what the depth of philosophy is.)” Wittgenstein (1958: 47, § 111; original emphasis). Or are we back to an Eco-Kantian “transpose-ability” (trasponibilità), where we interpret the world (for those that think and see it a joke, or a laugh), as if it were, and thus find all the coherence of a world, and therein meld constitutive and regulative, blissfully ignorant of paying penalty and restitution, and thus of there being no “No,” because a laugh of this magnitude could never question its limits. See Paolucci (2017a: 204, 210-1). 55. This sense of humor is also heard in “La soglia e l’infinito,” (Eco in Paolucci, 2007: 175n.3, and 176n7 and n11), and comes through with joy, toughness, and reverence in Paolucci (2017a: 34-7, 221-4).

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ABSTRACTS

This study is a three-part play of musement on a few details in the potentially infinite landscape of Umberto Eco’s turn to, relations with, and adaptations of Pragmatism. This three-part guess was product of an abandoned first guess-attempt entitled: “Who’s on First(ness)?” The present title ensued naturally, and with some laughter, in recalling and using the play on words and names made famous by Abbott and Costello. Section 1 will mention two uncles of American Pragmatism. Section 2 will engage in Eco’s ista ricostruzionista (with a dash of ologo) reading of “iconismo primario” (primary iconism) that raises questions regarding his Peircean rereading and assessments. Section 3 will switch to a darker voice and touch upon a few issues in Eco’s writing (or not) on the “comic,” particularly his essays “Pirandello Ridens,” and “The Comic and the Rule.”

AUTHOR

LUCIO PRIVITELLO Stockton University Lucio.Privitello[at]stockton.edu

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Essays

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Cognition as a Transformative Process Re-affirming a Classical Pragmatist Understanding

Vera Saller and Donata Schoeller

1 We begin with brief remarks on the debate on non-conceptuality. We show that certain aspects of a pragmatist approach have found its ways into today’s discussions. However, the underlying understanding of knowledge based on the justification of beliefs has stayed untouched in this discussion, and the classical pragmatist approach has not been considered. Dealing with the question whether a qualitative dimension in cognition is a relapse in givenism, we argue that this is not the case when taking the implications of knowledge as transformational process seriously. Re-introducing the perspectives of Peirce, Dewey and Gendlin we show how an interactive fine-grained description of knowledge as a transformative process explicates the pragmatist concern of cognition as a fundamental prerequisite to meet the challenges of human life. By conceiving knowledge as a transformative and interactional process, one acknowledges at the same time the dimension of “firstness” in experience. Our paper aims to show that this acknowledgment does not imply falling back into the Myth of the Given.

1. Pragmatist Shifts in the Debate on Non-Conceptual Contents of Knowledge

2 In his early book Mind and World (1994), John McDowell insists on the conceptuality of non-conceptual content drawing powerfully on Kantian perspectives. According to him, a deeper dualism behind the relation of the conceptual and intuitive components of knowledge has to be acknowledged: the Kantian problem of how to relate reason’s spontaneity to a receptivity grounded in the natural realm of law. McDowell’s response to this challenge is to lay out a bigger picture of human development, including the fact that human beings are born into a language that “serves as a repository of tradition, a store of historically accumulated wisdom about what is a reason for what” (McDowell

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1994: 126). His suggestion to integrate “Bildung” into the natural development of human beings seems to arrive where classical pragmatists begin.

3 On a more detailed level of argument, however, McDowell demonstrates concepts in use even when there seems to be no identifiable concept available for what is experienced. Responding to Gareth Evans’ (1982) argument that humans often find themselves confronted with aspects of the world they do not have any concepts for, for instance a certain shade of color, McDowell points out that, even in this case, one can nevertheless refer to “that shade of color.” The capacity for recognition is another strand of evidence McDowell presents for every moment of perceptual intake being conceptual, thus claiming that the capacity for recognition calls for conceptual memory (1994: 46).

4 Christopher Peacocke famously argued against these suggestions with what is now called “The Fineness of Grain” argument. By taking account of phenomenological aspects of experience that exceed the conceptual repertoire (cf. Peacocke 2001), Peacocke indicates how perceptually based discrimination of properties and experience of moments are so replete with content that goes beyond memory and identification (ibid.: 251). He argues every detail of the lived situation cannot be remembered but even if memory were as finely discriminative as perception, the recognition argument would not hold when perceiving properties for the first time. Peacocke’s insistence on perceptual quality also implies that “the content of perception is more fine-grained than the content of propositional attitudes” (Bermúdez & Cahen 2012).

5 Suggesting that non-conceptuality is distinct from conceptuality in “making it available,” Peacocke (2001: 244) seems to envision non-conceptuality as a kind of active base for concepts, thus coming closer to the phenomenological perspectives emphasized by classic pragmatist thinkers (as we will show below). McDowell himself will have shifted his position in the years to come. By dropping the assumption of experience as mere actualizations of conceptual capacities, his claims draw more closely on Kant’s notion of intuition, understanding rational capacities to permeate our experiences, even those “we act on unreflectively in our ordinary coping with our surroundings” (McDowell 2008: 13).

6 Further steps in a pragmatist direction have been explicitly or inexplicitly taken by more recent contributions to the debate. Robert Hanna’s lucid overview on the debate provides strong interventions for the non-conceptualist side, also by drawing heavily on Kant. Yet, juxtaposing the “Grip of the Given” to the famous “Myth of the Given,” Hanna introduces perspectives of continuity that clearly exceed the Kantian positions, while also reformulating non-conceptual content as “situated content.” By considering whole situations, the perspective on non-conceptual content is widened beyond the mere perceptual intake. He also includes evolutionary perspectives in our understanding of cognition and reminds us not to forget a […] continuous thread-of-life by which the world is sensorimotor-subjectively or pre-reflectively consciously delivered up from human animal experience to our self-conscious or self-reflective thought and action-oriented deliberation. (Hanna 2011: 390)

7 The “grip of the given” as embodied, contextualized living provides the basis from which deliberate thinking arises (ibid.). Continuity, as suggested by Hanna, has to be considered in mutual transformative, rather than in exclusive relations between what

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is conceived as conceptual and non-conceptual contents, as well as between non- human and human aspects of experience.

8 In a careful analysis of the debate between McDowell and Hubert Dreyfus, Dan Zahavi (2013) seems to complement Hanna’s line of argument, by pointing to the unsurmountable discontinuity between animal and children on the one hand, and rational, lingual beings on the other, which seems implied in McDowell’s position (cf. also, Welchman 2008; Godfrey-Smith 2010: 317). However, both authors, according to Zahavi, share a concept of mindedness that does not account for the character of “prereflective selfconsciousness” resp. “for-me-ness of experience.”

9 A similar direction is taken up in Steven Levine’s (2012) critical discussion of Robert Brandom’s “rationalist pragmatism” (Brandom 2011: 32). Levine carefully lays out some side effects of Brandom’s position and demonstrates how it re-affirms a subtle, yet decisive separation between rational capacities and bodily responses. Drawing explicitly on John Dewey to point to the developmental character of rational capacities, Levine suggests ways to overcome the kind of rupture he detects in Brandom’s thinking. By considering rational behaviors as an acquired capacity “that develop in time due to a series of overlapping processes” (Levine 2012: 16), the divide between articulated reasons for action and the responding body closes. A similar emphasis on development in regards to conceptual schemes as well as language can be found in Jennifer Welchman’s article (2008) on Dewey and McDowell.

2. Knowledge As Transformational Practice

10 Before moving on to a classical pragmatist understanding of cognition, which, as we would like to suggest, is first and foremost, to be characterized as a transformative process, it seems worthwhile to note a common denominator on which the above- mentioned arguments seem to operate. This consists in the internalized critique of what Wilfrid Sellars famously termed the “Myth of the Given” (2000/1956). With “given,” Sellars depicts an epistemological blindspot in which observations as states of knowing are given as an empirical description, instead of being understood as elements in the logical space of reasons, in which one is justifying and able to justify what one says.

11 Knowledge implied by the Myth, as McDowell summarizes, is “entitlement to judge that things are thus and so because experience reveals things are thus and so: for instance, seeing that something is thus and so” (2008: 2). Nothing immediately “given,” as we convincingly learn from the critics of the “Myth,” can act as a guarantee that judgements or beliefs about things being in one way or another are true. The wrongness of the Myth of the Given is widely discussed in regards to its wrongly held foundational functions concerning the possibility of justified knowledge and in making sentences and theories true. Donald Davidson summarizes this as a mistake in category: “no thing makes sentences and theories true.” (Davidson 1974: 194; original emphasis).

12 However, with a few exceptions, this kind of critique and its many variations leave the concept of knowledge as justified beliefs untouched or unquestioned. True or at least verifiable propositions of things being “such and so” seem to remain the accepted basis on which different strategies of criticism of the misconception of the “given” set forth.

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13 In the following, we do not lay out yet another strategy responding to the threat of the Myth. Rather, we want to emphasize aspects of cognition which are blind spots in this kind of approach to knowledge, centering chiefly on justification of beliefs.

14 By bringing the classical pragmatists into the discussion, we would like to shift this perspective on knowledge by emphasizing its development and its fundamental usefulness for the human species. We will say more clearly in which way the respective pragmatist approach introduces a transformational approach to epistemology, and how this radically challenges a foundational understanding of knowledge, with its polarity of either assuming something ‘given’ that justifies beliefs, or the threat of skepticism.

15 Re-affirming a classical pragmatist stance will also remind us that justifiable claims are results of manifold practices transforming situational complexity into useful beliefs within a space of reason. Classical pragmatists have demonstrated that these processes need to be closely considered in order to understand a transformational and processual character of cognition.

16 We have to ask ourselves however, whether by referring to “qualitative experiences” of situations and “Firstness” of impressions in the Deweyan and Peircean sense, for example, we slide back into givenness as Colin Koopman suggests (2009: 76). In emphasizing practice as the main element of his understanding of Pragmatism’s theory of knowledge he stresses transitionality as a main feature of cognition, emphasizing the historical and temporal change process of all knowledge (Koopman 2009). We appreciate his emphasis on practice, yet Koopman avoids the qualitative dimension of experience, out of fear to fall back into the “Myth.” Disregarding the qualitative dimension of real situations in which knowledge makes transisitions neglects to take account of the non-contingent character of the transitional movement he highlights. To keep it safe from any danger of givenism, the word practice in his approach thus gains an important role while at the same time hardly obtaining any detailed description or attention. Koopman writes: […] the transitionalist’s account also has no need for referring to experience and language as supplying the basis upon which practice is elaborated. Practice is elaborated only upon itself, that is, upon its own accumulated historical furnishings. It confronts only with ongoing stream of practice in its further construction and reconstructions of itself. (Koopman 2009: 118)

17 The problem of the Myth of the Given, from this vantage point, dissolves, but so do people and the real experienced challenges of daily situations, which are met by knowledge that makes a difference. Practice seems to need nothing but more practice, stripped of predicaments of contexts, challenges, problems, as well as dangers and opportunities that arise through the way they are handled and formulated.

18 In contrast to Koopman’s resistance towards an experiential embededness of practice, the initial pragmatist move consists in tying together rational cognition and situational specificity, as the founding father Dewey quotes William James: The effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence, in our future practical experience, whether active or passive; the point lying rather in the fact that the experience must be particular, than in the fact that it must be active. (Dewey’s Italics) (Dewey 1916: 710-1/James 1904: 674)

19 Dewey introduces the term “situation” along the lines of qualitative and complex experiences, which allow close up studies of cognition as a subtle and intricate interaction. In comparison to these fine-grained perspectives, Koopman’s reference to

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practice seems rather abstract. In contrast, also Peircean “Firstness,” which he criticizes as falling for giveness, is a processual moment of cognition, itself a product of interpretative processes and evolving systems of interconnected signs. A dynamic emergence of a world in need of conceptual forms for clarification also implies the development of a space of reasons. The space of reasons thus becomes one dynamic aspect of a wider and intricate evolving system of inter-related meanings involved in knowledge.

20 Also for Dewey, neither language nor experience can be focused on in isolation, but always in relation to the continuity of body-environment interactions responding to continuous needs.

21 The same applies to Eugene Gendlin’s epistemological approaches and his philosophy of language. His embodied, interactional understanding of the development of knowledge is based on his rigorous close-up studies of meaning making processes, which is why we call him a Classical Pragmatist of the third generation.

22 With Gendlin, the Classical Pragmatist approach to practice becomes even more fine- grained. His methods of Focusing and Thinking-at-the-Edge draw on tacit dimensions of knowledge, the “authority” of which is not “given,” but in need of constant, sometimes very subtle practices, such as a slight shift in awareness or attitude. Next to interpretative process, Gendlin demonstrates how slight differences in attending to a felt dimension of experience can make an important difference in practice. Taking into account vague beginnings to evolve into fruitful cognitive processes and to be transformed into (more) stable and explicit forms of knowing, knowledge as a transformational process implies practices cultivating situational experiences on different fine-grained levels. This is the recurrent theme that motivates the choice of our three classical pragmatist thinkers.

3. Peirce’s First and Habits

23 It was Joseph Ransdell (1979) who showed that regarding perception, Charles S. Peirce had overcome the traditional alternative between the skylla of naive realism and the charybdis of skepticism more than a hundred years ago. The pragmatistic turn, initiated by Peirce, succeeded in this by combining the customarily conflicting doctrine of representative content on the one hand and immediate perception on the other. This was possible because he differentiated the immediate sense impact, which he named “percept” from perception (or perceptual judgement) and introduced the abductive inference. The “percept” as raw sense impression in its Firstness is left in total potentiality (indeterminacy), whereas thoughts as Thirdness have become conceptual and conventional.

24 One could argue that the gap between iconic Firstness and conceptualized Thirdness corresponds to the dichotomy alluded to in the contemporary debate. But Peirce’s account shifts the picture because 1) he considers perception as one dynamic instant in the more encompassing process of thinking and acting, 2) the consideration of thought as sign process on different levels overcomes the polarization of dichotomies, and 3) his theory of abduction opens up a spectrum of cognitive movements shedding a new light on whether these processes are to be considered as rational or pre-rational.

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25 Peirce conceived of thinking as a process of sign-interpretation through and through. In other words, he showed that there is no state, which is not a sign-process, even if this may be considered as pre-reflective. By demonstrating that thinking is not possible without signs, he found different ways to conceive how pre-conceptual states do not have to be discursive and are still permeated by rational capacities without underestimating their difference to propositional content, yet without introducing a rupture either. Instead of re-emphazising the two classical components of knowledge, his radical thinking of signs opened up ways to reflect thought and knowledge as a continuous process reaching from preconceptual states to propositional statements, always moving and finding new formulations and meaning: From the proposition that every thought is a sign, it follows that every thought must address itself to some other, must determine some other, since that is the essence of a sign. (CP 5.253)

26 His consideration of these processes is intrinsically interwoven with his categories. We already mentioned McDowell’s argument for conceptuality in sensations, where he shifts from an iconically lived instant to an indexically meant “this shade.” Distinguishing the iconically experienced sense from the indexically experienced shade of color, indicates two different aspects of a process, aspects that cannot substitute each other, but that build and transform each other. The indexical this points to a certain trait of reality, to this shade of color. The indexical aspect is second to the iconically lived moment, it is the next step of becoming aware of a thing in the interpretative process. It is the second level, the level before we are able to tag something with a name – which would be the level of the Third. The reference to indexical experience does not refute non-conceptual content however. In trying to understand perception, it is not only the registering of things that attract our attention that matters. Peirce’s iconicity allows us to take into account that our orientation in the world includes many things that we perceive without them being the focus of our attention. A major part of being able to act in the world and in situations happens, as Peirce rightly points out, with only peripheral awareness. This is especially true of bodily sense of somatic consciousness, like balance, temperature and quality of air. For example, we are habitually capable of adapting to the temperature of a room, by opening and closing windows and doors and by adding another piece of clothing, or taking it off. Until a person begins to feel uncomfortable, one does not pay any focal attention to the definable temperature of the surroundings.

27 Although Peirce rather seldom refers to bodily feelings as such his notion of iconicity and indexicality implies a bodily situation in every further sign process. This enriches today’s debates, which often claim the importance of including the prereflective embodied experience of situations. The Peircean notion of habit plays a noteworthy role in this respect. Hubert L. Dreyfus (2013) describes moments of absorption in sportive activities and habitual orientation as entirely without participation of consciousness and nearly automatized. Zahavi (2013) rightly criticizes these descriptions for denying the phenomenological important aspects of pre-reflective self- consciousness and “for-me-ness of experience.” Here, the categories of First and Third could become germanely useful in precise ways. Habitual bodily actions and absorbed states are not guided by self-conscious understanding; nevertheless, they are mindful and sociable. This does not mean that they are conceptual, because we understand deliberation as developing in levels, as an ever-growing net of relations of interconnected signs. The finely woven web of signs includes images, sounds and smells

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as well as clearly differentiated concepts. “For-me-ness experience” certainly happens on a more indexical or iconical level.

28 The capacity to react reasonably on a bodily level of learned habits is the subject of Levine’s (2012) criticism of Brandom. Although he neither mentions Peirce nor benefits from the possibilities afforded by his sign-theory, he “re-discovers” the importance of habits. But while passive, habits and bodily skills nonetheless have a rational intelligibility or significance that is determined by the intelligibility of the projects of which they are a part. When this intelligibility is disrupted because our habits and bodily skills can no longer unreflectively cope with the situation into which they have been drawn, the active capacities for deliberation and practical reasoning emerge. (Levine 2012: 13)

29 At the end of his article, Levine mentions Dewey, but not Peirce. Nevertheless, he shows a way to defend classical pragmatists, especially Peirce, providing ways to think beyond the Myth. Levine writes: If we stick to the practical case, we can avoid this conception [the Myth] by recognizing that the capacities that make action possible – i.e., the ability to reason practically and to act on bodily habits – are acquired capacities that are relatively plastic, i.e., are one’s [sic!] that develop over time. (Levine 2012: 14; original emphasis)

30 This suggests that current discussions end at the point where Peirce’s fundamental dictum “all thought is in signs” (CP 5.253) indicates a path. More inclusion of Peircean thought promises to bring further fruitful inspirations to these debates. We will continue unfolding just a couple of these.

31 The gap between First and Third is completed by the Second, the indexical contact with reality, which ignites the mental activity of abduction. This intrinsically entails the possibility of error. To admit that humans are, in fact, capable of “taking hold of aspects of world” (McDowell 1994: 58) while simultaneously bearing in mind possible misrepresentation, is a major feature in Peirce’s categorical thinking. Accounting for the embodied ways of contact with the world without taking this to be any kind of authority for the interpretation of things being “such and so,” is the important lesson today’s discourse can learn from Peirce. It was his way of responding to the classical threat of skepticism. The possibility of failure initiated philosophers’ refusal of naive realism and drew them in the direction of radical skepticism.

32 Especially in the time of Peirce, new evidence of the weakness of our sensory organs and bistable pictures, like Schröder’s staircase and Joseph Jastrow’s duck/rabbit were a matter of public interest. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Peirce showed particular interest in these cognitive puzzles.1

33 With the category of the Second, one seems to touch the ontological level. If we suggest that Peirce considered the Second as the moment when we encounter reality, many may ask: what reality? Peirce was a skeptic in the sense that he acknowledged the necessary impact of cultural meanings which form our perception and imply the danger of perceptive deformation, as well as the obvious possibility of false interpretation. Nevertheless, he always allowed for the reality of a mind-independent world, as well as the clash with this kind of pre-conceptual reality. It is this reality and its challenge, which he took to be the ultimate target of science.2 Compared with contemporary and postmodern authors, one of the most surprising facts in Peircean philosophy is this tension: although he insists that we do not have direct access to the

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world without the mediation of signs, he nonetheless stresses what can be called the phenomenological aspect of experience that exceeds a conceptual grip. This is most apparent in the aspect of iconicity. Iconicity as the most basic sign-level takes experience to be a sign for further experience. One relates to the world’s properties, in which one is embedded, not only with concepts but also with embodied needs and primary dependency towards others.

34 According to Peirce, these needs and dependencies are expressing themselves within a net of interconnected signs, on the pre-conceptual level as icons and indexes (First and Second), slowly developing into conceptual meanings (Third). However, we must remember that the development of meaning is a process of continuous learning. Peirce’s iconic level is a powerful tool to include these primary bonds as agencies of learning. On this iconic level no sharp distinctions are to be drawn since icons are not signs for different things, but lay the ground for a potential interpretation. Because a smell reminds us of another or “looking at the one is like looking at the other in some respects. […] It is the base on which all other forms of representation are built.” (Deacon 1997: 76f.). In this way signs, experience and world cannot be separated (cf. Jung 2009; 2013).

35 Compared to the dual pattern, which permeates debates on the Myth and on conceptuality versus non-conceptuality, Peirce’s approach unfolds the multifaceted structure of conceptuality, based on three levels, similarity (icon), contiguity (index) and conventionality (symbol). In today’s discourse, it is Hanna (2011) who expresses the need for understanding the process of knowledge developing in levels (cf. also Schlicht 2008). As already mentioned, his approach is based on an unconventional analysis of Kant, regrettably without mentioning Peirce. Peirce allows us to think, that before explicit conceptual interpretation even starts, we have the capability to “liken”3 traits of reality. On this “first” level, perception functions iconically. The shapes that we perceive in the first sensory impression are not deliberately classified yet. Following the Peircean categories, it is very clear that the signs on the level of First elicit the responsive capability to assimilate properties of things. It is the human senses that are assigned to “liken” properties with their grasp, be this fingers, ears, skin, nose, tongue or eyes. It is again Ransdell (1979) who reminds us that this principle of iconicity is originally an Aristotelian idea.4 Nevertheless, it seems completely forgotten in contemporary discussions.

36 The potentiality of the unformulated percept on the level of First reminds us of something further. Insofar it is not conceptualized or at least understood as indicating something (as indexical pointing does), the percept is not a distinct intake. This is important to answer the question whether Peirce would agree with the idea of non- conceptual content. As the content of iconic signs is not conceptualized, couldn’t we call it non-conceptual? The question is, if iconic resemblances already mean “content,” or just a germ of a developing sign – more accurately – having the potential to develop. For this question we have to keep in mind that there are no purely iconical signs, in other words, there is no strict separation of the categories since every sign is constituted by the interrelation of all three levels. Also, the sensual intake does not have any meaning per se, in isolation.

37 It is intrinsically relational to memories or images of past experience and to pressing needs of the body, in this way it has the capacity to become meaningful in several transformational steps or shifts.

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38 In developmental psychological descriptions of how newborns experience the world, the phenomenological and developmental character of the First gathered evidence. Daniel Stern (1985) summarizes the rich material of experiments and observations, presenting the “interactional world of babies” in an empathic way to the reader. A most surprising result from a series of experiments was the fact that babies have cross- sensual capacities (e.g. rhythms, visual images or sounds) already shortly after birth. They recognize their mother by her face, as well as by her scent or the way she walks, breathes or talks. In a similar way, the new field of neuro-phenomenology emphasizes the capacity of the mature human mind to transformatively interrelate a variety of sensual inputs on the fringes of awareness: The analysis of the descriptions we have gathered, demonstrates that the vocabulary used to describe the “stuff of felt meanings” often simultaneously calls on several sensorial registers: the visual (shape, shadow, fuzzy etc.), the kinetic, and the tactile (vibration, pulsation, pressure, density, weight, texture, temperature etc.), the auditory (echo, resonance, rhythm etc.) and even the olfactory or the gustative. (Petitmengin 2007: 63)

39 Only if one fails to account for the first person aspect of growth and development of meaning, can one regard such experiential process, as Koopman does, as a danger of falling back into givenism (2009: 122).

4. Dewey’s Situation and Interaction

40 This is why it seems promising to us, to also take a close look at John Dewey again. He introduces qualitative aspects of experience into the epistemological debate of his time in a rather bold manner, stressing their vital functions for cognition. Throughout, these passages convey an understanding of cognition that is highly dynamic and that is the result of the transformation of any experiential material it emerges from. What is ‘given’ is never a foundational basis of knowledge, but an initial phase, changing rapidly like a ‘storm’ in ways that only allow us to speak of a stable product at the end of a process. This processual and transformative account undermines any givenist understanding of knowledge because it leaves behind the assumption that knowledge of something being ‘such and so’ is founded on non-conceptual perception.

41 Of course, the differences between Dewey’s and Peirce’s approach to knowledge need to be closely studied and are subject matter of worthwhile research (cf. for example Dewey 1916; Tschaepe 2013: 39, FN 3). For our purpose here, we want to concentrate on the continuity of the classical pragmatist understanding of knowledge, knowledge understood as ever changing with evolving results of interpretative processes that are grounded in the daily challenge of action and problem-solving. The non-contingency of this process does not only rely on logical structures and measurements, but on the embodied and lived experience of situations and their needs. This is the classical pragmatist frame in which to understand intellectual operations.

42 Taking seriously daily situations, their predicaments and requirements leads beyond the binary constellation of conceptual and pre-conceptual which pervades today’s debates.

43 Similar to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Dewey introduces a philosophically uncommon starting point of epistemological reflection by reminding philosophers, past and present, of the simple fact that thinking and speaking begin in situations (1930) and not

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with singular perceptions (such as shades of colors, etc.). From this vantage point, the level of abstraction of today’s debates becomes apparent: discussing experience or knowledge on the grounds of isolated propositions within the frame of the duality of conceptual vs. non-conceptual content, distinctions derived from the history of philosophy, not from the predicaments of daily life.

44 Dewey, however, reminds us: In actual experience, there is never any such isolated singular object or event; an object or event is always a special part, phase, or aspect of an environing experienced world – a situation. (Dewey 1938: 66)

45 Yet, one may legitimately ask: how are situations experienced if not by perceiving and conceptualizing? It is to this kind of question, that Dewey gives a new variety of answers. Thinking about experience based on the traditional epistemological split between concepts and perception omits to take into account how living in situations “functions” in the way we perceive and conceptualize things. Experiencing a situation, for instance, functions in ways that participants “know” what is relevant to say and distinguish, what needs no mentioning, what needs emphasis, etc. From “here” different kinds of epistemological questions arise, that Gendlin, as we will show later on, develops further. For instance, how is it that researchers do not have to choose between thousands of percepts or thousands of concepts what is relevant to “know” and to say? Dewey points to a contextual, environmental, social, as well as a historically-situated starting point of epistemological reflection encompassing every single cognitive operation while being changed at the same time. Dewey’s critical attitude towards epistemological analysis is the logical result of this view, making us aware that analysis itself is a change-process: conditions of cognitions found in this process are a result of a reflective transformation of what is reflected upon. The actual stages of this dynamic thinking process do not show up anymore in the clear structure that is presented as ‘found.’ W. Teed Rockwell re-affirms Dewey’s point about analysis’ crucial limitations, stressing that “below a certain level of analysis, that which is realest to us, lived experience, […] inevitably get(s) bypassed” (Rockwell 2005: 141). Once lost out of sight in the textbooks of philosophy and science, it is difficult to bring back. McDowell, from another, more skeptical stance, acknowledges the problem: if thought and judgment is to be recognizable as bearing on reality, there must be external constraint that is unlike an analyzed perception of concept, or else thinking and speaking would be equivalent to “frictionless spinning in a void” (1994: 11). Questions about how judgments are controlled by something outside of judgment again lead directly to the problems involved in the Myth. McDowell suggests that by understanding conceptual capacities taking part in receptivity (1994, Lecture 1), this problem is overcome. Classical pragmatism goes further in opening up the bigger picture and shifting a basic epistemological approach. Dewey directly criticizes a skeptical split in our approach to the world: It is only when an object of focal observation is regarded as an object of knowledge in isolation that there arises the notion that there are two kinds of knowledge, and two kinds of objects of knowledge, so opposed to each other that philosophy must either choose which is ‘real’ or find some way of reconciling their respective ‘realities.’ (Dewey 1938: 67)

46 In order to overcome inquiring into objects of knowledge in isolation, Dewey’s descriptions at this point seem to shift into phenomenological accounts of how it is like to experience a situation. He begins to describe a kind of “quality” that is sensed or felt

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in a situational context. He is quick to correct this use of words not to invite the impression of the situational quality being equivalent to a feeling, an emotion, or “anything mentalistic.” He ventures on to say that, on the contrary, emotions, feelings and sensations themselves can only be described on account of the uniqueness of situations. His descriptions, of course, are not phenomenological in the sense of wanting to capture the essence of pure experience in isolation of any judgement. Rather, at this point his work becomes especially innovative, leaving behind traditional disciplinary boundaries, trying to convey an inseparability of a qualitative aspect of the situation’s “controlling presence” and judgements at work, which never occur in isolation, but in relation to a kind of situational “implying” that Dewey is clear to distinguish from logical implication. The experienced situation’s “regulating function” and its “pervasive and unifying quality,” as in works of art, feed into distinctions that are relevant or coherent in relation to the situation (cf. Dewey 1938: 68f.; Dewey 1931). In the course of this process, distinctions evolve in interaction with the experienced situation, changing both, because a new description or solution, which emerges out of situational experience leads into a new situation.

47 At this point contemporary philosophers worry about a Deweyan lapse into givenism. This critique, as mentioned above, has recently been forwarded by Koopman, who warns that contemporary pragmatists who are eager to retrieve the classicopragmatist accounts of experience must be on guard to not treat experience as a kind of ultimate given-ness against which we might be able to measure our practical knowings, doings, and sharings (that is, our epistemic, ethical, and political practices) (Koopman 2009: 76f.).

48 Understanding Koopman’s objection, we want to slow down at this point. If a situation were “there” in this manner as “something” regulating in a “given” way as a foundation for true distinctions, then Dewey’s notion of situations would have to be dismissed as naive. Also, if his use of the term “quality of a situation” would imply something static, univocally there, something outside of the cognitive process, guaranteeing the adequacy of its representations, then Dewey’s remarks concerning situations would instance givenism.

49 However, Dewey’s notion of situations has to be grasped first and foremost in interactional terms. This will become more evident through Gendlin’s approaches carrying Dewey’s insistence on the function of situations even further. We understand Dewey’s emphasis on a situational quality as an invitation to consider practice as necessarily rooted in body-environment interactions. It is no coincidence that he mentions the functions of a situation not only in his article on “Qualitative Thought,” but also in his naturalistic account of logic.

50 While developing the rules and capacities of thought and language on the basis of body- environment interaction as one integration, Dewey trains his readers not to consider both terms (body and environment) apart.5 He writes: If what is designated by such terms as doubt, belief, idea, conception, is to have any objective meaning, to say nothing of public verifiability, it must be located and described as behavior in which organism and environment act together, or inter-act. (Dewey 1938: 33; original emphasis)

51 Let us suggest that experiencing a situation is enacting this integration and interaction on the complex level of human living and languaging (cf. Gendlin below). This allows us to consider situations as forms of interaction in which perceptions, beliefs, actions,

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meanings, contexts and environments are not given as separable elements, but as interdependent and interconnected. Whatever we single out in descriptions of situations, is a result of implicit or explicit differentiation-processes and of focused attention, with rich details playing important roles, which could open up to further details. The various degrees of subtlety in which we can talk about situations are decisive for individual or collective life. That the quality of a situation is not “given” like a perceivable quality, but is itself interaction, this is surprisingly to be found in Dewey’s remarks on scholarly work. There he indicates different kinds of access to a challenging situation or problem, and he stresses a situation as a starting point of thinking that is primary, and more encompassing than any given observation and or conceptual framework at hand: […] it is more or less a commonplace that it is possible to carry on observations that amass facts tirelessly and yet the observed “facts” lead nowhere. On the other hand, it is possible to have the work of observation so controlled by conceptual framework fixed in advance that the very things which are genuinely decisive in the problem in hand and its solution, are completely overlooked. Everything is forced into the predetermined conceptual and theoretical scheme. The way, and the only way, to escape these two evils, is sensitivity to the quality of a situation as a whole. In ordinary language, a problem must be felt before it can be stated. If the unique quality of the situation is had immediately, then there is something that regulates the selection and the weighing of observed facts and their conceptual ordering. (Dewey 1938: 70)

52 This real-life example indicates that Dewey’s formulations about quality of a situation are not to be misread as givenism, as a given factor, which only needs to be perceived and represented “to get it right.” Rather, accessing the felt quality of a situation can be rephrased as an active process of becoming aware of a feeling dimension, in which feeling itself is an interactional process instead of a mental entity. In Dewey’s observations we notice the attention he gives when he focuses on a situation as interactional living that can be conceptually distinguished in many different ways.

53 Dewey’s philosophically unusual direct and close description, as with Gendlin, will lead to a dense understanding of subtle practices. This is opening up a detailed account of the explicative process as cognition on the move, changing the situation as well as the nuances of the meaning of words used in it, by active ways of interacting, relating and symbolizing.

54 Thus, starting with Dewey, one can understand practice on the basis of body- environment interaction that can be described in ever more subtle details, as well as in historical and social contexts, with first-person experience and feeling going along with this. Only in considering particular situational needs and challenges can differences in practice lead to progress and innovations. Situational experience consists of interactions that need to be specifically understood and met, not in static constituents and conditions. Dewey emphasizes: Unless this fact is recognized, development becomes abnormal or at least unusual matter rather than a normal feature of life activities. Need remains a constant factor but it changes its quality. With change in need comes a change in exploratory and searching activities, and that change is followed by a changed fulfillment or satisfaction. Of human organisms it is especially true that activities carried on for satisfying needs so change the environment that new needs arise which demand still further change in the activities of the organism by which they are satisfied; and so on in a potentially endless chain. (Dewey 1938: 28)

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55 Thus Dewey’s Logic – A Theory of Inquiry ventures into a radical beginning of rationality in the organism’s needful and productive relation to its environment as enacting an integration that maintains the living organism. The way things, and finally, categories become significant in living process cannot be sufficiently understood in representational terms, but by uncovering a situational-embodied dimension of need in which meaning is grounded in ways which are not given, hence, “needs” produce responses, actions, structures – and further interaction. Considering this embodied- behavioral dimension of meaning, Dewey becomes an acknowledged forerunner of the cognitive scientific turn to Embodiment (Crippen 2016). To become aware of this, he addresses his readers in an unusually direct manner by bringing awareness to a context that exceeds the text; a context that involves the living process of the reader. He indirectly demonstrates that it needs a different sort of concentration (practice!) to notice a situational background that is not identical to the conceptually trained focus. The reader, whether he agrees or not with what has been said, whether he understands it or not, has, as he reads the above passages, a uniquely qualified experienced situation, and his reflective understanding of what is said is controlled by the nature of that immediate situation. One cannot decline to have a situation for that is equivalent to having no experience, not even one of disagreement. (Dewey 1938: 69)

56 Dewey’s invitation to direct attention away from the specific content to the “having” of a situation, manifests itself as a process of understanding, whether as an implicit agreement or disagreement. This is a bold shift within intellectual routine, or better, practice. It emphasizes a background of the cognitive process that is not in focus, but necessarily functioning for concepts and percepts to make contextual sense and meaning. However, this background is not a static given, but dynamic in character and requiring radical reflection in the course of conceptual thinking to become noticed (cf. also Schoeller/Saller 2016): It would be a contradiction if I attempted to demonstrate by means of discourse, the existence of a universe of experience. It is not a contradiction by means of discourse to invite the reader to have for himself that kind of immediately experienced situation in which the presence of a situation as a universe of discourse is seen to be the encompassing and regulating condition of all discourse. (Dewey 1938: 69)

57 Claire Petitmengin’s research on the emergence of ideas demonstrates that this kind of discursive invitation to notice implicit aspects of situational experiencing is a difficult, yet not impossible affair. Again, it requires practice and special methodologies developed for this purpose. Her elaborate interview techniques lead to surprising results that manifest in new, precise descriptions and distinctions of the emergent characteristics of the cognitive process. The transmodal quality of the descriptions of her interviewees blurs a rigid distinction between inner and outer, thus also undermining presumptions of “inner” and “outer sense” (cf. McDowell 1996: 22). Her thick descriptions of these subtle interactional processes even find applications in fields such as pedagogy and therapy (cf. Petitmengin 2007, Petitmengin 2016, Schoeller 2016).

58 In Dewey’s understanding of situations, the philosophical picture of isolated subjects giving rise to the constant worry about the connection of human knowledge to the world, is left far behind. With Dewey we can think about how every epistemic move may prove to be clarifying or relevant, not by comparing it with a “given” immediate

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experience, but by experiencing the transformation of the situation, that has thus become possible. Arguments are not isolated propositions, but need to be understood in an environment of further arguments and counter-arguments, occasioning change, satisfying needs and developing novelties within the situational interaction. This can be deliberately cultivated in a responsive kind of cognitive practice, as we would like to demonstrate in this final part of the paper.

5. Gendlin’s Functional Relationships and Felt Sensing

59 Rightly, one may ask why we include Gendlin in our choice of Classical Pragmatist authors. With the following section we want to indicate to what extent Gendlin, student of Dewey’s student Richard McKeon, continues the Classical Pragmatist endeavor to think cognition and meaning in continuous terms of body-environment interaction (Gendlin 1997). His close-up study of the explicative process carefully explores and distinguishes the roles played by situational experience (Gendlin 1962). Gendlin’s work allows us to trace the transformation of a situation by means of the subtle interaction of symbols and experienced situation, creating freshly nuanced meaning with every propositional transition. The Classical Pragmatist’s emphasis on the particular situation gains new momentum with Gendlin, as the young philosopher is involved in Carl Roger’s research consisting of the empirical study of the effect of therapy. Gendlin discovers very specific conditions of a transformative conceptualization of ordinary experience. His first book on Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning (Gendlin 1962) evolves from these interdisciplinary practices and perspectives. It integrates the vital functions of what he calls “experienced meaning” and later “felt sense” into his philosophical approach to language. His widened notion of feeling and emotion are today re-affirmed by cognitive scientists and philosophers (cf. Ratcliffe 2008, Damasio 1994).

60 In his field research, Gendlin notices that some people during a therapy session interrupt and pause the automated flow of speech, in order to attend and feel what they are trying to say.

61 His research proves that by attending to a felt meaning of situations and events, the semantic contents during therapies change in major shifts. These changes manifest in embodied-experiential ways, clarifying the actual issue, problem or situation with measurable release of tension. Gendlin writes: “Statements that speak-from the felt sense can be recognized by the fact that they have an effect on the felt sense. It moves, opens, and develops.” (Gendlin 2004: 1; original emphasis). Feeling and articulating in this manner changes the felt quality of situations, in ways that a detached conceptual grasp, a narrative or an analytic understanding cannot provide (Gendlin 1961; 1964).

62 Gendlin’s phenomenological close-up studies thus observe further functional aspects of the quality of a situation, which Dewey began to notice. A felt situation from which clients speak in sessions, shifts and responds to the way it is articulated. It is not a given foundation of propositional truths, yet the manifestation of an ongoing interaction of symbolization and situational living that requires attentiveness and responsive articulation, which can be practiced. The therapy-session thus becomes a magnifying glass on daily speech acts. While ordinary language philosophy emphasizes clear intentions as the condition of meaning, Gendlin shows how subject matters can develop, without clear intentional referents, yet in close felt relation to experienced

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messy and complex situations (Schoeller 2018a; 2018b). This explicative process consists in more than being able to follow logical and syntactical rules and speaking according to learned language games. Thus the explicative practice of a gradual clarifying content, which Gendlin analyzes, provides not only new approaches in therapy andthe philosophy of language, but also in neurophenomenological and cognitive research on creativity (Petitmengin 2007, Colombetti 2009, Schoeller 2017, Schoeller 2018a). In Classical Pragmatist spirit, Gendlin does not stay in the ivory tower of a philosophical discourse that is concerned only with the problems of philosophers, but dedicates his approach to the challenges of real life problems in transforming his findings into practices (“Focusing” and “Thinking at the Edge”) which help to deal with the intricacy and complexity of modern day situations (cf. Gendlin 1981; 2004).

63 In Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning (1962), Gendlin conceptualizes the mutual transformative relation of symbols and “experienced meaning” as functional relationships.6 It is important to note here, that Gendlin’s use of the word “functional relationship” is meant in a literal way. Taking Dewey’s use of the word “function” a step further, Gendlin distinguishes seven well defined respects in which situational experience functions in language-use and vice versa. As one of the most basic features of these relations, Gendlin makes us aware of the remarkable fact that one does not have to choose between hundreds of words to say something in a situation. The coming of words is so clever! They come specifically and newly phrased to make just your point! The words come with their past uses taken into account. Much that you have read and know is taken account of, as well as the present situation, what you just heard these people say, what you know of them from other times, even the peculiar way in which this group uses certain words. Why are words and situations inherently together in the bodily focaling that implies the right words? (Gendlin 1991: 104f.; original emphasis)

64 The sensitive interaction of symbolizing and feeling in situations (1997, chapter VIII) allows a detailed account on cognition as a responsive transformational practice. Again, felt meaning or “felt sense” is not considered as “given” by Gendlin. In his main work A Process Model (2018a) he develops a notion of feeling as a dynamic, ever responsive product of a hyper-complex interaction process in which the body and different kinds of environments evolve and change together.

65 The philosophical relevance of Gendlin’s work must therefore be indicated in several different ways. In terms of philosophy of language, his close-up studies of the explication process are an important contribution in overcoming a representational as well as a constructive model of meaning. Gendlin’s introduction of the technical term “carrying forward” (Gendlin 2004) opens up a new and phenomenological concise conceptualization of conceptuality in terms of process. When one is able to conceptualize what one thinks or feels, the formulation “carries” an experiential process “forward” as much as it specifies the meaning of the words one uses. What one says thus does not represent some ‘given,’ nor does it construct an (inner or outer) world. Formulating becomes a change-process on several interacting levels, yet not in an arbitrary way (Schoeller 2018a). Gendlin’s term of “carrying forward” does justice to the difficulty we often encounter when Saying What We Mean (Gendlin 2018b, Schoeller 2017, Schoeller 2018a), and to the precision needed to formulate something in scientific, creative or daily contexts that makes a difference, by clarifying or transforming a situation, a problem, a thought or feeling. In terms of epistemology, Gendlin’s thinking makes it necessary to face the challenge to think body-environment

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interaction, behavior, situations, culture and language together to grasp the challenge of meaning (Schoeller & Dunaetz 2018). In this way, Gendlin needs to be counted to the pioneers of an embodied approach to meaning as early as the 1960ies, deeply disturbing conventional distinctions such as subject and object, body and mind, nature and culture, inside and outside etc. Gendlin does not only criticize a dualistic approach to the world, but delivers a robust alternative model of thinking (Gendlin 2018a, Schoeller 2018b). This introduces new basic distinctions which “carry forward” an understanding of meaning, while at the same time requiring a style or practice of thinking that becomes decisively more self-reflective.

66 Re-conceptualizing Dewey’s term of situational implying (cf. Dewey 1931) as a precise, yet indeterminate need characterizing the body-environment interaction, Gendlin engages an “implying” that manifests in his own conceptual generating. He thereby develops an increasingly complex understanding of the phenomenon by radically reflecting each of his conceptual moves as always happening into an implicit context, each “occurring” (happening) “into an implying” that is thereby changed in intricate ways. He engages and unfolds this kind of continuity as the principle of emerging novelty, in which new possibilities of reflective process open up responsively to concepts, yet not determined by them (cf. Gendlin 1997).

67 Deriving the development of meaning on these grounds, Gendlin can gradually build conceptual tools that make conceivable how a situational feeling, and even slight changes in attending to it, can function in the coming of specific words attuned to the demands of the situation. The present situation becomes understandable as richly layered implicit process, in which a vast past is actively functioning. Feeling a situation, let alone speaking from it, becomes conceivable as a change-process that shifts in more ways than can be said simultaneously. Since each word is “a gigantic system of situation-changes and other words” (Gendlin 1991: 104f.), applying words is itself a crossing that creates new meaning, a term Gendlin introduces and which allows us to think beyond representational or constructivist models. The concept of crossing (Gendlin 1995), however, does not only apply to the use of language but to every occurrence: whatever happens interacts, that is, “crosses with” embodied situational living process, in which past occurrences function in forming the next event, regenerated and changed by the present. Therefore particular events include more implicit intricacy than we can propositionally spell out, and body-experiencing freshly exceeds what is conceptually differentiated. This also implies the necessity to philosophically cultivate a kind of attentiveness that expands the usual conceptual focus on propositions. Gendlin’s methods “Focusing” and “Thinking-at-the-Edge” exercise awareness for “what goes without saying” – for the subtly felt changes and shifts going on while articulating. Let us give a simple example. When seeing an inspiring film and speaking about it later on, the impact might easily shrivel away the more the analysis takes over. In other instances, however, the meaningfulness of the experience can grow and lead to further connections, clarifying, while we speak, the richly complex implications we felt. Gendlin suggests that these semantic differences result from a difference in explicative practice. Experiencing the impact of what we and others say, and speaking from that experience, adds another kind of precision to articulation; it provides situationally felt differentiations. If that happens, then we are glad we spoke. If, however, what we thought and experience shrivels while explicating,

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Gendlin has a simple piece of advice. He suggests pausing and sensing, “…..” – and then have other words come from there: We hope that the person will enter further into this “.....,” this edge, [...] When what wants to be spoken is only partly formed, if you can stand it as a “.....,” then odd and quite newly formed phrases soon come from it. They develop it further, but not into something else, rather into something that follows from what you wanted to say and carries ‘it’ forward. (Gendlin 1999: 205)

6. Conclusion

68 Peirce’s groundbreaking semiotic perspective opened up a new horizon for considering thought processes. The novelty of his approach consists in understanding that we “have no power of thinking without signs” (CP 2.265). Looking at the development from Peirce to Dewey, and then Gendlin, we have detected a coherent development of understanding knowledge as a transformational process, starting with iconic Firstness, through the having of situations, to the close interaction of situational experience and symbols. All three thinkers thereby also show that meaning extends beyond symbolic conceptualization. Peirce makes us aware that indeterminate or complex situational feelings, resemblances and occurrences must be considered as signs, as intrinsically relating to other characteristics, thoughts and objects. What endows meaning to things, as Terrence Deacon today reformulates, is always “an interpretive process” (Deacon 1997: 62), encompassing different sign levels and experiential stages. Conceptuality as understood in current debates is only one aspect of this process.

69 Dewey’s notion of a situation exemplifies this point further. Although his situation appears to have little in common with a semiotic perspective at first sight, we suggest an underlying systematic continuity. The situation, characterized by Dewey as a feeling which functions in discourse, could be viewed in the Peircean spirit as a moment in the developing system of interconnected signs on different levels. However, Dewey contributes a further aspect, by emphasizing the importance of engaging the qualitative feeling of the situation as a subtle practice for gaining relevant distinctions.

70 In our opinion, this classical pragmatist approach goes further than “hopeful cultural criticism” (cf. Koopman 2009). Thinking closely from the predicaments of daily life and its challenges and conceiving thinking as a continuity that manifests in the precision of changed practice is more than hopeful criticism. It becomes life-changingly fruitful in methods that actually help to meet the demands of complex situations. This is what Gendlin demonstrates with his practices that are underpinned by his philosophy. His practices of Focusing and Thinking-at-the-Edge make the complex continuity of body- environment-interaction, thought, feeling and symbol deliberately accessible, in daily life as well as in scientific and creative work (cf. Tokumaru 2011, Deloch 2010).

71 Although often neglected by mainstream academic philosophy, it is indisputable that the inspirational impact of the classical pragmatists’ approach to knowledge not only overcomes traditional dualistic impasses of thinking, but opens up new avenues of theory, research and practice in many different fields outside of philosophy such as sociology, psychology, social anthropology and pedagogy. By conceiving knowledge as a transformative and interactional process, these thinkers demonstrate a dimension of experiential “firstness” that does not imply falling back into the Myth of the Given. Rather, by starting to spell out the complexity involved in conceptuality, they shift the challenges we need to consider: the intricacy of embodied and situated interactional-

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processes that functions in concepts which make sense, which are true or false, and which are performative in having the power to carry situations forward. Today, the paradigm of embodiment in cognitive science is acknowledged and proves congruent with their basic claims, showing how ahead of their times these thinkers were. In analytical philosophy, more and more classical pragmatist inspirations are re- integrated in order to deal with the epistemological problems of the Myth of the Given. Yet, the radical nature of Classical Pragmatist thinking of continuity on different levels is not yet tapped in its full potential. We trust that our study will inspire more detailed inquiry and commitment in pursuing this rich heritage for contemporary approaches to knowledge and meaning. On this note, we end with a quote from Peirce: Thought must live and grow in incessant new and higher translations, or it proves itself not to be genuine thought. (CP 5.594)

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NOTES

1. Cf. CP 5.183, and the commentary of Viola 2012. During his time as a lecturer at John Hopkins University Peirce worked together on experiments with Joseph Jastrow, who later on was the first who described the ambiguous picture of a duck-rabbit. The philosopher and the psychologist examined subliminal perception (cf. Jastrow 1916). 2. In his later works, he termed the accordance of meaning with truth – although only virtual potential – within his semiotic grid as the dynamic object. 3. We choose this unusual verb, inspired by the terminology of Aristotle (compare the following footnote) because we wanted avoid every possible idea of representation. 4. “Spoken words are symbols [symbola] of affections of the psyche; written words are symbols of spoken words. Like written words, spoken words are not the same for all persons. The affections of the psyche, however, of which these are primarily signs [semeia], are the same for all, as are also the objects [pragmata] of which the affections are likenesses [homoiomata].” De Interpretatione (16a3-7). 5. “The processes of living are enacted by the environment as truly as by the organism; for they are an integration.” (Dewey 1938: 25; original emphasis). 6. He distinguishes between direct reference, recognition, explication, metaphor, comprehension, relevance, circumlocution.

ABSTRACTS

The paper elaborates the classical pragmatist understanding of cognition as a transformational process. The pragmatists’ emphasis on the situatedness of cognition, on abductive moves and feeling will also be discussed in the light of the contemporary debate on conceptuality and givenism. Our inquiry on a classical pragmatist approach shifts today’s emphasis on knowledge qua justification of belief and suggests ways to transcend the dualism of conceptuality vs. non- conceptuality. Reconsidering the Peircean category of Firstness, Dewey’s quality of situations and Gendlin’s felt sense as subtle tacit moments in cognitive processes enhance a fine-grained and contextualized understanding of cognition in terms of a transformative process.

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AUTHORS

VERA SALLER Psychoanalytical Seminar Zurich vera.saller[at]hispeed.ch

DONATA SCHOELLER Senior lecturer at Koblenz-Landau University and Programdirector at the Centre for Continuous Studies, University of Zurich schoeller[at]uni-koblenz.de

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Book Review

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Peter OLEN, Wilfrid Sellars and the Foundations of Normativity London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 240 pages

Gabriele Aleandri

REFERENCES

Peter OLEN, Wilfrid Sellars and the Foundations of Normativity, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 240 pages

1 In many ways, the figure of Wilfrid Sellars personifies the second half of XXth century American philosophy. He lied at the crossroad of three powerful traditions: German rationalistic phenomenology, as Marvin Farber’s scholar; logical empiricism, as a philosopher grown up in the golden age of neo-positivism; and classical pragmatism, as an intellectual deeply inspired by the need of keeping a synoptic vision and finding practical and behavioral solutions for conceptual oppositions. In his last book, Wilfrid Sellars and the Foundations of Normativity, Peter Olen makes these philosophical backgrounds emerge, together with a strong professional and intellectual link to the prominent minds of his time, throughout the formal and rigorous style of Sellars’s works, lighting up the changes in his main philosophical concerns and in the solutions he gave them.

2 The book is divided into two parts. The first one offers, in Olen’s words, “a historical account of Sellars’s early thought that both situates his attempt to formalize pragmatics among his peers and historically grounds his conception of language and linguistic rules as it developed from his earliest, under-analyzed publications to his most cited works in the 1950s and 1960s” (p. 2); the second one is a precious appendix of unpublished manuscripts and epistolary concerning the development of Sellars’s philosophy described in the first part. But the book ends up in being more than a work of philosophical historiography correcting the widespread ahistorical interpretation of Sellars; it is a historical reconstruction aimed to clarify and possibly solve some

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philosophical problems arisen from misunderstandings between Sellars and his interpreters, and even between Sellars and other important philosophers as Carnap, Feigl and C.I. Lewis. Since The Pittsburgh School, in its position between neo- pragmatism and neo-analytical philosophy, has become more and more influential through the years, such a clarification on his founder’s thought is much more than a philological work.

3 The central topic of the book seems to be Sellars’s shift from a formalist to a world- directed conception of philosophy, its backgrounds and its reasons. Olen’s point of view is that the needs contained in Sellars’s first formalism – preserving the distinction between philosophy and the empirical sciences, and at the same time preserving a quasi-scientific method for philosophy itself – found an answer in his later psycho- sociological reconstruction of meaning, but this did not happen as part of a precise philosophical strategy. The reasons behind Sellars’s first peculiar mix of rationalism and logical empiricism are essentially historical, depending on the unsatisfactory coherentist interpretation that had been given of Carnap’s pure semantics at the University of Iowa. Sellars thought that pure pragmatics would have been a proper answer to such coherentism, but his refusal in giving his pragmatics a link to the real world (and not only to the logically possible ones) made impossible finding a clear formulation of the oxymoronic “pure pragmatics.” Only when he started reading Carnap correctly he significantly changed his own philosophical aims, which in the end were satisfied by a new formulation of the “solutions” he gave to his earlier concerns and made the final picture of his philosophy as apparently fully original and self- developed.

4 However, as the title of the book suggests, Olen’s real point was to focus on the concept of normativity as the key to understanding how different paths in Sellars’s philosophy have converged in a coherent conception. In his early formalism, Sellars shared the positivistic vision that admitted substantially two kinds of rules for language: logical ones, which make language understandable, and conformation ones, with Sellars’s insistence in claiming, for the latter, something like an a priori deduction (in order to avoid both scientism and anti-naturalistic psychologism). The deep point of agreement with the positivists was Sellars’s conviction that there is something as an “empirical meaningfulness” that makes us capable to distinguish between understandable and senseless sentences. The passage to his later philosophy is clearly marked by the dissolution of this notion by two paramount considerations: first, the admittance that empirical meaningfulness and conformation rely on the criteria of a community of speakers; second, the discover that modal expressions and moral commitment introduce in our language numberless sentences which are not reducible to an extensional or descriptive language, and can be considered “empirical” only in a broad sense. At the end, these considerations also better justify Sellars’s early most unmotivated assumption: the conviction that philosophy can and have to maintain an explanatory role in the age of sciences, although being not in competition with them. And how did this change in his meta-philosophy influence his original conception of normativity? Olen wisely reformulates this question in a different way: “The most relevant question to ask, then, might not be ‘Does Sellars’s change in meta-philosophy cause him to abandon his earlier philosophical positions?’, but ‘How does Sellars’ later meta-philosophy change the justification (or lack thereof) for his first-order position?’” (100).

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5 The author suggests that the answer should be sought by taking a look at the exchanges between Carnap and Sellars himself. For Carnap and the early Sellars, formalism (and pure pragmatics) is a part of the scientific method that investigates language. For the later Sellars, instead, a non-factual characterization of language says something about the nature of the language, i.e. about meaning. This bold connection between the formal analysis and the concreteness of meaning is possible because of the broader conception of “empirical” mentioned above and, of course, because of Sellars’s behavioristic inclination, which allowed him to sing the praises of the S-R principle all together with the arguments for the irreducibility of intentionality to descriptive language (in front of his floored colleagues and friends). And, if we look at these three different points – behavior, intentional language and formal language – we can appreciate how normativity holds them together, since the latter is traditionally composed of formal principles independent from empirical order and concerning behavior. Finally, and in a perfectly coherent way, Olen makes two very different conceptions of language and normativity emerge: the first one, typical of Carnap, which substantially denies that normativity is sui generis and that there is continuity between the formal structure of language and its world-aboutness; and the second one, which is more or less the opposite and focuses on the hermeneutic link between logical generalizations and pragmatics.

6 Despite the fact that his reconstruction of Sellars’s thought makes the last one seem precisely an attempt to mediate, through practical arguments, between formal requirements of meaning and its dependency on the world, Olen is very careful in finding Kantian elements or even a Kantian project behind it. Since this book has explicit goals of historical contextualization, it is quite clear that insisting in underlining the similarities between Sellars and a XVIIIth century’s philosopher would look like an odd move. But the idea that in normative language we can find the connection between words and the world that we cannot find between conformation rules and natural laws has much more of the Kantian primacy of practical philosophy over theoretical than we can ignore, like also the division of philosophy from both scientific laws and contingent facts and the search for non-arbitrary rules in formation and transformation of sentences and connection of different meanings.

7 All the point is, of course, the sense of that “non-arbitrary,” that could decide in which direction Sellars’s Kantianism is oriented – if at all. Both the possibilities chosen by Sellars (in his formalist period, “non-arbitrary” in the sense of “logically independents from the world,” later “non-arbitrary” as “constitutive of natural languages”) are open to the same two-fold interpretation, which was magnificently expressed by Everett Hall in a letter to Sellars himself in 1947: If one gives up realism in favor of linguistic formalism, one is landed not in Berkeleyan idealism but in absolute idealism. I think it also to be commended for showing that the coherence theory is not only of truth, but also of verification, that is its ‘coherence’ (in your terminology, ‘rules of conformation’) is neither logical consistency nor a merely contingent set of P-laws, but something peculiar in between and, that its plausible outcome is not absolutism but relativism, that is, both ‘true’ and ‘verified’ are relative to some “story.” (182)

8 Even when Sellars abandoned formalism, the idea that “both ‘true’ and ‘verified’ are relative to some story” remained unmatched in its crucial position, in the form of the dependence of conformation rules from psycho-sociological facts. As Hall pointed out, with a bit of prophetic talent, such a dependence might mean two different things: if

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there is only one “story,” one is landed very near to a naturalized version of absolute idealism; if there are many, one is landed in to the open relativism that Kant leaves behind after his transcendental machinery is abandoned. And this choice was going to be the central philosophical question for The Pittsburgh School, with – more or less – John McDowell on one side and Robert Brandom on the other. McDowell, from Mind and World, has found a way to keep together world-aboutness and coherence insisting in saying that the world exercises conceptual force on a animals receptive to meaning; in Hall’s words, “true” and “verified” are both relative to a story and to the world, since the world somehow tells the same story to all rational beings. In doing this, McDowell is giving complete development to the Hegelian aims in Sellars’s philosophy, maybe to the detriment of his original insistence on the independence of the space of reason from the space of nature, famously claimed in the sentence that knowledge is entirely and only collocated in the first one. This development is subtly ironical, since McDowell’s professed quietism starts just after he has reopened the main door for metaphysics, which is the Parmenidean identity of structure between thought and world. Brandom, on the other hand, interprets Sellars’s story-dependency of truth and verification as an admittance that there is no semantic system that could incorporate all the truth about everything, and that the best we can do in order to keep a synoptic vision is (methodologically) trying to find connections between different stories, and not (ontologically) trying to summarize them in a greater one. Brandom, of course, insists that Kant discovered, and Sellars re-discovered, that factuality relies on modality and activity on normativity, but is not interested at all in deducing from this crucial point something about the essence of human beings or nature. In doing this – in saying, following David Lewis, that what matters is knowing and not believing – he is probably abandoning Sellars’s definition of philosophy as something that tries to find the universal connection through all the things.

9 This comparison between Sellars’s two most influential scholars has been necessary in order to show something that generally comes up only from the study of the (untouched by Olen, coherently with the purposes of his book) consequences of a system of thought: its precious incoherence. The two fundamental aims in Sellars’s philosophy seem to be, using a philosophia perennis language, an ambition to ordered totality and a claim for freedom from monistic exigencies. It is very probable that they are incompatible. In Olen’s more historically contextualized words “Sellars’s reliance on such facts [that including normativity in philosophy of language would imply abandon formalism], though not exhausting his conception of normativity, is largely responsible for the tension between normative and naturalistic commitments in Sellars’s philosophy” (3). Often, when Sellars found a sharp opposition like this one, he tried to solve it accepting a weakened version of the first side and refusing the second, but preserving something of its empirical aspect; he did so in the famous opposition between the scientific and the manifest image of man, accepting the metaphysical aims of the former and the empirical exigencies of the latter, and he did the same also about that “tension” answering it with his peculiar nominalism. Since the ancient problem of universals had three solutions (realism, conceptualism and nominalism), and Sellars judged improbable the metaphysics of the first and even more suspicious the mentalist ontology of the second, he was with no doubt a nominalist, however his own anti- dichotomic way.

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10 The general idea is that, if a proper semantics has to get an explanatory role, it only needs seeming to contain universals. These universals will be categories of behavior, and so they will be at the same time epistemological tools and references to the empirical world. As far as we can understand from Olen’s reconstruction, lastly, Sellars ended up in giving the role of the rationalistic exhaustiveness to the uniformity of human behaviors, and the role of empirical contingency to the arbitrary constitution of natural languages.

11 As it is well known, between their death and their becoming a classic all the important philosophers live four or five decades of dereliction, when their works are at best only quoted and their original purposes deformed (often with an improvement, without doubt) by their scholars. Peter Olen’s Wilfrid Sellars and the Foundations of Normativity is, together with other increasingly numerous studies, a crucial step in order to bring Sellars out from that state and make of him a true classic. We can also say that the goal explicitly pursued by the author has been successfully met: the reader gets a vivid picture of Sellars’s philosophical backgrounds, continuities – somehow, Olen’s attention on individuating two phases of Sellars’s thought makes us better understand the continuity between them – and discontinuities, following the natural development of his thought without the teleologism that often afflicts systematic reconstructions. Since the criterion of exposition is mostly chronological, sometimes we have to put different elements about the same topic together from distinct sections of the book in order to find the theoretical connection. As a matter of fact, although the topics should be pure pragmatics and normativity, we find all the crucial elements of Sellars’s philosophy, as nominalism, epistemological behaviorism, and the interaction between empirical sciences and philosophy. But, perhaps, such an irregularity is more capable to give us the original proceeding of Sellars’s thought than any philological explanation would have been. Lastly, the Appendix of unpublished texts and documents gives us a rich and unusual view on the cultural environment where the last aims of traditional pragmatism and neo-positivism melted into the analytic philosophy, making us understanding – from the pen of some of its protagonists – the genesis of many of latter’s peculiarities.

AUTHORS

GABRIELE ALEANDRI Università degli Studi Roma Tre G.92.A[at]hotmail.com

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Joseph MARGOLIS, Three Paradoxes of Personhood: The Venetian Lectures Hermann, Mimesis International, 2017, 146 pages

Matthias Kramm

REFERENCES

Joseph MARGOLIS, Three Paradoxes of Personhood: The Venetian Lectures, Hermann, Mimesis International, 2017, 146 pages

1 In the academic world, Joseph Margolis is best known as the proponent of a particular combination of radical historicism and robust relativism. In his publications, he argues that “humankind is the measure of all things” with regard to aesthetics, history, natural and social sciences, and philosophy. In doing so, he effortlessly interacts with authors from the continental, pragmatist, and analytic traditions. His book Three Paradoxes of Personhood is a collection of the three Venetian lectures and the Michael Eldridge Lecture which Margolis was invited to give at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. These highly thought-provoking contributions should be of particular interest to pragmatist scholars working in the areas of anthropology, philosophy of language, social ontology, and political philosophy.

2 The book begins with an excellent and very accessible introduction to the philosophy of Joseph Margolis by Roberta Dreon, which familiarises the uninitiated reader with key themes from his work. This introduction is followed by Margolis’s three Venetian lectures, which make up the bulk of the book, and then by his Michael Eldridge Lecture. The two sketches by Jale N. Erzen that supplement the text convey a vivid picture of the pragmatist philosopher at work as a thinker and as a speaker.

3 Dreon’s introduction to Margolis’s philosophy puts a particular emphasis on his aesthetic work, but also includes an outline of his relativism, his constructivism, and his historicism. In addition, Dreon provides a very helpful overview of the reception of Margolis’s philosophy in Italy, which forms the background to his Venetian lectures. By

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acquainting the reader with Margolis’s (sometimes idiosyncratic) conceptual framework, she makes the text approachable for a wider audience. Of particular interest are the connections she draws between Margolis’s writings and the classical pragmatists – for example, his development of Dewey’s concept of the human being as a cultural animal.

4 Margolis’s four lectures are structured around three paradoxes. I will first describe these three paradoxes which form the leitmotif of his first three lectures, then provide some comment on the three lectures in turn, before ending with some notes on the Michael Eldridge Lecture, which can be read as a conclusion to the foregoing argument and as an application of its results to political philosophy. When Margolis writes about a paradox, he diverges from the standard definition of the term. Instead, he refers to a philosophical puzzle which refuses a solution within one particular philosophical paradigm, but which requires a combination of two or more approaches that may stand in considerable tension with each other.

5 The paradox Margolis addresses in his first lecture concerns the transformation of human primates into persons. Neither a purely Darwinist nor a purely intellectualist approach can account for this problem. Thus, Margolis demands a revision on both sides in order to conceptualise human beings as hybrid creatures that mingle “biologically and culturally acquired abilities” (p. 41). While evolution can explain the development of prelinguistic conceptual abilities, it is only through the active use of language that consciousness can arise. The paradox of the second lecture deals with the vagueness and indeterminacy of our language, something Margolis terms as “mongrel functionality” (63). Both a rationalist reconstruction of human language and a therapeutic treatment of possible conceptual confusions are at a loss here. According to Margolis, mongrel devices fulfil a certain function within our language, in both its philosophical and its non-philosophical varieties. They help us to signal conceptual puzzles which we cannot yet solve, and to avoid absurd phrasings. The third lecture analyses the collective nature of enlanguaged societies and the question of whether society is based on mutual understanding or whether meaning is based on societal conventions. Margolis rejects both the notion of society as a mere aggregation of competent speakers and the intellectualist notion of meaning as independent of any form of collective life. Instead, he reinterprets Wittgenstein’s concept of the Lebensform (form of life) in order to describe the mastery of language as “the very paradigm of a collective practice” (123) in which the meaning of our utterances is rooted. Thus, we can trace the meaning of our words back to this collective practice, but this is where we reach bedrock.

6 Having outlined the themes of the three lectures, I will now consider each lecture in turn in order to locate those themes in the dialogue between Margolis and his various conversation partners and to identify common threads, such as Margolis’s continued criticism of a rationalist version of pragmatism which he refers to as The Pittsburgh School (naming in particular Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom). Afterwards, I will connect these themes and threads with Margolis’s Michael Eldridge Lecture.

7 In his first lecture, “Persons as Natural Artifacts,” Margolis engages with (among many others) Michael Tomasello on the one hand, and Brandom on the other. He applauds Tomasello for recognising the crucial role of language in human development but criticises him for disregarding the continuities between human animals and non- human animals. Interestingly, he discovers a precursor of this confusion about the

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continuity between prelinguistic and linguistic capacities in George Herbert Mead. While Tomasello attributes we-intentionality to human beings, Margolis sees this capacity already present in non-human animals. We can attribute perceptual and nonlinguistic concepts to animals, whereas discursive concepts are restricted to the human realm. Thus, the solution to the first paradox is a concept of the human person as an “artifactual transform” (54) of the human primate which presupposes prelinguistic conceptual capacities on the part of non-human animals. Margolis contrasts this continuity thesis with Brandom’s inferentialism, which he interprets as proposing an alternative solution to the problem. According to Margolis, Brandom establishes the rational autonomy of our framework of reasoning and, consequently, avoids any reference to nonlinguistic concepts in his explanation of human rationality. Yet, his supposed rational autonomy remains merely heuristic and “effectively unsecured” (57).

8 Margolis’s primary conversation partners in his second lecture on “The Mongrel Functionality of Ordinary Language” are Noam Chomsky and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Margolis acknowledges Chomsky’s contributions to the specification of the biological resources necessary for the development of language. Yet, he is profoundly critical of Chomsky’s reconstruction of universal grammar, because it ignores the import of both evolutionary and cultural history. Chomsky attempts to reduce the variety of natural languages to a common underlying formula, whereas Wittgenstein claims the opposite: that language cannot and should not be reduced in this way. But Margolis is not satisfied with Wittgenstein’s therapeutic project of dissolving conceptual confusions either. He takes the famous example of the mind/body puzzle and analyses the different ways in which it has been treated by Descartes and Kant. According to Margolis, our language can assume a mongrel function of remaining deliberately vague on conceptual issues and keeping the conversation open to further specification. Thus, neither Descartes’s dualism nor Kant’s apperceptive unity solve the conceptual problem of the relationship between body and mind, but they provide a “reassuring picture” (91) which helps us to continue to use these two concepts both in philosophical and non-philosophical language. Descartes’s and Kant’s concepts function as temporary placeholders.

9 In the third lecture, on “Collective Individuals,” Margolis again engages with a great diversity of authors, but the two who stand out are Charles S. Peirce and Vincent Descombes. He discovers in Peirce’s Collected Papers a first move away from an understanding of society as a mere aggregation of individuals to society as a collective unit. In his article “What Pragmatism Is,” Peirce describes society as a “loosely compacted person” (114). Descombes adds an additional layer of complexity to the underlying philosophical problem: he sees an incoherence between employing the concept of society to refer to a collection of individuals and using it to refer to an individual of a superior order. Margolis disagrees with Descombes’s verdict. He suggests resorting to the mongrel functionality of language in order to do justice to the collective features that can be attributed to enlanguaged societies. While speech must be ascribed to individual persons, meaning goes beyond the individual and involves the collective. Accordingly, Margolis suggests a reinterpretation of the Wittgensteinian notion of Lebensform as “the nominalized totality of all the continually evolving processes (and all the contexts enabling the processes) of external and internal Bildung,

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that transform human primates into persons and issue in whatever human societies thereupon do, produce, utter, enact, bring about, and Intentionally manifest” (99).

10 I come now to Margolis’s Michael Eldridge Lecture, which bears the title “Norms Misjudged.” The topic of this lecture is the interpretation of societal norms and the question of whether they can be justified or universalised. In this lecture, Brandom’s inferentialism is not explicitly mentioned, but Margolis engages critically with the Kantian enterprise which leads him to polemicise against The Pittsburgh School as one of many “regressive revivals of rationalism” (127). Margolis begins this lecture by arguing that Kant’s notion of transcendental necessity cannot be upheld in the face of the history of physics. He concludes from this that Kant’s application of a regulative principle in the realm of politics and morals is endangered as well. At this point, Margolis begins a conversation with John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, whom he regards as “the leading Kantian-inclined moral-political philosophers of the twentieth century” (130), in order to provide philosophical evidence for his argument. Comparing the late Rawls of The Law of Peoples with the early Rawls of A Theory of Justice, he sees Rawls as retreating from an abstract moral universalism to the “contingencies of ethical practice” (133) and to the non-universalisable requirements of his liberal proposal. In Habermas, Margolis senses a deep incompatibility between the naturalised transcendentalism of his discourse theory and the pragmatist manner in which he reconstructs rational consensus. Margolis consequently suggests that transcendental rationalism and methodological individualism must be abandoned, and, with them, the notion of absolute moral norms. Instead, we should rely on cultural memory, contemporary ideals, future hope, and reasonable inquiries in order to construct a “ modus vivendi […] among aggregated persons and collective peoples, among all the diverse societies of our age” (140). Returning to the title of his lecture, Margolis rejects any claim of a priority between moral norms and ethical values.

11 In sum, Margolis’s Three Paradoxes of Personhood provides an impressive and exemplary intellectual masterclass in thinking through the issues of personhood, language, society, and social norms as radically historical and contingent categories. The emergence of personhood is contingent upon prelinguistic conceptual abilities, language retains the vagueness and indeterminacy it acquired in the evolutionary adaptation of human beings to changing environments, enlanguaged societies are imbedded in contingent forms of life, and social norms can only be substantiated by resorting to existing cultural practices. At the same time, all four categories are the result of hybrid processes in which biological and cultural factors are intertwined. Margolis’s argument acquires its extraordinary force from his dialectical engagement with a multiplicity of conversation partners. By indicating the shortcomings of two opposite approaches, Margolis creates space for a third option. He also puts considerable effort into clarifying what pragmatism is and what it is not. Thus, he defends the pragmatist thesis of continuity between nature and culture against Brandom’s inferentialism, which he interprets as a rationalist counter-proposal to pragmatism. Although Margolis’s defence need not be the last word in this debate, it nevertheless provides a very useful starting point for further discussions.

12 That said, Margolis’s great ability to engage with other philosophers can sometimes make it difficult to follow his argument, as it is mainly developed in conversation with other points of view. While this discursive style enriches his argument considerably, it occasionally comes at the expense of stringency and clarity. And while he provides a

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fair treatment of his discussants in the first three lectures, I am a bit hesitant about his analysis of Rawls’s and Habermas’s shortcomings. By reducing the tensions in their philosophical work too much to metaethical considerations, he does not take sufficiently into account their political and moral thought, neglecting, for example, that Rawls’s “overlapping consensus” is also based on political reasons. A third and final point concerns a question regarding the mongrel functionality of language in the philosophical realm: While Margolis rightly points to the usefulness of mongrel devices in keeping philosophical conversations open to future corrections and specifications, I would have liked to know more about the way in which such criticism and corrections can and should take place – for example, with regard to Cartesian mind/body dualism.

AUTHORS

MATTHIAS KRAMM Utrecht University m.kramm[at]uu.nl

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Peter OLEN & Carl SACHS (eds), Pragmatism in Transition: Contemporary Perspectives on C.I. Lewis London & New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 222 pages

Sarin Marchetti

REFERENCES

Peter OLEN & Carl SACHS (eds), Pragmatism in Transition: Contemporary Perspectives on C.I. Lewis, London & New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 222 pages

1 It is not uncommon, when reading and writing about philosophical traditions, to be highly selective. Especially so when the tradition under review has been contested among its friends and foes alike since its very beginning. This has surely been, and still is, the case with pragmatism, where depending on the narrative spun we would have very different figures foregrounded or rather eclipsed. One might well speak of pragmatisms in the plural, as the Peirceans, the Jamesians, the Deweyeans, and so forth1 – where later installments are usually presented as updated varieties of earlier ones – all have very strong feelings about the (allegedly) competing accounts. More often than not, these accounts formed and then dismantled alliances in order to build master-narratives about longer-term legacies within the tradition. Banners gained in respect, only to progressively fading away and possibly coming back either in disguise or hand in hand with past competitors – sometimes with uncomfortable rust between the two still very much in view. This is what, among other things, makes pragmatism a rather lively and appealing tradition: by studying its trajectory one would in fact face rather surprising twists and turns, a number of intra- and extra-tradition alliances, as well as deep legacies which helped it not only to outlive the philosophical turmoil of the twentieth-century, but also to establish itself among the most promising voices (a choir, indeed) in the twenty-first. This was some productive, as opposed to destructive,

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agonism: an engagement only occasionally – yet not unpainfully – stained by politically-driven (that is academic) turf wars.

2 Now, the Lewisians, for a long time little more than a jolly book club, are currently on the rising. And for good reasons, according to the editors of the book under review. Pragmatism in Transition aims in fact to dust off the work of a mastermind of pragmatism who sat between the gilded age of classical pragmatism and the seminal if contested one of mid-century pragmatism. Despite the relatively poor attendance they received, C.I. Lewis’s writings have been in fact pivotal to the very unfolding of the tradition. Lewis himself was a remarkable figure: an enthusiastic student of James and Royce, a suspicious roommate sharing his office with Peirce’s (uncollected) papers, a dissenting voice among the “realists” of the 1920s and 1930s, tutor of W. Sellars, Quine, and N. Goodman at Harvard, and most recently godfather of the cognitivist line (as opposed to the conversationalist one, though nomenclatures grew buoyant) within contemporary pragmatism, Lewis played the role of a silent if crucial presence throughout the various stages of the tradition, and hence a book assessing his legacy is a particularly welcome addition to the somewhat thin secondary literature.

3 The editors crafted together contributions by more established and younger scholars, which form a rather compact and balanced blend, as they do cover the whole spectrum of Lewis’s writings – his philosophical development (Kegley, Olen), moral philosophy (Heney), logic (Shieh), and theory of knowledge (Mayoral, Stump, Westphal, Zarebski) alike –, rather than focusing on his epistemology only as happened too often – though, the imbalance is still towards the latter. What is interesting to notice, if only in passing, is that the editors are best known as Sellars scholars: this is rather telling because, as we know, Lewis and Sellars had a close philosophical relationship (almost a partnership) in their agreeing on the way key philosophical problems should be addressed and yet disagreeing in the solution offered. Two chapters of the book (by Westphal and Zarebski) investigate this liaison in some detail. As a consequence, the book will be of particular interest to Sellars scholars, beyond pragmatist sympathizers or detractors more generally. It will also be of interest for scholars working on the history of analytic philosophy since Lewis was an analytic philosopher, too. Actually, he was perhaps the first and most notable case of a thinker equally influenced by the two traditions, and working to bringing them closer to each other – other candidates being Carnap, Goodman, Quine, White, Putnam, Rorty, and Brandom, with rather disparate goals and strategies. In the volume, this effort in philosophical bridging and cross- fertilization is shown at work by surveying Lewis’s swinging path from logical theory to the theory of knowledge through moral and social theory – unfortunately, the latter is given little space in the volume, even if, admittedly, his social philosophy does not shine for originality and timelessness. As a whole, the volume offers plenty of food for thought to advancing our own contemporary investigations into matters of mind, morals, and metaphilosophy. This is in fact the very angle of the collection: namely, to bring Lewis into the contemporary philosophical conversation and check what is still alive and what is instead dead in his work. As with most collections, the quality of the contributions is uneven, but all the chapters are nicely crafted and genuinely contribute to the deepening of an aspect of Lewis’s work – to my tastes and interests, the contributions by Heney, Olen, and Mayoral stand out. Rather than summarizing the various chapters, I shall conclude by mentioning a few recurring themes as they surface in the various chapters, concerning the combo of realism, cognitivism, and empiricism.

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4 As the editors explain in their resourceful introduction to the volume, Lewis’s work early and late is characterized by the attempt to enriching the empiricist program (hence demising idealism and rationalism) by bringing to light the interplay of the empirical and the conceptual. This is in fact what he sought to accomplish in his earlier logical and epistemological work, which he then partially revised in his later work on knowledge and (e)valuation. And this is what made him a pragmatist of a kind: namely, the idea that it is really our shifting conceptual apparatus (that is, our shifting conceptual interests) what drives our empirical investigations and investigations into the empirical world – the only world creatures like us enjoy and partake in. Now, this is a form of pragmatic realism because by attending our practices of knowledge and valuation we would keep track not so much of how things are, but rather of how what we should be responsive to. Reality becomes a necessary friction in its being a reference point for assessing our interests and projects. This pragmatic realism, itself a radical form of empiricism (of Jamesian ancestry), would then count as a cognitivist approach to philosophical issues as it takes beliefs and values (and hence knowledge and valuation) as equally truth-apt and hence rationally debatable. The wider stakes of this philosophical maneuver lie in fact in Lewis’s criticism of those bifurcational accounts of reality (of which nowadays we have brand new, sophisticated accounts) according to which only Humean matters of fact (things and necessities) can be empirically assessable while relation of ideas (modals and morals) should be left to the subjective realm of taste (variously understood). Lewis strongly believed that almost everything under the sun, from logical connectors to aggregates of matters to moral judgments could and actually should be equally assessed with reference to what we take their different reality to be. There would then be not so much degrees of reality (proper as opposed to quasi-truths) but rather different kinds of reality (and hence of truths) corresponding to how our concepts about such reality work. If this is the blueprint of Lewis’s philosophical project, the chapters comprising the volume problematize aspects of it with reference both to the interlocutors of his time (Dewey, logical empiricism, Sellars, Kuhn, Quine) and of ours (the Pittsburgh School, expressivism). It is no surprise, then, that Lewis’s name is today brought by some of the most distinguished scholars of pragmatism as a still promising perspective to tackle these philosophical matters, with newer legacies gaining traction – most notably, the Peirce-Lewis axis along which Rosenthal and Misak reconstruct what they think are the best teachings of pragmatism. This volume breaks new interpretative ground, and reinvigorates the conversation between Lewisians and others, thus contributing to the shining of his name in the twentieth-century philosophical pantheon, pragmatist and otherwise.

5 A coda on Lewis’s metaphilosophy is in order. At face value, Lewis was indeed a philosopher’s philosopher if there was one, as he wrote on philosophical problems as they issued in the philosophical discussion as it took place in academic books, journals, and departmental and professional meetings (as also Olen and Sachs mention at p. 4-5). He was actually pivotal to the professionalization of philosophy in the US, and in this respect he led (together with R. B. Perry and a few others colleagues) Harvard and hence American philosophy departments from cultural centers in the widest acceptation of the term to scientific hubs. If, before Lewis, James and Royce trained their students to become finest intellectuals (philosophers or otherwise), after Lewis students would train to become finest academic philosophers (and only occasionally intellectuals). If this picture is certainly accurate (and the masterful work of Bruce Kuklick is the definitive reference), still two things should be noted. First, if Lewis, an

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ardent follower of James and especially Royce, became the quintessential academic philosopher (but the same can be said of Perry and the other “realists”), then we should at least partially revise the picture of James and Royce as utterly anti-professionalized philosophers, and rather investigate how, at the turn of the century, classical pragmatism underwent deep self-criticism and fashioned a philosophy which broke for sure with the past in its emancipation from theology and metaphysics, but in so doing prepared the ground for an enlightened professionalization of philosophical discussion inside the academia. Secondly, Lewis himself was not cold to themes and discussions exceeding the academia. His unsung social philosophy (his The Ground and Nature of the Right and Our Social Inheritance are usually not even considered as worth reading) is an example of his deep concerns for what happened outside philosophy halls. We should should perhaps start to revise his moral philosophy as well as an effort not so much in philosophical foundation – meta-ethical or normative alike, despite this is exactly how his ethics looks like, at least superficially–, but rather at philosophical elucidation of our (his) historical present – and there is plenty of this, despite its title, in the recently issued Essays on the Foundation of Ethics, where we find more than a gesture towards the understanding of philosophical ethics as a descriptive yet critical investigation of our ordinary moral situation for its practical transformation. This resonates with his earliest metaphilosophical views about philosophy’s consisting in “the mind’s own study of itself in action; and the method is simply reflective. It seeks to formulate explicitly what from the beginning is our own creation and possession.” (Mind and the World Order, p. 17). If this task can be sometimes performed from the armchair, still its point is self-understanding from the point of view of conduct. And such doings are the plethora of things we commit to, long for, and theorize about in our ways of world- making well beyond what is usually simplified in oft-caricatural philosophical accounts of them. Via philosophy we should make explicit (and hence perspicuous) what goes on outside it (that is, in conduct). This is no small feat, and an aspect of Lewis which would bring him closer to the classical pragmatists as well as to kindred figures in other philosophical traditions. An aspect still to be fully explored and furthered in our present philosophical situation and practice.

NOTES

1. As an aside, which proper treatment would take us way too far, it is rather peculiar how most pragmatist streams are associated with the names of their respective representative figures in a way, say, analytic or continental ones are not. For sure we have Wittgensteinian and Quinean or Heideggerian and Foucauldian philosophies and philosophers, but within pragmatism there has been an almost perfect coincidence between the names of the master thinker of choice and the style and content of the endorsed philosophy. This is slowly changing, though, thanks to recent new efforts in periodization (both historical and theoretical), such as classical/recent/ contemporary pragmatism (see R. Brandom, Perspectives on Pragmatism, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2011) or first-experience/second-language/third-conduct wave in pragmatism (see C. Koopman, Pragmatism in Transition, New York, Columbia University Press, 2009).

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AUTHORS

SARIN MARCHETTI Sapienza Università di Roma Sarin.marchetti[at]uniroma1.it

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