Semiosis, Sign and Labyrinth

Umberto Eco’s Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language reconceptualises the sign not as a static equivalence between expression and content, but as the inaugural mechanism of an open-ended interpretive process. Against reductive structuralist accounts that confine signification to codified correspondences, Eco argues that the sign must be understood as an inferential and dynamic entity whose intelligibility emerges through semiosis, that is, the potentially unlimited chain of interpretations by which meaning is generated, displaced, and socially stabilised. The book’s central intervention lies in dissolving the false opposition between sign and semiosis: the sign is not the terminus of meaning, but its operative threshold. Drawing on Peirce, Eco redefines signification as a triadic and abductive process in which every sign activates an interpretant, thereby embedding interpretation within the very structure of signhood itself. This move permits a decisive expansion of semiotics beyond linguistics into a general philosophy of language, one capable of accounting for verbal, visual, symbolic, and inferential forms alike. Eco’s distinction between dictionary and encyclopedia further radicalises this model: meaning is not exhausted by taxonomic definition, but unfolds within a labyrinthine network of cultural knowledge, contextual associations, and historically sedimented interpretive habits. A word, image, or symbol signifies not because it refers transparently, but because it activates an encyclopaedic competence shared by interpreters. The exemplary consequence of this thesis is that semiotics becomes neither a science of fixed signs nor a theory of unrestricted relativism, but a disciplined account of how meaning remains both culturally constrained and interpretively open. Eco, therefore, establishes semiotics as the most comprehensive philosophical framework for understanding how human beings inhabit, negotiate, and transform the world through signs. Harvard citation: Eco, U. (1984) Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.