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Eco e Goodman sull’ontologia dell’arte / Eco and Goodman on the ontology of art

in Versus n. 121, Rileggere un classico: il Trattato di semiotica generale 40 anni dopo / Rereading a classic: Trattato di semiotica generale 40 years later, pp.89-102

Abstract (italiano)

Umberto Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics and Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art share some crucial assumptions. In particular, both draw the distinction between artworks, copies and executions in terms of types and tokens. It appears that the phenomenon of variants, which are neither variations nor copies, raises serious difficulties both to Goodman’s celebrated classification of artworks into autographic and allographic, and to the conception of artworks as types, comprising their respective executions, copies and variations as tokens. This paper first examines some examples of variants – a topic entirely neglected by semiotics and analytical aesthetics. Then it deals with their ontological status, which is clearly different from that of mere copies. We shall capitalise on a comparison between the metaphysics of artworks and the metaphysics of the characters in a notational system such as the words of English, or any other natural language.