Steps towards an epistemology for cognitive semiotics

Cognitive semiotics has been characterized as the pooling together of theories, methods, models, and findings from semiotics and cognitive science. Those who have taken up the challenge of combining these two research traditions have done so, however, in rather different ways. Nevertheless, within both traditions, and predominantly in the second one, there are those who espouse some kind of reductionism, in which meaning and consciousness are non-existent or mere epiphenomena. The present contribution argues that there can be no study of either meaning or consciousness that does not start by recognizing that these are real phenomena, and that all other methods, such as, notably, experiments, while very useful, are only limited and indirect ways of approaching meaning and consciousness. We start by pointing out that linguistics, and therefore semiotics, doesn’t fit into the classical division between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften, but shares properties with both. To begin the building of an epistemology for cognitive semiotics, we hark back to Vico’s notion of Verum Factum, unwittingly explicated by the semiotician Luis Prieto, as well as to the phenomenological method, as it has been defined by both Husserl and Peirce, and taken further by Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty.