Cognitive Semiotics: Integrating Signs, Minds, Meaning and Cognition

By Claudio Paolucci

This volume serves as a reference on the field of cognitive semantics. It offers a systematic and original discussion of the issues at the core of the debate in semiotics and the cognitive sciences. It takes into account the problems of representation, the nature of mind, the structure of perception, beliefs associated with habits, social cognition, autism, intersubjectivity and subjectivity. The chapters in this volume present the foundation of semiotics as a theory of cognition, offer a semiotic model of cognitive integration that combines Enactivism and the Extended Mind Theory, and investigate the role of imagination as the origin of perception. The author develops an account of beliefs that are associated with habits and meaning, grounded in Pragmatism, testing his Narrative Practice Semiotic Hypothesis on persons with autism spectrum disorders.  He also integrates his ideas about the formation of the theory of mind with a theory of subjectivity, understood as self-consciousness which derives from semiotic cognitive abilities.  This text appeals to students, professors and researchers in the field. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Feb 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030429867

Book preview

Volume 24

Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology

Editor-in-Chief

Alessandro Capone

University of Messina, Barcelona, Italy

Editorial Board

Noel Burton-Roberts

University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia

Brian Butler

University of North Carolina, Asheville, USA

Marco Carapezza

University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

Felice Cimatti

Universitá della Calabria, Cosenza, Italy

Eros Corazza

Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Marcelo Dascal

Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

Michael Devitt

City University of New York, New York, USA

Frans van Eemeren

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Alessandra Falzone

University of Messina, Messina, Italy

Neil Feit

State University of New York, Fredonia, USA

Alessandra Giorgi

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy

Larry Horn

Yale University, New Haven, USA

Klaus von Heusinger

University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

Katarzyna Jaszczolt

University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Ferenc Kiefer

Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

Kepa Korta

ILCLI, Donostia, Spain

Ernest Lepore

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA

Stephen C. Levinson

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Fabrizio Macagno

New University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

Jacob L. Mey

University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

Pietro Perconti

University of Messina, Messina, Italy

Francesca Piazza

University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

Roland Posner

Berlin Institute of Technology, Berlin, Germany

Mark Richard

Harvard University, Cambridge, USA

Nathan Salmon

University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Stephen R. Schiffer

New York University, New York, USA

Michel Seymour

University of Montreal, Montreal, Canada

Mandy Simons

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

Timothy Williamson

University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Anna Wierbizcka

Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Dorota Zieliñska

Jesuit University of Philosophy and Education Ignatianum, Kraków, Poland

Advisory Editors

Keith Allan

Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Louise Cummings

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Hong Kong

Wayne Davis

Georgetown University, Washington, USA

Igor Douven

University of Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, France

Yan Huang

University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

Istvan Kecskes

State University of New York at Albany, Albany, USA

Franco Lo Piparo

University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

Antonino Pennisi

University of Messina, Messina, Italy

Francesca Santuli

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venezia, Italy

More information about this series at http://​www.​springer.​com/​series/​11797Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy and Psychology deals with theoretical pragmatics and pragmatics from a philosophical point of view. The connection between philosophy and pragmatics is double. On the one hand, philosophy contributes to creating a framework to be called the ‘pragmatics of language’ capable of dealing with interpretation phenomena that complement purely semantic processes; on the other hand, pragmatics is capable of coping with major philosophical problems, e.g. skepticism and Gettier’s problem. All volumes in the collection reserve a central place for the philosophical ideas in pragmatics, such as contributions to epistemology in which pragmatics plays a key role.

This series is indexed by Scopus

The collection: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy and Psychology publishes:

- pragmatics applied to philosophical problems and in the area of pragmalinguistics

- pragmatics applied to the understanding of propositional attitudes, including knowledge, belief, in dissolving paradoxes and puzzles relating to epistemology.

- pragmatics applied to psychology, especially on the topic of intentions and mind-reading

- philosophical treatments of dialogue analysis

Editor-in-Chief

Alessandro Capone, University of Messina, Italy

Consulting Editors

Keith Allan, Monash University, Australia

Louise Cummings, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

Wayne Davis, Georgetown University, Washington, USA

Igor Douven, University of Paris-Sorbonne, France

Yan Huang, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Istvan Kecskes, State University of New York at Albany, USA

Franco Lo Piparo, University of Palermo, Italy

Antonino Pennisi, University of Messina, Italy

Francesca Santulli, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy

For inquiries and submission of proposals authors can contact the editor-in-chief, Alessandro Capone, via: [e-mail].

Claudio Paolucci

Cognitive Semiotics

Integrating Signs, Minds, Meaning and Cognition

1st ed. 2021

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Claudio Paolucci

Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

ISSN 2214-3807e-ISSN 2214-3815

Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology

ISBN 978-3-030-42985-0e-ISBN 978-3-030-42986-7

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42986-7

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Preface

In this book, I advance a proposition concerning cognitive semiotics, and I try to shed light on some key problems in contemporary debates in semiotics, philosophy and the cognitive sciences such as subjectivity, representations, beliefs, perception, imagination, social cognition, mind and language. In my view, cognitive semiotics should not be conceived as a special type of semiotics but as an attempt to answer the following question: How can we come to know the world through signs and languages?. I am inspired in this by Umberto Eco and by his ideas on semiotics. Indeed, when Umberto Eco reflected, in old age, upon what might have been the driving idea of his work and what theme had obsessed him through the entirety of his scientific activity, he identified with great clarity the cognitive problem of how we come to know the world.

"I think the theme I have addressed in an almost obsessive way, throughout all my work, is that of how we come to know the world. Perhaps this explains the growing attention I have dedicated to narrative universes: these constitute an Ersatz, a substitute for the world. (Eco 2004: 199)

I do not want to be the critic or the reviewer of myself, but think of my novels: the issue in The Name of the Rose is a truth to uncover; Foucault’s Pendulum discusses how to construct a nonexistent world; The Island of the Day Before examines a world that exists, but the contours of which are still unclear. My work in semiotics, in the end, concerns the problem of how our signs give account of that which is or construct that which is not. My interest in avant-garde phenomena springs from the interest for a language that tends to break down and recreate our worldview. The years I have spent analysing mass media likewise concern the problem of truth (Eco 2001: 616–7)".

Eco seems to suggest that cognitive semiotics is not, after all, a kind of semiotics but the vocation of semiotics itself or, at least, the vocation of the kind that he practiced. If the word cognitive refers to the question of how we come to know the world,¹ and if only through signs, meanings, texts and languages are we able to give account of that which is or to construct that which is not, then the object of cognitive semiotics is the way in which semiotic systems represent the background of our perception of the world and define the conditions under which cognition and knowledge are possible. It is not by chance that this topic represents the almost obsessive way of all of Umberto Eco’s work.

It is, after all, a classical option embraced by semiotics in its totality; when Saussure, Hjelmslev and Greimas said that meaning could not be determined based upon the referent’s structure or upon the extralinguistic universe, this was because the problem was not that of investigating the relationship between the world and languages or questioning their significance within a given culture. On the contrary, the problem lays in focusing on the ways in which languages can provide a scaffolding for human cognition, directing our points of view and extending and strengthening our cognitive possibilities and ability to know the world.² Peirce made a similar argument when—in open polemic with the phrenology of his era which sought to locate cognitive functions within areas of the brain—he stated that in my opinion, it is far more true that the thoughts of a living writer are in any printed copy of his book than that they are in his brain (CP 7.365). Far from arguing that anatomy does not matter, Peirce was instead putting forth the cognitive semiotics option, which represents a true philosophical antecedent to the extended mind thesis (cf. Paolucci 2011; Iliopoulos 2019): to study texts and languages that shape thought and express it is to study cognition and the way we think in a profound and non-trivial way.

For this reason, in my opinion, cognitive semiotics deals with the way in which a semio-linguistic reflection upon signs, meaning and language can shed light on both the ways in which we arrive at an understanding of the world through cognition and action, and our ability to make sense of our experience. Therefore, cognitive semiotics is committed to partecipating in contemporary debates concerning cognition, since many cognitive scientists nowadays face frequent semiotic dilemmas and deal with semiotic problems under a different name or rubric.

In my view, in order to do that, cognitive semiotics has to be presented as a strong theoretical proposition, able to take sides in the current debate on cognition and to represent a reference point for both semiotic researchers interested in the cognitive sciences and cognitive scientists in search of valid, trustworthy knowledge about signs, meaning, language and cognition.

This book presents this strong theoretical proposition concerning cognitive semiotics in the first chapter. Cognitive semiotics must be conceived as a theory of the lie that keeps together Radical Enactivism, Pragmatism and Material Engagement Theory.

In the second chapter, I deal with a classic problem of philosophy—the problem of subjectivity—and I try to show how this problem can be better posed and solved through a semiotic theory of impersonal enunciation that deals with subjectivity in language.

In the third chapter, I outline the features of a semiotic mind, starting from an interpretation of Peirce’s semiotics. From this perspective, based on an extended cognition framework grounded on signs and languages, I deal with three key notions at the core of the contemporary debate: habits, beliefs and representations.

The fourth chapter is dedicated to the problem of social cognition and outlines the crucial role of semiotic narratives in explaining our capacity for attributing meaning to the others’ actions and for understanding, through semiotic interaction analysis, social cognition impairments like Autism Spectrum Disorders in infants.

The fifth chapter deals with a theory of perception conceived as controlled hallucination or controlled figuration. Starting with the semiotics of perception outlined by Umberto Eco in Kant and the Platypus, I will deal with Andy Clark’s predictive processing and connect it with Jan Koenderink’s Goethean account of perception, focusing on the key role of imagination in perception.

In my perspective, cognitive semiotics interprets cognition as (1) an enactive form of sense-making, involving interaction with the external world; (2) a form of action mediated by meaning, where meanings are not representations of the world or truth conditions, but interpretive habits and sense-making activities; (3) a perspective in which texts, languages and semiotic systems represent not the expression of a pre-existing thought located in our heads, but forms that structure the way in which we think and know reality, or as cognitive scaffolding which represents the background of our perception of the world.

Claudio Paolucci

Bologna, Italy

December 2020

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the contribution of three people.

Firstly, Shaun Gallagher, who has honoured me with his friendship and constant support during all these years. The periods spent at the University of Memphis in 2016 and 2018, where I had the possibility to give lectures and seminars to its extraordinary students, were the most important moments for refining the ideas of this book.

Secondly, Antonino Pennisi, to whom I owe the gratitude for having convinced me that the connection between semiotics and the cognitive sciences—inaugurated by Umberto Eco in Kant and the Platypus—was fundamental. I owe a great deal to the many opportunities for discussion over the past 10 years at the University of Messina, with him and with his talented students, who showed me that a relationship between cognitive sciences, semiotics and philosophy of language was not only possible, but unavoidable.

Finally, Lambros Malafouris, with whom I have built a truly special relationship over the last few year. The fellowship with the University of Oxford and the many opportunities for confrontation related to the ERC Handmade project allowed me to develop some of the extraordinary ideas in his Material Engagement Theory in my own approach to semiotics.

A special thanks goes to the great generosity of Vittorio Gallese, who has always valued my work throughout all of these years, discussing it with me and reading my publications and my projects while supporting them publicly.

I would also like to thank Paolo Leonardi, Patrizia Violi, Giovanni Matteucci, Dan Hutto, Andy Clark, Jean Petitot, Fausto Caruana, Pietro Perconti, Marco Carapezza, Göran Sonesson, Ruggero Eugeni, Rossella Fabbrichesi, Francesca Piazza, Antonis Iliopolus, Stefano Gensini, Alessandro Sarti, Rocco Ronchi, Liliana Albertazzi, Andrea Pinotti, Francesco Parisi, Marco Viola, Alessandra Falzone and Jordan Zlatev for discussing some of these ideas with me and reading some parts of this work.

Another thank you goes to the young semioticians of the University of Bologna, who supported me in the drafting and revision of this book: Martina Bacaro, Paolo Martinelli, Laura Pielli, Paola Columbano, Luigi Lobaccaro, Gabriele Giampieri, Marta Caravà, Flavio Valerio Alessi and John Sykes.

This book owes a great deal to the PRIN 2015 project on Perception, Performativity and the Cognitive Sciences, funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. A big support came also from the European Commission that funded my NeMo project (NEw MOnitoring Guidelines to Develop Innovative ECEC Teachers Curricula, Grant No: 2019-1-IT02-KA201-063340) on embodied interactions.

Finally, the Research Center for Enactivism and Cognitive Semiotics of the University of Memphis contributed decisively to this book. Special thanks go to Mia Burnett for her extraordinary work, to the University of Memphis and, once again, to Shaun Gallagher who made so many things possible.

List of Abbreviations

Hjelmslev, Louis T.

CC

1935. La catégorie des cas. Étude de grammaire générale. Acta Jutlandica, VII, pp. I–XII e pp. 1–184, I. Aarhus: Universitetsforlaget.

NE

1985. Nouveaux essais. Paris: PUF.

Peirce, Charles S.

CP

Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. I–VI edited by Hartshorne, C. and Weiss, P. 1931–1935. vol. VII–VIII edited by Burks A. W. 1958. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

W

Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce. A Chronological Edition. 7 vols. Eds. Moore, E. C., Kloesel, C. J. W. et al. 1982. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

LW

Semiotic and Significs. The Correspondence Between Charles Sanders Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby. Edited by Hardwick, C. S. 1977. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

NEM

The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce. vol. I–IV. Edited by Eisele, C. 1976. Mouton: The Hague.

RLT

Reasoning and the Logic of Things, edited by Ketner, K. L. 1992. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

MS

Manuscripts in the Houghton Library of Harvard University, as identified by Richard Robin. 1967. Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. And in 1971 The Peirce Papers: a Supplementary Catalogue. Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society 7: 37–57.

Contents

Cognitive Semiotics.​ Radical Enactivism, Pragmatism and Material Engagement 1

1 The Threshold Between Nature and Culture 1

2 The Three Dimensions of Cognitive Semiotics 6

3 Enactivism, Sense-Making and Pragmatism 10

4 Cognitive Semiotics Sense-Making 13

5 Languages and Cognitive Systems 18

References 22

For a Cognitive Semiotics of Subjectivity 27

1 Subjectivity in Language 27

2 For an Enactive Semiotics of Subjectivity 32

3 The Pre-Logical Mind 37

4 Persona. The I, You, He Hierarchy 43

5 The Primacy of ‘He’ 48

6 Illeity 50

References 59

The Semiotic Mind.​ Beliefs, Habits and Extended Cognition 63

1 Anti-Cartesian Semiotics 64

2 Cognitive Semiotics and Pragmatism:​ Beliefs and the Extended Mind 68

3 The Semiotic Extended Mind (1):​ Parity Principle and Cognitive Intertwining 76

4 The Semiotic Extended Mind (2):​ Phenomenology 81

5 Semiotic Representations 89

References 92

Social Cognition and Autism Spectrum Disorders:​ From Mindreading to Narratives 97

1 Early Mindreading and Narrative Practices 97

2 Interaction Theory and Narrative Practices 99

3 Radical Enactivism, Interactive Specialization and Social Cognition 103

4 Two Discoveries 105

5 A Two-Levels Model.​ Low-Level:​ Action/​Perception/​Imagination Matching 108

6 A Two-Level Model.​ High-Level:​ Narrativity 110

7 Narrativity and Developmental Trajectories 115

8 From Deception to Pretend Play and Language Acquisition 118

9 Autism Spectrum Disorders and Cognitive Semiotics 119

References 122

Perception as Controlled Hallucination 127

1 Semiotics of Perception 127

2 Kant, the Platypus and the Predictive Processing 129

3 Diagrammatic Thinking, Inference and Perception 132

4 The Bootstrap Problem and the Metaphor of Vision 138

5 The Laws of Imagination 142

6 Perception as Controlled Hallucination 146

7 Perception, Imagination and Narratives 149

References 156

Footnotes

1

Cognitive and cognition are not thought in opposition to emotion or passion and do not recall in any way intellectual or rational values as opposed to non-intellectual or non-rational ones. Fear, feeling, emotion and passion are all cognitive forms that enable us to know the world (cf. Caruana and Viola, 2018), as Peirce forcefully argued in his anti-Cartesian essays.

2

This is the correct way of reading Saussure’s adage, often confused with the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that thought is an amorphous mass prior to the appearance of language.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

C. PaolucciCognitive SemioticsPerspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology24https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42986-7_1

Cognitive Semiotics. Radical Enactivism, Pragmatism and Material Engagement

Claudio Paolucci¹  

(1)

Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

1 The Threshold Between Nature and Culture

As suggested by Goran Sonesson (2012: 208) in a seminal article, cognitive semiotics has been invented many times during the last decades. Cognitive semiotics can indeed be many things, and there are many ways to invent it. Some of these things and ways are de facto. Other things and other ways are de iure. I will not proceed to create a new invention. Rather, in this book I will try to clarify the articulation between what cognitive semiotics is de facto and what, in my perspective, should be able to be de iure.

De facto, there is an international association of cognitive semiotics that brings together scholars from different disciplinary fields, encouraging their exchange and interaction. De facto, Cognitive Semiotics is an international journal in semiotics with an important history, many important papers in different disciplinary fields and a great international prestige. De facto, cognitive semiotics is a research direction practiced worldwide by many scholars who aim to link cognitive science with semiotics. All of this is of fundamental importance, and it entertains many of the connections that we will discuss in this book, which, however, is not about what cognitive semiotics currently is (de facto), but about what cognitive semiotics would and should be in the future (de jure). In my opinion, cognitive semiotics has to deal with the way in which a semio-linguistic reflection on signs, meaning and languages is able to make more intelligible the way in which we come to know the world through action and sense-making, and has to strongly commit to discussing the contemporary debate on cognition. This research perspective has a counter-effect. Since we engage with many heterogeneous ways of thinking that may be extraneous to the semio-linguistic tradition, our comparisons between semiotics and the contemporary debate on cognition will entail important effects on the structure of semiotic theory itself. Also, this research perspective is needed because, as it often happens in the current landscape of 4e cognition,¹ many scholars in the cognitive sciences address semiotic problems by doing semiotics without calling it with this name.²

To do this, cognitive semiotics cannot be only a political attempt to keep together existing things. Nor can it be the attempt to mediate between distant instances, with the goal of establishing a dialogue between them. To be clear, I believe that both these dimensions are fundamental and that they have a decisive importance in the current international landscape of the sciences of language and cognition. Nonetheless, in order to make a contribution to what cognitive semiotics should be de jure, we need to present cognitive semiotics as a strong theoretical proposal, capable of taking a stand in the current debate, and of representing a reference point for researchers in semiotics who are interested in the cognitive sciences.

My mentor Umberto Eco (1997: Chap. 2), whom I continue to be inspired by in the research group I am directing at the University of Bologna, called Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory cognitive semiotics, which had influenced him in a deep way. For Peirce himself, what Eco is calling cognitive semiotics is not a species or a type of semiotics that can be distinguished from other types of semiotics (on this topic, see Zlatev 2011) nor, for Peirce, can we make a theory of cognition without semiotics. His idea, already discussed in 1868 together with a real philosophical antecedent of the theory of the extended mind (Paolucci 2011, see also infra, Chap. 3), was that whenever we think, we have present to the consciousness some feeling, image, conception, or other representation, which serves as a sign (CP: 5.283). Every thought was a sign, and, according to Peirce, since we have no power of thinking without signs (CP: 5.265), a theory of cognition was inseparable from a phenomenological semiotics that studied everything that is present to the mind. Describing Peirce’s cognitive semiotics and how this ambitious and original program can be achieved through the connection with pragmatism goes beyond the scope of this first chapter (Paolucci 2010, 2011, infra, Chap. 3). What we are interested in here, instead, is to draw upon how Umberto Eco developed this idea.

For Eco, Peirce’s idea of sign was too broad, and it needed to be reassessed. The very notion of sign was too tied to commonsense, and it needed to be substituted with the idea of semiotic system. This is interesting for two reasons. First, it placed cognition under the aegis of the idea of system, in accordance with the enactivist tradition in the cognitive sciences, that is built from the very beginning on the idea of system (see Maturana and Varela 1980; Chemero 2009; Gallagher 2017; Hutto and Myin 2017; Di Paolo et al. 2018). Second, this idea is aligned with the revolution of linguistics, in which the idea of system was pivotal (Eco 1997; Paolucci 2017a, b). Therefore, Eco advanced a synthesis between the two main semiotic traditions, which is also discussed in Kant and the Platypus (Eco 1997; Paolucci 2010). Hence, what is this idea of semiotic system? What does Eco mean by this notion?

Eco (1975), in two passages which are close together, gives two very different definitions, which he certainly thought to be compatible, but which clearly are not. The first definition is this one:

there is a semiotic system when there is the socially conventionalized possibility of generating sign-functions, whether the funtives of such functions are discrete units called signs or vast portions of discourse, provided that the correlation has been previously posited by a social convention. This is why semiotics is a logic of culture. (Eco 1975: 7)

This definition, which identifies semiotics with a general theory of culture and the semiotic with the cultural has had enormous success, and it has influenced a very large part of the semiotic tradition. Indeed, semiotics has often dealt with cultural phenomena, also by endorsing Barthes’ idea of a critique of ideology, which had the aim of showing the cultural dimension of what presents itself as natural. It is precisely because of this definition and this identification that Eco considered zoosemiotics the lower limit of semiotics, i.e., because it concerns itself with the communicative behavior of non-human (and therefore non-cultural) communities. As both Rodriguez Higuera and Kull (2017) and Gensini (2018: 97–8) have shown, this definition by Eco and its endorsement by a large part of the semiotic tradition has produced more problems than it has solved. My aim is to eschew the very idea of the threshold between nature and culture, and the corresponding identification of semiotics with what is cultural. This will also allow me to build semiotics as a critique of ideology—a fundamental aspect of semiotics that I want to keep³—on a purely semantic and rhetoric ground, as Eco himself did in the very same chapter on semiotics and ideology in A Theory of Semiotics.

Perhaps, this is why, in the very same book, Eco gave another definition of semiotics and of its object:

A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. This something else does not necessarily have