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Article 1249 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Is semiotics an "informal logic"?
Message-ID: <Veo4aB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: 8 Nov 91 15:48:06 GMT
References: <rreiner.689479216@yorku.ca>
Lines: 42

rreiner@nexus.yorku.ca (Richard Reiner) writes:
> Whatever else it is, A Theory of Semiotics (Eco 1979) is an
> extraordinarily bad book.
> 
> Someone close to me once seemed to be in danger of taking it
> seriously, so I read it carefully.  Most of it is so unclear as to be
> vacuous; it makes no real contact with current (or any) work in
> semantics; and when Eco does mention work from more established
> fields, he usually misunderstands it: for instance, the culmination of
> Part I of the book is Eco's so-called "Model Q", which is nothing but
> a total misunderstanding of some ideas from a 1968 AI paper by Ross
> Quillian.
> 
> I'll post more evidence of the badness of (Eco 1979) if there is
> demand, but I'd rather not clutter up the net with more commentary on
> such a substandard piece of work.

I've been aware of Eco and that book for a while, but haven't
gotten to it.  It is also comparatively old given how fast-moving
developments in semiotics seem to have been recently.

No, don't post a lot of laborious examples.  But, do you think
your impression that the book is bad is because it is written
within another paradigm of logic and the assumptions it makes are
alien to you? Does anybody know what Greimas himself thinks of
Eco's work?

Also, was Eco attempting to relate semiotics to ongoing work in AI?
(I believe the connection is much stronger on the continent than
in the UK and US.)

I have been trying to learn Prolog, which is the French AI
language, but Prolog seems to be based pretty much on ordinary
first order logic of the type taught at Oxford, Cambridge or
Harvard.  I haven't managed to find out what language
computer-oriented semioticians use.  Does anyone happen to know?

--
Richard Carlson        |    rc@depsych.gwinnett.com
Midtown Medical Center |    gatech!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc
Atlanta, Georgia       |
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