Three Pragmatist Legacies in the Thought of Umberto Eco

Pragmatism was one of the greatest influences on Umberto Eco\u2019s intellectual adventure. In this paper, I will try to identify three large legacies of pragmatism which were central in Eco\u2019s thought and which shaped and influenced his philosophy to its foundations. The three of Eco\u2019s overarching ideas that are marked in their very essence by pragmatic legacy are: i) the non-separation of semantics and pragmatics; ii) the centrality of abduction for cognition and semiotic thought; iii) synechism, or rather, the continuity between mind and world that Eco was unwilling to allow on a theoretical level, but which he explicitly puts on stage in narration

Perception, Hallucination, Virtual Reality. From Controlled Hallucination to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

In this paper, I will work on the relationship between perception and imagination in Virtual Reality, claiming that “hallucination” is the ordinary motor also for online perception and not only a deviant form of it. First, I will deal with the problem of perception from the point of view of cognitive semiotics and I will try to underline the crucial role of imagination, claiming that perception is a form of “controlled hallucination”. Later, I will focus on the relationship between perception, hallucination, and memory in Virtual Reality. On the one hand, I will claim that Virtual Reality expresses the transition from actual perception to imagination, memory or dream through another actual perception. On the other hand, I will claim that it can express it without any problems through the old techniques coming from cinema and other audiovisual languages, since they partially share the very same formal apparatus of enunciation. I will demonstrate all of this by analyzing Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

The distinction between semantics and pragmatics: The point of view of semiotics

In this paper I will try to outline the reasons why, in order to understand the life and the nature ofmeaning, the semiotic tradition has always thought that it was better not to separate semantics and pragmatics. I will first reconstruct the history of this idea, grounded in Pragmatism and in Structural Linguistics. Later, I will deal with its first formulation in A Theory ofSemiotics by Umberto Eco. In the second part of the paper, I will work on the idea by Ferdinand de Saussure that meanings are values, that is, indeterminate entities whose identity is determined only through reciprocal determination. I will claim that this idea is the importation in linguistics of Leibniz’s principles of the differential calculus. In the final part of the paper, I will apply this idea to the distinction between semantics and pragmatics, claiming that meanings are better understood through a theory ofmodes of existence. If we understand the differential nature of meaning, we can see that meanings live only through the using of the expressions and these variations contribute to offer stability within the transformations, without creating a stable object defined by its properties and e

Phase-tunable Josephson thermal router

Since the the first studies of thermodynamics, heat transport has been a crucial element for the understanding of any thermal system. Quantum mechanics has introduced new appealing ingredients for the manipulation of heat currents, such as the long-range coherence of the superconducting condensate. The latter has been exploited by phase-coherent caloritronics, a young field of nanoscience, to realize Josephson heat interferometers, which can control electronic thermal currents as a function of the external magnetic flux. So far, only one output temperature has been modulated, while multi-terminal devices that allow to distribute the heat flux among different reservoirs are still missing. Here, we report the experimental realization of a phase-tunable thermal router able to control the heat transferred between two terminals residing at different temperatures. Thanks to the Josephson effect, our structure allows to regulate the thermal gradient between the output electrodes until reaching its inversion. Together with interferometers, heat diodes and thermal memories, the thermal router represents a fundamental step towards the thermal conversion of non-linear electronic devices, and the realization of caloritronic logic components.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Pre-Truth: Fake News, Semiological Guerrilla Warfare, and Some Other Media and Communication “Revolutions”

In this article, I will work on the idea of Pre-Truth (as opposed to post-truth) and Semiological Guerrilla (as opposed to fake news), claiming that these two concepts are better equipped to explain what is happening in our contemporary societies, especially if we take into account the world of media and communication. In the first part of the article, I will frame the problems of fake news and post-truth within the dynamics characterizing the relationships between knowledge and power. Taking into account Foucault and Latour’s perspectives, I argue that the problem of fake news can be understood as a new kind of relationship between these two instances, previously stably coupled and in the hands of institutional power. Later, I will deal with three different meanings of “fake news,” that are usually blended and confused: (a) serendipity, (b) false belief, and (c) mendacity. Consequently, I will deal with the problem of “Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,” arguing that the new shape of the “knowledge-power relationship” rendered alternative and non-institutionally certified interpretations the norm. Eventually, I will identify the deep cause of this effect in the machinic production of documents provided by new technologies, causing a return of the medieval sense of “truth” as “trust,” independent from knowledge and strictly related to anecdotes and personal experiences. Finally, I will work on the concept of “truth” connected to technology, trying to reveal its genealogy with the aim of explaining some misleading contemporary beliefs on “post-truth.

Three Pragmatist Legacies in the Thought of Umberto Eco

1. Eco and Pragmatism Pragmatism was one of the greatest influences on Umberto Eco’s intellectual adventure. This influence can be seen not only in his philosophical work, but also in many of the ideas hidden behind his novels, which, as Eco himself had recently admitted by authorising the Library of Living Philosophers to extensively cover such a topic in the volume dedicated to him, are an important part of his philosophy. Or, perhaps, Eco’s novels should be called a “non-philosophy” that, ..

Sentido y cognición : la narratividad entre semiótica y ciencias cognitivas

En este artículo, comparo desde un punto de vista epistemológico las teorías se mióticas de la narratividad elaboradas en el marco semiótico con las que han surgido en el de las ciencias cognitivas. Al examinar el lugar cada vez más central que la narratividad ha tomado en estas últimas, demuestro que la noción misma de narratividad tiene un impacto espectacular sobre ellas, en tanto que esta noción es susceptible de modificar sus posiciones epistemológicas.In this article, I compare from an epistemological point of view the semiotic theo ries of narrativity elaborated in the semiotic framework with those that have emerged in the cognitive sciences. By examining the increasingly central place that narrativity has taken in the latter, I show that the introduction of the very notion of narrativity has a spectacular impact on them, likely to modify their epistemological positions