Article

The Social Horizon of Embodied Language and Material Symbols

by Riccardo Fusaroli

in Versus n. 112-113, The External Mind. Perspectives on Semiosis, Distribution and Situation in Cognition, pp.97-123

Abstract (english)

Both semiotics and the cognitive sciences are deeply concerned with the origins and articulations of knowledge and thought. while semiotics assumed the primacy of language and culture in determining the ways and the content of thought, the initial versions of cognitivism assumed the primacy of universal mechanisms internal to the individual. By sketching a minimal history of the concept of cognition in cognitive sciences, we argue that a progressive convergence is happening, fostered by the embodied, extended and enacted epistemological turns. Cognition is increasingly investigated as an activity constitutively relying on culture, context and history.
By building upon Peirce's philosophical framework and its semiotic developments we sketch a pragmaticist approach to meaning and cognition and we argue that this perspective can contribute to the epistemological turns of cognitive sciences by articulating a functionalist extended perspective with the organism-based value-orientation of enactivism.