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

by Umberto Eco

  [i] The proposition “snow is white,” conveyed by the sentence (in L) snow is white

  is true if, and only if,

  [ii] the proposition “snow is white” conveyed by the sentence (in L2) snow is white is true.

  It is clear that this solution is destined to produce a sorites of infinite sentences, each one expressed in a new metalanguage. If we assume Tarsky’s example in a naïve fashion, we find ourselves in the same boat (or wagon) as the editors of De Saussure who represented the relationship between signifier and signified with an oval split into two superimposed halves, in which the word arbre is contained in the bottom half while the top half contains a drawing of a tree. Now, the signifier arbre is certainly a word, but the drawing of the tree is not intended to be and cannot be the signified or a mental image (because what it is, if anything, is another nonverbal signifier that interprets the word below it). Seeing that the design excogitated by De Saussure’s editors had no formal ambition, only a mnemonic function, we can forget about it. But the problem with Tarsky is different.

  We could of course interpret the definition in a strictly behaviorist sense: snow is white if, when confronted by the stimulus snow, every speaker reacts by saying it is white. But, apart from the fact that we would find ourselves up to our necks in the difficulties of radical interpretation, I do not believe this was what Tarsky had in mind, and, even if this was his intention, this would not be a way to decide whether a proposition is true, because it would simply tell us that all speakers are guilty of the same error of perception, just as the fact that for thousands of years all speakers declared that the sun sinks into the sea in the evening does not prove that the proposition was true.

  It seems more convincing to admit that, in Tarsky’s formulation, [ii] stands conventionally for the assignment of a truth value to [i]. The Tarskyan state of affairs is not something we can check in order to recognize the proposition that expresses it as true; on the contrary, it is what a true proposition, or indeed anything that is expressed by a true proposition, corresponds to (cf. McCawley 1981: 161), in other words its truth value. In this sense Tarsky’s notion does not tell us whether it is more true to say that a cat is a cat than it is to say that a cat is a mammal.

  17.6. Meaning, Referent, Reference

  This node, between truth-conditional semantics, reference semantics, semantics of the sentence, and textual semantics compels us to revise a few concepts, something I attempted to do in my Kant and the Platypus.

  1. Meaning of a term like cat. It may contain categorial elements like mammal and feline, but it also contains instructions to define the referent. But the referent of cat is not some individual cat, but cats in general. In this sense, terms that denote nonexistent objects may contain reference instructions (for instance, “unicorn”). It is possible to transmit and understand instructions for identifying the referent without having had and without ever having the occasion of referring to something.

  2. References to cats (My cat is in the kitchen). Reference as a linguistic act, to be negotiated. The reference, however, is completely unconnected either to the empirical truth of the proposition (if I am lying or mistaken, the cat is not there) or to any discussion of its truth value. To be sure, if there is a cat in the kitchen, there is a feline mammal in the kitchen (sense 4), I am certainly referring to a specific cat, mine (sense 3), but it might not be true that it is in the kitchen. Senses 1 and 2 are presupposed by semantics of the third type, and can be taken into consideration by semantics of the fourth, but the converse is not true. Let us not forget that Morris (1938) reminded us that semantics is concerned with the relationship between a sign and its designata, that a semantic rule establishes under what conditions a sign is applicable to an object, but that the notion of designatum has nothing to do with the existence of the object; the designatum of a sign is something the sign may denote—but establishing whether there really are objects of this kind goes beyond the competence of semiotics.

  Let us now suppose that I were to visit a culture (with a language adequate to express it) in which only two animals are known: the cat, hairy, smaller than a human being, domesticated, and harmless, and the crocodile, usually bigger than a human being, and scaly. For the members of that culture, based on such an elementary system of oppositions, which constitutes the full extent of their classification of the animal kingdom (a cat is everything a crocodile is not, and vice versa), if a dog were to show up, given that it was hairy, domesticated, and friendly, it would be defined as a cat (however unusual its appearance) and certainly not as an unusual crocodile. Let us suppose again that I realize that there is a boa constrictor behind my native interlocutor’s back. I wouldn’t be able to tell him that it was a boa because there is no adequate term in his language, and I couldn’t describe the strange and unusual animal without wasting precious time. I would therefore have to tell him that there was a crocodile behind him, assuming that, since in that culture animals are divided into harmless and hostile, I would thus be informing him that he was in a dangerous situation. This example is not chosen at random because in some medieval encyclopedias, not knowing how to define a crocodile (since the author had probably never seen one), they were content to call it a serpens acquaticus.

  If I succeed in causing my interlocutor to be concerned, as was my intention, and if I obtain his consent to my proposition (he turns around, gives a start and concedes that the animal, obviously not a cat, is indeed a crocodile), I will have behaved according to certain methodological principles of sense 2, to make a successful reference in the sense of sense 3, obtaining his consent in terms of sense 4.

  But in fact all this is because I am basing myself on the principles of sense 5, according to which it is the text and the context that have the last word in defining the meaning of terms.

  This whole discourse will no doubt lead someone to opine that there is no semantics that does not need to be backed up by a pragmatics. I can only agree, as indeed I always have, from my A Theory of Semiotics (1976) to Kant and the Platypus (2000).

  Paper presented at the symposium “La semantica fin de siècle: Dalla fondazione di Michel Bréal all’attualità della ricerca” (“Fin de siècle semantics: From Michel Bréal’s foundation to contemporary research”), held at the Center for Semiotic and Cognitive Studies of the University of San Marino in November 1997. It was later published with the title “Cinque sensi di ‘semantica’ ” [“Five Meanings of ‘Semantics’ ”] (Eco 2001).

  1. English translation: Bréal (1964: 99).

  2. English translation: Greimas and Courtés (1982: 432).

  3. [Translator’s note: The Venetian painter Giorgione was born Giorgio Barbarelli. The two names are used as a paradoxical example in Quine 2004.]

  4. “To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true” (Wittgenstein 1922: 4.024). Nevertheless, we know the truth conditions of the proposition: “At twelve noon on August 2, 1810, all living cats made up an odd number,” but it is unlikely that either today or in the future anyone will ever be able to say whether it is true or false.

  5. In any case, here is what Tarsky thought in 1944: “We may accept the semantic conception of truth without giving up any epistemological attitude we may have had; we may remain naive realists, critical realists or idealists, empiricists or metaphysicians—whatever we were before. The semantic conception is completely neutral toward all these issues.”

  18

  Weak Thought versus the Limits of Interpretation

  In 1983, a symposium entitled Il pensiero debole (Weak Thought), edited by Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovati, was published by Feltrinelli. The notion of “weak thought” had been proposed by Vattimo, and in that collection of essays thinkers of various stripes were invited to discuss its definition. To my knowledge, not all of those invited to join in the debate agreed to take part, and so my own contribution appeared in a context in which those who bought into the project of “weak thought” were more numerous than those with
reservations. Furthermore, in their introduction, Vattimo and Rovatti, after pointing out that the essays in the volume were not to be lumped together under the label of a school, “given the heterogeneous provenance and theoretical orientations of their authors,” nonetheless claimed that what they all had in common was the idea that the various discourses on the crisis of reason had still not thoroughly explored “the experience of the forgetfulness of being, or the ‘death of God’, of which Heidegger and especially Nietzsche had brought the tidings to our culture” (p. 9).

  Anyone rereading my contribution to that symposium—entitled “L’antiporfirio” (“The Anti-Porphyry”: a good deal of which is recapitulated in the Chapter 1 of this book)1—will observe that I showed no interest in the theories of Heidegger or Nietzsche or in the death of God, so much so that Cesare Cases, in a review in the periodical L’Espresso dated February 5, 1984, could write: “with the exception of Umberto Eco, who sticks to the encyclopedists, the others see it [i.e., weak thought] embodied above all in Nietzsche.”

  What possible connection could I have pointed out between a hypothetical metaphor of “weak thought” and the encyclopedists? On that occasion I argued against the model of thought represented by dictionary semantics, to which I opposed an encyclopedic semantics. My presentation (though it took up and anticipated what is for me a central theme which received its definitive formulation the following year in the 1984 Italian edition of Sémiotique: Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage (see Greimas and Courtés 1982) was not totally alien to Vattimo and Rovatti’s proposal, since I argued that, from the point of view of an encyclopedic semantics—dominated by the Peircean idea of interpretation and hence of unlimited semiosis—no thought expressed in language ever claims to reflect in a definitive fashion the Dynamical Object (or thing in itself) but is aware that what it is putting into play are Immediate Objects (pure content), interpretable in their turn by other expressions that refer back to other Immediate Objects in a self-sustaining semiotic process.

  Naturally, I alluded to the question, developed at length elsewhere, that, from the Peircean perspective, the “flight” of the interpretants does not resolve our conception of the world into a mere sequence of interpretations, but generates habits and therefore modes of transformation of the natural world. In that communication, however, I was content to take for granted as obvious my conviction that semiosis is an activity that takes place in a world of facts, since the position of weak thought had not yet been summed up in the catchphrase according to which there are no facts, only interpretations. In other words, I had not yet realized that the return to Nietzsche on the part of many of my accidental fellow travelers implied this very catchphrase; and I became aware of it only when, as we shall see, the slogan was also attributed to me.

  At the time, all I was arguing was that an encyclopedic semantics may be called “weak,” not in the sense that it is insufficient to explain how we use language to signify and define the world, but because it submits the laws of signification to the constant determination of context and circumstances. I wrote:

  An encyclopedic semantics has no problem providing rules for the generation and interpretation of the expressions of a language, but its rules are orientated toward contexts, and semantics incorporates pragmatics (the dictionary incorporates, albeit in a semioticized form, our knowledge of the world). What makes the encyclopedia weak, but fruitfully so, is the fact that the representation it provides is never closed and definitive, and that an encyclopedic representation is never global but always local; produced to deal with given contexts and circumstances, the perspective it provides on semiotic activity is a limited one.… The encyclopedia does not provide a complete model of rationality (it does not reflect an ordered universe in an unambiguous fashion), but instead it provides rules of reasonableness, rules, that is, for negotiating at each stage the conditions that permit us to use language to give an account—according to some provisional criterion of order—of a disorderly world (or a world whose criteria of order escape us)” (Eco 1983b: 75).

  I was referring back implicitly to a review I had written of the collection of essays edited by Aldo Gargani (1979),2 in which, against a number of “strong” definitions of Reason, either as the ability of knowing the Absolute through direct vision, or as a Platonic belief in a system of universal innate principles, or as the conviction that the order of language mirrors unproblematically the order of the world while truth is always and in every instance adaequatio rei et intellectus (“the correspondence of a thing to the intellect”). I defended the rights of critical reasonableness, of a series of conjectural procedures that called at a minimum for the pooling of certain instruments of verification. And I concluded with a eulogy of the modus ponens, while admitting that it had no place in poetry, dreams, or the language of the unconscious. I ended (parodying the slogans of the Maoism fashionable at the time): “Comrades, long live the Modus Ponens!”—and adding: “As the case may be!”

  Can someone who sings the praises of the modus ponens become a charter member of the sect of weak thought?

  Be that as it may, such is the mass-media power of the slogan that I have frequently since found myself automatically enrolled among the devotees of weak thought, simply because I once contributed (it obviously didn’t matter what) to a volume with that title. This display of superficiality was joined by a number of professors of philosophy, whom one might have expected to be a little more attentive to what a colleague had written, and several respectable clerics, who had perhaps gotten their notions of philosophy from the conning of glossy magazines.

  It is understandable why the question should be of concern to ingenuous realists or guarantors of absolute truths: if thinking in a “weak” way meant asserting that there are no facts only interpretations, the notion of a “fact” as something independent of our interpretations is thrown in doubt, and by the same token we deny the very concept of Truth, falling as a consequence into that murky recess which neoreactionary thought identifies confusedly with “relativism” (just as the ultraconservative Thomists of the nineteenth century saw “the Kantian poison” in every aspect of modern thought).

  I do not believe that even the most extremist champion of weak thought insists that there are no facts, only that such notions of fact as we possess come to us through the series of our interpretations—so that we ought not to waste time investigating facts but attempt to understand the mutable history of their representation. What is sure is that the debate between the proponents of weak thought and its opponents turns on whether the preceding affirmation should stop there, or whether it ought not to imply as its natural corollary the issue (to which Peirce was sensitive) of whether or not, against the background of the sequence of interpretations, the ineluctable presence of a Dynamic Object inevitably rears its head. Since the idea of a sequence of interpretations is conceivable and makes sense only if we admit that there is something to interpret, wouldn’t it make sense too to come to grips with that something?

  This is the problem I came back to definitively in Kant and the Platypus, but, even prior to that, it was hard to credit me with the idea that there are no facts, only interpretations, considering I had written a book entitled—no less!—The Limits of Interpretation. And the problem had already come up previously in some of my earlier writings. In the face of the affirmation that there are no facts only interpretations, I have always maintained that every fact is the occasion for diverse and conflicting interpretations, but one curious thing about facts is that they resist interpretations they do not legitimate or support. In other words, though it may be difficult to decide whether one interpretation is better than another, we can always recognize untenable interpretations. And finally, though facts are always known and communicable by means of interpretations, they also somehow stand as parameters of our interpretations.

  In 1986, I wrote an essay on Latin thought for a symposium edited by Georges Duby. In it I identified the notion of limit as the fundamenta
l concept of Latinity. From Greek rationalism to its medieval progeny, knowing meant reconstructing causes. To explain the world we must postulate the idea of a unidirectional causal chain: if a movement goes from Alpha to Omega, no force can make it invert its direction and go from Omega to Alpha (in Aesop’s fable the wolf is cheating because he claims to turn this principle on its head). The necessary foundations of this idea of a unidirectional chain are the principles of identity, noncontradiction, and the excluded middle or the excluded third (principium tertii exclusi). The typical way of reasoning of Western rationalism is based on the modus ponens: if p then q; but p: therefore q.

  Latin rationalism had basically accepted the principles of Greek rationalism, transforming and enriching them, however, in a juridical-contractual direction, so as to set up as a fundamental principle the notion of limes or frontier, and hence limit. The obsession with the spatial frontier is present in Latin culture right from its foundation myth: Romulus draws a line of demarcation and slays Remus because he has violated it. If the frontier is not recognized there can be no civitas. Bridges are sacrilegious because they cross the sulcus, the circular moat of water that defines the limits of the city, so much so that they can only be administered under the ritual control of the pontifex. The ideology of the pax romana is based on the precise nature of its boundaries. The strength of the empire lies in knowing on which vallum, within which limen, its system of defense must be organized. When this notion of boundaries was no longer clear, when the barbarians (nomads who had abandoned their territories of origin and crossed all other territories as if the territories belonged to them, only to abandon them the following day) imposed their nomadic vision, whereupon the capital of the empire could be moved anywhere and, little by little, losing its center and its periphery, the empire collapsed.