Guy Raffa in his article “Eco’s Scientific Imagination” claims
that no author in the recent years has worked on redrawing of disciplinary
boundaries as Eco has done. The argument originates from Umberto Eco remark, “there
is something artistic in a scientific discovery and there is something
scientific in that which the naïve call brilliant intuitions of the artist.’
What they share is the felicity of Abduction”[1].
Raffa claims that the method of inquisition a critical role in the fiction, The
Name of the Rose; Foucault’s Pendulum; and The Island of the Day
Before – “science serves as a focal point for all of Eco’s fiction, just as
his theoretical works take account of the state of scientific work on a number
of topics.”[2]
Raffa argues that the blending of science discovery and
artistic creation are dexterously woven in Eco’s novels. The element of
creation and science empirical approach to find unique pattern that raises a
critical question on the philosophy.
Umberto Eco does not imitate inductive and deductive approach
to give a structure of plot to his text rather chooses a middle of two - Creative
abduction “the tentative and hazardous tracing of a system of signification
rules which will allow the sign to acquire its meaning”[3]
According to Charles S. Peirce, in relation to (but distinct from) deductive and inductive reasoning, abduction is an inferential process followed when some strange event cannot be explained satisfactorily by a ready-made rule (deduction) or by experience in the form of sufficient empirical evidence (induction).
All disciplines represent a way to the production of
knowledge which has been a blind spot or inaccessible to man. The inaccessibility
of knowledge presses a unique question on the nature of the true knowledge
which has either been a fantasy or imaginative material that require further
exploration. From the beginning of the civilization, philosophers have been
engaged in finding the true nature of knowledge or rather the crux that leads
to the production of knowledge. Michel Foucault has tried to do the same in his
book – The Archeology of Knowledge –
explaining the basics how the scientific knowledge is produced. If scientific
knowledge enables the accessibility of truth, then what is the relevance of
historical knowlehistorical knowledgedge.
According to the book - Umberto Eco: Rethinking History and Fiction, “History is a
narrative structure that gives us the glimpse of the past and enables to know
the truth. It is a narrative of past events supplemented with facts. The facts
are available to historians in documents, inscriptions, monuments and achieves.
Thus, history produces the knowledge of past. It is an instrument to access
truth. However, postmodernism prioritises indeterminacy, multiplicity of
meaning, narrative structure and interpretation. This leads us to theorize the
production of knowledge, its articulation, presentation and interpretation very
differently.”[4]
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