ABSTRACT
This essay explores some of Eco’s attempts to assess the kind of knowledge or ‘truth’ we can realistically hope to discover through interpretation, and what degree of accuracy can - or should - be attributed to both the result and the methodology used to discover it. How do we approach ‘knowledge’ that is no more than a temporary solution? If structuralism proposed stable, universal frameworks, its successor should incorporate elements of these (as Einstein suggests) whilst alerting us to new found inadequacies in the former approach. Eco seems to achieve this by privileging both an elusive ontological truth and a freeplay of semantic signifiers. This dual focus produces an interesting problematic, as the existence of an original truth is often seen to presuppose teleological progression. However, if the meaning accessible to us relies on new input (ever changing, arbitrary signifiers, devised by human intervention) rather than its derivation from this truth (a state beyond human interference), the material we have at our disposal is far removed from such an origin. Discovery of the truth would seem to require that both the material of signifying language and the original truth share the same source, trapping us in the essentialist framework poststructuralism claims to have exploded.
