Opis
What is meaning-making? How do new domains of meanings emerge in the course of child’s development? What is the role of consciousness in this process? What is the difference between making sense of pointing, pantomime and language utterances? Are great apes capable of meaning-making? What about dogs? Parrots? Can we, in any way, relate their functioning and behavior to a child’s? Are artificial systems capable of meaning-making? The above questions motivated the emergence of cognitive semiotics as a discipline devoted to theoretical and empirical studies of meaning-making processes. As a transdisciplinary approach to meaning and meaning-making, cognitive semiotics necessarily draws on a different disciplines: starting with philosophy of mind, via semiotics and linguistics, cognitive science(s), neuroanthropology, developmental and evolutionary psychology, comparative studies, and ending with robotics. The book presents extensively this discipline. It is a very eclectic story: highly abstract problems of philosophy of mind are discussed and, simultaneously, results of very specific experiments on picture recognition are presented. On the one hand, intentional acts involved in semiotic activity are elaborated; on the other, a computational system capable of a limited interpretation of excerpts from Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass is described. Specifically, the two roads to cognitive semiotics are explored in the book: phenomenological-enactive path developed by the so-called Lund school and author’s own proposal: a functional-cognitivist path. Spis treściIntroduction: How to Approach Meaning? 9 Acknowledgements 17 Part I. Cognitive Semiotics: The Basics 19 Chapter 1. Introducing Cognitive Semiotics 21 1.1 The beginnings 21 1.2 Extension of the term “semiotics” 24 1.3 Methodology of cognitive semiotics 26 1.4 Transdisciplinarity 29 1.5 Phenomenological contributions 30 1.6 “Third stage” of cognitive science 31 1.7 Key research interests 32 1.7.1 Metatheoretical considerations 32 1.7.2 Semiotic development and evolution 33 1.7.3 Multimodality and gestures 37 1.8 Cognitive semiotics and cognitivism 38 Chapter 2. The Semiotic Hierarchy Framework 41 2.1 Meaning theory – initial remarks 41 2.2 The Semiotic Hierarchy as a theory of meaning 43 2.2.1 Level 1: Life 43 2.2.2 Level 2: Consciousness 45 2.2.3 Between life and consciousness: the first transition 46 2.2.4 Level 3: Signs 48 2.2.5 Between consciousness and signs: the second transition 49 2.2.6 Level 4: Language 50 2.2.7 From signs to language: the third transition 52 2.3 The Semiotic Hierarchy: some objections 54 Part II. Minds and Meanings 61 Chapter 3. “Analytic” Philosophy of Mind 63 3.1 The Cartesian heritage 63 3.2 Meaningful behavior 66 3.2.1 Behaviorism and cognitive semiotics: mind, body, behavior 70 3.2.2 Problem of other minds 70 3.2.3 First-person knowledge 71 3.3 Reduction to the neural: meaning in the brain 72 3.3.1 Phenomenological fallacy and other problems 73 3.4 Meaning and function 75 3.4.1 On the way to functionalism: causal profiles 75 3.4.2 Mind and function 76 3.4.3 Qualia 79 3.4.4 The representational theory of mind 80 3.4.5 Functionalism extended 82 3.4.6 Functionalism and cognitive semiotics 84 3.4.7 Extended mind and meaning-making 86 3.5 Consciousness, functionally understood 87 3.6 The subjective mind 90 Chapter 4. The Phenomenological Mind and Meaning-Making 93 4.1 How should phenomenology be approached? 93 4.2 Intentionality 95 4.2.1 Perception 97 4.2.2 Remembering 101 4.2.3 Imagination and anticipation 103 4.2.4 Signitive intentions 103 4.2.5 Pictorial intention 105 4.2.6 Indicational intentions 106 4.2.7 Categorial intentions 107 4.2.8 Types of intentionality and the Semiotic Hierarchy 109 4.3 So where are meanings? 109 4.4 The phenomenological method 111 4.5 Lifeworld 115 4.6 Intersubjectivity 116 4.7 Embodiment 119 4.8 A way to science 120 4.9 Phenomenology applied 122 4.9.1 Neurophenomenology 122 4.9.2 Front-loading phenomenology 124 4.9.3 A note on heterophenomenology 126 4.10 Summary: taking phenomenology seriously 127 Part III. Cognition 133 Chapter 5. Cognitivist Approach to Cognition 135 5.1 “Cognitivism” or standard cognitive science 135 5.2 Symbolic approach: the three basic ideas 136 5.2.1 Limitations: magical number 7 137 5.2.2 The generative approach to language 138 5.2.3 TOTE: organization of behavior and behind behavior 140 5.2.4 Cognitivism in a nutshell: perception 141 5.3 Connectionist approaches 143 5.3.1 Overview of the architecture 144 5.3.2 Connectionist representations 145 5.3.3 Manipulations on representations 147 5.4 Representations revisited 148 5.5 What cognitive science is supposed not to be 149 5.6 Standard cognitive science and meaning-making 151 5.7 Cognitivism – summary 153 5.8 Departure from cognitivism: dynamical systems 154 5.8.1 Dynamical systems – applications 156 Chapter 6. Beyond Cognitivism? 159 6.1 Problems with cognitivism 159 6.2 The enactive approach: cognition as interaction 160