Advanced Issues on Cognitive Science and Semiotics

Description

There seems to be a consensus that many of the classic problems in cognitive science are strongly connected to the fundamental issues of information, meaning and representation. There is, indeed, no domain of research, interested in cognitive processes, that has not been concerned, at some point, with these notions. At the same time, as many authors have noted, these seminal elements of investigation are frequently obscured by terminological conflicts, uncertainties and vagueness. Problematic as they may be, notions of information and representation, or its models, even if only implicitly, are always present in studies on cognitive systems, urging for reliable and sound theoretical basis. North-American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce, founder of the modern theory of signs, defined semiotics as a science of the essential and fundamental nature of all possible varieties of meaning processes (semiosis). Peirce’s concept of semiotics as the ‘formal science of signs’, and the pragmatic notion of meaning as the ‘action of signs’, have had a deep impact in philosophy, psychology, theoretical biology, and cognitive science. The reader will find here a collection of papers that present, from different perspectives, an attempt to relate semiotics and cognitive science with linguistics, logic, and philosophy of biology. As a first broad account of those subjects, it does not specifically focus on or privilege any of the different approaches that have been proposed up to now, but instead gives the reader the opportunity to consider the various directions and topics of research that emerge from such relations. [...] Preface 1 1 A-life, organism and body: the semiotics of emergent levels 5 Claus Emmeche 2 Semiosis and living membranes 19 Jesper Hoffmeyer 3 Biosemiotics and the foundation of cybersemiotics 37 Søren Brier 4 Information and direct perception: a new approach 59 Anthony Chemero 5 Revisiting the dynamical hypothesis 73 Tim van Gelder 6 The dynamical approach to cognition: inferences from language 93 Robert F. Port 7 Models of abduction 123 Paul Bourgine Contributors 139