Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

Advances in Semiotics

by Umberto Eco

"Eco wittily and enchantingly develops themes often touched on in his previous works, but he delves deeper into their complex nature . . . this collection can be read with pleasure by those unversed in semiotic theory." ―Times Literary Supplement

Genres: Philosophy, Linguistics, Nonfiction, Semiotics, Language, Theory, Italian Literature

242 pages, Paperback

Published July 22, 1986

About the author

Umberto Eco was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory, as well as Foucault's Pendulum, his 1988 novel which touches on similar themes.

Eco wrote prolifically throughout his life, with his output including children's books, translations from French and English, in addition to a twice-monthly newspaper column "La Bustina di Minerva" (Minerva's Matchbook) in the magazine L'Espresso beginning in 1985, with his last column (a critical appraisal of the Romantic paintings of Francesco Hayez) appearing 27 January 2016. At the time of his death, he was an Emeritus professor at the University of Bologna, where he taught for much of his life. In the 21st century, he has continued to gain recognition for his 1995 essay "Ur-Fascism", where Eco lists fourteen general properties he believes comprise fascist ideologies.

Reviews

[hayatem · Rating 5 out of 5]

في هذا الكتاب يناقش ايكو خمسة مفاهيم سيميائية وهي: العلامة، المدلول، الاستعارة والرمز والسنن وذلك من خلال استقراء البعد التاريخي والنظري لها. وهو خص في هذا الكتاب النقاش والحديث حول السيميائيات الخصوصية، متمثلة بعلم العلامة، مبتعدا عن السيميائية التطبيقية كونها ذات حدود غير دقيقة. معتبرا السيميائية العامة الوجه أو الشكل الأكثر نضجاً لفلسفة اللغة .

وفلسفة اللغة كما يرى ايكو لا تقتصر على التأمل والدراسة في المنظور الصوري، ومنطق اللغات الطبيعية، وعلم الدلالة، والنحو والتداولية من زاوية اللغات اللفظية فحسب، بل يتعدى ذلك في فهم وادراك أنظمة العلامات.

السيميائية لا تهتم بنوع معين من الأشياء، بل بكنه هذه الأشياء على بساطتها، حينما تساهم في عملية توليد الدلالة.

تكمن أهمية دراسة الدال والمدلول في ضرورات قراءة ونقد النص القرائي وكذلك ترجمته. حيث من المهم التفريق بين مدلول الألفاظ المفردة ( المدلول المعجمي) والمدلول النصيّ، والفارق بين المدلول المباشر وغير المباشر، لفهم وادراك المعنى المراد تأويله ( مسألة التداولية).

وكما يقول فيتغنشتاين : " إن مدلول كلمة هو استعمالها في اللغة، وإن فهم كلمة يعني معرفة كيفية استعمالها والقدرة على تطبيقها.| كما قال: تفسير المدلول يفسر استعمال الكلمة."

هو " أن نفهم اللغة (ل) لا على أنها قاموس مختصر و لكن باعتبارها نظاماً معقداً من الكفاءات الموسوعية. "

بالاضافة الى الاهتمام بالخاصيات التحليلية والتأليفية ودورها في الاستدلال .

يمكننا أن نصف سيميائية ايكو كالتالي " أنثروبولوجية ثقافية تعترف بالعلامات المقولية التي تراهن عليها الاستعارات ، وتعمل على معرفة الملابسات التاريخية لهذه العلامات ونشأتها وتنوعها . كما ترغب في معرفة أنواع الأعمال والأيقونات والخرافات."

-الأنثروبولوجية الرمزية من الدراسات المهمة في فهم الرموز الطبيعية وما تنتجه من علامات والتي تعد مهمة في قراءة بعض صور الفرد ( ك-الجسدية) في النظام الاجتماعي. "حيث لكل مفهوم قاعدة اجتماعية و بالتالي سيميائية"

يكمن جمال دراسة أو تعلم السيميائية في فهم قوانين العلامات وفك شيفراتها ، التي تعيننا على تفسير السلوك الإنساني.

أمبرتو ايكو مفكر و باحث رائع، لجأ الى التحليل المحايث في قراءة واستقراء بنان السيميائية. إنه خيميائي السيميائية بامتياز.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not actually going to review this book. This book has chapters with titles such as "Discursive isotopies within sentences with paradigmatic disjunction". I read every word, I didn't understand every word. I probably understood a tiny fraction of the words.

I wanted to read a book about Semiotics and the library didn't have many to choose from so I picked some from university libraries to borrow but some were unavailable and I ended up with this one.

There was a lot of "food for thought" about metaphors in here! And the last chapter on mirrors (note: mirrors are NOT signs) was very good and understandable to a lay person like me.

What wasn't so understandable (to me) were the quotations in French or Latin with no translation, there being an assumption I could read more than just English.

I did like Eco's sense of humor peeking through here and there in the middle of his scientific discourses. In the Mirror chapter, for instance, he talks about how is facing a mirror as he is writing and "before deciding whether the door handle is on the right or on the left. . .in the event I wanted to throw my lighter and hit the handle. . . " Wait? What? He's smoking? Wow.

In the meantime, always remember "Greimas has admitted that the isotopies can take place also on the expression-plan, by accepting a minimal definition according to which isotopy is the iterativity of linguistic units, be it manifested or not at the expression plane, belonging to both expression and content."

I'll keep on reading and I'll get it eventually.

[Salma]

أذكر أني حاولت قراءته قبل سنوات
و لكني حينها لم أفهم سوى مقدمته العربية و التي كانت جميلة جدا
و لكني بعد ذلك لم أفهم شيئا فتركته
اكتشفت أنه كتاب متقدم في فنه
و ليس تأسيسيا
أظن بعد هذه السنوات، يستحق إعادة المحاولة

[Abdullah Başaran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eco should write novels.

[Claudia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must if you are a Semiotics student!

[Brooke Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like Eco because he bridges Academia and Occult quite seamlessly. He is a bit thick for my comprehension levels, I constantly have to look up words and reread paragraphs. His insights are agreeable and I love considering signs, symbols, semantics.

[محمد الهاشمي · Rating 5 out of 5]

The bible of semiotics

[Sam Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moments of genius wrapped in layers of obfuscation. If I could rate it 3.5/5, I would.

[William Bies · Rating 2 out of 5]

The learned philosopher can only marvel at the power of natural language to describe, if not verily to construct the world. Impressive enough as far as natural history and science go, but the epiphanic capacity of man’s faculty of language comes into its own when we turn to the social and cultural realms, where language plays a constitutive role. No wonder the ancient Greeks comprehended both language and reason itself under the single term, logos! Now, at the root of all this lies the significatory function of the word itself. Thus, the discipline of semiotics, which studies the nature of signs and the processes of their formation, must be exciting and key to a cultivated appreciation of knowledge and of the life of the mind, that which is highest in us. Or so one would suppose. Hence, one should welcome it when a celebrated literary figure such as the Italian novelist Umberto Eco takes it upon himself to write an exposition of these phenomena in the work presently under review, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language.

The book does put forward some worthwhile conceits, at least to one new to the field of semiotics. The first chapter on signs in general is stimulating, with its discussion among other things of the Stoic semainon and abduction. Smoke is a sign of fire, and in a similar sense the ancients were disposed to look on the spoken word as a sign of what is on the speaker’s mind. In other words, an indicator of or clue to something else, to be interpreted and investigated with the methods of physics. Nowadays, we restrict signs to their linguistic usage.

The distinction between a dictionary and an encyclopedia, to which chapter two is devoted, is also provocative. A dictionary encodes the knowledge one could impart to an artificial intelligence. A computer program could interpret one thing as standing for another, in a finite chain leading back to the elementary notions. But of course, no real knowledge is thereby conferred. An encyclopedia, on the other hand, does embody knowledge. From an encyclopedia entry, one can gather the relevant contexts in which a term will appear and some narrative understanding of how terms relate to one another (he calls these ‘scripts’). Thus, one can expect an encyclopedia to convey stereotypes and commonsense knowledge of the kind that every native speaker of a language makes constant implicit use of. As such, an encyclopedia is potentially open-ended, unlike a dictionary, where the definitional chain is fixed and must eventually terminate. Eco likens the encyclopedia to a labyrinth. In his view, only the encyclopedia has semantic content, properly speaking, whereas a dictionary is best viewed as nothing but a pragmatic tool.

The most accomplished part of the entire book is Eco’s critique of the time-honored tree of Porphyry in chapter two. There is simply too much freedom of choice about what specific differentia to apply to what for the linear, hierarchically ordered structure of the canonical tree, such as was first adumbrated for taxonomical purposes by Aristotle in his biology and is presupposed by Porphyry’s Isagoge, to be adequate to the full range of human knowledge. Eco points out some of the alternate classificatory possibilities in diagrams, which go to show that it would be artificial to seek to compress everything we know into the stricture of a single tree. To this reviewer, what is really at stake here (although Eco does not remark upon it) is that conceptual space cannot be equipped with a strict total ordering, but at best partial orderings. To picture what this might mean, consider the set of subsets of a mathematical space, which is partially but not totally ordered by set inclusion. The implications for ontology of this observation strike the present reviewer as very profound, but Eco himself, not being much of a metaphysician, declines to pursue them.

Now to the main drawbacks. Eco gives the impression of being a typical scholar who has read too widely for his own good, in the sense that he ends up little more than an eclectic. Certainly, nothing here would prompt the reader to suspect him to have anything like assimilative power, the ability to forge his own views on the major topics he covers by drawing on the best ideas he can unearth in the literature and refashioning them into something stamped with his own genius. Rather, all he does is to take a scattershot approach and to treat his topics in isolation, without any organizing principle or overarching themes to connect them. In consequence, his writing is fragmentary, but not in the positive sense of early German Romanticism. There, a well-crafted fragment can serve as a window into an entire world and, moreover, exemplify the poetics of a Friedrich Schlegel, for whom the fragmentary form best reflects the limitations of human knowing when faced with the transcendent; here, in Eco we get merely a disjointed heap of pericopes on trendy present-day semioticians, some of whose names will be familiar while others are deservedly obscure. Illustrative example: the chapter on symbolism. In rapid-fire succession, Eco serves up a series of sections on Lacan, Freud, Peirce, Hegel, Jung, scriptural exegesis, the Kabbalah etc. but manifestly fails to arrive at anything like an adequate grip on his ostensible topic, what is a symbol? Yes, he recognizes that a symbol is more than a mere cipher or allegory, but just what this surplus consists in he cannot say, and neither can any of the authors to whom he adverts. For how could one possibly understand symbolism and its transporting force without a robust metaphysics and the analogy of being, which are foreclosed to an atheist such as Eco himself? Eco’s own allusions to mysticism and the patristic tradition are notably tone-deaf—what is very revealing. He cites Henri de Lubac’s excellent monograph, Exégèse médiévale, but most apparently has not profited at all from his perusal of it.

For the real deal on symbolism one would have to go back to the medieval scholastics. One could heartily recommend the fourth volume of Peter Lombard’s Sentences and Hugh of Saint-Victor’s De sacramentis, written during the heady days of the twelfth century when the sacramental vision of reality as strewn with supernatural grace first emerged into theoretical consciousness (only to be negated during the Protestant Reformation, leading to listless modern man’s disenchantment—but that is a story for another time). For a sacrament is a visible sign of an invisible spiritual presence, and in its beginnings sacramental theology did not limit itself to the seven canonical sacraments but saw literally everything as potentially sacramental. The mythopoetic consciousness of prehistoric man was saturated with sacramentality of this kind and the medievals wrought it into a state of high sophistication and artistry. This recensionist really must promise reviews of these two foundational works. Suffice it to say that the field of semiotics must become lifeless and inert when it forgets its religious roots, and Eco’s dry and unimaginative treatment of his subject, which by rights ought to be charged with vital concern, certainly confirms this a priori prediction.

Shortcomings such as those noted above are symptomatic of unoriginal thought; no trenchant argumentation, no coherence, no vision—surely it is easier to read widely and to bone up on the views of currently popular postmodern thinkers (Saussure, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes and so forth) and perhaps to excogitate a few clever rejoinders to their theories, than to undertake the hard effort of fleshing out an original, systematic perspective of one’s own on the subject. The academic journal literature is clogged with such scholarly infelicities, which nobody will remember a generation from now, once they have served their purpose of securing a comfortable career for their undistinguished authors. But don’t we have a right to expect more of an artist and public persona such as Umberto Eco? His little Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages is not all that bad, after all; it promises far more than he delivers in the present work on semiotics, which goes to show the difference between urbane erudition commonly met with and real speculative philosophical vigor, a rare gift indeed.

Second, this reviewer wishes to register his disappointment over discovering that Eco’s book scarcely contains what he thought he has the right to expect of it, given its title. In his naïveté, he anticipated a revelatory analysis of lexicalization, the mysterious collective process whereby new terms are introduced into a living language. Another catchword for this would be semiosis (which presumably denotes something broader, in that not all signs have to be verbal). Whatever the jargon one chooses to employ, the idea is evidently of the greatest interest from a philosophical point of view. Nevertheless, in Eco semiosis is poorly explained, or what would be more accurate, neglected altogether. Strictly speaking, there is no philosophy of language per se to be found in Eco’s book, which barely gets past discussion of terminological issues. It is all well and good to be clear on one’s definitions, of course, but isn’t one supposed to go on and to apply them to explain something? That would be a proper philosophy of language. But Eco doesn’t even make the attempt.

The disappointment thereby encountered recalls that which befell the present reviewer upon hitting upon the shocking superficiality of T.S. Eliot’s notion of culture in his Notes toward a definition of culture, which occasions wonder as to how the esteemed poet could possibly have won his reputation in the first place as a leading literary figure of the first half of the twentieth century. Eliot is certainly no Herder, to say the least. Perhaps the comparison of Eco to Eliot is apt; just as the avant-garde modernist poet could have brought forth a number of creditable productions, among them the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday and the Four Quartets while at the same time being hopelessly shallow as a literary critic and would-be philosopher of culture, so too Umberto Eco has the well-received (at least among the general reading public) novels The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum to his name while being inept as a philosopher and semiotician, as this review has shown.

The present work has been rated two stars, although from the point of view of the intellectual quality of Eco’s performance it deserves only one, because, as it were despite its author, the attentive reader cannot fail to glean from it some instructive insights into the current state of the literature on semiotics in the second half of the twentieth century. Would that we had a source to go to that could offer an orderly presentation of the same, and what is more a just valuation of it!

[GONZA · Rating 3 out of 5]

Veramente difficile, ma non é che non me lo potessi aspettare, sono comunque contenta di aver capito qualcosa e soprattutto di aver seguito abbastanza il discorso su Freud, Lacan e il simbolico. Magari un giorno riprenderó in mano questo libro che sicuramente necessitá di piú di una lettura superficiale.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

While reading this I chuckled at the blurb on the back of this book that says something to the affect: "perfect for the lay reader." I consider myself a lay reader and found this rather challenging due to the sheer number of terms and references to which I was entirely ignorant. But the one thing I delight in when reading Eco (both fiction and non-fiction) is that even when he's over my head, he still manages to be enjoyable. So much of this book has to do with how language functions metaphorically and how semiotics is a process of interpreting these metaphors through a kind of cultural/language encyclopedia (as opposed to a dictionary... think, maybe web/tangents vs straight line/one-for-one correlations). In short, language is a kind of closed system:

"Every discourse on metaphor originates in a radical choice: either (a) language is by nature, and originally, metaphorical, and the mechanism of metaphor establishes linguistic activity, every rule or convention arising thereafter in order to discipline, to reduce (and impoverish) the metaphorizing potential that defines man as a symbolic animal; or (b) language (and every other semiotic system) is a rule-governed mechanism, a predictive machine that says which phrases can be generated and which not, and which from those able to be generated are ‘good’ or ‘correct’, or endowed with sense; a machine with regard to which the metaphor constitutes a breakdown, a malfunction, an unaccountable outcome, but at the same time the drive toward linguistic renewal. As can be seen,this opposition retraces the classical one between phusis and nomos, between analogy and anomaly, motivation and arbitrariness. … It is a metaphor that founds language, it is impossible to speak of metaphor unless metaphorically.

But within that system is vast array of possibilities and semiotics must always wrestle with trying to capture a partial structure to any sign system and the variability/inferential possibilities within and between systems. Here he posits a rather entertaining example of how language allows us to communicate concepts and create terminologies for things prior to their existence:

"Now let us suppose that, in order to avoid future world wars, the United Nations decided to establish a Peace Corps of ISC (Inter-Species Clones). This corps will be composed by half-human beings, to be produced by cloning, through a genetic hybridation of human punk rockers and speaking chimps trained in ASL. Such clones would guarantee a fair and unbiased international control, because they are independent of any national or ethnic heritage. The UN Assembly has to speak a lot about this new ‘natural kind’ because the members must reach a final agreement—that is, they have to speak about ISCs before ISCs exist, and just in order to make them exist. It is clear that, if there were any baptismal ceremony, what the UN christened as ISC was not an original ‘thing’, but the encyclopedic description of such a thing."

Much of this book still feels like it went over my head. I did get a little help from PBS's excellent Linguistics Crash Course (specifically, the episode on morphology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93sK4...). In the penultimate chapter Eco takes a look at mirrors and differentiates them from symbols. I found this particular chapter utterly captivating and elucidating. It begins with how we frequently misinterpret reflections of ourselves:

"But the point is that vertical mirrors themselves do not reverse or invert. A mirror reflects the right side exactly where the right side is, and the same with the left side. It is the observer (so ingenuous even when he is a scientist) who by self-identification imagines he is the man inside the mirror and, looking at himself, realizes he is wearing his watch on his right wrist. But it would be only if he, the observer I mean, were the one who is inside the mirror (Je est un autre!)."

Ultimately, mirrors have a direct tie to their referents and cannot lie about that referent in the way that symbols can.

What does all this mean? You cannot entirely trust words. Now proceed with your life as per usual knowing that you must.
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MOSTLY NEW-TO-ME WORDS/PHRASES/REFERENCES & A FEW IN NEED OF RE-INTRODUCTION
termic | emic | etic | univocal | apodictic | logical argument types | deduction/induction/abduction | ex novo | Porphry | Porphyrian tree | seme | sememe | ostension | hyperonyms | oneiric | implicature | catachresis | bestiaries | lapidaria | Physiologus | auctoritas | metonymy | paronomasia | syntagm | apologues | no nova sed nove | caritides | holophrastic | proairetic | s-code | yestimental | nomos | phusis | isotopy | ontogenesis | catoptric | denotatum | onomastics | aliquid | doxastic | asemiosic | Fata Morgana | Kuleshov effect
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[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a long, slow, crawl. Eco appears on many must-read 'metaphor' lists, and as a reader of his novel The Name of the Rose, I was excited to dive into this non-fiction book. My reading was limited to four of the seven chapters (Signs, Symbols, Metaphor and Mirrors), and I confess – that was enough.

Overall, Eco offers interesting opinions regarding language, words, and signs, and their relationships. From the introduction onwards, Eco notes that signs are referred to as a pair (signifier and signified). In contrast, semiology is a triadic relationship between a sign, its object, and its interpretant. As such, it is as if any discussion henceforth will be akin to pushing a square peg into a round hole, or vice-versa. Nevertheless, Eco appears to argue, and successfully, that both can simultaneously be true. His primary focus throughout the book is the interpretant. He holds firm that interpretation is flexible, changeable, mobile, or as he says of semiotics itself 'nomadic'.

In what seems to be a recurring theme for Umberto Eco, the material in this book was in part published elsewhere – in particular the chapter 'Metaphor,' (was previously published as 'The Scandal of Metaphor' the year before). In this chapter, Eco reviews Aristotle's four types of metaphors. The first is exampled by; 'the ship stands there' and "is a form of synonymy whose generation and interpretation depend on a pre-existing Porphyrian tree." The second type (a form of synecdoche) uses an example provided by Aristotle 'Indeed ten thousand noble things Odysseus did,' where 'ten thousand' stand for 'many'. Eco distinguishes between these two types, stating the second type is "logically correct but rhetorically insipid, whereas metaphors of the first type are rhetorically acceptable but logically unjustifiable." The third type of metaphor given is two-fold: 'Then he drew off his life with the bronze and Then with the bronze cup he cut the water.' It is this third version which Eco states "genuinely seems to be a metaphor," because cutting = taking away and taking away = drawing off. Eco notes that a metaphor of this type can be illustrated with a simple ven diagram where 'taking away' becomes both a metaphorising and a metaphorised term.

Nonetheless, Eco finds the metaphor troublesome because it requires a two-fold movement of production and interpretation (which others call inventive construction and inventive construal). In other words, an ad-hoc Porphyrian Tree that must, to be understood correctly, be constructed with the same frame of reference. As he says, the operation must be "oriented by a [compatible] universe of discourse." Furthermore, this is a transactional event where features are transferred in a manner whereby something must be lost in order for something else to be gained. He believes, who wins and who loses is not always apparent in the transaction. The fourth and final version of metaphor is the most complex, where A/B is compared to C/D. Here, similarities mingle with dissimilarities. Overall Eco believes the first two types of metaphors are the worst; "impoverished, both conceptually and perceptually," because the metaphorising term is subconsciously absorbed by (or altogether leaves) the metaphorised term.

He goes on at length to investigate the four types of metaphor, noting, that the last two versions are not a matter of substitution but involve a "superimposition" of two things in a cognitively transparent way, an "almost visual" way. "In other words," as Eco writes, "two images are conflated, two things become different from themselves, and yet remain recognisable, and there is born a visual (as well conceptual) hybrid." Eco postulates that this is a potentially oneiric image similar to Freud's notion of 'condensation' ("where noncoincident traits can be dropped while those in common are reinforced"). Eco also explains that Aristotle's review of the four types of metaphor is potentially ambiguous because for the first three types Aristotle explains HOW metaphors are produced and understood (via the "inflexible logic of a Porphyrian tree"). However, for the fourth type, he only notes WHAT they enable us to know.

It was also interesting to note his opinion that even 'scarcely cognitive' metaphors, which are 'poor' and 'worn-out' are never absolutely 'closed'. A new-speaker of our language, for example, must apply trial and error to disambiguate 'she is a rose.' Alternatively, in addition to calling the opposite version 'ambiguous' metaphors, he uses the terms "open" and "unstable."
[As an aside, it becomes apparent when a break in reading is required when you notice that Umberto Eco keeps using the example "She is a birch", and you cannot help but get a goofy smirk imagining birch-girl. Incidentally, he also appears to recognise that his creature "is not very far from being a parody of itself."]

In his chapter on Signs, Eco defines three sorts: intended meaning, pictorial representation and inferential proof. He provides an example of a man wearing a red badge with 'a hammer and sickle' on it and notes that any or all three of the sign-versions could be in play. The overriding point appears to be that a sign 'does not stand for itself.' This chapter is dense and confusing, noting that from as long ago as the Stoics, philosophers have understood "the provisional and unstable nature of the sign-function." Of particular use is the model he presents for deduction, induction and abduction. Too hard to summarise here, the model has the potential to explain three types of architectural competition thinking; the architect is determining the rules of the brief to generate a design, the judges inferring how the rules were interpreted based on the images of the design submission, and how some designs can end up altering the rules of the game, for that competition or all competitions.

Although this book was confusing, with 200 plus pages of often impenetrable writing, there were many sentences or phrases which jumped out as 'quote-worthy.' For example, his neologism 'content nebula' is incredibly evocative. Similarly, taking on board the architectural inferences, his quote regarding philosophy is telling; "Affected as they are by a constitutive solipsism, philosophies can say everything about the world they design and very little about the world they help to construct."

[As a small complaint, I do not speak a second language, so I acknowledge that the significant disadvantage I have attempting to study any subject to do with languages is my fault alone. That said, the majority of the book had been translated into English, so it remains unclear why occasional sentences were not.]

To finish, here is what Umberto Eco says at the end of his introduction: "There are obviously other philosophical approaches, but I think that this one deserves some effort." As a novice reader in the field, 'some' effort is an understatement, but otherwise, I concur.

[أحمد زبيدة]

لم أنهي الكتاب، فهو لا يتكلم عن علم السيمياء نفسه وإنما يؤسس للعلم نفسه ويوضح حدوده وأبعاده وعلاقته التاريخية بنظريات اللغة القديمة والحديثة، والكتاب موجه إلى المختصين أساسًا في علم العلامة وفلسفة اللغة، ويقوم فهو لا يشرح النظريات وإنما ينتقدها، ولهذا لا يمكن أن الكتاب يكوت بمثابة المدخل لهذا العلم. قد أعود إليه في وقت ما.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

An excellent exercise in a little researched(for me)area. Signs as meaning, code as language, a lot of presuppositions on communication I've held are just a filigree and nothing more. Or, Quite a bit more depending on how you look at it and what it is.

[Bob Shadel]

very long extremely detailed historically based discussion of several elements of texts including signs and coding, metaphors and symbols, and interpretation of such, the basis of semiotics as I understand it.

[Anton]

I tried.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amazonia

Gestaltic inelegance on parade
6/10

It seems to me, that you can divide the world's linguists into two categories. There are those who can use their linguistic insights to present their ideas clearly, simply and concisely, and there are those who instead use their linguistic insights to exhibit their vast knowledge of the subject via the liberal use of complexity, clever metaphor, and insider or otherwise obscure references and terminology. Eco is undeniably the consummate grandiloquent semiologue.

As Edmund Kean remarked, "Complexity is easy, simplicity is hard." Methinks the truly brilliant linguist, would be one of few words.

While reading this book, I just couldn't help thinking, what's wrong with this picture?
Is this rocket science?

No, I found here a pretentious alchemy, attempting to fashion lead into gold at the end of a semiotic rainbow.

To get a sense of some of the discourse, try this for size, the concluding sentence of the chapter on symbol:

"In any case, behind every strategy of the symbolic mode, be it religious or aesthetic, there is a legitimating theology, even though it is the atheistic theology of unlimited semiosis of or hermeneutics as deconstruction. A positive way to approach every instance of the symbolic mode would be to ask: which theology legitimates it?" p.163

So it ain't science, it's art. No, I take that back, it's a modern religious art (and seasoned with more than a little Dada).

Such pseudointellectual bourgeoisie seem to thrive on belaboring the number of linguistic angels that can dance on the head of a pin. That, and a propensity for name dropping. The true measure of any "science," analysis, or even a mere methodology, is its results. Where's the beef? Sure, Eco is known to tell a good story now and then, but so do many others. Did it really take deep semiotic study to get him there? Well, perhaps it did. I guess that's evidence. Of a sort. Of something.

Of course, many of these modern semioticians are trying to argue that language is fundamentally indeterminate-- by using their own ill-defined terminology and convoluted argumentation as example. Unfortunately, that only demonstrates THEY lack clarity of expression, not that such lack is inherent.

A more down to earth book on Semiotics is Daniel Chandler's Semiotics: The Basics. It's far more practical, and there's far less pretension. Still, it would appear that semioticians are yet struggling with basic definitions and lack coherent methodologies.

You'd think by now they'd have figured out enough to get better at communicating with each other, at least. What good is analysis if it doesn't net some understanding, other than to buffalo the deans of universities into paying your bills?

At this rate, significant semiotic insights are still a long ways off.

What should we expect to come out of it?
An awareness of cultural relationships and connections that will produce startling insights?
A new language that is more concise, or suggested refinements of existing languages?
The ability to communicate unique concepts that have been heretofore ineffable?

Or perhaps, something much more modest - the ability to identify and eliminate needless complexities and redundancies? Yes, I think that in particular would be a good start...

However, I do give Eco three stars, for effort and the fact that it has provided some comic relief. Irony indeed...

K. Doyle

[Viktoria Chipova · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language" by Umberto Eco

Status: Masterpiece / Essential Reading ⭐

Review: A monumental work that serves as a bridge between structural linguistics and the broader horizons of philosophy. Umberto Eco does not just explain signs; he deconstructs the very way we inhabit a world of meanings. This is a dense, challenging, and ultimately brilliant text that remains a cornerstone for anyone serious about how communication and thought intersect.

In this collection of essays, Eco moves beyond the rigid "code" models of early semiotics to explore a more dynamic, "encyclopedic" view of how we interpret reality.

Why it’s a 5/5: Intellectual Brilliance 🔍
The Shift from Dictionary to Encyclopedia: One of Eco’s most vital contributions here is his argument against the "dictionary" model of meaning (fixed, linear definitions). Instead, he proposes the "Encyclopedia"—a vast, multidimensional net of associations. This better explains how humans actually navigate culture and context.
Profound Analysis of Metaphor: His chapter on metaphor is arguably the best ever written on the subject. He moves away from seeing metaphor as a mere "ornament" of language and shows it as a fundamental cognitive process—a way of creating new knowledge by connecting disparate nodes in our cultural encyclopedia.

Historical Depth: Eco is a polymath. He seamlessly weaves together perspectives from Aristotle and Aquinas to Peirce and Hjelmslev. He treats the history of philosophy not as a dead record, but as a living conversation that informs modern semiotic theory.

Precision and Wit: Despite the extreme complexity of the subject matter, Eco’s voice is distinct. He possesses a rare ability to be rigorously academic while occasionally letting his characteristic irony and curiosity shine through the prose.

The Impact of the Work 📚
This isn't just a book for linguists; it is a book for anyone interested in epistemology (the study of knowledge). It forces you to realize that we do not perceive "things"—we perceive signs, and those signs are part of a massive, interconnected social contract.

"To speak of the world, we must first invent the world as a semiotic system."
Conclusion:

Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language is an intellectual "level-up." It is not an easy read—it requires a background in philosophy and a willingness to wrestle with abstract concepts—но (but) for the dedicated reader, it provides a total recalibration of how you perceive books, art, and daily conversation. It is a towering achievement by one of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of boring for the most part. He's certainly more methodical and traditionally academically sensible than the stars of post-structuralism with whom he's somewhat associated (at least in my mind) via his hit novel 'The Name of the Rose', which played around with the big ideas of the day entertainingly.
The style, at the level of how he presents his material and arguments, falls somewhere between traditional academia and show-off, perhaps closer to the former, but he can't resist lots of name-dropping from the older philosophical tradition, beyond what's necessary, and a smattering of donnish facetiousness. It's not exactly a joy to read but it could be worse.
I like the chapter on 'Dictionary vs encyclopaedia' - it's well argued and back in the 80s it seemed like an interesting response to the reductive approaches to semantics then prevalent in theoretical linguistics, and perhaps it's still worth taking notice of today.
The English is weird, and no translator is named on my copy, so perhaps it's possible that Eco misguidedly decided to draft it in English himself? (Poorly, if at all, copy-edited, but I suppose they don't spend much on academic publications, even by names that had become more widely known.)
Probably only worth your time if you are fairly seriously interested in the titular subjects; but if you are, I'd say it is worth a reasonably thorough skim.

[Jasmineyqq Yu · Rating 4 out of 5]

still havent finished reading - did not approach reading this book chronologically, only sought out chapters individually when in need. The twists and turns and tight logic and metaphors and at times fictive elements in Eco's delineation of topics and semiotics surprisingly has an emotional impact. I often find myself in tears by the end of chapters. there was one zizek quote from Examined Life I think about every time when reading anything by eco (especially the academic works); - "we should develop a new, much more terrifying, abstract materialism, a kind of a mathematical universe, where there is nothing, where it's just formulas, technical forms and so on, and the difficult thing is to find poetry, spirituality, in these dimensions; to recreate—if not beauty—then aesthetic dimension, in things like these: in trash. That's the true love of the world."

[Mat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting read, not always easy to read to the uninitiated. Something interesting can be found by anyone interested in language structure and use.

[Erierd D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me ha gustado: profundo pero didáctico.

[Michael Winfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful read.

[Adam Wilcox]

Read Chapter 2 on Dictionary vs. Encyclopedia - difficult reading but very insightful into the way that communication works.

[нєνєℓ ¢ανα · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book! Umberto Eco made his job magistrally!

[Barefoot Danger · Rating 4 out of 5]

More philosophy of language than semiotics.

[Joline Seif · Rating 4 out of 5]

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