Before they even set foot in the abbey, William is interpreting signs in the snow to show how a horse has escaped from the abbey stables, and where it has gone. William of Baskerville (a nice homage to the ur-semiotician Sherlock Holmes), and his young student Adso of Melk are asked to solve a mysterious death at an unnamed abbey in Northern Italy. Interpretation from deduction operates at the level of the who-dunnit: crime deduction is the archetypal semiotic activity. The interpretation of signs is a key activity and theme of the book, and may be said to operate in two contrasting areas: interpretation from deduction, and interpretation from doctrine. Eco’s novel is, among other things, an attempt to embody in artistic form the principles and practice of semiotics, and at the same time, to show how important it is for freedom of thought. In other words, a tripartite entity which involves a thing, an observer, and a sign mediating between the two and which is capable of different interpretations: a rose, its various names, and a seeing, scenting self. The grandfather of semiotics, the American philosopher Peirce, defined a sign as ‘something that stands to somebody for something else in some respect or capacity’. Semiotics is the study of sign systems, a more arcane and subtle version of the spurious field of symbiology invented by Dan Brown, a would-be Eco. Umberto Eco was Professor of Semiotics at Bologna University when The Name of The Rose was published in 1980. What's in a name? that which we call a rose
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