Welcome to this seminar, where Manuel Quezada who has taught phenomenology and semiotics in Chile, and has studied cognitive semiotics in Lund, addresses the key issue about the relation between semiosis (in both broad reading as meaning making and narrow reading as sign use) and intentionality, following the tradition of Göran Sonesson. Online vistors should have their cameras on for introductions at the start, and questions at the end (at least).

Views on the relationship between semiosis and intentionality divides into two main camps. On the one hand are those who take intentionality as pure directedness toward a content. This includes semioticians such as Tiercelin (1983, 2013) and Deely (2007), who, drawing on medieval sources, read Peirce as offering a realist, object-grounded conception of semiosis. On the hand are those who treat intentionality not only as directedness but also as having a creative (ontologically generative) force. On this phenomenologically informed side are Zlatev (2018) and Zlatev and Mouratidou (2024), who, besides having an object-grounded semiosis, also define layers of constitutive acts in semiosis, understood as meaning-making in general.
   I will argue that the late Göran Sonesson's work prepared a solution that integrates these two traditions. In his posthumous book, Sonesson (in press) developed an original synthesis of Husserl's phenomenology and Peirce's semiotic. From this, he introduced two key notions: (a) the double (or indirect) intentionality of signification and (b) the double asymmetry of the sign. In this talk I will focus on the double / indirect intentionality: how it unites semiosis and intentionality, and how this shows that semiosis cannot be non-cognitive.
   The plan is to first review medieval intentionality and Husserlian intentionality and their respective relations to objects, then explain how Sonesson layers these intentionalities into what he calls double or indirect intentionality, and its consequences for semiosis in general.

Deely, J. (2007). Intentionality and semiotics: a story of mutual fecundation. Scranton: University of Scranton Press.
Sonesson, G. (in press). Cognitive Semiotic Investigations: From Meaning to Pictures and Communication. 
Tiercelin, C. (1985). Logique, psychologie et métaphysique: Les fondements du pragmatisme selon C. S. Peirce. Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 16(2), 241–264.
Tiercelin, C. (2013). C. S. Peirce et le pragmatisme (Nouvelle éd.). Paris, France: Collège de France.
Zlatev, J. (2018). Meaning making from life to language: The Semiotic Hierarchy and phenomenology. Cognitive Semiotics 11 (1).
Zlatev, J., Mouratidou, A. Extending the Life World: Phenomenological Triangulation Along Two Planes. Biosemiotics 17, 407–429 (2024).