Spaces, domains, and meanings: Essays in cognitive semiotics

Two separate trends in the study of meaning have been crossing each other’s paths since the 1980s: the cognitive sciences and structural semiotics. One is as closely linked to neuro-psychology as the other is to phenomenology and aesthetics. But both aim at grasping basic, foundational properties of the human conceptualization of reality. None of them is particularly engaged with the militant nominalistic and relativistic schools of cultural studies, while both are open to, and even committed to, comparative cultural analysis and the analysis of such specifications and differentiations as occur across languages and cultures of our species. A common field of phenomena is open to contemporary research on meaning—comprising the conundrums of linguistic semantics, the vast field of behavioral studies, affective science, psychiatry, gestural semiotics, the study of signs and representations in discourse, in social life, in art, and in perception as such—and appeals to a host of disciplines and to experiential as well as experimental methodologies. The shared ontological claim—that meaning can be understood both in term