Umberto Eco is one of the people who shaped the way I think. His novels reflect a deep sense of understanding of many related fields among them Semiotics and systems theory.
Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. The semiotic tradition explores the study of signs and symbols as a significant part of communications. As different from linguistics, however, semiotics also studies non-linguistic sign systems. Semiotics is often divided into three branches:
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Semantics: relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their signified denotata, or meaning
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Syntactics: relations among or between signs in formal structures
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Pragmatics: relation between signs and sign-using agents or interpreters
Semiotics is frequently seen as having important anthropological dimensions; for example, the late Italian novelist Umberto Eco proposed that every cultural phenomenon may be studied as communication. Some semioticians focus on the logical dimensions of the science, however. They examine areas belonging also to the life sciences—such as how organisms make predictions about, and adapt to, their semiotic niche in the world (see semiosis). In general, semiotic theories take signs orsign systems as their object of study: the communication of information in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics(including zoosemiotics).
Syntactics is the branch of semiotics that deals with the formal properties of signs and symbols. More precisely, syntactics deals with the "rules that govern how words are combined to form phrases and sentences".
Charles Morris adds that semantics deals with the relation of signs to their designata and the objects that they may or do denote; and, pragmatics deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena that occur in the functioning of signs.
…..Umberto Eco, in his Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, has argued that semiotic theories are implicit in the work of most, perhaps all, major thinkers.
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Umberto Eco (1932–2016) made a wider audience aware of semiotics by various publications, most notably A Theory of Semiotics and his novel, The Name of the Rose, which includes (second to its plot) applied semiotic operations. His most important contributions to the field bear on interpretation, encyclopedia, and model reader. He also has criticized in several works (A theory of semiotics, La struttura assente, Le signe, La production de signes) the "iconism" or "iconic signs" (taken from Peirce's most famous triadic relation, based on indexes, icons, and symbols), to which he purposes four modes of sign production: recognition, ostension, replica, and invention.
The connection between semiotics and politics has been explored here my some of us, especially George Lakoff. Eco was on top of this and used it well.
How Umberto Eco Tagged Today’s Fascists
When I saw last week that the great Italian intellectual Umberto Eco had died, I was reminded of a long essay he wrote for the New York Review of Books more than two decades ago. And, re-reading it now, it strikes me as an important guide to our thinking about this powerful, almost primal political force, its seductive strength and its inherent, enormous dangers.
Because fascist regimes in the 20th century all had their differences and contradictions, Eco, a semiotician whose studies of the way meaning is communicated led him to write such brilliant novels as The Name of the Rose, sought to identify, precisely, the fundamentals of what he called “Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism.”
When Eco published his essay in June 1995, the world seemed marginally more benign, and considerably less fascistic, than it does today. Yes, very bad things happened. The Rwandan genocide had just ended; the Balkan wars were raging. A Japanese cult had released Sarin gas in the Tokyo metro. But Communism was dead just about everywhere except Cuba and North Korea, and “terrorism” was far from being a national obsession in the United States. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had not yet been murdered, and “Middle East peace” actually seemed plausible. The Russian empire had collapsed and cosmonauts were welcoming American astronauts to their Mir space station.
Yet even then, Eco wrote, “Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes.” He warned that, “Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world.”
And so it has come back, and, yes, we should point the finger.
We need to heed his warning and continue to point the finger.