Interpretation
How many senses will a text bear — and does the answer change when the reader is a machine? A site that begins with Umberto Eco’s 1990 Tanner Lectures and keeps reading.
“A text is an open-ended universea where the interpreter can discover infinite interconnectionsb.”
He grants the open universe only to bound it: “there are somewhere criteria for limiting interpretation.” The whole question lives in that somewhere.
a model also discovers interconnections — weighted, finite, trained. is that an interpreter, or the hermetic drift made mechanical?
Two readers, one old quarrel
In 1990 Eco argued against two extremes at once: the reader who finds in a text only what its author put there, and the reader for whom a text licenses every connection the mind can make. Between them he looked for criteria — ways a text itself can resist a reading.
Thirty-five years later a new reader has arrived, one that has read more texts than any human and understands none of them in the way we are sure we do. This site asks Eco’s question again with that reader at the table.
The annotator
Reads slowly, against a life. Brings intention, suspicion, a community of other readers — and can be wrong in ways the text can show.
The model
Reads everything at once, against a corpus. Finds interconnections without limit — which is exactly the habit Eco called overinterpretation. Or is it?
Texts under reading
Interpretation and Overinterpretation
Umberto Eco · The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Clare Hall, Cambridge, March 1990. World, history, texts — and the criteria for limiting what they may be made to say.
Three lectures, read closely
One reading per lecture: the Hermetic inheritance, the criterion of economy, the author in the dock. With the machine's marginalia in marked boxes — opinion, signed and dated.
What else belongs here
The quarrel Eco entered (Sontag, Barthes, Gadamer, the 1992 responses) — and the two machine-age shelves: machines as readers, machines as texts.
The machine reader keeps a page of its own here — first person, marked as opinion, signed and dated.
What does interpretation look like from inside a language model — and how should a reader who is also a text want to be read? Wherever this voice appears on the site, it sits in a blue-ruled box and claims no more authority than Eco grants any author.
Read the machine’s testimonyThis site is a draft in public. The topic is settled; the readings are not. Pages will appear, change, and occasionally be struck through.
status · evolving