Welcome to the first CogSeminar for the Fall semester! Sara and I will present versions of our IACS6 presentations in Rome in June, from a theme session devoted to "comparing key concepts": with ca. 30 minute presentations, and 20 minute discussions. Other IACS presentations will follow in this 2 per seminar, in the following weeks. As you can see for the abstracts below: we will focus on what are perhaps the most important concepts: sign and subjectivity! I will send the zoom link for this a week in advance to all who are on the mailing list! And those who are there IRL are welcome to join the post-seminar at Valvet!

Zlatev:  As well-known,Sonesson has defined the sign by combining Husserl’s notion of appresentation with Piaget’s notion of differentiation, making the sign a form of  second-order intentionality, where the expression is perceived  but non-thematic, while it is the referent, as mediated by the content, that is thematic. I will define a particular version of this approach, and argue that it is theoretically and empirically productive, since it offers a clear distinction between signs and signals, and identifies sign use proper (and not language) as the unique feature of human semiosis. In the interpretative semiotics of Eco (1976), there a number of similarities between his notion of sign-function and the above: a dynamic, context-sensitive mapping between expression and content, under the agentive power of an interpreter, possible also under conditions of ratio-difficilis, where interpretative conventions are yet not established. On the other hand, Eco insists that signs are exclusively cultural, and are necessarily defined by their differential relations, implying that all signs, including pictures, are essentially conventional. Most in contrast to cognitive semiotics, Eco argues that subjectivity is not a primary force, but a secondary effect of the sign function. 

Lenninger: Subjectivity occupies a central, yet complex, place in cognitive semiotics. Precisely because cognitive semiotics is constitutively tied to semiosis, it cannot escape phenomenology: meaning-making appears as a lived, subjective process, which any adequate approach must thematise. Subjectivity can be conceptualised in several, partly diverging but related ways. First, and most generally, subjectivity is transcendental form: not an inner entity, but the structure of meaning in consciousness, the network of intentional and horizon-structures in virtue of which things appear as something for a subject at all. Second, it can be understood as in “genetic” phenomenology, as a temporally unfolding stream of consciousness in which the “I/we” functions as a pole constituted through retention, protention, habit and sedimentation, rather than presupposed as a ready-made substance. Third, as a conception of embodied subjectivity, where perceptual orientation and bodily self-localisation are basic conditions for any intentional directedness. Fourth, by analyses of empathy, the lived body of the other and the lifeworld point to an intersubjectively open subjectivity, in which the very sense of objectivity is co-constituted through the mutual implication of one’s own and other bodies in a shared world of experience. The proposal treats such a stratified notion of subjectivity as both central to cognitive semiotics and one of the field’s distinctive contributions to the interdisciplinary study of meaning.