Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1515/cogsem-2023-2006
Mikkel Wallentin, Johanne Nedergaard
Abstract In this theoretical paper, we use a linguistic vocabulary to reframe self-talk in endurance sport through a focus on grammatical function. Self-talk often works as speech acts, a kind of communicative action, e.g. where a self-talker is using the imperative mood to accomplish some goal with respect to herself (Come on!). Auxiliary modal verbs work across three main types of utterances: Deontic modality involving permission and obligation; dynamic modality involving ability and willingness; epistemic modality involving probabilistic judgements. In self-talk, these all function to establish a hypothetical domain for further reflection. Self-distance can be negotiated using 1st and 2nd person pronouns (I/you) and spatial demonstratives (this/that). Sentiment is communicated using adjectives, while negation may yield a means for impulse control. We can question our own utterances and use interjections to communicate surprise. These are all vital mental tools in endurance sports and an increased awareness of their functions in self-talk research will likely yield better self-talk interventions and lead to better performance for athletes.
{"title":"Reframing self-talk in endurance sports using grammatical taxonomy","authors":"Mikkel Wallentin, Johanne Nedergaard","doi":"10.1515/cogsem-2023-2006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cogsem-2023-2006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this theoretical paper, we use a linguistic vocabulary to reframe self-talk in endurance sport through a focus on grammatical function. Self-talk often works as speech acts, a kind of communicative action, e.g. where a self-talker is using the imperative mood to accomplish some goal with respect to herself (Come on!). Auxiliary modal verbs work across three main types of utterances: Deontic modality involving permission and obligation; dynamic modality involving ability and willingness; epistemic modality involving probabilistic judgements. In self-talk, these all function to establish a hypothetical domain for further reflection. Self-distance can be negotiated using 1st and 2nd person pronouns (I/you) and spatial demonstratives (this/that). Sentiment is communicated using adjectives, while negation may yield a means for impulse control. We can question our own utterances and use interjections to communicate surprise. These are all vital mental tools in endurance sports and an increased awareness of their functions in self-talk research will likely yield better self-talk interventions and lead to better performance for athletes.","PeriodicalId":52385,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semiotics","volume":"67 1","pages":"91 - 119"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139302590","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-22DOI: 10.1515/cogsem-2023-2001
{"title":"Eulogy for Göran Sonesson (17 October 1951 – 17 March 2023)","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/cogsem-2023-2001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cogsem-2023-2001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52385,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semiotics","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84163313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1515/cogsem-2023-2002
Joel West
Abstract This paper engages the question of the extended mind hypothesis, specifically in terms of memory and mnemonics. I use the case of an external object which is set to trigger a memory internally, but is not the memory, to explore the idea of extension versus distribution. I use the example of tzitzit, which is a garment worn by observant Jewish men, where is states in scripture that seeing the tassels attached to the garment are supposed to trigger a specific memory. The point of the essay is that extension is merely a metaphysical commitment, and that this commitment leads to some ethical issues.
{"title":"Mnemonics as signs of memory: semiotics and agency","authors":"Joel West","doi":"10.1515/cogsem-2023-2002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cogsem-2023-2002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper engages the question of the extended mind hypothesis, specifically in terms of memory and mnemonics. I use the case of an external object which is set to trigger a memory internally, but is not the memory, to explore the idea of extension versus distribution. I use the example of tzitzit, which is a garment worn by observant Jewish men, where is states in scripture that seeing the tassels attached to the garment are supposed to trigger a specific memory. The point of the essay is that extension is merely a metaphysical commitment, and that this commitment leads to some ethical issues.","PeriodicalId":52385,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semiotics","volume":"13 1","pages":"45 - 67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82924787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1515/cogsem-2023-2005
Ľudmila Lacková
Abstract This is a short overview of the newly published four-volume anthology edited by Jamin Pelkey et al. titled Bloomsbury Semiotics, with a critical reflection upon the disciplinary status of general semiotics today. The paper proposes methods and principles for future semiotic research and observes the overall trajectory of semiotics during the age of the business model of university life and the marginalization of the humanities. The paper supports the major position of Bloomsbury Semiotics, which is to conceive of semiotics as the most effective platform for revitalizing the humanities in cooperation with hard science, and the reintegration of Peirce and Saussure as the theoretical bedrock of general semiotics.
{"title":"In the fold of the manifold: a reflection on Bloomsbury Semiotics","authors":"Ľudmila Lacková","doi":"10.1515/cogsem-2023-2005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cogsem-2023-2005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This is a short overview of the newly published four-volume anthology edited by Jamin Pelkey et al. titled Bloomsbury Semiotics, with a critical reflection upon the disciplinary status of general semiotics today. The paper proposes methods and principles for future semiotic research and observes the overall trajectory of semiotics during the age of the business model of university life and the marginalization of the humanities. The paper supports the major position of Bloomsbury Semiotics, which is to conceive of semiotics as the most effective platform for revitalizing the humanities in cooperation with hard science, and the reintegration of Peirce and Saussure as the theoretical bedrock of general semiotics.","PeriodicalId":52385,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semiotics","volume":"8 1","pages":"69 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90114387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1515/cogsem-2023-2003
P. Fernandez-Velasco, Jade Nijman, Roberto Casati
Abstract Notebooks are widely used in a large number of professional and everyday life contexts. The notebook has been widely mentioned in the context of distributed cognition, the extended mind hypothesis and the study of cognitive artefacts. Despite its ubiquity and almost paradigmatic status, to date, there is no dedicated analysis of the notebook qua cognitive artefact, to explain its success and its resilience. Our aim is to fill this gap in the literature by studying a set of cognitive advantages of the notebook. For our analysis, we employ the methodological framework of distributed cognition. Using this framework, we find a series of cognitive advantages at both an individual and at a group level. At an individual level, these include external non-biological memory, the consolidation of long-term biological memory encoding, effects on attention modulation, an enhancement in metacognition and the graphication of thought. At the group level, the cognitive advantages include collaboration, the transference of content from one user to another, group-level metacognition, coordination, and the transformation of the overall epistemological setting in which notebook use takes place.
{"title":"The cognitive advantages of the notebook","authors":"P. Fernandez-Velasco, Jade Nijman, Roberto Casati","doi":"10.1515/cogsem-2023-2003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cogsem-2023-2003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Notebooks are widely used in a large number of professional and everyday life contexts. The notebook has been widely mentioned in the context of distributed cognition, the extended mind hypothesis and the study of cognitive artefacts. Despite its ubiquity and almost paradigmatic status, to date, there is no dedicated analysis of the notebook qua cognitive artefact, to explain its success and its resilience. Our aim is to fill this gap in the literature by studying a set of cognitive advantages of the notebook. For our analysis, we employ the methodological framework of distributed cognition. Using this framework, we find a series of cognitive advantages at both an individual and at a group level. At an individual level, these include external non-biological memory, the consolidation of long-term biological memory encoding, effects on attention modulation, an enhancement in metacognition and the graphication of thought. At the group level, the cognitive advantages include collaboration, the transference of content from one user to another, group-level metacognition, coordination, and the transformation of the overall epistemological setting in which notebook use takes place.","PeriodicalId":52385,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semiotics","volume":"1 1","pages":"3 - 21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90091782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1515/cogsem-2023-2004
Donna E. West
Abstract This inquiry addresses how working memory underpins abductive inferences, given their means to objectify meanings. Binding experiences in WM: integrates features with objects, makes obvious object situatedness, and determines impingement of objects upon other objects. These meaning chunks verify how events affect consequences, tracing episodic profiles. WM binding is essential to the evolution of sign meanings, when hatching inferences about which objects/events should be included in the same image, illustrating how WM bindings are implicated in constructing Percepts. Percepts mark the starting point when new meanings are attributed to objects (7.671). These new meanings materialize consequent to implied predicative alterations. WM chunks consist in locative and/or descriptive predicates; they can be implicit in Terms, or explicit in Propositions (1908: 8.373). As Terms with implied predicates, percepts provide the building blocks to attribute new meanings to event profiles, complying with Peirce’s proviso that interpretants “have to be much widened” (1906: 4.538).
{"title":"Managing abductions in working memory: the influence of percepts","authors":"Donna E. West","doi":"10.1515/cogsem-2023-2004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cogsem-2023-2004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This inquiry addresses how working memory underpins abductive inferences, given their means to objectify meanings. Binding experiences in WM: integrates features with objects, makes obvious object situatedness, and determines impingement of objects upon other objects. These meaning chunks verify how events affect consequences, tracing episodic profiles. WM binding is essential to the evolution of sign meanings, when hatching inferences about which objects/events should be included in the same image, illustrating how WM bindings are implicated in constructing Percepts. Percepts mark the starting point when new meanings are attributed to objects (7.671). These new meanings materialize consequent to implied predicative alterations. WM chunks consist in locative and/or descriptive predicates; they can be implicit in Terms, or explicit in Propositions (1908: 8.373). As Terms with implied predicates, percepts provide the building blocks to attribute new meanings to event profiles, complying with Peirce’s proviso that interpretants “have to be much widened” (1906: 4.538).","PeriodicalId":52385,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semiotics","volume":"38 1","pages":"23 - 43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84790851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1515/cogsem-2022-2016
Victoria Reeve
Abstract This interdisciplinary approach to the semiotics of emotion offers insights on emotion as a semantic category organising an array of feelings, thoughts and sensations into meaningful (communicable) terms. This is achieved via an exploration of the role of perspective-taking in making meanings that are felt rather than expressly articulated through words. Forming a semiotic system based on embodied experiences and their contexts, emotions, as semantic categories, are the first stage in processes of expression and communication. I lay the groundwork for an interdisciplinary semiotics of emotion in accordance with findings and stances taken in the fields of literary and cultural studies, neuroscience, and cognitive and comparative psychology. Narrative empathy (sometimes called narrative emotion), like emotion per se, stands upon processes of communication involving the interpretive capacities of feeling, cognitive processes of identification, and perspective-taking. Feeling, beginning as an interpretation of sensorial and neurologically driven values, intensifies through the cognitive-affectual interpretative processes of perspective-taking. With recursive (multi-perspectival) feeling resulting in intensifications of feeling we recognise as emotion, I define emotion as a complex recursive pattern of feeling and affect that calls attention to itself in terms that are readily identifiable with semantic categories such as love, hate, shame, sadness, and anger.
{"title":"Reading perspectives on feeling and the semiotics of emotion","authors":"Victoria Reeve","doi":"10.1515/cogsem-2022-2016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cogsem-2022-2016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This interdisciplinary approach to the semiotics of emotion offers insights on emotion as a semantic category organising an array of feelings, thoughts and sensations into meaningful (communicable) terms. This is achieved via an exploration of the role of perspective-taking in making meanings that are felt rather than expressly articulated through words. Forming a semiotic system based on embodied experiences and their contexts, emotions, as semantic categories, are the first stage in processes of expression and communication. I lay the groundwork for an interdisciplinary semiotics of emotion in accordance with findings and stances taken in the fields of literary and cultural studies, neuroscience, and cognitive and comparative psychology. Narrative empathy (sometimes called narrative emotion), like emotion per se, stands upon processes of communication involving the interpretive capacities of feeling, cognitive processes of identification, and perspective-taking. Feeling, beginning as an interpretation of sensorial and neurologically driven values, intensifies through the cognitive-affectual interpretative processes of perspective-taking. With recursive (multi-perspectival) feeling resulting in intensifications of feeling we recognise as emotion, I define emotion as a complex recursive pattern of feeling and affect that calls attention to itself in terms that are readily identifiable with semantic categories such as love, hate, shame, sadness, and anger.","PeriodicalId":52385,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semiotics","volume":"20 1","pages":"249 - 267"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82716974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1515/cogsem-2022-2015
Ben Berners-Lee
Abstract Neurons called place cells are selectively activated in correspondence with the location or place field that a rodent occupies. In a phenomenon that neuroscientists call replay, place cell activation sequences rapidly repeat during subsequent periods of rest and grooming. Replay has been theorized as a mechanism for reinforcement learning of the spatial trajectories represented by place cell coactivation. Preplay is a competing theory that suggests that these sequences also occur before a novel run and that sequences are not recordings of position made in real time, but rather pre-made repertoires that an organism selects from as it makes a trajectory through space. The preplay theory maintains the language of representation while breaking from the entailment of the conceptual metaphor “MEMORIES ARE RECORDINGS” that recordings are produced simultaneously to the experiences that they represent. It does so through a conceptual blend that affords preplay researchers flexibility in their theorizing about memory without requiring a break from representationalism. Broadly, these findings demonstrate how the blending of conceptual metaphors is a viable approach for the implicit development and contestation of theories of representation in the neural and cognitive sciences.
{"title":"Accommodating representation in the neuroscience of memory: a conceptual blending analysis of replay and preplay in hippocampal place cell research","authors":"Ben Berners-Lee","doi":"10.1515/cogsem-2022-2015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cogsem-2022-2015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Neurons called place cells are selectively activated in correspondence with the location or place field that a rodent occupies. In a phenomenon that neuroscientists call replay, place cell activation sequences rapidly repeat during subsequent periods of rest and grooming. Replay has been theorized as a mechanism for reinforcement learning of the spatial trajectories represented by place cell coactivation. Preplay is a competing theory that suggests that these sequences also occur before a novel run and that sequences are not recordings of position made in real time, but rather pre-made repertoires that an organism selects from as it makes a trajectory through space. The preplay theory maintains the language of representation while breaking from the entailment of the conceptual metaphor “MEMORIES ARE RECORDINGS” that recordings are produced simultaneously to the experiences that they represent. It does so through a conceptual blend that affords preplay researchers flexibility in their theorizing about memory without requiring a break from representationalism. Broadly, these findings demonstrate how the blending of conceptual metaphors is a viable approach for the implicit development and contestation of theories of representation in the neural and cognitive sciences.","PeriodicalId":52385,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semiotics","volume":"14 1","pages":"175 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73089370","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1515/cogsem-2022-2014
Andreas Larsson, Karin Stolpe, Marlene Johansson Falck
Abstract This paper addresses the challenges of exploring metaphor use in a naturalistic environment. We employed an integrative approach to the analysis of metaphor in video-recorded classroom observations of a teacher lecturing on computer programming. The approach involved applying the Procedure for Identifying Metaphorical Scenes (PIMS) and the Metaphor Identification Guidelines for Gesture (MIG-G) both individually and jointly. Our analysis of the data shows that the teacher primarily uses metaphors that evoke experiences of manipulating physical objects while using his hands to add spatiality to these ‘objects’. Furthermore, it indicates that specific gestures may serve as ’anchoring-points’ for larger scenes, enabling the speaker to form a scene in which to place smaller concepts. Throughout the analysis, our integrative approach to metaphor analysis provided opportunities to both support and refute results from each of the procedures employed. Moreover, the PIMS procedure has both served as an efficient tool for identifying central concepts of a scene and a way to validate the results of the gesture analysis. We suggest that this integrative approach to metaphor may be used to provide clues about the embodied motivation of a metaphor at an individual level.
{"title":"Analysing the elements of a scene – An integrative approach to metaphor identification in a naturalistic setting","authors":"Andreas Larsson, Karin Stolpe, Marlene Johansson Falck","doi":"10.1515/cogsem-2022-2014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cogsem-2022-2014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper addresses the challenges of exploring metaphor use in a naturalistic environment. We employed an integrative approach to the analysis of metaphor in video-recorded classroom observations of a teacher lecturing on computer programming. The approach involved applying the Procedure for Identifying Metaphorical Scenes (PIMS) and the Metaphor Identification Guidelines for Gesture (MIG-G) both individually and jointly. Our analysis of the data shows that the teacher primarily uses metaphors that evoke experiences of manipulating physical objects while using his hands to add spatiality to these ‘objects’. Furthermore, it indicates that specific gestures may serve as ’anchoring-points’ for larger scenes, enabling the speaker to form a scene in which to place smaller concepts. Throughout the analysis, our integrative approach to metaphor analysis provided opportunities to both support and refute results from each of the procedures employed. Moreover, the PIMS procedure has both served as an efficient tool for identifying central concepts of a scene and a way to validate the results of the gesture analysis. We suggest that this integrative approach to metaphor may be used to provide clues about the embodied motivation of a metaphor at an individual level.","PeriodicalId":52385,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Semiotics","volume":"321 1","pages":"223 - 248"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77945043","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}