The mental architecture of meaning: a view from cognite semiotics

Authors

  • Per Aage Brandt Cognitive Science, Center for Cognition and Culture/Pesquisador

Abstract

Mental content, also called meaning, is ostensibly organized in a layered architecture based on integration of material from lower to higher levels. Thus, qualia are integrated in objects, and these in situations, etc. However, I argue and show that there are significant transversal bindings connecting material of non-adjacent levels, and that these bindings constitute the structural entities we call signs, or semiotic functions. The finding of these bindings therefore grounds semiotics in cognition, and it allows cognitive studies to progress into the realm of cultural phenomena, communication, and the semiosis of language and thought. What I present in this article is a special version of the very base of the approach we now call cognitive semiotics.

Key words: Iconicity, symbolicity, semantic integration, mental architecture, cognitive semiotics.

Author Biography

Per Aage Brandt, Cognitive Science, Center for Cognition and Culture/Pesquisador

Per Aage Brandt, born 1944, Ph.D. from University of Copenhagen 1971 (L‟analyse phrastique, 1973), Doctorat d‟Etat from Sorbonne Paris I in 1987 (La charpente modale du sens, 1992). Grand Prix de Philosophie de l‟Académie française 2002. Founder of the Center for Semiotics at the University of Aarhus. Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland. Recent publication: Spaces, Domains, and Meaning, 2004. Founding (2007- ) editor of Cognitive Semiotics. Multidisciplinary Journal on Meaning and Mind.

Published

2021-02-24