Cartographies of the mind: Generalization and relevance in cognitive landscapes
Cartographies of the mind: Generalization and relevance in cognitive landscapes
Author(s): Sergio Rodríguez GómezSubject(s): Semiotics / Semiology, Semiology, Cognitive linguistics, Philosophy of Mind, Cognitive Psychology
Published by: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus
Keywords: relevance; categorization; generalization; cognitive landscape; semiotic scaffolding; neurodynamics; index;
Summary/Abstract: The problem of relevance, at individual agent scale – or how we decide what is adequate for our interpretation of the signs we encounter in the world – is a question that keeps reappearing in semiotics and other disciplines concerned with meaning. In this article I propose an approximation on relevance that conceives meaning as a trajectory across a cognitive landscape. Unlike conventional accounts on relevance, which presuppose mental processes built on feature-based representations, my proposal suggests conceiving cognition as a fluid and emergent field of attractors basins that become specified and modified when experiences appear, and conceiving meaning as a trajectory across the cognitive field. Consequently, I suggest that when cognitive landscapes better fit world experience, agents’ categorizations will be more relevant. My proposal is mainly supported by two approaches: the enactivist notion of structural coupling and the theories of dynamic neural populations of Walter Freeman III.
Journal: Σημειωτκή - Sign Systems Studies
- Issue Year: 47/2019
- Issue No: 3-4
- Page Range: 382-399
- Page Count: 18
- Language: English