From Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac we learn that today is Umberto Eco's birthday. So: Happy Birthday Umberto!
It's the birthday of Umberto Eco, (books by this author) born in Alessandria, Italy (1932). He was a professor of aesthetics, visual communication, architecture, and semiotics. He wrote critical theory about pop culture. Then one day, a fiction publisher called him up and asked him if he'd like to contribute to an anthology of detective fiction. Eco had never written fiction, but as an academic, he knew what made good fiction, so he decided to give it a try. And instead of a short story, he wrote a 500-page book, a 14th-century whodunit set in a monastery, The Name of the Rose (1980). It sold 2 million copies. He went on to write Foucault's Pendulum (1988) and The Island of The Day Before (1995).
Eco is quite a person and if you haven't read his novels or seen the movie you have missed something. But that's the tip of the iceberg as far as I am concerned. Come look beyond the break and see more of this amazing man.
A little over a year ago I wrote a diary On causality, science, and magic: Umberto Eco after reading his book Turning back the clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism . I focused on the chapter "Science, Technology, and Magic" where he develops the thesis that magic today carries the label "science" yet is merely a lot of technology that has taken over our lives completely.
I just reached up to the shelf above my desk for the delightful little book: Introducing Semiotics" which is one of those quick reads that might have been called "Semiotics for the common dummy" or something like that. If you want a quick introduction and some laughs, I think you will like it. Here's what he says about him::
Umberto Eco b (1932) [That's why he is so much smarter than I am, he is four years older] is a medieval historian, an essayist, a novelist, but, perhaps above all, a semiotician.
his work contains a productive synthesis of virtually all the 20th century schools of semiotics, supported by a vast knowledge of the classical heritage of sign study.
In spite of Eco's avoidance of scholasticism, he has not been overwhelmed by a semiotic glut.
In his popular essay "Fragments" (1959), a post apocalyptic Arctic civilization uncovers and interprets artifacts from the regions to the south:
We have here a line - alas, the only legible one - of what must have been an ode condemning terrestial concerns: "It's a material world." Immediately from a propitiatory or fertility hymn to nature: "I'm singing in the rain, just singing in the rain, It's a glorious feeling ..." It is easy to imagine this sung by a chorus of young girls: the delicate words evoke the image of maidens in white veils dancing at sowing time in some pervigillium
Clearly the Arctic civilization, with too little evidence to hand, embark on a project of gauche overinterpretation.
Eco warns of this danger throughout his career.
The rest of this section gets into Eco's contributions to semiotics more deeply if you are interested.
The issue of semiotics came up in my work quite a few years back. Our research/discussion group was delving into complex systems theory with some vigor and we were confronted with a fairly large group of very respectable scientists who did exacly what Eco had warned against, namely overinterpretation.
Now as I look back I see a project that could be of benefit to us here. That is, if you have the same respect for the contributions of George Lakoff and Drew Westin to the way we frame the debate in political campaigns. Semiotics, according to wikipidea is:
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems. It includes the study of how meaning is constructed and understood.
One of the attempts to formalize the field was most notably led by the Vienna Circle and presented in their International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, in which the authors agreed on breaking out the field, which they called "semiotic", into three branches:
Semantics: Relation between signs and the things they refer to, their denotata.
Syntactics: Relation of signs to each other in formal structures.
Pragmatics: Relation of signs to their impacts on those who use them. (Also known as General Semantics)
These branches are clearly inspired by Charles W. Morris, especially his Writings on the general theory of signs (The Hague, The Netherlands, Mouton, 1971, orig. 1938).
Semiotics is frequently seen as having important anthropological dimensions, for example Umberto Eco proposes that every cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication. However, some semioticians focus on the logical dimensions of the science. They examine areas belonging also to the natural 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 or sign systems as their object of study: the communication of information in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics or zoosemiosis.
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 which they may or do denote; and, pragmatics deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of signs.
We have been very interested in these ideas in the context of science and that has spilled over to politics in an interesting way. You see, there is this myth of "objectivity" out there that science has done so much to give the false status of something akin to natural law. We break through this myth using a model of how we think, that is nothing more than a model of how we make models. A glance at the ideas of semiotics applied to the symbols that are at the core of the scientific mythology with respect to objectivity and pandora's Box is irreversibly opened. This is a long and interesting story and I invite you to look at Causality and Complexity: The Myth of Objectivity in Science for an abstract of the latest published work.
As you can see I wallow in this stuff. It is to the chagrin of everyone around me, but like any other addict I can not help myself. Worse than that, I don't even want to. I can guarantee you some fun if you look at some of this stuff. So "Happy Birthday Umberto!"