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Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language QUOTES

Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language QUOTES

1 " Since language was increasingly believed to be the semiotic system which could be analyzed with the most profit […] and the system which could serve as a model for all other systems […] the model of the linguistic sign gradually came to be seen as the semiotic model par excellence. // By the time this conclusion was reached ( the definitive sanction took place with Saussure), the linguistic model was crystallized into its 'flattest' form, the one encouraged by the dictionaries and, unfortunately, by a lot of formal logic which had to fill its empty symbols only for the sake of exemplification as well. As a consequence, the notion of meaning as synonymy and as essential definition began to develop. "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

2 " What is frequently appreciated in many so-called symbols is exactly their vagueness, their openness, their fruitful ineffectiveness to express a 'final' meaning, so that with symbols and by symbols one indicates what is always beyond one's reach. "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

3 " The task of general semiotics is that of tracing a single formal structure which underlies all these phenomena, this structure being that of the inference which generates interpretation.
The task of specific semiotics, on the other hand, will be that of establishing—according to the sign system in question—the rules of greater or lesser semiotic necessity for inferences (institutionalization rules). "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

4 " World visions can conceive of everything, except alternative world visions... "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

5 " 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. "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

6 " No algorithm exists for the metaphor, nor can a metaphor be produced by means of a computer’s precise instructions, no matter what the volume of organized information to be fed in. The success of a metaphor is a function of the sociocultural format of the interpreting subjects; encyclopedia. In this perspective, metaphors are produced solely on the basis of a rich cultural framework, on the basis, that is, of a universe of content that is already organized into networks of interpretation, which decide semiotically) the identities and differences of properties. "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

7 " Perception is always interrogative and conditional and is invariably based (even if we do not realize it) on a bet. "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

8 " Perhaps we are, somewhere, the deep impulse which generates semiosis, And yet we recognize ourselves only as semiosis in progress, signifying systems and communicational processes. The map of semiosis, as defined at a given stage of historical development (with the debris carried over from previous semiosis), tells us who we are and what (or how) we think. "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

9 " If metaphors require an underlying cultural framework, then the heiroglyphhic language of the gods cannot be a merely primitive stage of human consciousness: it needs the presence of both the symbolic language of heroes and the epistolary language of me as its starting point. Thus Vico is not speaking of a linear development from a metaphorical language to a more conventional language, but of a continual, cyclical activity.
The language of the gods is a heap of unrelated synedoches and metonymies… "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

10 " ...no theory of hermeneutic legitimation can be indeed legitimate if not by the process of hermeneutic reading… At the origin of the hermeneutic practice, there is a circle; it does not matter how holy or how vicious. "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

11 " There comes a time when one has to make up one’s mind and choose which side one is on. The catoptric universe is a reality which can give the impression of virtuality, whereas the semiotic universe is a virtuality which can give the impression of reality. "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

12 " ...not everything can be a symbol. A symbol has to be textually produced; it requires a specific semiotic strategy. [...] . A symbolic strategy can produce aesthetic enjoyment, but it is first of all semiotic machinery. "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

13 " The sign is supposed to be based on the categories of 'similitude' or 'identity' . This presumed fallacy renders the sign coherent with the ideological notion of the subject. The subject as a presupposed transcendental unity which opens itself to the world (or to which the world opens) through the act of representation, as well as the subject that transfers its representations onto other subjects in the process of communication, is supposedly a philosophical fiction dominating all of the history of philosophy. "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

14 " The sign is not concerned with that smoke and that fire, but with the possibility of a relationship between antecedent and consequent regulating of any occurrence of the smoke (and of the fire). The sign is type, not occurrence. "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

15 " But metaphors set up not only similarities but also oppositions. A cup and a shield are alike in their form (round and concave), but opposite in their function (peace vs. war), just as Ares and Dionysus are alike insofar as they are gods, but opposite with regard to the ends they pursue and to the instruments they use. "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

16 " There always exists a context that is capable of reproposing as new a codified catachresis or dead metaphor. "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

17 " 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. "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

18 " Even the most ingenuous metaphors are made from the detritus of other metaphors - language speaking itself, then - and the line between first and last tropes is very thin, not so much a question of semantics as of the
pragmatics of interpretation. At any rate, for too long it has been thought that in order to understand metaphors it is necessary to know the code (or the encyclopedia): the truth is that the metaphor is the tool that permits us to understand the encyclopedia better. This is the type of knowledge that the metaphor stakes out for us. "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

19 " ... metaphor is not only a means of delight but also, and above all, a tool of cognition... "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

20 " By studying the human signifying activity it influences its course. "

― Umberto Eco , Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language