Abstract

In Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language Eco points out that the task of Semiotics is to figure out the relationship between explicit interpretation and implicit intuition. The Semiotician has “to explain why something looks intuitively, in order to discover under the felicity of the so-called intuition a complex cognitive process”. With this statement Eco establishes an interaction between the semiotic and the hermeneutic approach towards the problem of understanding and interpretation of text and world. However, this move pushes Semiotics between two competing and polarizing paradigms: on the one hand Poststructuralism, Deconstructivism and New Pragmatism, represented by Foucault, Barthes, Derrida and Rorty; on the other hand Hermeneutics and Theory represented by Gadamer and Iser. The trace of this confrontation can be found in Eco´s reader The Limits of Interpretation as well as in his lectures on Interpretation and overinterpretation, where he tries to defend a “moderate position” and aims at finding a “minimal criterion” for unacceptable interpretations. Eco´s account of interpretation is based on the Peircean idea of interpretation as an infinite inferential process, whose first step is abductive or conjectural reasoning. “The logic of interpretation”, Eco writes, “is the Peircean logic of abduction” which becomes for him the crucial idea of a semiotic re-formulation of the “old, and still valid ‘hermeneutic circle’ ”.