The "External Mind": Semiotics, Pragmatism, Extended Mind and Distributed Cognition

In this paper, I will present a theoretical comparison between Peirce's cognitive Semiotics ‒ which is constitutively grounded on his theory of social cognition and Pragmatism ‒ and contemporary developments of Cognitive Sciences which go by the names of “extended mind”, “distributed cognition” and “situated cognition”. I would thus like to show: i) how Pragmatism is first of all a semantic theory which has to do with cognition while giving special attention to the meaning of beliefs; ii) how in the Pragmatism of Peirce, meaning is subject to the community and to the extension of thought in the environment; iii) how this pragmatic conception of thought leads to a theory of “extended mind” which is explicitly formulated by Peirce (CP 7.364); iv) how this theory of the extension of the mind based on the identification of thoughts with signs freed cognition from any kind of personal, psychological or computational/inferential mechanism that would take place under the individual's skin; v) how Peirce is able to build a concrete logical-mathematical model of the extension of the mind with his system of existential graphs; vi) how Peirce's Synechism, defined by Peirce as the “The Law of Mind”, the first part of which is constituted by the cognitive semiotics found in the anti-Cartesian essays, defines a formulation which is equivalent to the “parity principle” defined by Clark and Chalmers (1998); vii) how the union of Peirce's cognitive Semiotics, Pragmatism and Synechism defines a frame which, in our view, represents a theoretical horizon which we think is particularly relevant to the discussion and solving of some current problems of cognitive sciences.