Cfp: "Towards Cognitive Semiotics," Seventh Conference, Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies, Centre for Cognitive Semiotics and Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, May 6-8, 2011.

For most of the second half of the 20th century, semiotics and cognitive science have been rival transdiciplinary or interdisciplinary approaches to the human and social sciences, even including some parts of the natural sciences such as, most notably, biology. Apart from everything else they are, both semiotics and cognitive science may be seen as being involved with the central notions common to all of the social sciences and the humanities. From this point of view, the core interest of semiotics is the structuring of meaning and its carriers, while cognitive semiotics focuses on the modes of access to meaning (though it often gives them some other name). It has been observed (notably by Dadessio) that these two aspects can hardly be discussed separately. While generalizing the notion of cognition to make it cover most of mental life (as well as, sometimes, many “subpersonal” aspects), cognitive science has hardly left any specific place to phenomena of meaning. Semiotics, on the other hand, at least in some of its manifestations, those, notably, inspired by Peirce, tends to resolve about everything into constellations of signs. The result, in both cases, is one-sidedness and conceptual confusion. Cognitive semiotics, or semiotic cognitive science, recently proposed in different quarters as a new paradigm for the human and the social sciences, aims to wed cognitive science with semiotics. Epistemologically, the task of cognitive semiotics consists in relating these two instances of single vision, putting mind where mind should be and signs in their proper place.

Presentations should involve research involving the relation between semiotics and cognitive science, or, more broadly, which attends to cognitive issues while taking a semiotic approach, or puts the quest for meaning into focus within a cognitive science approach. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Cognition and meaning
• Cognitive science and semiotics
• Perception and semiotics
• Language within a semiotic framework
• Cognitive linguistics and semiotics
• Semantics and pragmatics within semiotics
• Gesture studies and semiotics
• The psychology of pictures and pictorial semiotics
• Narrativity and the self
• Semiotic artefacts and the mind
• The social and cognitive construction of meaning
• Semiotic resources in child development
• Semiotic resources in evolution
• Semiotics and primatology
• Cultural semiotics and developmental psychology
• Phenomenological analyses
• Husserlean and Peircean phenomenology
• Linguistic and other kinds of semiotic releativity
• Semiotic typology

Visit the conference website here: http://conference.sol.lu.se/en/nass2011/.