Eco, Peirce, and the Limit of the General Theory of Signs and Meaning in Fiction

In this talk, I address the arguments and concerns in recent scholarship on what the general theory of meaning could look like from the point of view of Peirce’s pragmaticism. This talk responds to Randall E. Auxier’s question (Auxier, “Eco, Peirce, and the Pragmatic Theory of Signs, 2018) of how Peirce’s pragmatism could illuminate knowledge-claims in fiction, such as Eco’s reply to the “grocery-list” questions. By analysing the strict limits of what can be asserted on unknowables, indeterminacy of truth for fictional claims, and the nature of authorial intentions that need not determine the status of truth claims that stand to be asserted, I draw a general result concerning the undefinability of truth, not in Tarski’s sense of semantic undefinability, but in its fictive version of unassertibility of certain Moorean unknowables in the context of the meaning of fiction. From this point of view, one can then proceed to explain why Eco may be assumed to reply "I cannot know" to the grocery-list question, and why he is then lead to highlight the act of ‘lying’ as the preferred option when faced with such unassertibles in the domains of fiction.

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