Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition by Eco Umberto

Author:Eco, Umberto [Eco, Umberto]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2000-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

4.3 WILD CATEGORIZATION

At the level of NC there is a continuous organizing and reordering of “wild” categories, most of which spring from the recognition of constant precategorial features. For example, in the Western world the chicken is considered one of the edible animals while the dog is not, but in some Asiatic regions the dog is a fully fledged member of the edible category and is kept around the house much like a turkey or a pig in the West, in the knowledge that at a certain point it will have to be eaten.3 But it is in the specialized sector of the MC that negotiations become more punctilious.

Just think of the notions of mineral, vegetable, or insect. Many speakers, who would hesitate about recognizing that a certain animal (the porpoise, for example) is a mammal, would cheerfully admit that the fly or the flea is an insect. Could it be said that we are dealing with a zoological category, at first proper to an MC, which in the course of time has been captured, so to speak, by the NC? I should say not: this would happen if we noticed that common competence has accepted the idea that cows are mammals (a notion learned at school), but there is no doubt that people were recognizing insects before taxonomists decided to label a certain class ARTHROPODS.

This happens because MAMMAL was coined in 1791 as a technical term, preceded by MAMMALIA (extended for the first time to include the CETACEANS), in Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae of 1758, and it depends on a certain functional criterion that takes the reproductive system into account. On the contrary, insectus, a Latin caique from the Greek entoma zoa, meant a “cut” animal: this is an interpretation of a morphological feature that takes into account the typical form of these little animals (from the instinctive feeling that those bodies might be cut and divided where they are joined in a bottleneck shape or by rings). The “wild” category of insects still has such strength that we commonly give the name insect to many animals that zoologists do not recognize as such, such as spiders (which are ARTHROPODS but ARACHNIDS instead of INSECTS).4 In this way, on the level of NC we might find it odd if someone said that a spider is not an insect, while on the level of MC the spider is not an INSECT.

Therefore “insect” is either a semiosic primitive, of a precategorial type, which ordinary speech has presented to naturalists (while the mammals are a category that, if anything, has been given to ordinary speech by naturalists), or it is a wild category in any case. In categorizing wildly, we group objects by what use they have for us, by their relation to our survival, by formal analogies, et cetera. Our indifference in retaining the fact that an animal is a mammal is due to the fact that the scientific category MAMMAL includes animals that are not only very different to look at but also very different to deal with (e.

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