VERSUS n. 112-113 (january-december 2011)

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A recent turn in social and cognitive sciences focuses on the role of actions and networks of interaction, making practices central for cognitive processes. While initially an embarrassing variable to be locally managed, pragmatic processes become a necessary condition for description of cognitive processes. Cognition, thus, far from being conceived as localized (for instance in the mind and in the body), appears now to be distributed and situated in a bundle of practices and emerges as a mediated process between a plurality of instances that cross and redefine the biological barriers of the individual. Extended mind, distributed cognition, situated action and cognition and actor-network theory are all different approaches that dwell on the crucial role of the mediation between human and non-human actors (including artifacts, collective subjects, semiotic systems, etc.), of the intersubjective and interactive dimension and of the strong operative and cognitive role of the production of signs and representations. The aim is not a forced unification of this multi-disciplinary heterogeneity, as much as it seeks a joint effort that, through the existing differences, can highlight: i) the polyphony of a mind irreducible to processes happening under the skin of the individual; ii) the multiplicity of the meaning trajectories the action; iii) the delocalization of cognition inside networks in which the individual is only a node and not the exclusive organizing centre or referent. Through articles by Michael Wheeler, Massimiliano Cappuccio, Shaun Gallagher, Claudio Paolucci, Riccardo Fusaroli, Tommaso Granelli, Charles Goodwin, David Kirsh, Ivan Rosero, Robert Lecusay and Michael Cole, this Versus sketches such turns, bringing the role of semiotics, both as a discipline and as a field of problems, on the foreground. In the trajectories here delineated it is possible to see the seeds of a structural conception of cognition, able to critically keep together functionalist and enactivist perspective.