Göran Sonesson

New considerations on the proper study of man – and, marginally, some other animals.

In order to differentiate the semiotic capacities of animals and human beings we need to understand more exactly what these properties are. Instead of identifying all vehicles of meaning with signs, we certainly have to specify the notion of sign, but it will also be necessary to provide an inventory of other kinds of meaning, starting out from perception, and going through a number of intermediate notions such as affordances, markers, and surrogates before reaching signs and sign systems. This essay proposes a phenomenological description of a few kinds of meaning, which is not meant to be exhaustive, but still should give an idea of the complexity of the task. It suggests that not only the setting up of semiotic levels and hierarchies of evolution and development, but even, to some extent, the comparison of the capacities of animals and human beings must go hand in hand with advances in phenomenological observations.

Chimpanzees Show a Developmental Increase in Susceptibility to Contagious Yawning: A Test of the Effect of Ontogeny and Emotional Closeness on Yawn Contagion

Contagious yawning has been reported for humans, dogs and several non-human primate species, and associated with empathy in humans and other primates. Still, the function, development and underlying mechanisms of contagious yawning remain unclear. Humans and dogs show a developmental increase in susceptibility to yawn contagion, with children showing an increase around the age of four, when also empathy-related behaviours and accurate identification of others’ emotions begin to clearly evince. Explicit tests of yawn contagion in non-human apes have only involved adult individuals and examined the existence of conspecific yawn contagion. Here we report the first study of heterospecific contagious yawning in primates, and the ontogeny of susceptibility thereto in chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes verus. We examined whether emotional closeness, defined as attachment history with the yawning model, affected the strength of contagion, and compared the contagiousness of yawning to nose-wiping. Thirty-three orphaned chimpanzees observed an unfamiliar and familiar human (their surrogate human mother) yawn, gape and nose-wipe. Yawning, but not nose-wiping, was contagious for juvenile chimpanzees, while infants were immune to contagion. Like humans and dogs, chimpanzees are subject to a developmental trend in susceptibility to contagious yawning, and respond to heterospecific yawn stimuli. Emotional closeness with the model did not affect contagion. The familiarity-biased social modulatory effect on yawn contagion previously found among some adult primates, seem to only emerge later in development, or be limited to interactions with conspecifics. The influence of the ‘chameleon effect’, targeted vs. generalised empathy, perspective-taking and visual attention on contagious yawning is discussed.

From mimicry to mime by way of mimesis: Reflections on a general theory of iconicity

Practically all theories of iconicity are denunciations of its subject matter (for example, those of Goodman, Bierman and the early Eco). My own theory of iconicity was developed in order to save a particular kind of iconicity, pictoriality, from such criticism. In this interest, I distinguished pure iconicity, iconic ground, and iconic sign, on one hand, and primary and secondary iconic signs, on the other hand. Since then, however, several things have happened. The conceptual tools that I created to explain pictoriality have been shown by others to be relevant to linguistic iconicity. On the other hand, semioticians with points of departure different from mine have identified mimicry as it is commonly found in the animal world as a species of iconicity. In the evolutionary semiotics of Deacon, iconicity is referred to in such a general way that it seems to be emptied of all content, while in the variety invented by Donald the term mimesis is used for a particular phase in the evolution of iconic meaning. The aim of this article is to consider to what extent the extension of iconicity theory to new domains will necessitate the development of new models.

Semiosis Beyond Signs. On Two or Three Missing Links on the Way to Human Beings

Human beings are special in mastering, apart from signs, a number of semiotic resources embedded already in perception, which is not differentiated, but which may still be iconic, indexical, or symbolic. The sign is no doubt one of the missing links between human beings and other animals. An even earlier breaking point between (some) animals and human beings may be the ability to distinguish type and token, that is, to have access to a principle of relevance. Somewhere on the border between relevance and the sign is found the act of imitation. The Peircean sign, which is so much more (and less) than a sign, may be able to account for the emergence of imitation and its accomplishment in the sign function, in the restricted sense.

From sign to action : studies in chimpanzee pictorial competence.

Abstract Many studies of children and apes realized in psychology address issues that are highly relevant to semiotics, but they often do so indirectly, or they use a terminology that is confusing and/or too vague from a semiotical point of view. The studies reported here, however, follow the paradigm of these psychological studies, but they are couched in an explicit semiotical terminology. They involve three classical semiotical issues: the nature of the sign, as opposed to other meanings; degrees and/or types of iconicity and their relevance for understanding; and the importance of temporal focus in different kinds of semiotical resources. The studies all involve one subject, the chimpanzee Alex, and all issues were studied looking at the actions accomplished by the subject after being exposed to different semiotic resources.

The Natural History of Branching: Approaches to the Phenomenology of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness

In the present essay the author sets out to reflect on the notions of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, pursuing the research beyond what is directly given in Peirce’s writings. For the purpose, Peircean phenomenology is considered to be a special variety of the Husserlian kind, because it restricts possible phenomena to threesomes and also attributes special contents to the three categories. The first restriction means that Peirce’s theory is a kind of structuralism, although a triadic one, whereas the second restriction implies that it is not merely formal. In the present essay, specific, primitive meanings are assigned to each of the categories, and they are seen to be similar in form to the dyads and triads of social psychology. At the end, signs are considered to be special kinds of Thirds, and an attempt is made to elucidate what hypo-icons owe to Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.

Still do not block the line of inquiry: On the Peircean way to cognitive semiotics

Frederik Stjernfelt has written a ground-breaking contribution to the understanding of a fairly neglected part of Peircean semiotics that, at the same time, is also an attempt to bring Peirce’s ideas to bear on some burning issues central to contemporary cognitive science and/or cognitive semiotics. Indeed, most presentations of Peircean semiotics hardly make more than a dutiful mention of one of the famous trichotomies – the one that opposes Rhemes, Dicisigns, and Arguments. The reader of Stjernfelt’s opus will easily understand why: in order to make this thorough exposition of the doctrine, Stjernfelt has had to piece it together from numerous fragmentary writings, many of them contained in unpublished manuscripts. It is also understandable that Stjernfelt did not, in the end, take Barry Smith’s advice to translate the idiosyncratic Peircean terminology into “ordinary philosophical lingo” (p. 10). Much of the originality of Peirce’s approach would have been lost with the abandonment of what I have elsewhere called Peirce’s trinary structuralism (cf. Sonesson 2012b, Sonesson 2013).

Translation and Other Acts of Meaning : In Between Cognitive Semiotics and Semiotics of Culture

Abstract If translation is an act of meaning transaction, semiotics should be able to define its specificity in relation to other semiotic acts. Instead, following upon suggestions by Roman Jakobson, the Tartu school, and, more implicitly, Charles Sanders Peirce, the notion of translation has been generalized to cover more or less everything that can be done within and between semiotic resources. In this paper, we start out from a definition of communication elaborated by the author in an earlier text, characterizing translation as a double act of meaning. This characterization takes into account the instances of sending and receiving of both acts involved: the first one at the level of cognition and the second one at the level of communication. Given this definition, we show that Jakobson’s “intralinguistic translation” is, in a sense, the opposite of translation and that his “intersemiotic translation” has important differences and well as similarities to real translation. We also suggest that “cultural translation” has very little to do with translation proper except, in some cases, at the end of its operation. Peirce’s idea of exchanging signs for other signs is better understood as a characterization of tradition.

Here comes the semiotic species : reflections on the semiotic turn in the cognitive sciences.

Cognitive semiotics – or, perhaps better, semiotic cognitive science – aims to bring together the knowledge base and models of cognitive science and semiotics. It seems to have been invented several times over, probably because it is needed. What seems to be lacking, most of the time, in semiotics, is real empirical research. What is fundamentally missing in cognitive science is a conception of meaning.

Human Lifeworlds: The cognitive semiotics of cultural evolution

This book, which presents a cognitive-semiotic theory of cultural evolution, including that taking place in historical time, analyses various cognitive-semiotic artefacts and abilities. It claims that what makes human beings human is fundamentally the semiotic and cultural skills by means of which they endow their Lifeworld with meaning. The properties that have made human beings special among animals living in the terrestrial biosphere do not derive entirely from their biological-genetic evolution, but also stem from their interaction with the environment, in its culturally interpreted form, the Lifeworld. This, in turn, becomes possible thanks to the human ability to learn from other thinking beings, and to transfer experiences, knowledge, meaning, and perspectives to new generations. (Less)