Defining and Then Questioning
I liked this from Umberto Eco’s essay “Producing Signs” (from On Signs):
But when semiotics had finally defined its own object [at the First International Congress of Semiotics in 1974], at that moment it launched an impressive series of critiques of the very notion of a sign. This attempt to destroy its raison d’être has been interpreted as a suicidal syndrome on the part of a neurotic discipline too weak to trust itself and therefore condemned to die because of a lack both of self-identity and self-confidence. On the contrary, we have been witnessing a normal growth process. Even for a new-born discipline, maturity is everything, but the maturity test for a discipline is its capability of submitting to systematic doubt the definition of its field and of its methods.