1. English translation: Bréal (1964: 99).
2. English translation: Greimas and Courtés (1982: 432).
3. [Translator’s note: The Venetian painter Giorgione was born Giorgio Barbarelli. The two names are used as a paradoxical example in Quine 2004.]
4. “To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true” (Wittgenstein 1922: 4.024). Nevertheless, we know the truth conditions of the proposition: “At twelve noon on August 2, 1810, all living cats made up an odd number,” but it is unlikely that either today or in the future anyone will ever be able to say whether it is true or false.
5. In any case, here is what Tarsky thought in 1944: “We may accept the semantic conception of truth without giving up any epistemological attitude we may have had; we may remain naive realists, critical realists or idealists, empiricists or metaphysicians—whatever we were before. The semantic conception is completely neutral toward all these issues.”
18
Weak Thought versus the Limits of Interpretation
In 1983, a symposium entitled Il pensiero debole (Weak Thought), edited by Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovati, was published by Feltrinelli. The notion of “weak thought” had been proposed by Vattimo, and in that collection of essays thinkers of various stripes were invited to discuss its definition. To my knowledge, not all of those invited to join in the debate agreed to take part, and so my own contribution appeared in a context in which those who bought into the project of “weak thought” were more numerous than those with reservations. Furthermore, in their introduction, Vattimo and Rovatti, after pointing out that the essays in the volume were not to be lumped together under the label of a school, “given the heterogeneous provenance and theoretical orientations of their authors,” nonetheless claimed that what they all had in common was the idea that the various discourses on the crisis of reason had still not thoroughly explored “the experience of the forgetfulness of being, or the ‘death of God’, of which Heidegger and especially Nietzsche had brought the tidings to our culture” (p. 9).
Anyone rereading my contribution to that symposium—entitled “L’antiporfirio” (“The Anti-Porphyry”: a good deal of which is recapitulated in the Chapter 1 of this book)1—will observe that I showed no interest in the theories of Heidegger or Nietzsche or in the death of God, so much so that Cesare Cases, in a review in the periodical L’Espresso dated February 5, 1984, could write: “with the exception of Umberto Eco, who sticks to the encyclopedists, the others see it [i.e., weak thought] embodied above all in Nietzsche.”
What possible connection could I have pointed out between a hypothetical metaphor of “weak thought” and the encyclopedists? On that occasion I argued against the model of thought represented by dictionary semantics, to which I opposed an encyclopedic semantics. My presentation (though it took up and anticipated what is for me a central theme which received its definitive formulation the following year in the 1984 Italian edition of Sémiotique: Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage (see Greimas and Courtés 1982) was not totally alien to Vattimo and Rovatti’s proposal, since I argued that, from the point of view of an encyclopedic semantics—dominated by the Peircean idea of interpretation and hence of unlimited semiosis—no thought expressed in language ever claims to reflect in a definitive fashion the Dynamical Object (or thing in itself) but is aware that what it is putting into play are Immediate Objects (pure content), interpretable in their turn by other expressions that refer back to other Immediate Objects in a self-sustaining semiotic process.
Naturally, I alluded to the question, developed at length elsewhere, that, from the Peircean perspective, the “flight” of the interpretants does not resolve our conception of the world into a mere sequence of interpretations, but generates habits and therefore modes of transformation of the natural world. In that communication, however, I was content to take for granted as obvious my conviction that semiosis is an activity that takes place in a world of facts, since the position of weak thought had not yet been summed up in the catchphrase according to which there are no facts, only interpretations. In other words, I had not yet realized that the return to Nietzsche on the part of many of my accidental fellow travelers implied this very catchphrase; and I became aware of it only when, as we shall see, the slogan was also attributed to me.
At the time, all I was arguing was that an encyclopedic semantics may be called “weak,” not in the sense that it is insufficient to explain how we use language to signify and define the world, but because it submits the laws of signification to the constant determination of context and circumstances. I wrote:
An encyclopedic semantics has no problem providing rules for the generation and interpretation of the expressions of a language, but its rules are orientated toward contexts, and semantics incorporates pragmatics (the dictionary incorporates, albeit in a semioticized form, our knowledge of the world). What makes the encyclopedia weak, but fruitfully so, is the fact that the representation it provides is never closed and definitive, and that an encyclopedic representation is never global but always local; produced to deal with given contexts and circumstances, the perspective it provides on semiotic activity is a limited one.… The encyclopedia does not provide a complete model of rationality (it does not reflect an ordered universe in an unambiguous fashion), but instead it provides rules of reasonableness, rules, that is, for negotiating at each stage the conditions that permit us to use language to give an account—according to some provisional criterion of order—of a disorderly world (or a world whose criteria of order escape us)” (Eco 1983b: 75).
I was referring back implicitly to a review I had written of the collection of essays edited by Aldo Gargani (1979),2 in which, against a number of “strong” definitions of Reason, either as the ability of knowing the Absolute through direct vision, or as a Platonic belief in a system of universal innate principles, or as the conviction that the order of language mirrors unproblematically the order of the world while truth is always and in every instance adaequatio rei et intellectus (“the correspondence of a thing to the intellect”). I defended the rights of critical reasonableness, of a series of conjectural procedures that called at a minimum for the pooling of certain instruments of verification. And I concluded with a eulogy of the modus ponens, while admitting that it had no place in poetry, dreams, or the language of the unconscious. I ended (parodying the slogans of the Maoism fashionable at the time): “Comrades, long live the Modus Ponens!”—and adding: “As the case may be!”
Can someone who sings the praises of the modus ponens become a charter member of the sect of weak thought?
Be that as it may, such is the mass-media power of the slogan that I have frequently since found myself automatically enrolled among the devotees of weak thought, simply because I once contributed (it obviously didn’t matter what) to a volume with that title. This display of superficiality was joined by a number of professors of philosophy, whom one might have expected to be a little more attentive to what a colleague had written, and several respectable clerics, who had perhaps gotten their notions of philosophy from the conning of glossy magazines.