Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Umberto Eco
Contents
Note
Introduction
- Signs
1.1. Crisis of a concept
1.2. The signs of an obstinacy
1.3. Intension and extension
1.4. Elusive solutions
1.5. The deconstruction of the linguistic sign
1.5.1. Sign vs. figura
1.5.2. Signs vs. sentences
1.5.3. The sign as difference
1.5.4. The predominance of the signifier
1.5.5. Sign vs. text
1.5.6. The sign as identity
1.6. Signs vs. words
1.7. The Stoics
1.8. Unification of the theories and the predominance of linguistics
1.9. The ‘instructional’ model
1.10. Strong codes and weak codes
1.11. Abduction and inferential nature of signs
1.12. The criterion of interpretability
1.13. Sign and subject - Dictionary vs. Encyclopedia
2.1. Porphyry strikes back
2.1.1. Is a definition an interpretation?
2.1.2. The idea of a dictionary
2.1.3. The interpretation of the markers
2 2 Critique of the Porphyrian tree
2.2.1. Aristotle on definition
2.2.2. The Porphyrian tree
2.2.3. A tree which is not a tree
2.2.4. The tree is entirely made up with differentiae
2.2.5. Differentiae as accidents and signs
2.3. Encyclopedias
2.3.1. Some attempts: registering contexts and topics
2.3.2. Some attempts: registering frames and scripts
2.3.3. Some attempts: stereotypes and commonsense knowledge
2.3.4. Clusters
2.3.5. The encyclopedia as labyrinth
2.3.6. The dictionary as a tool - Metaphor
3.1. The metaphoric nexus
3.2. Traditional definitions
3.3. Aristotle: synecdoche and Porphyrian tree
3.4. Aristotle: metaphors of three terms
3.5. Aristotle: the proportional scheme
3.6. Proportion and condensation
3.7. Dictionary and encyclopedia
3.8. The cognitive function
3.9. The semiosic background: the system of content
3.9.1. The medieval encyclopedia and analogia entis
3.9.2. Tesauro’s categorical index
3.9.3. Vico and the cultural conditions of invention
3.10. The limits of formalization
3.11. Componential representation and the pragmatics of the text
3.11.1. A model by ‘cases’
3.11.2. Metonymy
3.11.3. ‘Topic’, frames’, isotopies
3.11.4. Trivial metaphors and ‘open’ metaphors
3.11.5. Five rules
3.11.6. From metaphors to symbolic interpretation
3.12. Conclusions - Symbol
4.1. Genus and species
4.2. Expressions by ratio facilis
4.2.1. Symbols as conventional expressions
4.2.2. Symbols as expressions conveying an indirect meaning
4.3. Expressions produced by ratio difficilis
4.3.1. Symbols as diagrams
4.3.2. Symbols as tropes
4.3.3. The Romantic symbol as an aesthetic text
4.4. The symbolic mode
4.4.1. The Hegelian symbol
4.4.2. Archetypes and the Sacred
4.4.3. The symbolic interpretation of the Holy Scriptures
4.4.4. The Kabalistic drift
4.5. Semiotics of the symbolic mode
4.6. Conclusions - Code
5.1. The rise of a new category
5.1.1. A metaphor?
5.1.2. Dictionaries
5.2. The landslide effect
5.3. Codes and communication
5.4. Codes as s-codes
5.4.1. Codes and information
5.4.2. Phonological code
5.4.3. Semantics-codes
5.5. Cryptography and natural languages
5.5.1. Codes, ciphers, cloaks
5.5.2. From correlation to inference
5.5.3. Codes and grammars
5.6. S-codes and signification
5.6.1. S-codes cannot lie
5.6.2. S-codes and institutional codes
5.7. The genetic code
5.8. Toward a provisional conclusion - Isotopy
6.1. Discursive isotopies within sentences with paradigmatic disjunction
6.2. Discursive isotopies within sentences with syntagmatic disjunction
6.3. Discursive isotopies between sentences with paradigmatic disjunction
6.4. Discursive isotopies between sentences with syntagmatic disjunction
6.5. Narrative isotopies connected with isotopic discursive disjunctions generating mutually exclusive stories
6.6. Narrative isotopies connected with isotopic discursive disjunctions that generate complementary stories
6.7. Narrative isotopies connected with discursive isotopic disjunctions that generate complementary stories in each case
6.8. Extensional isotopies
6.9. Provisional conclusions - Mirrors
7.1. Is the mirror image a sign?
7.2. The imaginary and the symbolic
7.3. Getting in through the Mirror
7.4. A phenomenology of the mirror: the mirror does not invert
7.5. A pragmatics of the mirror
7.6. The mirror as a prosthesis and a channel
7.7. Absolute icons
7.8. Mirrors as rigid designators
7.9. On signs
7.10. Why mirrors do not produce signs
7.11. Freaks: distorting mirrors
7.12. Procatoptric staging
7.13. Rainbows and Fata Morganas
7.14. Catoptric theaters
7.15. Mirrors that ‘freeze’ images
7.16. The experimentum crucis
References
Index of authors
Index of subjects
Note
Early versions of Chapters I, 3, 4, and 5 of this book were written in Italian as entries of the Enciclopedia Einaudi\ however, these have been reworked and rewritten for the purposes of this book. Slightly different versions of the following chapters have already been published in Eng-lish: «Signs» (Chapter 1), as «The Sign Revisited,» translated by Lucia Re, Philosophy and Social Criticism 7 (1980); «Metaphor» (Chapter 3), as «The Scandal of Metaphor,» translated by Christopher Paci, Poetics Today 3 (1982); «Isotopy» (Chapter 6), as part of the article «Two Prob-lems in Textual Interpretation,» Poetics Today la (1980). An earlier ver-sion of «Mirrors» (Chapter 7) was written for a volume in honor of Thomas A. Sebeok for his sixty-fifth birthday. The translators men-tioned above are not responsible for the changes in the final versions.
Figure 3.5 of this book is adapted from Groupe , Rhetorique generate (Paris: Larousse, 1970), p. 109. Figure 6.1 of this book is reprinted from Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 14.
In the course of this book, I use (as I did in A Theory of Semiotics) single slashes to indicate expressions; guillemets indicate the corre-sponding content. Thus /x/ means, or is an expression for, «x». How-ever, when it is not strictly necessary to stress such a distinction (that is, when words or sentences are used as expressions whose corresponding content is taken as intuitively understood), I simply use italics.
All the subjects dealt with in this book have been widely discussed during the last four years in my courses at the University of Bologna and during my visiting terms at Yale University and Columbia University; many of the topics were also elaborated in the course of various congres-ses, symposia, seminars —in so many circumstances that it would be difficult to be honest and exhaustive in expressing my gratitude to all those students and colleagues who have contributed to the original draft with their objections and suggestions. I am, however, particularly in-debted to Barbara Spackman and John Deely, who have kindly revised part of the chapters.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
[О] INTRODUCTION
O.I.
The empirical reader of this book could have the impression that its various chapters deal with two theoretical objects, mutually incompati-ble, each being focused on as the object of a general semiotic approach: the sign, or the sign-function, and semiosis. The sign is usually consid-ered as a correlation between a signifier and a signified (or between ex-pression and content) and therefore as an action between pairs. Semiosis is, according to Peirce, «an action, or influence, which is, or involves, an operation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into an action between pairs» (C. P. 5.484).
The Model Reader should (as I hope) understand that the aim of this book is to show that these two notions are not incompatible. If one thinks of the more trivial and current notion of linguistic sign, one can-not match a theory of semiosis as indefinite interpretation with a ‘doc-trine of signs’; in this case, one has to choose either a theory’of the sign or a theory of semiosis (or of the significant practice, of the communica-tive processes, of textual and discursive activity). However, the main purpose of this book is to show that such an alternative is a misleading one: the sign is the origin of the semiosic processes, and there is no opposition between the ‘nomadism’ of semiosis (and of interpretive ac-tivity) and the alleged stiffness and immobility of the sign. The concept of sign must be disentangled from its trivial identification with the idea of coded equivalence and identity; the semiosic process of interpretation is present at the very core of the concept of sign.
Chapter I («Signs») shows that this idea was clearly spelled out by the classical doctrines where the semeion was not considered as an equiva-lence but as an inference.
Chapter 7 («Mirrors») tackles the question of a threshold between semiotic and presemiotic phenomena. The phenomenology of our expe-rience with mirror images represents the experimentum crucis for testing the role played by two fundamental characteristics of any semiosic expe-rience: a sign is an x standing for а у which is absent, and the process which leads the interpreter from x to у is of an inferential nature.
Definition is the subject matter of Chapter 2 («Dictionary vs. Ency-clopedia»), from the allegedly Aristotelian model called the Porphyrian Tree to the contemporary discussions on the possibility of an encyclopedia-like representation of our semantic competence. In this chapter, the current opposition ‘dictionary/encyclopedia’ is traced back to the classical models of the tree and the labyrinth. /Tree/ and /labyrinth/ are not metaphors. They are topological and logical models, and as such they were and are studied in their proper domain. However, I have no difficulties in admitting that, as labels or emblems for the overall discussion developed in the various chapters of this book, they can be taken as metaphors. As such, they stand for the nonmetaphoric Peircean notion oi unlimited semiosis and for the Model Q outlined in A Theory of Semiotics (Eco 1976).
If texts can be produced and interpreted as I suggested in The Role of the Reader (Eco 1979), it is because the universe of semiosis can be postu-lated in the format of a labyrinth. The regulative hypothesis of a semiosic universe structured as a labyrinth governs the approach to other classical issues such as metaphor, symbol, and code.
Metaphors can be read according to multiple interpretations; yet these interpretations can be more or less legitimated on the grounds of an underlying encyclopedic competence. In this sense, Chapter 3 («Metaphor») aims at improving some of the proposals of my essay «The Semantics of Metaphor» (Eco 1979, ch. 2), where the image of the Swedish stall-bars required a more rigorous explanation in terms of a representable encyclopedic network.
The notion of symbolic mode outlined in Chapter 4 («Symbol») ac-counts for all these cases of textual production that do not rely on a preestablished portion of encyclopedia but invent and propose for the first time a new interpretive connection.
0.2.
The principle of interpretation says that «a sign is something by know-ing which we know something more» (Peirce). The Peircean idea of semiosis is the idea of an infinite process of interpretation. It seems that the symbolic mode is the paramount example of this possibility.
However, interpretation is not reducible to the responses elicited by the textual strategies accorded to the symbolic mode. The interpretation of metaphors shifts from the univocality of catachreses to the open
