La semantica cognitiva di Kant e l'ornitorinco tra topi, uova e zanzare: possibilità di tenuta di uno schematismo enciclopedico

Abstract: Kant and the Platypus, which represented a real turn in Umberto Eco's thinking, is above all, as its introduction states, a work of cognitive semantics. We will focus then on a chapter, the third one, which is precisely devoted to the elabora- tion of this semantic proposal, defined by Eco himself as a «possible neo- schematism» (ECO 1997: 104). Given a semiotic model that wants to keep together the structuralist tradition and the interpretive one, we consider in fact the maintaining of a cognitivist and schematizing perspective highly problematic. We will analyse then the notion of cognitive type - which revises in a non trascendental sense the Kantian schema - and the correlated ones of nuclear and molar content: in this way, we will see that, notwithstanding an absolute hierarchic primacy ascribed to the per- ceptual level that presides at the acts of recognition and reference, the stress on the role of encyclopaedic competence smashes the notion of scheme, which is now de- fined in terms of regularities rather than in terms of rules.