Cognitive semiotics has been characterized as the pooling together of theories, methods, models, and findings from semiotics and cognitive science. Those who have taken up the challenge of combining these two research traditions have done so, however, in rather different ways. Nevertheless, within both traditions, and predominantly in the second one, there are those who espouse some kind of reductionism, in which meaning and consciousness are non-existent or mere epiphenomena. The present contribution argues that there can be no study of either meaning or consciousness that does not start by recognizing that these are real phenomena, and that all other methods, such as, notably, experiments, while very useful, are only limited and indirect ways of approaching meaning and consciousness. We start by pointing out that linguistics, and therefore semiotics, doesn’t fit into the classical division between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften, but shares properties with both. To begin the building of an epistemology for cognitive semiotics, we hark back to Vico’s notion of Verum Factum, unwittingly explicated by the semiotician Luis Prieto, as well as to the phenomenological method, as it has been defined by both Husserl and Peirce, and taken further by Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty.

Kognityvinė semiotika, pastaruoju metu įvairiose terpėse pristatoma kaip nauja humanitarinių ir socialinių mokslų paradigma, siekia sujungti kognityvinius mokslus su semiotika. Išplėsdami kognicijos sąvoką taip, kad ji aprėptų didžiąją dalį psichinio gyvenimo (o kartais – ir daugelį „subasmeninių“ [subpersonal] aspektų), kognityviniai mokslai ne kažin kiek vietos paskyrė reikšmės fenomenams ir jų savitumui. Kita vertus, semiotika ar bent jau kai kurios jos apraiškos, ypač įkvėptosios Peirce’o, turi polinkį bene viską aiškinti kaip ženklų konsteliacijas. Abi šios tendencijos veda į konceptualinę miglą ir sąmyšį. Epistemologiniu požiūriu, kognityvinės semiotikos užduotis – susieti šiuodvi vieno ir to paties akiračio tendencijas, sąmonę [mind] padedant ten, kur jai ir vieta, o ženklus – į jiems skirtą vietą. Šio straipsnio pirmoje dalyje aptariamas fenomenologinis metodas ir jo taikymas suvokimui [perception]. Konkrečiai aptarsime, ar ir kokia apimtimi galima sakyti, kad suvokime esama propozicijų [propositions]. Antroje dalyje bus pristatomas ženklas kaip elementari kognityvinės semiotikos sąvoka, didžiąja dalimi išvesta iš aprezentacijos apibrėžties fenomenologijoje, bet taip pat sudaroma pasinaudojant kai kuriomis [Jeano] Piaget idėjomis. Užuot visas reikšmės prieigas [vehicles] tapatinus su ženklais, šiame straipsnyje ženklo sąvoka susiaurinama iki labai konkrečių reikšmės atvejų, kurie skiriasi nuo kitokių reikšmės tipų, kai reikšmė labiau tiesiogiai duota suvokime. Galiausiai trečioje dalyje imsimės neograisiškos [neo-Gricean] reikšmės analizės ir tvirtinsime, kad įprasčiausiais atvejais šio pobūdžio reikšmę apims ženklo sąvoka, tačiau kai kuriais atskirais atvejais ir tam tikruose kontekstuose vis tiek prireiks graisiško tipo reikšmės sąvokos.

AbstractIn the sense of phenomenology, actions are special cases of acts of consciousness. Within semiotics, first Jan Mukařovský and then A. J. Greimas have established, in different terms, a distinction between instrumental actions and actions which carry their meaning in themselves. But this is insufficient to account for the variety of actions which comprises everything from the creation of artefacts, dance, sporting events, theatre, rituals, and much else. Already those actions mentioned relate in different ways to instrumentality and intrinsic meaning, as well as to (depictive) iconicity and plasticity. In this paper, I will be particularly concerned with dancing, especially classical ballet, trying to delimit it from sporting events and theatre. Apart from the sign function and the spectacular function, I will notably have recourse to what I have elsewhere term secondary (depictive) iconicity as well as to plasticity. In the process, I hope to be able to throw some light also on the nature of sport, by comparing and contrasting it to dance, as well as to the theatre as well as, more incidentally, to some other types of action. In a wider perspective, my ambition is to contribute to a general inquiry into the semiosis of actions.

No cabe duda de que, en los ultimos 20 anos, pocos ambitos de la semiotica han tenido un desarrollo tan rapido y tan fecundo como el que se refiere a las imagenes. Podemos considerar que hoy existe una verdadera ciencia de las imagenes, con sus propios planteamientos, metodos y modelos, que, ademas, ha generado resultados relativamente ciertos (sobre la iconicidad, el lenguaje plastico, etc.), aunque todavia falta mucho por corroborar. Este desarrollo se debe a los modelos propuestos por la escuela de Greimas, en particular por Floch y Thurlemann, por una parte, y por los del Groupe μ, por la otra (cf. Sonesson 1987;1988; 1992c; 1993; 1996b); asi como a la sistematizacion de la psicologia de la Gestalt y de la topologia matematica, por la escuela de Quebec, y a la aplicacion de las funciones de comunicacion de la imagen, por la escuela de Perth; a cuales hay que anadir, segun Saint-Martin (1994:2), el trabajo de la escuela de Lund, que se caracteriza por enfocar las contribuciones de las otras tradiciones, desde una perspectiva meta-critica y sintetica, integrandolas en un marco a la vez psicologico y sociologico. Las consideraciones que siguen tienen el caracter metodologico y teorico que es un rasgo fundamental de esta ultima concepcion.

The distinction between primary and secondary iconic signs, which I first made with regard to pictures, has been applied by other scholars to language, gesture, and music. Taking stock of this process, it has become necessary to clarify the distinction, insisting on the fact that secondary iconicity is not conventionality, but a kind of iconicity which is in itself not sufficient to define a meaning, but needs to be supplemented by other means, such as a label or a system of oppositions. We have shown this to be the case earlier, when considering what Arnheim termed ‘droodles’, but we will see that it also applies to language and music.

The notion of "plastic language" (or, as we will say in the following, the plastic layer) of the picture goes back to French structuralism, where it was supposed, just like "iconic language", to be fundamentally based on arbitrary conventions. Nobody nowadays takes seriously the idea of depiction being purely conventional, but we will argue that the same counterclaim should be made with regard to the plastic layer of the picture. The Ganzheitspsychologie of the early 20th century, notably that of the Leipzig School, offered fruitful ideas on how to analyze plastic meanings, as did their later followers in the United States, such as Rudolf Arnheim, on one hand, and Heinz Wellek and Bernard Warren, on the other. It is, however, the rather anecdotic evidence presented by Wolfgang Kohler, a member of the more well-known Berlin school of Ganzheitspsychologie, customarily known as Gestalt psychology, which was taken up more recently by V. S. Ramachandran, and applied in a more systematic way by Felix Ahlner and Jordan Zlatev, which paves the way for a serious study of plastic meanings. In this paper, I try to show that, in semiotic terms, plastic meanings tend to manifest secondary iconicity, which means that they have a rich, but indeterminate, potential for similarity, the meaning of which can only be fixed using structural oppositions, and more precisely, proportionalities, that is, relations between two pairs of opposed terms. From the point of view of the indeterminacy of iconic meaning, the plastic layer of pictures is similar to droodles, which, however, manifest this indeterminacy on the level of depiction, and their meaning are usually settled by the means of labels. Droodles differ from pictures, in the narrow sense, which rely on primary iconicity, and thus convey a determinate meaning on their own precisely on the level of depiction.

When putting semiotics and phenomenology in juxtaposition, the first task necessarily is to find out what a study of meaning, conceiving of itself as an empirical science, has to do with a philosophical school, the business of which it is to secure the epistemological foundations of all the sciences (broadly understood). Our answer, in short (but we will go at some length to show it), is that since all results of phenomenology also count as contributions to phenomenological psychology, the phenomenological method constitutes a part of the panoply of methods offered to semiotics. Our second task will be to review the fragmentary semiotics proposed, originally employing that term, by Edmund Husserl, to gauge its value for contemporary semiotics. Since our investigation of Husserl’s semiotics will demonstrate that it sometimes concerns the sign in a narrow sense, and sometimes broadens up to a study of meaning in general, our third and final task, in this paper, will be to consider a proposal made by a close follower of Husserl, Alfred Schütz, whose idea of a system of relevancies, wedded to Husserl’s notion of sedimentation, might be amended when considered in connection with Umberto Eco’s idea of the encyclopaedia.

Within a broader definition of design, as the conception and planning of everything that is artificial, the place of tools is central. With the help of cognitive semiotics in general and Donald's theory of the evolution of the human mind in particular, we propose a stage model for the evolution of design, consisting of four stages: Proto-design, Simple design, Complex design, and Advanced design, some of which are further divided into substages. We argue that nonhuman animals are capable of Proto-design, but it is only with the advent of stone tool technology in hominins that we witness Simple design. The stages are individuated based on evidence from archaeology and cognitive science, but also on the particular semiotic resources that are novel for each stage: mimesis-based gestures, speech, drawings, and polysemiotic communication. The model suggests both continuities and relative discontinuities in the evolution of design, and more generally, in human bio-cultural evolution.

Many contemporary scholars have recently defended the idea that the agency of things is symmetrical and equivalent to human agency. We propose an alternative approach to artefacts’ agency based on a field study concerned with contextually situated observations of the process of design of artefacts in Amazonia. By means of participant observation and interviews, we address the role of artefacts in relation to human agency. In so doing, we focus on the human-unique capacity for design as it is related to cognitive resources such as intentionality, decision-making, planning, and volitional adaptations of the material world to human purposes. We argue that such cognitive resources are ultimate manifestations of human agency. The findings allow us to conclude that artefacts possess a special form of agency, which operates in different ways from the agency of true agents. This agency is derived: it depends on the actions of true agents, with either function as remote intentions or are required for the artefact to work at the moment of use. Thus, the relation between artefacts and agents is asymmetrical. Given that the derived agency of artefacts allows people to expand their own agency, we propose the notion of enhanced agency for the prosthetic incorporation of artefacts into the agentive capabilities of human agents.

In Krisis,and in many of the preparatory papers for his last published work,Edmund Husserl repeatedly declares his allegiance to the Enlightenment,but,at the same time,always expresses his misgivings about its concrete purport.Like Horkheimer and Adorno,but for somewhat different reasons,he thus succumbs to what Ferrone has termed the philosopher’s conception of the Enlightenment,as opposed to that of the historian of ideas.No doubt Husserl is explicit about not aiming to write a history of ideas,but in so doing he misses the essential thrust of the Enlightenment as being a part of what he himself describes as the European tradition.In accordance with his own notion of generativity,the Enlightenment must be seen as going well beyond the Greek beginnings by epitomizing,in the 18th century,the idea of human rights,as well as that of universal critique.Indeed,it is the discovery of the （rights of the） Other which justifies Husserl’s claim for Europe being the bearer of a universal meaning.These days,however,Enlightenment values,by means of a genuine dialectics,have been brought,in the guise of the so-called Social Justice Theory,to enter into contradiction with themselves,one of the victims of which is Husserl’s notion of Europe.Since the new struggle for Enlightenment,like the classical one,has to be fought out in the Public Sphere,we need to develop a novel Ethics of communication.