|
|
|
|
|
|
(ii) Documents can be (a) objects produced with an explicit intention of communication (manuscripts, books, gravestones, inscriptions, and so on), where one can recognize an expression and a content (or an intentional meaning); (b) objects which were not primarily intended to communicate (such as prehistoric finds, objects of everyday use in archaic and primitive cultures) and which are interpreted as signs, symptoms, traces of past events; (c) objects produced with an explicit intention of communicating x, but taken as nonintentional symptoms of yy being the result of an inference about their origin and their authenticity. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
(iii) Authentic means historically original. To prove that an object is original means considering it as a sign of its own origins. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Thus 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 make a "correct" authentication is a clear case of semiosic interpretation or of abduction. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
6.1. Proofs through Material Support |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
A document is a fake if its material support does not date back to the time of its alleged origin. This kind of proof is a rather recent one. Greek philosophers looking for the sources of an older, Oriental wisdom rarely had any chance of dealing with original texts in their original language. The medieval translators generally worked with manuscripts which stood at a considerable distance from the archetype. As for the artistic marvels of Antiquity, people in the medieval period knew only either crumbling ruins or vague rumors about unknown places. The judgments passed in the carly Middle Ages on whether a document produced in evidence in a lawsuit was genuine or not were at best restricted to investigating the authenticity of the seal. Even during the Renaissance, the same scholars who started studying Greek and Hebrew, when the first manuscript of the Corpus Hermeticum was brought to Florence and was attributed to a very remote author, did not wonder at the fact that the sole physical evidence they hadthe manuscriptdated to the fourteenth century. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Nowadays, there are recognized physical or chemical techniques for determining the age and the nature of a medium (parchment, paper, linen, wood, and so on), and such means are considered fairly "objective." In these cases, the material supportwhich is an instance of the substance of the expressionmust be examined in its physical structure, |
|
|
|
|
|