From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!yorku.ca!rreiner Tue Nov 19 11:09:12 EST 1991
Article 1218 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!yorku.ca!rreiner
>From: rreiner@nexus.yorku.ca (Richard Reiner)
Subject: Re: Is semiotics an "informal logic"?
Message-ID: <rreiner.689479216@yorku.ca>
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Organization: York University
References: <L9cwaB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM> <91310.142252MORIARTY@NDSUVM1.BITNET>
Date: Thu, 7 Nov 1991 02:00:16 GMT

MORIARTY@NDSUVM1.BITNET writes:

>I don't know whether semiotics is an "informal logic" or not.
>You'll find that Humberto Eco, "Semiotics" 1979 titles the
>first chapter "0.  Introduction-Toward a Logic of Culture."

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.

Richard


