Signs, webs, and memories

The article reviews Italian semiotician and philosopher Umberto Eco’s vision of semiotics as a discipline, the aim of which is to study the ‘whole of culture’. It focuses especially on Eco’s trajectory out of structuralism and on the development of a cognitive semantics based on strong pragmatist principles, that inform his notion of interpretability as the key process of semiosis and on the encyclopedia as the format more apt to describe the cultural space. After a consideration of the interface between the cognitive, the pragmatic and the cultural dimensions of semiosis, the article highlights a few open problems in contemporary, culturally-oriented sociological theory that could benefit from a deeper engagement with these concepts.