Three Pragmatist Legacies in the Thought of Umberto Eco

Pragmatism was one of the greatest influences on Umberto Eco’s intellectual adventure. In this paper, I will try to identify three large legacies of pragmatism which were central in Eco’s thought and which shaped and influenced his philosophy to its foundations. The three of Eco’s overarching ideas that are marked in their very essence by pragmatic legacy are: i) the non-separation of semantics and pragmatics; ii) the centrality of abduction for cognition and semiotic thought; iii) synechism, or rather, the continuity between mind and world that Eco was unwilling to allow on a theoretical level, but which he explicitly puts on stage in narration.