Umberto Eco Quotes on Knowledge
Umberto Eco (1932–2016) developed in A Theory of Semiotics (1975) and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984) one of the most rigorous late-twentieth-century theories of how knowledge is structured by the systems of signs through which it is articulated. The contrast between the dictionary model — knowledge as a finite set of definitional equivalences — and the encyclopaedia model — knowledge as an indefinitely expandable network of associations — frames much of the work, and Kant and the Platypus (1997) extends the framework to the cognitive question of how the categorial apparatus deals with the genuinely novel.
Quotes
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Attributed to Umberto Eco:
“Every text is a lazy machine asking the reader to do part of its work.”
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Attributed to Umberto Eco:
“The list is the origin of culture.”
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Attributed to Umberto Eco:
“Translation is the art of failure.”
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Attributed to Umberto Eco:
“There are limits to interpretation, and they are inscribed in the text itself.”
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“Il costume di casa (1973); as translated in Travels in Hyperreality (1986)”
Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d'état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes. The day after the fall of Khrushchev , the editors of Pravda , Izvestiia , the -
“Trattato di semiotica generale (1975); [ A Theory of Semiotics ] (1976)”
Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie . If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth : it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all. -
“A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis .”
Can Television Teach?" in Screen Education 31 (1979), p. 12 -
“The Role of the Reader : Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (1979), Part 1: Open, Ch. 1 : The Poetics of the Open Work, endnote 9, p. 66; later published amidst extended and developed translations of Opera aperta (1962), in The Open Work (1989) as translated by Anna Cancogni, Ch. 1 : The Poetics of the Open Work, endnote 9, p. 251”
Epistemological thinkers connected with quantum methodology have rightly warned against an ingenuous transposition of physical categories into the fields of ethics and psychology (for example. the identification of indeterminacy with moral freedom ). Hence, it would not be justified to understand my formulation as making an analogy between the structures of the work of art and the supposed structu