Este artigo traça o perfil de uma nova semiótica cognitiva: uma proposta abrangente para uma virada material nos estudos semióticos a partir do legado de Umberto Eco. Depois ter definido o campo de estudo da maneira de praticar semiótica, identificamos suas três principais marcas distintivas: o enativismo radical, o pragmatismo e a teoria do engajamento material. Revisitando o processo de sense-making como uma ocasião para repensar a enunciação, o artigo desenvolve um quadro teórico para analisar o meio ambiente como um mundo de sentido articulado em recortes enciclopédicos, tecido pelas mil vozes do Antropoceno.Palavras-chave: Semiótica cognitiva. Sense-making. Nichos semióticos. Enunciação. Virada Material.

This paper investigates the long-standing cultural stereotype linking madness and creativity, endorsing an interpretive and encyclopedic semiotic approach. Through the analysis of three famous movies, the article shows how cinema have assumed and rearticulated the stereotype of the mad genius, shaping the way common sense links together the universes of creativity and madness. After that, the paper focuses on the enunciative passages and assemblages between the domains of art, science, and psychology, thus tracing the cultural and historical roots of the figure of the mad genius. Eventually, the paper critiques the process of ontologization of this link in contemporary scientific narratives, revealing its ideological underpinnings and its dependence on cultural myths, such as the "split-brain" theory. Ultimately, this study argues for a reframing of the question, asking not whether madness causes creativity, but how creative potential might emerge within or despite psychopathological conditions.

In this article, I will work on the idea of Pre-Truth (as opposed to post-truth) and Semiological Guerrilla (as opposed to fake news), claiming that these two concepts are better equipped to explain what is happening in our contemporary societies, especially if we take into account the world of media and communication. In the first part of the article, I will frame the problems of fake news and post-truth within the dynamics characterizing the relationships between knowledge and power. Taking into account Foucault and Latour's perspectives, I argue that the problem of fake news can be understood as a new kind of relationship between these two instances, previously stably coupled and in the hands of institutional power. Later, I will deal with three different meanings of "fake news," that are usually blended and confused: (a) serendipity, (b) false belief, and (c) mendacity. Consequently, I will deal with the problem of "Semiological Guerrilla Warfare," arguing that the new shape of the "knowledge-power relationship" rendered alternative and non-institutionally certified interpretations the norm. Eventually, I will identify the deep cause of this effect in the machinic production of documents provided by new technologies, causing a return of the medieval sense of "truth" as "trust," independent from knowledge and strictly related to anecdotes and personal experiences. Finally, I will work on the concept of "truth" connected to technology, trying to reveal its genealogy with the aim of explaining some misleading contemporary beliefs on "post-truth."

There is considerable discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of early ASD diagnosis. However, the development of easily understandable and administrable tools for teachers or caregivers in order to identify potentially alarming behaviours (red flags) is usually considered valuable even by scholars who are concerned with very early diagnosis. This study proposes an AI pre-screening tool with the aim of creating an easily administrable tool for non-competent observers useful to identify potentially alarming signs in pre-verbal interactions. The use of these features is evaluated using an explainable artificial intelligence algorithm to assess which of the proposed new interaction characteristics were more effective in classifying individuals with ASD vs. controls. We used a rating scale with three core sections - sensorimotor, behavioural, and emotional - each further divided into four items. By seeing home videos of children doing everyday activities, two experienced observers rated each of these items from 1 (highly typical interaction) to 8 (extremely atypical interaction). Then, a machine learning model based on XGBoost was developed for identifying ASD children. The classification obtained was interpreted through the use of SHAP explanations, obtaining an area under the receiver operating curve of 0.938 and 0.914 for the two observers, respectively. These results demonstrated the significance of early detection of body-related sensorimotor features.

laudio, enactivism is the attempt to think about cognition in a non-representational way, but semiotics is intrinsically representationalist. So they cannot be together.” These words by Jean Petitot have stuck with Claudio Paolucci ever since 2003, when he was working under the former’s mentorship at the CRÉA, the Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée. In Paris, Petitot had been a close collaborator of Francisco Varela, and Paolucci could definitely see the merit of their enactivist ideas, but doing away with semiotics was out of the question, especially for one of Umberto Eco’s last students. Having reflected on those words for almost two decades, Paolucci (2021) is now ready to assertively proclaim that “Yes, semiotics and enactivists can be together and they have to be together.” Such is the author’s confidence in this union that he recently spearheaded the establishment, in Bologna, of the International Centre for Enactivism and Cognitive Semiotics. His latest book thus comes not as a self-standing monograph concerned with its author’s idiosyncratic interests, but as a manifesto of sorts for the now institutionally enshrined idea that enactivism and semiotics belong together. Yet, putting the representational and anti-representational together is no small feat. It takes C

In this paper, I will work on the relationship between perception and imagination in Virtual Reality, claiming that “hallucination” is the ordinary motor also for online perception and not only a deviant form of it. First, I will deal with the problem of perception from the point of view of cognitive semiotics and I will try to underline the crucial role of imagination, claiming that perception is a form of “controlled hallucination”. Later, I will focus on the relationship between perception, hallucination, and memory in Virtual Reality. On the one hand, I will claim that Virtual Reality expresses the transition from actual perception to imagination, memory or dream through another actual perception. On the other hand, I will claim that it can express it without any problems through the old techniques coming from cinema and other audiovisual languages, since they partially share the very same formal apparatus of enunciation. I will demonstrate all of this by analyzing Resident Evil 7: Biohazard.

The semiotics tradition has been radically anti-mentalist. Daddesio (1995) showed how hard the semiotics tradition tried to avoid a mentalistic language and any kind of psychologism. Peirce himself, who was the real founder of a cognitive semiotics, wrote that any reference to a mind in his semiotics was “a sop to Cerberus”, because he despaired “of making my own broader conception understood” (LW: 81). On this topic, the semiotic tradition followed a noble legacy in the history of philosophy, one whose founders are Kant and Husserl. According to this conception, thought is not related to a psychology of the mind, but rather to the logical operations which represent the conditions of possibility of the latter.

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.

Dans cet article, je me propose de réfléchir au rapport entre notre niche écologique, qui est faite aussi des formations discursives à travers lesquelles nous habitons l’environnement, et les différentes formes d’acte et d’actantialité qui régulent et produisent les formations discursives qui nous permettent de « meubler » notre environnement, en transformant la niche écologique en une véritable niche sémiotique. La notion clé pour penser la relation entre environnement sémiotique et acte est, me semble-t-il, celle d’énonciation. J’essaierai de proposer une nouvelle théorie ergative et impersonnelle de l’énonciation comme « addition de soustractions », et de repenser l’agency de cet acte qui n’appartient pas au sujet mais à une multiplicité d’instances énonçantes produisant l’environnement sémiotique qui, à son tour, les produit.

This chapter faces the issue of European Identity, reaffirming the importance of two interventions of Umberto Eco about the role of the Erasmus project and of multilingualism. Grounding Eco’s ideas on two key concepts like “Nomadism” and “Bilingualism”—conceived as the compresence of a “dominant language” and “minority language”—I will deal both with the ongoing scientific debate and the political one, taking into account the positions held by the Italian philosopher Diego Fusaro and the far right politician Giorgia Meloni. Final remarks will highlight the limits of such vision and remark three assets: (i) impossibility of not being European, (ii) cognitive necessity of a bilingualism, that represent the background of our perception of the world; (iii) semiotics necessity of being like a foreigner in one’s own language, and deviating from established conditions.

In this paper I will try to outline the reasons why, in order to understand the life and the nature of meaning, the semiotic tradition has always thought that it was better not to separate semantics and pragmatics. I will first reconstruct the history of this idea, grounded in Pragmatism and in Structural Linguistics. Later, I will deal with its first formulation in A Theory of Semiotics by Umberto Eco. In the second part of the paper, I will work on the idea by Ferdinand de Saussure that meanings are values, that is, indeterminate entities whose identity is determined only through reciprocal determination. I will claim that this idea is the importation in linguistics of Leibniz's principles of the differential calculus. In the final part of the paper, I will apply this idea to the distinction between semantics and pragmatics, claiming that meanings are better understood through a theory of modes of existence. If we understand the differential nature of meaning, we can see that meanings live only through the using of the expressions and these variations contribute to offer stability within the transformations, without creating a stable object defined by its properties and endowed with an independent existence split from the relationships that define it.

In this paper, I outline a semiotic methodology able to detect possible future impairments that can lead to Autism Spectrum Disorder and other neurodevelopmental pathologies through the observation of embodied interactions. In the first part, I deal with the state of the art concerning ADOS and then I describe the three substitutions operated by our NeMo Methodology: i) a substitution in the age of the infant (NeMo deals with 9-18-month-old infants); ii) a substitution of a competent ADOS observer with a less competent one (caregivers, pre-primary teachers, etc.; iii) a substitution of the laboratory and highly grammaticalized ADOS setting with real-life, in the wild, home videos shot through smartphones by caregivers. In the second part of the paper, I describe the twelve signs the observers must look for in order to rate an interaction and decide about its typicality. Finally, through ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) graphs, I describe the performances of the observers who used NeMo methodology and I compare them with the state of the art.

System is a key word for semiotics and linguistics and is a key word also in Umberto Eco’s thought and philosophy. However, Eco always tries to find new words in order to express in a proper way his own idea of system. These new words are also new ways of thinking and rethinking the very core of his own philosophy and semiotics, which remains somehow stable during the years. Through these five words – summa, structure, code, encyclopaedia and rhizome – this paper aims at outlining an image of the evolution of Umberto Eco’s thought and philosophy.

En este artículo, comparo desde un punto de vista epistemológico las teorías semióticas de la narratividad elaboradas en el marco semiótico con las que han surgido en el de las ciencias cognitivas. Al examinar el lugar cada vez más central que la narratividad ha tomado en estas últimas, demuestro que la noción misma de narratividad tiene un impacto espectacular sobre ellas, en tanto que esta noción es susceptible de modificar sus posiciones epistemológicas.

In this paper, I will deal with the way linguistics and semiotics focus on person and subjectivity in language. I start from two different meanings of the “person” word and from Benveniste and Latour’s theories of enunciation. Later, I deal with the problem of subjectivity in language and I connect it to two different views: Benveniste’s idea that subjectivity is grounded on the “I” and Guillaume’s idea of a primacy of the “he”. Starting from the Iliad and from the semiotic idea of subject, I take side for Guillaume and Latour’s theory: it is the delocutive structure of the “he” which, in language, expresses subjectivity, namely the capacity of the subject to make himself the object of his reflections and of his words.

In this chapter, I will deal with the problem of perception from a the point of view of cognitive semiotics. I will try to underline the crucial role of imagination, claiming that perception is a form of “controlled hallucination” (Koenderink 2010; Clark 2016), where, by “controlled hallucination”, I mean the product of the imagination controlled by the world. The way in which we match the “hallucination” of imagination with the “control” of the world is through diagrams and narratives. The main idea is that “hallucination” is the model of perception and not a deviant form of it. With “hallucination”, as defined in perception studies and in the neurogeometry of vision (Koenderink 2010; Sarti et al. 2008), I mean the morphological activity of the production of forms by the imagination, which remains crucial both when it is not controlled by the world—as in the case of hallucination, imagination or dream—and when it is controlled by the world, as in the case of online perception. Maybe, the word “hallucination” can be misleading, since perceptual phenomena under the aegis of hallucination may seem to lose the concreteness that I want to characterize them as having. It is possible that “figuration” would fit better with the ideas I will develop here, since no Sartrean “derealization” is involved (see Matteucci 2019). However, sinceour brains try to guess what is out there, and to the extent that that guess matches the evolving sensory data, we perceive the world, in Surfing Uncertainty, Clark (2016) recalls the slogan coined by the vision scientist Ramesh Jain that perception is controlled hallucination. This is the direction I am going to take in this chapter. But, exactly because “this view of perception puts us in genuine cognitive contact with the salient aspects of our environment”, Clark (2016: 326, see also paragraph 6.10) suggests considering hallucination as a form of “uncontrolled perception”. However, Clark’s view is the classical one that thinks of perception as grounding both hallucination and imagination, which are supposed to be “deviant” or “uncontrolled” forms of perception. Since we want to claim the opposite, in this chapter. I will continue to use “hallucination”, and since there is a well-established tradition regarding this concept in the field of perception studies, I will do so with the caveat that “hallucination” does not imply any kind of “derealization” of perceptual phenomena from a phenomenological point of view (Gallagher and Zahavi 2014).