The original and the copy

Umberto Eco

pp. 273-303

in: Francisco Varela, Jean-Pierre Dupuy (eds), Understanding origins, Berlin, Springer, 1992

Abstrakt

It seems that in terms of natural language everybody knows what a fake, a forgery or false document is. At most, one admits that it is frequently difficult to recognize a forgery as such, but one relies on experts, that is, on those who are able to recognize forgeries simply because they know how to tell the difference between a fake and its original.