From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation

by Umberto Eco

  On the other hand, the Greimas-Courtés Dictionnaire, through a number of different entries, provides a review of the various lexicographical theories in the semantic and notional fields. They examine the componential theory, taken to the Hjelmslevian extreme of its own ambitions (how from “a score of binary semic categories, considered as the taxonomical basis of possible combinations” one can succeed “in producing several million sememic combinations”). They assume as prerequisites of any semantics that it be at once generative (recognizing too the work of the post-Chomskyan generativists), syntagmatic (attempting to overcome the limits of linguistic taxonomism and come to grips with a semantics of the sentence and finally of the text, sense 5), and general; semantics is not limited to the investigation of linguistic meanings but must address the semantics of the natural world insofar as it is made manifest by the various semiotics. I would say that senses 1, 2, and 5 are covered, and at this point we cannot expect Greimas to give his attention to model semantics or to the semantics of possible worlds (given that his treatment takes no account whatsoever of modal logic) or to truth-conditional semantics, considering the position he has staked out with regard to truth. The dictionary proceeds, then, with entries dedicated to Discursive semantics, Fundamental semantics, Generative semantics, Narrative semantics, Seme and Sememe, all, however, in a strictly Greimasian key.

  The most balanced treatment is the one appearing in John Lyons’s two-volume Semantics, which represents a tolerant approach to all of the relevant traditions. Being on the one hand a linguist, exposed to the sirens of European theory, and on the other an insular Briton, did not prove a disadvantage for Lyons. But he does not formulate a theory, he expounds what has previously been said on the subject, and he can therefore afford to be ecumenical. Ecumenical, but hardly systematic.

  Is ecumenism a pis aller, a necessity for the popularizer, or may it also be a theoretical choice? I would choose the second option. The problem of meaning is so complex that it is preferable to be syncretistic rather than a dogmatist and fundamentalist on the subject.

  17.3. Does the Notion of Meaning Still Have a Meaning?

  I remarked earlier that it is still a moot point whether or not semantics is concerned with the meaning of words (sense 1). It would appear that all we need do is pass from sense 1 to the subsequent meanings to accept that semantics is still concerned with meaning. It is arguable, however, whether the notion of meaning still enjoys citizenship rights in sense 3 (for some—for instance Quine—meaning can be shelved as long as one has a good theory of reference). Most interestingly, it is also debatable whether the notion of meaning (at least in the sense of a meaning conventionally agreed—sense 1) still has citizenship rights in sense 5. So long as, apropos of sense 5, we have in mind Greimas, in whom a generative semantics of texts is preceded by a structural semantics, there is no reason for this suspicion. But deconstructionists and Davidsonians, or those like Sperber and Wilson who subscribe to the theory of inference, can also be subsumed under sense 5.

  Here meaning itself is called into question. In the case of Derrida, the denial of so-called transcendental meaning seems to be directed rather at the single meaning of a text (which he certainly calls into question) while sense 1 is not in question. In his De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology) he declares that, without the tools of criticism and traditional philology (including, I presume, dictionaries), interpretation could take off in any direction and consider itself authorized to say whatever it liked. Only he adds that this indispensable guardrail protects but does not initiate a reading, and he is evidently convinced that existing grammars and dictionaries are sufficient to protect a reading.

  In the case of Davidson and the various theories of inference, he chooses to ignore the fact that terms have meanings fixed by the community (the ones provided by dictionaries) because what counts is that I take for granted that anyone speaking to me sees the world as I see it and intends to say what I would say in the same circumstances. It would therefore seem irrelevant that a boat be designated as a “boat,” because if someone were to say to me “Let’s get on that wagon,” pointing to a boat, I would understand, through the principle of charity, that he meant to refer to the boat and I don’t go splitting hairs about the “conventional” meaning of the terms.

  The example, however, presupposes that all there is in front of us a boat, and not a boat and a wagon, and that the direction in which I am pointing is unambiguous. In the latter case, and in the absence of any further circumstantial indicators, if the speaker says “Let’s get on that wagon,” I understand that he wants to get on the wagon and not on the boat. This is a consequence of the fact that social and linguistic conventions assign two different meanings to the words “boat” and “wagon” independently of any context or act of charity. Of course, out of a principle of charity that, under the circumstances, would be tantamount to a “principle of malevolence,” I could always assume that the person speaking had a selection disturbance and said “wagon” whenever he meant “boat,” but we do not usually push the malevolence principle that far. We assume that there is a semantics in sense 1 involved, in which words have a certain meaning independently of any specific context.

  Note that not even Davidson denies this evidence—see “Communication and Convention” (Davidson 1984b)—in which he asks himself if we need a convention to tie every word to a fixed meaning for all speakers, and assumes, as a condition of the existence of a convention, the position of Lewis, which is clearly more valid for poker than for languages. At this point Davidson realizes that we can even understand terms we are not familiar with and decides that all conventions are useful but not necessary. The argument is that we simply tend to speak like everyone else—and this would shift the problem of the existence of a code to that of consistency of usage.

  To be quite frank, this strikes me as merely playing with words. Saying that we regularly associate the word “boat” with a floating vessel and saying that the code establishes that a boat is a floating vessel doesn’t change much. In fact when linguists speak of a code they are speaking of a statistical extrapolation from common usage: the code de la langue that De Saussure talked about is a fiction based on consistency of usage.

  Otherwise, it would be like saying that it is not true that the penal code establishes that whoever kills someone else must serve x number of years in prison, but that “usually” (that is, as a rule) whoever kills someone else gets x number of years in prison. If this were the only difference between Roman Law and Common Law, what we would have is identical conventions. The difference is that, in order to decide what is customary, Common Law, has recourse, not to a rule fixed once and for all, but to the precedent set by a previous case.

  Now, Davidson does not deny that there are conventions according to which a “boat” always signifies a floating vessel; he simply decides that this is a marginal or obvious case (obvious because it is marginal and marginal because it is obvious), and he prefers to give his attention to the more dramatic cases. The dramatic cases are when we use the word “boat” to indicate something other than a floating vessel. The most convincing example, of course, is that of metaphor (think of the example of “sauce boat”). But we cannot build a theory of a language on its use of metaphor, unless it be to say that the meaning of all linguistic terms is originally metaphorical—and I do not believe this was Davidson’s intent.

  The confusion lies in demonstrating that what is dramatic is normal and what is normal marginal, whereas in science the dramatic cases are always used as marginal examples to demonstrate that the normal cases are not as simple as we think. True, the principle that the exception confirms the rule is scientifically infantile (something proved by Popper’s falsificationist theory, according to which an exception calls the rule into question), but to state, as humorist Achille Campanile does, that “rules made up entirely of exceptions are rules fully confirmed,” is to state a paradox, and it is equally paradoxical to claim that the exception constitutes the r
ule. The rule for defining a rule, in the human sciences, is that it must allow for a number of exceptions, but that they must be controllable, that is to say, predictable. In the physical sciences, either all bodies fall according to the laws of gravity or, if only one body does not, the laws of gravity must be called into question. In the human sciences, on the other hand, the statistical rule is that the majority of human beings come together in heterosexual congress in order to procreate (otherwise our number would not have increased from two to six billion in a matter of fifty years), but this does not exclude the fact that some human beings choose not to procreate, which allows us to include Catholic priests and homosexuals among human beings.

  Were it true that there is no such thing as meaning in the sense of sense 1, we would have no end of trouble understanding each other, and in fact, Davidson, though through gritted teeth, has never defended this thesis. What we may be sure of is that, in terms of sense 5, the principle of charity theory must be taken very seriously. It is then that we discover that Davidson, by suggesting that he is contesting sense 1 (which he nevertheless presupposes) and seeming to place in discussion, for purely academic reasons, senses 3 and 4, was in fact proposing the principles of the semantics in sense 5—in other words, a semantics not of terms, or of sentences, but of texts. From the lexicographic point of view, Davidson seems to be denying the evidence, but from the point of view of a theory of textual interpretation he is a fairly sane person, or—though he is not aware of it—someone with something serious to say about the interpretation of the meaning of texts (texts that, on top of everything else, produced as they are in complex situations, are always multimedia; made up, in other words, of words, demonstrative and deictic gestures, paralinguistic elements, and maybe even hypoiconic supports).

  Allow me to remind you of a well-known example of Ducrot’s. The expression je suis le rognon (“I am the kidney”), uttered by a human being, is false (from the point of view of senses 3 and 4), but, when said in the context of a restaurant, accompanied by a gesture first pointing to the dish in the waiter’s hand and then to the speaker himself, it signifies unequivocally that the speaker is affirming that he is the one who ordered the kidney and not the one who ordered the sirloin steak.

  17.4. The Identification of Meaning and Synonymy

  In order to deny that semantics makes sense in sense 1, to affirm, that is, that words do not have meanings agreed upon by convention, it is customary to employ a quite fallacious argument. Meaning is identified with synonymy. Philosophers of language are more responsible for this fallacy than lexicographers. No sensible person versed in languages can believe that there are two synonyms that really do mean the same thing (and even the authors of dictionaries of synonyms offer their alternatives as possibilities faute de mieux, as stylistic variants to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, not as absolute equivalents). Once meaning and synonymy have been identified, however, the tendency is to demonstrate that, since there is no such thing as absolute synonymy (so much is obvious), there can be no meaning (which is not so obvious). This is the argument of those who hold that translation is an impossibility.

  Let us consider a fairly curious text of Quine’s, “The Problem of Meaning in Linguistics,” which appears in his From the Logical Point of View. In it Quine speaks of lexicography and lexicographers, saying that lexicographers seem to be interested in the problem of meaning, and he is certainly correct. After which he opines that a lexicographer “differs from the so-called formal linguists only in that he is concerned to correlate linguistic forms with one another in his own special way, namely, synonyms with synonyms” (Bréal 1900). If by “lexicographer” we understand the author of a dictionary of synonyms, this is certainly what he does, though with all due caution, as we said before. But Quine seems to think that the only thing the lexicographer is interested in is deciding what linguistic forms are synonymous, that is, “alike in meaning.” This is not true. The lexicographer’s first task is precisely to establish why the same expression may have different meanings in different contexts. Rather than cultivate the myth of synonymy, a good lexicographer contests it.

  If by “lexicographer” we understand someone who is writing a dictionary for tourists, and if he tells us “steak” is a synonym of bistecca, he may be taking advantage of the work of other lexicographers, but he is deliberately impoverishing it, though he may make it possible for an English-speaking tourist to order a bistecca if he happens to be in Italy. The good lexicographer is the one who explains that cagna is not a synonym of “bitch,” except in a few rare cases, so that in Italian I may define a lousy singer as a cagna, however impeccable her morals, but I could not call her a “bitch” in English without suggesting that she is of easy virtue (though her singing may be divine).

  So lexicographers, real lexicographers, are indeed semanticists in sense 1, in that they endeavor to establish on what common bases we may legitimately use a word, but they are above all semanticists in sense 2 when they try to decide the nature of our lexicographic conventions, not in the caricatural terms of synonymy and homonymy, but on the basis of an inspection of the systems of content and basing their findings on a broad survey of previous texts and their meaning (sense 5).

  When Quine says that lexicographers do not hold the monopoly on the problem of meaning, he appears to have in mind the authors of pocket dictionaries for tourists, rather than lexicographers who are scholars of structural semantics.

  Just how debatable Quine’s ideas about lexicography are can be seen from the paragraphs which follow, in which he equiparates the work of the lexicographers to that of the phonologists who decide whether two phonemes are different according to whether or not the meaning of the word changes if we substitute one for the other within the same language. It is true that the phonologist decides that a given phoneme is different from another because, if we substitute one for the other within the same syntagm, we obtain two words with two different meanings (ship and sheep, for instance), but, when he does so, the phonologist is not concerned with the notion of meaning. He simply assumes that the native speaker (of whom he himself is a reliable sample) perceives a variation in meaning in the passage from one phoneme to another. He merely registers a fact, he does not remotely presume to define what a ship or a sheep is. The lexicographer on the other hand takes as a given the proof of substitution provided by the phonologist and is concerned with defining the difference between a ship and a sheep.

  17.5. Truth-Conditional Semantics

  Let us go on to the fourth sense of semantics. It goes without saying that if we have such an impoverished notion of lexicography and meaning as that of synonymy, we are free to experiment with phenomena such as the substitution of apparently synonymous terms in opaque contexts (and clearly, someone who believes that Aristotle wrote the Metaphysics does not automatically believe that Alexander’s teacher wrote the Metaphysics). These are exercises of considerable importance for the study of logic, but not very important for understanding the way we speak. No speaker in his right mind, once it had been affirmed that “Giorgione” has three syllables, would affirm that “Barbarelli” too had three syllables.3 I am one of the first to admit how many things we would have failed to understand if we had not performed exercises of this kind, but they have nothing at all to do with at least four of the five senses of semantics that I am talking about.

  Let us come now to the differences between sense 3 and sense 4. It is my conviction that a truth-conditional semantics has nothing to do with the problem of reference. The problem of reference has to do with our ability to designate objects and states of the world, to reach an understanding on this act of designation (and hence it has something to do with sense 1), and—eventually (but this is not a semantic but an epistemological and gnoseological problem)—to say whether the object or the state of the world we referred to exists or is taking place to the extent that we referred to it. In simple terms, if I say that it is raining today, we have to be agreed on the meaning of “rain
,” we have to grant that the speaker is saying that water is falling from the sky, and that (another problem) water is actually falling from the sky.

  Let us take a look at Tarsky’s truth criterion. Its concern is with how to define the truth conditions of a proposition, but not with how to establish if the proposition is true when used for acts of reference. And saying that understanding the meaning of a sentence means knowing its truth conditions (that is, on what conditions the proposition expressed would be true) it is not the same thing as proving the sentence to be true or untrue.4

  Agreed, the paradigm is nowhere near as homogeneous as is usually maintained, and there are those who tend to interpret Tarsky’s criterion according to a correspondentist epistemology. But, whatever Tarsky may have thought,5 it is hard to read in a correspondentist sense his famous definition:

  The sentence [i] “snow is white” is true if, and only if, [ii] snow is white.

  We are in a position to say what kind of logical and linguistic entity [i] is—it is a sentence in an object language L that conveys a proposition—but we have no idea what [ii] is. If it were a state of affairs (or a perceptive experience) we would be extremely embarrassed: a state of affairs is a state of affairs and a perceptive experience is a perceptive experience, not a sentence. If anything, a sentence is produced to express a state of affairs or a perceptive experience. But if what appears in [ii] is a sentence about a state of affairs or a perceptive experience, it cannot be a sentence expressed in L, since it must guarantee the truth of the proposition expressed in [i]. It must be, then, a sentence expressed in a metalanguage L2. But in that case Tarsky’s formula ought to be translated as follows: