The place of the picture in the development of human beings.

In proposing their theories concerning the development of humans out of the higher primates, psychologists and neurologists such as Deacon, Tomasello and Donald have, each in his peculiar way, accomplished “a semiotic turn”. But these attempts leave at lot to be desired. Most notably, perhaps, they are all (with the exception of Donald, to some degree) incapable of assigning a place to the picture in their evolutionary framework, although everything tends to suggest that picture interpretation is as peculiar a capacity of human beings as is verbal language. Most of them never arrive at a concept of sign that is not simply coterminous with language. On the other hand, semiotics also has a lot to learn from cognitive science, in particular its closeness to empirical investigatio