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The Semiotic Mind. Beliefs, Habits and Extended Cognition

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Cognitive Semiotics

Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology ((PEPRPHPS,volume 24))

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It has also been anti-cognitive if we take into account the generative tradition.

  2. 2.

    Youtube. 2006 (16th July), Umberto Eco, Semiotica: origini, definizione, sguardo sul presente. Interview in Monte Cerignone.)

  3. 3.

    “Logic, in its general sense, is, as I believe I have shown, only another name for semiotic (σημειωτική), the quasi-necessary, or formal, doctrine of signs.” (CP 2.277) MS L 751902, MS 478, MS 693, MS 640.

  4. 4.

    Obviously, it is not a problem of memory; it is the fact that perception relies on habits built up from previous cognitions (priors).

  5. 5.

    This idea of previous knowledge circulating in the community, that will inspire Umberto Eco’s idea of Encyclopedia, can be usefully thought as a cognitive semiotics’ institution, a set of human and non-human interrelationships embedded in different semiotic and cognitive systems. Each of them may be defined not simply by semiotic and cognitive principles, but by “norms and practices, and by less formal and imperfect social interactions that may involve a variety of biases. Different task-players are dynamically related in a gestalt arrangement such that an intervention (above a certain threshold) on one node or element in the system will lead to modulations in other nodes or elements, or in the whole”. (Gallagher et al. 2019: 7).

  6. 6.

    I follow here Fabbrichesi 2016.

  7. 7.

    Obviously, this is not true inside the “Peircean community”, where many important works have been published on this topic. In my opinion, the most important is still Parker 1992. The main writings by Peirce on phenomenology are MS 1101, 831, 478, 304–6, 336–7 and 908: all published in The Essential Peirce vol. 2. An important Italian work which deals with many of the problems we are discussing here is Calcaterra (ed.) 2006.

  8. 8.

    On Peirce’s ideas about subjectivity, see Colapietro 1989.

  9. 9.

    This abandon of the subject will be confirmed in W1: 75 & 78 and will represent a constant in Peirce’s thought, up to its complete refusal in the Cognitive Essays from 1868 (cf. CP 5.313).

  10. 10.

    W1: 75, 152, 154 & 1.559, cf. Apel (1967: 203–4).

  11. 11.

    As for example: “You will observe that under the term ‘Subject’ I include not only the subject nominative, but also what the grammarians call the direct and the indirect object, together, in some cases, with nouns governed by prepositions” (CP 4.543).

  12. 12.

    Peirce’s example is renowned: “the stove is black”, where “stove” is defined as sub-stantia and takes the place of the sub-jectum of the proposition of which you predicate some properties (its blackness). We can recall here Aristotle’s definition: “The subject is the one of which everything else is predicated, while it is itself not predicated of anything else. And so we must first determine the nature of this; for that which underlies a thing primarily is thought to be in the truest sense its substance.” (Metaphysics, VIII, 3, 1029. Cf. also Categories c, 5, 2).

  13. 13.

    The expression “community of monads” is itself symptomatic of Husserl’s approach to the problem.

  14. 14.

    In Time and Being (1927), the Dasein is casting his light (being, Sein) on the object (Seinde). Cf. Paolucci 2010: Chap. 5.

  15. 15.

    Recall that an opposition is defined as “participative” when one of the terms of the opposition can also assume, in certain contexts, the semantic value which is usually attributed to its opposing element. For example, the linguistic opposition “man versus woman” is participative because the term “man” can locally also assume the semantic value of “woman” in sentences like “Man is a rational animal”. In such cases, “woman” is defined as an intensive term, because it concentrates meaning in one single zone of the semantic category, while “man” is an extensive term, because its meaning is distributed across the whole semantic category. In the above sentence, “man” doesn’t only mean “male”, but “male+female”. Similarly, in Peirce’s definition of the “external mind”, “external” has exactly this kind of “extensive” value. Peirce is saying that the mind is external+internal and he adds that the internal part of the mind, that has been considered as the only real one, is in fact a phenomenon and thus a sign of the external part.

  16. 16.

    See Paolucci 2017a, Bellucci and Pietarinen 2016, Dondero and Fontanille 2012.

  17. 17.

    An introduction to the Peircean existential graphs system can be found in Roberts 1973 and a wonderful reading which connects it to the theory of continuity and to the Logic of Relatives can be found in Zalamea 2003.

  18. 18.

    Cf. Zeman 1964, Roberts 1973 and Zalamea 2003.

  19. 19.

    Personal communication. See also Zalamea 2003.

  20. 20.

    The plural form “cognitive sciences” start having a currency only a few decades later, following Gardner’s (1987) still insightful reconstruction, that individuates the birth of cognitive science in two main conferences: “Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior” held in September 1948 at CalTech, to which von Neumann, McCullough and Lashley participated; and “Symposium on Information Theory” held at MIT in September 1956, to which Newell, Simon, Chomsky, Miller, Bruner, Goodnow and Austin took part.

  21. 21.

    See Fusaroli (2011: 99), Fusaroli and Paolucci (2011).

  22. 22.

    For a discussion, see Caravà 2019.

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

    Claudio Paolucci

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Paolucci, C. (2021). The Semiotic Mind. Beliefs, Habits and Extended Cognition. In: Cognitive Semiotics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42986-7_3

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