Qu’est-ce qu’un citoyen global ? La vision d’une sémiotique cognitive

Abstract

In order to think “globally”, despite the differences we so enjoy and value, we have to accept using global notions, of society, subjectivity, language, and semiosis, evidently developed in science-based frameworks when possible. Here, we will firstly give a general and global ecological account of what a human society is, in terms of what it extracts from and expels back into nature. The stratified model obtained will serve as a general and global frame for a characterisation of the human life-world and its experiential strata and domains. Human principles of authority, power, and truth depend on a perspective of this eco-ontological kind. We will secondly consider how signs and meaning unfold according to such a global, indeed universal, characterisation : meaning falls into a stable typology including performative, epistemic, and affective modes, and both sign types and types of language use anchor these modes as semantic formats in the discourses. Discourse structures, including the narrative, the argumentative, and the descriptive formats, ground the possible forms of knowledge available to a global citizen: history, philosophy, science — complementary to our forms of art and religion, whose structural origin must be sought in the psyche. However, instead of opposing psyche and world, i.e. life-world, we will finally try to show how a psycho-semiotic study must also directly relate to an eco-semiotic study, because the mind is itself shaped by the semiotic world that evolved with it during its 50,000 years of modernity. Ethics, aesthetics, and critical thinking must now converge, in view of the contemporary threats, to defend the possibility of a global, planetary habitat and humanity.