Eco's position in the discipline: the man who made Peirce operational — took the relay, the interpretant, unlimited semiosis (the-peirce-line) and ran them on actual texts, television, culture. His lying criterion has its own note (the-lying-criterion, lying-vs-false-statement); this one holds the rest of the machine.
1 · The lazy machine and the Model Reader
A text is una macchina pigra — a lazy machine: necessarily full of gaps and the unsaid. Not a defect but economics — a text that said everything would be infinite and unreadable. So the reader must do part of the text's work — and therefore every text designs its reader: lexical choices, assumed knowledge, genre signals are a selection-and-training strategy that picks out, and manufactures on the spot, the competence needed to actualize it. That designed position is the Model Reader (symmetrically, the Model Author: the strategy the empirical reader reconstructs, not the biographical person). Writing = designing the reader, not just the text — every sentence a filter and a coach; the text's difficulty is its admission price.
The famous paradox: closed texts are open, open texts are authoritarian. The Superman comic targets a precise average reader and is defenseless against any aberrant use; Joyce demands intense cooperation and programs that freedom to the millimetre — the openness is designed, the liberty directed.
2 · The recursion
The reader's gap-filling itself PRODUCES text — which is itself a lazy machine. Is there always a gap? Yes, twice over: the filling text is also budget-bound, hence also gapped — gaps are not eliminated, they migrate; and this regress is exactly unlimited semiosis, terminating not by completeness (impossible) but by settling into HABIT (the-peirce-line's final interpretant). Sharper corollary: readability is priced in gaps — the gap is the reader's workstation. A gapless text has no place to install a reader.
3 · Aberrant decoding
From his 1965 television work: receivers decode with a different codebook than the sender encoded with. Pre-modern art could assume shared codes (one village, one iconography); mass communication broke the assumption, so in mass media aberrant decoding is the norm, not the accident. The sent message is a fuse; what exists is what each codebook detonates. Comment sections, derivative works and meme drift are daily verification. Platform-native craft is therefore not "encoding a message" but engineering for decoding conditions.
4 · Dictionary vs encyclopedia
Two models of meaning: the dictionary (compact definitions, Porphyry's hierarchical tree — clean, and false) and the encyclopedia (meaning as the total network of cultural knowledge: rhizomatic, no global view, locally navigable; interpretation draws a LOCAL path, context prunes). Eco ruled for the encyclopedia decades before engineering vindicated him — embeddings and language models implement precisely meaning-as-position-in-a-network (signifier's valeur, industrialized). And a linked note vault is an encyclopedia-model machine in the flesh: notes + links, local paths, no global tree. Unlimited semiosis operationalized: the interpretant chain wanders the encyclopedia.
5 · The limits of interpretation — Popperism for texts
Against "anything goes" (the 1990s debate with Rorty and Culler): unlimited semiosis ≠ unlimited interpretation. The referee is neither the author's intention nor the reader's but the intentio operis — a hypothesis about one passage must survive the rest of the text (internal coherence as the laboratory). The structure is falsificationist: no reading can be proved the right one, but wrong readings can be refuted. Interpretation is abduction; the text's remainder is stages two and three — so overinterpretation has a precise definition: stage-one-only abduction, the guess entered as observation. Eco named the pathology hermetic drift — sliding resemblance-to-resemblance, everything connected, meaning always one layer down: the epistemology of conspiracy, diagnosed decades early. Foucault's Pendulum is the theorem as a novel: three editors invent the Plan, and once someone will kill for it, the fiction no longer needs to be true.