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This article is primarily an extended summary of a talk presented to the Seventh Conference of the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies (NASS), Lund University, Sweden in May 2011, presenting the Mirror System Hypothesis, which emphasizes the role of imitation and manual gesture in the evolution of the language-ready brain. An Afterword offers pointers to a number of subsequent publications that build upon the theory presented there.

It has been clear for some time – particularly since Krampen’s pioneering introduction of phytosemiotics in 1981 – that semiosis extends beyond the animal world. Indeed, since at least the 1990 proposal of the notion of a physiosemiosis prior to and independent of life in the universe, in a work that Sebeok deemed at the time “the only successful introduction to semiotics in English,” the question of the full extent of the action of signs has remained both open and pressing. In this essay, however, my aim is to situate as clearly as possible zoösemiosis and anthroposemiosis within semiosis understood in its full extent, both to show how the former permeates the latter and how the latter transcends at the level of Innenwelt the communicative extent or limitations of the former. Finally, my aim is to show that the affective states of animal life – cathexis – along with the cognitive states together provenate the relations which in particular make of the animal surroundings a “wold” (Umwelt) meaningful to the animal and irreducible to the subjectivities and intersubjectivities that constitute the environment in its awareness-independent dimension as physical.

Cognitive semiotics has an experiential basis: its thesis is that the origin of meaning – a problem that classical semiotics usually glosses over – lies in the sense system. This paper will outline the mechanisms that make possible such meaning construction, but its main focus will be the impact of the cognitive perspective on the epistemology of semiotics. It implies a process of naturalization of the humanities and the social sciences. This naturalization has triggered harsh criticism: its arguments are supposed to be circular; these are secretly founded on a postulate of innateness; it is at the service of an individualistic ideology in tune with a neoliberal society…. The paper will examine these pieces of criticism, which lead us to oppose and challenge both neural autonomism and the culturalist autonomism inherent in classical European semiotics. The conclusion is a plea for a continuum between nature and culture.

A widespread assumption in Danish consumer law is that if the package of a food product carries a picture of a potentially taste-giving ingredient (say, a strawberry), then consumers will expect the corresponding taste to stem primarily from that ingredient rather than from artificial flavouring. However, this is not expected to be the case if the packaging carries only a verbal indication of the potential ingredient (say, the word strawberry ). We put these assumptions to experimental test. Our goal was to contribute firmer evidence to the legal decision-making in the present field while at the same time providing new perspectives and data to the general theoretical debate on the communicative potential of pictures versus words. Our findings showed that pictures did have an effect on assessments of naturalness that was however marginal compared to that of product type. Moreover, participants’ general level of food knowledge had a significant influence on their expectations about naturalness.