The elusory kingdoms of the mind: Glosses on José Luis Caivano’s paper
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Göran Sonesson
Göran Sonesson is a semiotician specializing in pictorial, cultural, and cognitive semiotics. In recent years, he has also been concerned with the epistemology of semiotics, mainly on a phenomenological basis, as well as with an evolutionary foundation for semiosis. His main book-length work is Pictorial semiotics (LUP 1989), which, among other things, is the most explicit argument published so far against the structuralist critique of iconicity, and a defense of a phenomenlogical-ecological view of perception and the world taken for granted. Sonesson has published numerous articles in many anthologies, as well as in journals such as
Semiotica, VISIO, Sign System Studies, Degrés, RSSI, Signa, Signata, and Cognitive Development . He was one of the founders of the International Association for Visual Semiotics (AISV/IAVS) and has also been active in the boards of International Association for Semiotic Studies (AIS/IASS), the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies (NASS), and the International Association of Cognitive Semiotics (IACS).
Abstract
Peirce’s best idea, and the one least implemented by himself and his followers, is that of an ethics of terminology. Using this ethics as a tool, we suggest that many Peircean terms are in fact misleading, or, as he said himself at the end of his life, “injurious.” From the point of view of cognitive semiotics, there is no reason to abide by Peirce’s definition of semiosis, but, taking up the two quotes offered by Caivano, we demonstrate that they lead to different results, one being phenomenological and the other formalist. We go on to suggest that Peirce himself cannot have believed in the first definition, because then there could be no point in fallibilism and the community of scholars. In fact, we claim that what the different definitions of the “kingdoms” of nature show is precisely that human beings can liberate themselves from their Umwelt and adopt the scientific world-view, and this is also what we have to do when analysing semiosis itself.
About the author
Göran Sonesson is a semiotician specializing in pictorial, cultural, and cognitive semiotics. In recent years, he has also been concerned with the epistemology of semiotics, mainly on a phenomenological basis, as well as with an evolutionary foundation for semiosis. His main book-length work is Pictorial semiotics (LUP 1989), which, among other things, is the most explicit argument published so far against the structuralist critique of iconicity, and a defense of a phenomenlogical-ecological view of perception and the world taken for granted. Sonesson has published numerous articles in many anthologies, as well as in journals such as Semiotica, VISIO, Sign System Studies, Degrés, RSSI, Signa, Signata, and Cognitive Development. He was one of the founders of the International Association for Visual Semiotics (AISV/IAVS) and has also been active in the boards of International Association for Semiotic Studies (AIS/IASS), the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies (NASS), and the International Association of Cognitive Semiotics (IACS).
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©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The emergence and nature of genres – a social-dynamic account
- Cognition and semiotic processing of luminous stimuli in various orders of the natural world
- The elusory kingdoms of the mind: Glosses on José Luis Caivano’s paper
- Swampman encounters an Immediate Object
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The emergence and nature of genres – a social-dynamic account
- Cognition and semiotic processing of luminous stimuli in various orders of the natural world
- The elusory kingdoms of the mind: Glosses on José Luis Caivano’s paper
- Swampman encounters an Immediate Object
