Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) was a medievalist, semiotician, literary theorist, and bestselling novelist whose work converges on a single irreducible claim: that meaning is not a substance transmitted from author to reader but a labor performed in the space between a text and the community that uses it. Trained under the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas before turning to the theory of signs, he built a career that moved between Scholastic libraries and James Bond, between academic semiotics and global fiction, because he believed both poles illuminated the same truth. His foundational concept of unlimited semiosis—the endless chain in which every sign produces another sign as its interpretant, with no natural terminus in the world—turns out to be the most exact description available of what a large language model actually does: generate interpretants, endlessly, from a corpus of signs it has never tested against the world that produced them. Against the postmodern temptation to conclude that any interpretation is therefore valid, Eco