The External Mind: an Introduction

Both semiotics and the cognitive sciences are deeply concerned with the origins and articulations of knowledge and thought. While semiotics assumed the primacy of language and culture in determining the ways and the content of thought, the initial versions of cognitivism assumed the primacy of universal mechanisms internal to the individual. By sketching a minimal history of the concept of cognition in cognitive sciences, we argue that a progressive convergence is happening, fostered by the embodied, extended, distributed and enacted epistemological turns. Cognition is increasingly investigated as an activity constitutively relying on culture, context and history. An increasingly semiotic perspective is thus needed to integrate and re-assess conceptual frameworks, methodologies and results mostly focused on the individual and the biological. We sketch a pragmaticist approach to meaning and a structural theory of cognition and we argue that this perspective can contribute to the epistemological turns of cognitive sciences by articulating a functionalist distributed perspective with the organism-based value-orientation of enactivism.