João Queiroz

New technologies for dynamic tattoo art

With the development of new technologies, new dynamic epithelial artifacts (new tattoos) are designed, enabling new types of situated and embodied multimodal communication. New tattoos (NTs) turn the skin into a source of dynamic and reversible inscription, possibly responsive to fine-grained organic variations, and dependent on oriented local perturbation. As new aesthetic-cognitive artifacts, NTs alter the operational and semiotic dimension of the skin, transforming it into a new frame of interactive interface. This paper aims at introducing some epithelial prostheses based on new biocompatible materials and technologies.

Icon and Abduction: Situatedness in Peircean Cognitive Semiotics

Differently from the anti-cartesianism defended by some embodied-situated cognitive scientists, which is predominantly anti-representationalist, for C. S. Peirce, mind is semiosis (sign-action) in a dialogical form, and cognition is the development of available semiotic material artifacts in which it is embodied as a power to produce interpretants (sign-effects). It takes the form of development of semiotic artifacts, such as writing tools, instruments of observation, notational systems, languages, and so forth. Our objective in this paper is to explore the connection between a semiotic theory of mind and the conception of situatedness and extended mind through the notions of iconicity and abductive inference, taking advantage of an empirical example of investigation in distributed problem solving (Tower of Hanoi).

Habit in Semiosis: Two Different Perspectives Based on Hierarchical Multi-level System Modeling and Niche Construction Theory

Habit in semiosis can be modeled both as a macro-level in a hierarchical multi-level system where it functions as boundary conditions for emergence of semiosis, and as a cognitive niche produced by an ecologically-inherited environment of cognitive artifacts. According to the first perspective, semiosis is modeled in terms of a multilayered system, with micro functional entities at the lower-level and with higher-level processes being mereologically composed of these lower-level entities. According to the second perspective, habits are embedded in ecologically-inherited environments of signs that co-evolve with cognition. Both descriptions offer a novel approximation of Peirce’s semiotics and theoretical findings in other areas (hierarchy theory, evolutionary biology), suggesting new frameworks to approach the concept of habit integrated with its role in semiosis.

Iconicity in Peircean situated cognitive Semiotics

A psychologist cuts out a lobe of my brain . . . and then, when I find I cannot express myself, he says, ‘You see your faculty of language was localized in that lobe.’ No doubt it was; and so, if he had filched my inkstand, I should not have been able to continue my discussion until I had got another. Yea, the very thoughts would not come to me. So my faculty of discussion is equally localized in my inkstand. It is localization in a sense in which a thing may be in two places at once. (CP 7.366, 1902).

Notes about the london underground map as an iconic artifact

The icon is defined as a sign whose manipulation reveals, by direct observation of its intrinsic property, some information on its object. The London Underground Map is an example of an artifact used to represent part-part/part-whole relations of the largest underground systems of the world. It provides a powerful semiotic niche built for extraction and manipulation of relations. This paper explores the design of the London Underground Map through the notion of iconic artifact.