The External Mind. Perspectives on Semiosis, Distribution and Situation in Cognition

This thematic issue is centred around an only apparently provocative question to be investigated with extreme attention and rigour: what does it mean to claim that the mind is external? What does it mean to take cognition, thought and meaning into the body, into the world - into "the wild" to use a fortunate expression by Edwin Hutchins ? This is the challenge that the present thematic issue of Versus is tackling: as it deals with cognition within a semiotic horizon in order to overcome the opposition internal/external concerning cognition. Tackling this question offers us the chance to reconsider the relations between semiotics and cognitive sciences1 and to build an initial and maybe unstable but much needed bridge between these polyphonic disciplinary fields. Cognitive sciences and semiotics have occasionally met without lasting results. However, some recent turns in the concept of cognition - the situated and distributed epistemological turns that generally go under the name of 4E: embodied, embedded, extended and enacted - once again offer the chance of realizing a fruitful comparison and articulation with a semiotic epistemology. We think it is high time for semioticians and cognitive scientists to cross each others' paths and realise how much can be learned from the other.