Cultural encyclopedia

The cultural encyclopedia is the web of shared knowledge, associations, and competencies that any competent member of a culture brings to the act of interpretation. Umberto Eco developed the concept to explain how texts constrain meaning without determining it: the encyclopedia functions as a distributed control system that penalizes aberrant readings and rewards coherent ones by making some interpretants structurally possible and others structurally impossible. The cultural encyclopedia is not a reference work but a network of prior understandings that constitutes the horizon within which all interpretation occurs.\n\n== See Also ==\n\n* Encyclopedic Competence