Cognitive Semiotics

Signs, Mind, and Meaning

Per Aage Brandt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350143326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Interrogating the relatively new field of cognitive semiotics, this book explores shared issues in cognitive science and semiotics. Building on research from recent decades, Per Aage Brandt investigates the potential of a cognitive semiotic approach to enhance our understanding of language, thought and semiosis in general. Introducing a critical, non-standard approach both to cognitive science and to semiotics, this book discusses the understanding of meaning and mind through four major dimensions; mental architecture, mental spaces, discourse coherence and eco-organization. Encompassing a rich variety of topics and debates, Cognitive Semiotics outlines several bridges between 'continental' and 'analytic' thinking in the study of semantics, pragmatics, discourse and the philosophy of language and mind.

1

Introduction

The essays in this book originated from my work at the Center for Semiotics, University of Aarhus, at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, and finally at Case Western Reserve University, all written since the turn of the century and most of them after my latest volume of essays, Spaces, Domains, and Meaning (2004). I want, first and foremost, to thank my editors Paul Bouissac and Andrew Wardell for opening their series Advances in Semiotics to my book and for their insightful suggestions as to the difficult selection of texts from the much larger inventory of recent papers in cognitive semiotics I proposed.

Where This Comes From

The direction in research on meaning represented in this book draws both on cognitive science, including linguistics, semantics, poetics, and on general semiotics, including the often competing schools of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles S. Peirce. It emerged in the 1980s, when the interest in force dynamics in cognitive semantics—as proposed by Ronald Langacker, Leonard Talmy, Eve Sweetser—met the semiotic interest in dynamic phenomena in structural semantics as understood in Algirdas-Julien Greimas’ Paris school. In my own history, this happened early in the 1980s, while I prepared my Thèse d’Etat at the Sorbonne with Professor Greimas, on the modalities, and discussed with my own generation of scholars, in particular philosopher Jean Petitot and linguist Wolfgang Wildgen. Both had direct contacts with the mathematician-philosopher René Thom, who had developed a “qualitative mathematics” for purposes of morphological, biological, and linguistic analyses. Thom’s “morpho-genetics” appeared to be compatible with Greimas’ structural semantics, especially via the reanalysis of dynamical schemas that allowed us to account for and rewrite many semantic formalizations in the more logical style used by Greimasian semioticians. Talmy’s model of force dynamics and his work on causation, as well as Sweetser’s work on the modalities, fitted well in this emergent framework, and Scandinavian semiotics of the 1990s now became a laboratory of the new, dynamical, cognitive semiotics, in particular at the Center for Semiotics at the University of Aarhus—an institution of which the glossematic, structural linguist Louis Hjelmslev had been one of the founding fathers. Then the cognitive literary scholar Mark Turner and the logician Gilles Fauconnier came into the picture with their mental space theory (MST) and its prolongation, the conceptual blending analysis, which we had the opportunity to discuss in San Diego, at Stanford, in Aarhus, and later in Cleveland. In my Danish context, it became clear rather early that a semiotic elaboration of this theory was possible, and that it was even needed in order to take its potential insights out of the rather nominalistic analytic framework and place it in a viable phenomenological environment. We thus developed an “Aarhus model” of semiotic blending, described at length by Line Brandt (2013), who contributed substantially. We created a journal, Cognitive Semiotics, in 2007 and, later, a supporting association. My role in the latter is now marginal; after finishing my teaching career, I have returned to my former research milieu in France.

Semiotics was often conceived as the more or less intuitive study of signs in society and of their direct and indirect messages, the latter to discover and criticize, as in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, or as a social extension of logic, devoted to the study of inferences in informal thinking in communication, fiction, and discourse, as in Umberto Eco’s The Absent Structure. There were hardly any semiotic attempts to philosophically ground the research on communication in a phenomenology of meaning, despite the impact of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Signs, or in a study of human cognition, despite Jean Piaget’s Structuralism, that is, of the role of the mind’s own configurations in the configurations of signs and language. In short, signs and signification were one thing, and minds and cognition were seen as something totally different. Semiotics, in the humanities, was too distant from any idea of “hard science” to approach the underlying questions.

The classical cognitive sciences, psychology and linguistics, are experimental disciplines that often prefer to avoid theoretical commitments, apart from evolutionary hypotheses, and although it is generally accepted that cognition is in a sense both individual and collective, there are few theoretical suggestions as to how the “collectivization” of cognition happens. In view of the fact that human beings spend most of their lives exchanging signs of all kinds with conspecifics and animals, and that these exchanges manifestly determine much of the mind’s properties, it is also the fact that these cognitive disciplines have long missed the opportunity to develop a noticeable interest in semiotics (despite David McNeill’s gesture studies).

Cognitive studies need to become (more) semiotic, as much as semiotics needs to become (more) cognitive, if a more fully developed research into mind, meaning, and signs is to be achieved. This is the general claim of this book. The essays offered in this book suggest some basic principles and models that typically address both the cognitive and the semiotic side of meaning. The stratifying model I call mental architecture describes a fundamental dimension in meaning formation, one that language follows rather closely. The mental space model describes the elementary principles of more complex meaning formation via conceptual blending, a process rooted in communication. The model of semantic domains shows how complex meanings, on higher levels of the architecture, naturally unfold, across cultures, as different modes of experience and imagination. My last essay in this book, inspired by the difficult question of the semiotic status of money—is it a sign?—explores the social and ecological grounds of meaning formation and finds, among other surprising things, that these meaning modes give rise to a canonical series of expressive modes that might explain both the sign classes and the basic ecological structure of human societies. This finding changes our view of how society and subjectivity are related.

What Happens in This Book?

Chapter 2 offers an episode of my inquiry into the metaphysics of meaning as springing from classical rationalism and in particular, opposing within the framework of rationalist thinking, the “dualism” of Descartes and the “monism” of Spinoza. Grosso modo it can be said that works of cognitive science prefer references to Spinoza and Spinozist patterns of reasoning, hence the influence of logical empiricism in these works, whereas semiotics is “continental” in the sense of walking in Descartes’ footsteps. Spinoza is to Descartes as cognition to semiotics. The contrast between these two lines in modern rationalism is striking. I try to pinpoint the essential questions involved, such as the understanding of the relations holding between mind and body, Descartes’ res cogitans and res extensa—the immaterial meanings and the material things, which in Spinoza are aspects, attributes, viewpoints, or facets of the very same entities. Descartes posits possible causal relations in both directions between mind and body, since they are different but connected substances or realities, while his critic, Spinoza, rejects such relations, given that for him, minds and bodies, or concepts and material referents of concepts, are ontologically the same. Spinoza therefore rejects the possibility of an autonomous semantics, which for Descartes is an obvious possibility. This philosophical debate of course concerns a cognitive semiotics directly. My conclusion recommends a mostly Cartesian but more explicitly embodied and Spinoza-friendly phenomenological ontology more generously inviting empirical research on signified meaning. My particular use of the terms body, bodily, embodied, embodiment is due to this preliminary philosophical inquiry.

Chapter 3 explores the mental architecture of perceived meanings that integrate to form the levels of mental content that attention can fixate: qualia integrate into objects that integrate into scenarios, scenarios integrate into concepts, and concepts eventually inform our affective states. Five levels are distinguished and compared to the possible levels of signifiers in language. Mental contents span from perception to concepts that make our affects meaningful. Affective states in turn influence our somatic states, so we may think of the afferent, integrative processes of consciousness as extending from the somatic sensory realm to the equally somatic realm beyond consciousness. “Mind” runs from perceptive soma to affective soma. Contents are furthermore signified by efferent processes linking lower-level signifiers to higher-level signifieds. Since the linked items can be stabilized in social exchange, signs can be read as they are expressed, in afference as in efference. Signs work both ways. I show that iconicity is a particularly clear case.

Chapter 4 presents a narrative model of situational and actantial meaning in animal and human consciousness, compatible with the architecture just shown. On the level of scenario representation, a dynamic constellation of narrative “actants” emerges. The subject is intentionally attracted to a value object but has to confront an antagonist and seek help from an adjuvant, who also may be determined by the same attractor. The resulting intersubjective interactions involve mimetic fights with antagonists and symbolic exchanges with adjuvants, that is, semiotic acts delaying the access to the object and thereby dramatizing the scenario. Immediate situational awareness thus implies a narrative default setting of intersubjective phenomenology, and the essay shows how this leads to affective perspectives determining both an ethical condition (based on helping versus harming) and an aesthetic perspective. The affective investment of the object may singularize it as the unique target of desire and inscribe it in a logic of love that ends in self-consciousness and something like the momentary disappearance of the self in higher-order instants of impersonal “pure thought.” None of this could happen without the narrative grounds of immediate situational consciousness. However, it takes many cognitive-semiotic steps to reach such a final level of meaning.

Chapter 5 takes us further in the direction of otherness in language, namely toward a view of coherence in discourse as built on dialogue, a view and a model that explain the linking of arguments in coherent discourse as based on presupposed, implicit, virtual interpersonal exchange set in terms of the pragmatic and semantic relation between speaker and hearer, writer and reader, in discourse. I first offer a pragmatic text example, then an application of the analysis to the understanding of conditionality as an implicit interpersonal and dialogical relation. My second pragmatic example is somewhat poetic, a simulated prayer found in the media of American political and religious communication. It shows us a remarkable negotiation with God. Finally, I present and comment on three stanzas by the renowned American poet Rosmarie Waldrop, whose contemporary “language poetry” would be unreadable without the dialogical approach here recommended. Language is thoroughly structured by and for dialogue, from internal sentence grammar to coherent social discourse.

Chapter 6 presents the theory of mental spaces and the technical development of conceptual blending theory. It applies the philosophical criticism (discussed in Chapter 2) to the problematic aspects of these theories or models, in view of a new version of MST that depends less on analytic (Spinozan) views of meaning, and which makes possible and even necessary a semiotic explicitation of the grounds of blending in semiosis and particularly in discourse. The discourse-grounded model presents the advantage of being able to take over the cognitive, conceptual metaphor modeling and to avoid some of its weaknesses. It offers clearer accounts of the blending process in textbook cases discussed as examples of the former version, such as the “material anchors” that combine symbolic and indexical signification, and it lets us venture into the study of pictorial meaning formation, that is, blending theory applied to visual art, here a famous painting by Henri Matisse.

Chapter 7 further develops the semantic account given above on stratified mental architecture, especially the elementary but still complex question of determining the types of links we establish from space to space, by what I call “space delegation,” in time and space but also in terms of other mental modes of existence. And it applies this stratifying model to a series of semantic problems calling for clarification, such as counterfactual conditionality (If I were you …), evaluative projection (X is the Y of Z), metaphor, hypothesis (similar to C. S. Peirce’s abduction), and, finally, intentional agency (involving the semantics of motivated action). This chapter is a laboratory of what I consider to be wonderful problems.

Chapter 8, on blending in songs, and a detailed analysis of a masterpiece, Hallelujah, coauthored by the Swedish semiotician and rock music specialist Ulf Cronquist, explores the legendary song by Leonard Cohen (who was also a great poet). After some obligatory philology, we first discuss the important general difference between a song and a poem, pragmatically and semantically. Then we describe this song and its musical structure and the role of lyrical metrics in relation to the music. The semiotic blending network, once more explained, lets us see how the schematizing musical pattern affects the text’s two predominant themes, the love relation and the religious relation of the subject. Since the mental space network is modeled as a process based on articulated performance, its meaning production runs and completes a cycle from verse to verse, with the refrain each time stabilizing the thematic blend. The sacredness and the bitterness of both relations blend into a “broken hallelujah” that keeps moving the soul of listeners, because the network (or what corresponds to it) lives in their cognitive architecture, and the poignant music carries it into our hearts.

Chapter 9, on narrative discourse, that is, coherent fictional prose, offers a theory and a model of narrativity in stories of sufficient length to display the supposedly obligatory series of narrative spaces necessary to shape the dynamic framework of story logic on the level of events, agents, situations, and causal coherence (not on the level of narrators). Firstly, I discuss the problem of narrative worlds and narrative genres, distinguished by the dynamic consistency of these worlds, in terms of narrative forces. The narrative forces are tentatively classified, and it is shown that the genres can be categorized according to the types of forces that their respective worlds admit. Within each story, there is furthermore a specific inventory of active forces in each of its spatial settings, and the coherence from space to space, or setting to setting, is the result of a change of these forces and the variable unfolding of causal effects from space to space. Even a temporal backfiring of forces is possible, and as shown in stories by Guy de Maupassant, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ernest Hemingway, such effects—forward or backward in time—are as essential to the intelligibility of stories as the transfer of agents from space to space. The explicitation of the dynamic networks built by these connections constitutes the story-logical analysis of each narrative on this basic level of “what happens,” without which no general interpretation could work objectively. If this approach is tenable in the narrative scale of “stories,” I believe it to be useful to the analysis of larger narrative entities, novels and multi-novel prose, or corresponding narrative unfoldings by other media, either by stipulating concatenations of the basic series or by embedding these into more complex forms of diegesis.

Chapter 10 discusses translation.¹ To translate is to transfer meaning from one semiology to another. I thus mention Roman Jakobson’s distinctions between interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translation. In the interlingual version, to translate is ideally to make the content of a text in one language become the content of a text in another language. This is possible, when the translator finds approximations to the source sentences in target sentences, one by one, approximations comprising lexical, phrasal, and clausal parts of sentences. Moreover, semantic and pragmatic properties of discourse are to be reproduced, simulated, as closely as possible. I discuss cases where the process is in principle blocked by semiotic situations that make such transfer impossible; they typically involve figurative word and phrase meanings becoming literal, as in certain jokes, reverse metaphor, or other similar thematizations of the signifier in its own signified. Such humor laughs at language itself, we could say. I further show that there are significant differences between the norms of literary translation, commercial translation, and philosophical translation. Literal semantics is more important in literary translation than in the commercial genre, where pragmatics is of course...