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Page 177
some embarrassing suspicions about several current philosophical and semiotic notions, for example, originality and authenticity, as well as about the very concepts of identity and difference.
2. Replicability of Objects
It appears from the current definitions given above that fakes, forgeries, and the like concern cases in which either (i) there is a physical object that, because of its similarity with some other object, can be mistaken for it, or (ii) a given object is falsely attributed to an author who is said to have madeor supposed to have been able to makesimilar objects. It remains unprejudiced, however, whether these mistakes are caused by someone who had the intention of deceiving or are accidental and fortuitous (see section 3). In this sense, a forgery is not an instance of lie through objects. At most, when a fake is presented as if it were the original with the explicit intention of deceiving (not by mistake), there is a lie uttered about that object.
A semiotics of the lie is undoubtedly of paramount importance (see Eco 1976:0.1.3), but when dealing with fakes and forgeries we are not directly concerned with lies. We are first of all concerned with the possibility of mistaking one object for another because they share some common features.
In our everyday experience, the most common case of mistakes due to similarity is the one in which we hardly distinguish between two tokens of the same type, as when in the course of a party we have put our glass down somewhere, next to another one, and are later unable to identify it.
2.1. Doubles
Let us define as a double a physical token which possesses all the characteristics of another physical token, at least from a practical point of view, insofar as both possess all the essential attributes prescribed by an abstract type. In this sense two chairs of the same model or two pieces of typing paper are each the double of the other, and the complete homology between the two objects is established by reference to their type.
A double is not identical (in the sense of indiscernibility) with its twin, that is, two objects of the same type are physically distinct from one another: nevertheless, they are considered to be interchangeable.
Two objects are doubles of one another when for two objects Oa and Ob their material support displays the same physical characteristics (in the sense of the arrangement of molecules) and their shape is the same (in the mathematical sense of "congruence"). The features to be recog-

 
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