In this last for the year CogSeminar, our long-term collaborator David Dunér, professor in the History of Ideas, will outline his proposal for a "cognitive (semiotic) history". Many of us know David as co-editor and author along with Göran Sonesson of the book "Human Lifeworlds: The cognitive semiotic of cultural evolution" (2016), and there is a clear connection between this and the present topic. Welcome to the room where David will present - or else to the zoom link from 15:00.

The last decades have seen a noticeable increase in cognitive studies that have changed the understanding of human thinking. Its relevance for historical research cannot be overlooked any more. In this talk I will explain cognitive history as the study of how human beings in history used their cognitive abilities in order to understand the world around them and to orient themselves in it, but also how the world outside their bodies affected their way of thinking. In focus here is the relationship between history and cognition, the human mind’s interaction with the environment in time and space. I will discusses certain cognitive abilities in interaction with the environment, which can be studied in historical sources, namely: embodied mind, situated cognition, perception, distributed cognition, conceptual metaphors, categorization, intersubjectivity, and communication. These cognitive theories, I hope, can give deeper understanding of how – and not only what – human beings thought, and about the interaction between the human mind and the surrounding world. The most ambitious aim of such a cognitive history could be to inform the research on the cognitive evolution of the human mind: a key topic in cognitive semiotics.