Eco develops his text semiotic that defines the
role of the reader as being situated between textual closure, arising
from authorial intention and other limits of interpretation, and interpretative
openness, resulting from a multiplicity
of hermeneutic codes and from semiosis as being an inferential process
allowing an infinite series of interpretations (see also Lewis 1985).
Eco focusses on his view of the encyclopaedic nature of the semantic
system, in which we find a key to Eco's text semiotics. In the semantic
network and labyrinth of an encyclopaedia, all conceptual nodes are
connected to form an unlimited semantic space.
Thus, every sign is linked to the whole semantic universe, as Eco later
puts it (1984: 46): "A sign is not only something which stands for somethingelse;
it is also something that can and must be interpreted. The criterion of
interpretability allows us to start from a given sign to cover step by
step the whole universe of semiosis."
An important source of Eco's encyclopaedic account of meaning is the
idea of serial thought. This idea, first introduced in Opera Aperta and
resumed in later writings, forms an antithesis to the models of a static
structuralism by relating meaning to the unlimited chain of messages to
which it is serially connected.
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