Cognitive Semiotics: An Overview

Abstract

This chapter revises evolving theories on cognition in relation to semiotics, the transdisciplinary study and doctrine of sign systems, and meaning-making. Cognition entails very complex networks of biological processes and actions that encompass perception, attention, manipulation of objects, memory mechanisms, and the formation of knowledge by means of direct experience as well as by learning from others, for which forms of communication and comprehension are also necessary. In view of this complexity, many different disciplines are involved in the study of cognition. These include neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, semiotics, linguistics, and more recently, computational intelligence, information processing, and neural networks used in machine learning, to name but a few. The chapter opens with an introduction to the field of cognitive semiotics and continues with a brief presentation of the interdisciplinary evolution of the 4Es. It also includes an in-depth discussion of Peircean semiotics in relation to the approaches known as wide cognition.