From the Tree to the Labyrinth, Umberto Eco

Contents
Introduction

1. From the Tree to the Labyrinth
2. Metaphor as Knowledge: Aristotle’s Medieval (Mis)Fortunes
3. From Metaphor to Analogia Entis
4. The Dog That Barked (and Other Zoosemiotic Archaeologies)
5. Fakes and Forgeries in the Middle Ages
6. Jottings on Beatus of Liébana
7. Dante between Modistae and Kabbalah
8. The Use and Interpretation of Medieval Texts
9. Toward a History of Denotation
10. On Llull, Pico, and Llullism
11. The Language of the Austral Land
12. The Linguistics of Joseph de Maistre
13. On the Silence of Kant
14. Natural Semiosis and the Word in Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (I promessi sposi)
15. The Threshold and the Infinite: Peirce and Primary Iconism
16. The Definitions in Croce’s Aesthetic
17. Five Senses of the Word “Semantics,” from Bréal to the Present Day
18. Weak Thought versus the Limits of Interpretation
    References
    Index

Introduction

At the second congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (Vienna, July 1979) I presented a number of “Proposals for a History of Semiotics.” I recommended that we intensify historical studies on the various theories of the sign and of semiosis over the centuries, first of all because I considered it a necessary contribution to the history of philosophy as a whole, and secondly because I was convinced that to do semiotics today one needed to know how it was done yesterday, however much it might have been disguised as something else. And what better place to begin than from that “Coup d’oeil sur le développement de la sémiotique” with which Roman Jakobson had opened the first international congress of the association five years earlier?

I suggested three lines of research. The first had narrower ambitions, since it was confined to those authors who had spoken explicitly about the relation of signification, starting with the Cratylus and with Aristotle, down through Augustine and eventually to Peirce—but without neglecting the authors of treatises on rhetoric like Emanuele Tesauro or the theorists of universal and artificial languages like Wilkins or Beck.

My second line of research involved a close rereading of the whole history of philosophy with a view to finding implicit semiotic theories even where they had apparently not been explicitly developed, and the chief example I gave was that of Kant.

Finally, my third suggestion was intended to cover all those forms of literature in which symbolic and hermeneutical strategies of any kind were deployed or developed (among them, for instance, the works of the Pseudo-Areopagite). I cited as examples manuals of divination (texts like Guglielmo Dorando’s Rationale divinorum officiorum), the medieval bestiaries, the various discussions of poetics, down to the marginal notes of writers and artists who had reflected in one way or another on the processes of communication.

Anyone familiar with the bibliography of semiotics over the last thirty years knows that my appeal was anchored on the one hand in already developed or developing historiographical interests, while on the other it voiced an urgency that was already, so to speak, in the air: over the past thirty years, the contributions to an historical reconstruction of theories of the sign and semiosis have been many, so many that we are already in a position (provided someone could be found with the will and the energy to take on the task) to plan a definitive history of semiotic thought, by various authors and in several volumes.

For my own part, in the course of this thirty-year period, I have continued to elaborate the occasional personal offering, even returning from time to time to a topic previously explored—not to mention that chapter in semiotic history to which I devoted my La ricerca della lingua perfetta (1993), translated as The Search for a Perfect Language (1995). Such, then, is the origin and nature of the essays gathered in the present volume.

They were conceived under various circumstances, some for strictly academic occasions, others as discourses addressed to a broader general public. I decided not to attempt to rewrite them in a more uniform style, and I have kept the apparatus of notes and references in the case of the more specialized contributions and the conversational tone in the case of the more essayistic pieces.

I trust that even readers whose interests are not specifically semiotic (in the professional sense of the word) will be able to read these writings as contributions to a history of the various philosophies of language or languages.

1 From the Tree to the Labyrinth

1.1. Dictionary and Encyclopedia
For some time now the notions of dictionary and encyclopedia have been used in semiotics, linguistics, the philosophy of language and the cognitive sciences, to say nothing of computer science, to identify two models of semantic representation, models that in turn refer back to a general representation of knowledge and/or the world.

In defining a term (and its corresponding concept), the dictionary model is expected to take into account only those properties necessary and sufficient to distinguish that particular concept from others; in other words, it ought to contain only those properties defined by Kant as analytical (analytical being that a priori judgment in which the concept functioning as predicate can be deduced from the definition of the subject). Thus the analytical properties of dog would be ANIMAL, MAMMAL, and CANINE (on the basis of which a dog is distinguishable from a cat, and it is logically incorrect and semantically inaccurate to say of something that it is a dog but it is not an animal). This definition does not assign to the dog the properties of barking or being domesticated: these are not necessary properties (because there may be dogs incapable of barking and/or hostile to man) and are not part of our knowledge of a language but of our knowledge of the world. They are therefore matter for the encyclopedia.

In this sense semiotic dictionaries and encyclopedias are not directly comparable to dictionaries and encyclopedias “in the flesh,” so to speak, to the published products, in other words, that go by the same name. In fact, dictionaries “in the flesh” are not usually composed according to the dictionary model: a normal dictionary, for instance, may define “cat” as a feline mammal, but usually adds details of an encyclopedic nature that concern the cat’s fur, the shape of its eyes, its behavioral habits, and so on and so forth.

If we wish to identify a dictionary in its pure form—to which various contemporary theoreticians in the field of artificial intelligence still refer when they speak (see section 1.7 below) of “ontologies”—we must return to the model of the Arbor Porphyriana or Porphyrian tree, in other words to the commentary on Aristotle’s Categories written in the third century A.D. by the Neo-Platonist Porphyry in his Isagoge, a text that throughout the Middle Ages (and beyond) will be a constant point of reference for any theory of definition.

1.2. The Dictionary

1.2.1. The First Idea of the Dictionary: The Arbor Porphyriana

Aristotle (Posterior Analytics, II, iii, 90b 30) says that what is defined is the essence or essential nature. Defining a substance means deciding, among its attributes, which of them appear to be essential, and in particular those that are the cause of the fact that the substance is what it is, in other words, its substantial form.

The problem is coming up with the right attributes that can be predicated as elements of the definition (Posterior Analytics, II, xiii, 96a–b). Aristotle gives the example of the number 3: an attribute such as being certainly applies to the number 3, but also to anything else that is not a number. On the other hand, the fact of being odd applies to the number 3 in such a way that, even if it has a wider application (it also applies, for instance, to the number 5), it nonetheless does not extend beyond the class of numbers. These are the attributes we must look for “up to the point where, although singly they have a wider extension of meaning than the subject, collectively they have not; for this must be the essence of the thing” (II, xiii, 96a 35). What Aristotle means is that, if we define man as MORTAL, ANIMAL and RATIONAL, each of these attributes, taken on its own, can also be applied to other beings (horses, for example, are animal and mortal, and the gods, in the Neo-Platonic sense of the word, are animal and rational), but, taken altogether, as a defining “group,” MORTAL RATIONAL ANIMAL applies only to man, and in a way that is absolutely reciprocal.

A definition is not a demonstration: to reveal the essence of a thing is not the same as to prove a proposition about that thing; a definition says what something is, whereas a demonstration proves that something is (II, iii, 91a 1), and, consequently, in a definition we assume what a demonstration must on the contrary prove (II, 3, 91a 35). Those who define do not prove that something exists (II, iii, 92a 20). This means that for Aristotle a definition is concerned with meaning and has nothing to do with processes of reference to a state of the world (II, iii, 93b 30).

To find the right way to construct good definitions, Aristotle develops the theory of predicables, that is, of the ways in which categories can be predicated of a subject. In his Topics (I, iv, 101b 17–25) he identifies only four predicables (genus, proprium or unique property, definition, and accident), while Porphyry—as we shall see—will speak of five predicables (genus, species, difference, proprium, and accident).1

In a lengthy discussion in the Posterior Analytics (II, xiii), Aristotle outlines a series of rules to develop a proper division, proceeding from the most universal genera to the infimae species, identifying at each stage of the division the proper difference.

This is the method followed by Porphyry in the Isagoge. The fact that Porphyry develops a theory of division