A semiotic lifeworld. Semiotics and phenomenology: Peirce, Husserl, Heidegger, Deleuze, and Merleau-Ponty

If we think of cognition and experience from the enactivist idea of a structural coupling between organism and environment, we see that this environment is first and foremost a semiotic environment, crowded with objects, norms, habits, institutions, and artefacts that shape our minds and represent the background of our perception of the world. This semiotic environment, which goes far beyond the opposition between nature and culture, (See Paolucci 2021. Cognitive semiotics: Integrating signs, minds, meaning, and cognition. Berlin: Springer: ch. 1.) is a semiotic lifeworld that is important to compare with the classic idea of lifeworld coming from phenomenology. In this paper, (i) we will first start with a comparison of the semiotic Lebenswelt and the phenomenological Lebenswelt; (ii) we will follow the construction of the semiotic lifeworld coming from Peirce’s Anti-Cartesian essays; (iii) we will make a deep comparison between the phenomenology coming from Peirce (phaneroscopy) and the phenomenology coming from Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty; (iv) we will show how these very same principles also ground structuralism; (v) we will show how this new semiotic lifeworld grounded on phaneroscopy is neither pre-logical nor pre-categorial. Rather, it is founded on the primacy of “telling” over “showing,” and on the primacy of discourse over perception.