**3. Embedded cognition**

The debate on embedded cognition (sometimes known as 'sociocultural 'situatedness') began to take place within ethnographic anthropology (i.e. Franz Boas) early in the 20th century. It argued against previous ideas on the universal basis of human language and defined ways in which human cognitive processes are shaped by social interactions and cultural structures and practices. In terms of linguistic studies, it was found that different languages classify experiences differently and that linguistic categories are in close relation to thought patterns. For instance, greeting gestures and speech acts of salutation are very different across cultures. These studies also formed the basis of the hypothesis of linguistic relativism (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), that is, the idea that the structure of a language affects its speakers' cognition and worldview. It was also present in connectionism, in which mental phenomena are seen as interconnected neural networks of units [16–18] (for a recent overview of the semiotic of gestures [19]).

Another example of how contextual factors, alongside particular language uses, shape the way metaphors are employed and add nuances to the purely cognitive account of conceptual metaphor/metonymy as transferring inferences across domains is the research pursued by Lionel Wee. He notes the shifting of conceptual models from the correspondence model [4] to the class-inclusion model [20]. The first assumes consistent horizontal or lateral relationships between source and target so that particular relations between objects and their properties are preserved. The second model operates vertically including metonymic displacements; so that the source domain is merely treated as a prototypical instantiation of a newly created superordinate category, which is then seen to encompass both the source and target. In the correspondence model a metaphor like LIFE IS A JOURNEY understands goals in life as destinations, and difficulties as impediments in the motion of progress. The class-inclusion model tries to explain expressions like MY JOB IS A JAIL, where both job and jail are understood in terms of a superordinate category defined as including unpleasant situations, confining, etc. [20]. Wee points out that in post-capitalist late modernity experiences are commodified and contemplated as functional resources, determining how metaphors are constructed. According to him, it is important to pay attention to indexes that, in the case of EXPERIENCES ARE RESOURCES might point to particular skills that serve as indicators of value within experiences [21]. The metaphor EXPERIENCES ARE RESOURCES also highlights the increasing influence of 'small stories' and under-represented tellings in late modernity, evidencing in language the reframing of experiences from one context to another.

### **4. Enactivism**

In the 20th century, the impact of cybernetics upon human theoretical models saw the growth of systemic forms of explanation. A system can be defined as a nonlinear dynamic set of actors, relations, objects and things, and all their intra- and inter-connections. Systems can be biological, for instance, an ecosystem, but also cultural, situated in a particular environment, place, and time. Systems can be open or closed to their surroundings. Closed systems have boundaries or walls, often defined artificially, like territorial borders. Although finite to a certain extent and with degrees of closeness, different systems are interconnected. For instance, in the human body, the digestive system functions in relation to the respiratory system, circulatory, and all other bodily systems. Operating in a sort of network, the distribution of system components can vary, which means that a given system can

#### *Cognitive Semiotics: An Overview DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101848*

acquire different states in a short time-span while remaining the same in a longer time span. Thus, a state of a system is understood as a momentary position in space and time. This position depends on physical properties (space-context) as well as on the distribution of these properties in a particular time. To have a complete understanding of how a system works, we need to contemplate it from an integrated approach that looks at the full spectrum of scales, networks, states, and multiple spatiotemporal dimensions, considering the intra- and inter-actions of all system components.

A systemic approach in semiotics is evident, for instance, in Actor-Network Theory (ANT) which, in the 1980s, stressed that the social is constituted by systemic networks and relationships created among people through the use of artefacts. These relations are simultaneously material (physical exchanges) and semiotic (conceptual exchanges). ANT was mainly occupied with the relationality among 'actants', a term inspired by the *modéle actantiel* of semiotician Algirdas Greimas. ANT did not consider the individual act-ant as an agent. Rather, agency that is, what makes things happen—was seen as distributed throughout the entire network of people, artefacts and instruments, all of which constitute a given assemblage.

A similar approach to ANT has been taken in enactivist approaches, where agency is the result of relationships among actors, not their property. However, in enactivism, the network is not a self-contained closed system. It is an open disorganized meshwork, rather than a network [22]. Action is not so much the result of an agency that is distributed around the network, but emerges from the interplay of relations in the meshwork, characterized in terms of patterns emerging from the relationships (material and semiotic) in the environment surrounding humans and nonhumans.

In the 21st century, systemic visions have moved even closer to eco-criticism and environmental concerns. The condition of openness in systemic relations has also expanded beyond artefacts and technologies. The 'nonhuman', a category first used for computer programs and robot-like devices with human-like characteristics, is being used for animals as well as other material forms. The concept of 'vibrant matter' [23] or that of 'transcorporeality' [24] suggests that even inanimate bioentities, like rocks or the sands and dunes of deserts, are forms of materiality open to their environment and in constant systemic interaction [25], while being free of semantic notions of intentionality. Hutto & Myin's concept of 'teleosemiotics' suggests that cognition is essentially extensive, not merely contingently extended [26]. Natural and geological forces, processes of decomposition, bio-deterioration, and disintegration [27], as well as episodes of climate change, glacial flows, and the evolution of the oceans, all exhibit various forms of nonhuman agency, influencing human life in various ways. In this scenario, nonhuman entities are understood as performing actions in the world, even if this agency is different from human agency. Thus, agency has come to be defined as the capacity to influence a given environment, and can be contemplated not as an individual trait but as an emergent state emanating from systemic inter- and intra-actions, as well as sensorimotor contingencies. Unfortunately, vulnerability to the agency of nonhuman entities has become evident during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The publication of Dan Dennett was a landmark on the discussion about agency, intentionality, and consciousness [28], with is 'false belief test' to find out if intelligent animals, chimpanzees in this case, were able to recognize the intentions of a human actor [29]. A long debate ensued exploring how humans develop a theory of mind, trying to understand how an observer can differentiate agentive capacities in others, and whether these capacities are species-specific and if they intentional or not, that is, if they imply a feeling of being in control. It was concluded that humans do not develop an understanding about other people's minds from their actions until they acquire consciousness and self-awareness [9]. However, the growth of so-called intelligent agents in cybernetics complicated the understanding of agency since some forms of AI can learn from their actions, being designed as 'autonomous' entities capable of functioning in the absence of human intervention and able to direct their activity towards a given purpose or goal.

The concept of 'affordance' (in Peircean terms, set of stimuli that an object provides an interpretant so that it acquires the character of a sign representamen, that is, it stands for something in some respect or capacity) was initially developed by psychologist James J. Gibson (1977), who argued that humans can modify affordances in their environment to their benefit. Learning to perceive affordances emerges through direct object manipulation and sensorimotor processes as well as by learning from the experiences of others. In the 1980s, affordance became synonymous with 'action possibilities' and was applied to human-computer interaction and design [30, 31]. From this perspective, cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between acting organisms and their environment. Gradually, enactivism has become part of a cluster of related theories known as the 4Es, which include embodiment, embedding, enaction, and, more recently, the extended mind.

In the 1990s, an approach in cognitive science known as 'Distributed Cognition' or DCog began to gain ground. It originated in the work of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky through research by Edwin Hutchins who explained that cultural schemas emerge from changing patterns of interaction among members of cultural groups and which are constantly negotiated and renegotiated across time and space [32]. Hutchins explained that this perspective aspired to "rebuild cognitive science from the outside in, beginning with the social and material setting of cognitive activity, so that culture, context, and history can be linked with the core concepts of cognition" [33]. DCog explores the ways in which cognition involves coordinated 'enaction', including artefacts and technological means in specific environments. Like 'sociocultural 'situatedness', DCog came to be assimilated to 'embedding', as part of the 4Es.

As aforementioned, these changes were mainly influenced by the explosion of the waves of cybernetics [34]. The term 'enaction' appeared during the third wave in Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's ground-breaking work [35]. To these authors, 'enact' means 'bring forth', a notion connected to their theory of 'autopoiesis' [36]. Biological systems are 'autopoietic', meaning that they are complex, proactive, and adaptive (self-organizing and self-regulating) in particular spatiotemporal spans. Enactivism considers that bodies and minds interact and respond to things in the world, creating meaning from environmental cues, rather than representing reality. Living beings and their environments stand in relation to codetermination [37].

Similar ideas were contemplated in the then emerging field of bio-semiotics. Jesper Hoffmeyer termed 'emergence' the process through which all kinds of things come together in the world and their encounter and settling down, at least in shortterm equilibrium before dynamically engaging again, they can creatively produce new kinds of organisations that are greater than the sum of their parts [38, 39].

Thus, enactivism relies on a model of cognition wherein new thoughts emerge through a dynamical engagement between the human mind and the material world. It foregrounds the differences between material things functioning as lower-order signs and higher-level cognitive activities. In this regard, Shaun Gallagher brings forth the distinction between body schema and body image. The first includes unconscious body awareness and automatic sensorimotor functions. Body images, however, are conscious self-aware representations of experiences encompassing some sensorimotor functions that serve intentional action, as well as other mental

#### *Cognitive Semiotics: An Overview DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101848*

states (i.e. desires, beliefs, etc.). Drawing on previous work [28, 40] and the European phenomenological tradition (i.e. Husserl, Dewey, Merleau-Ponty [41]), Gallagher considers the building of conscious mental narrative structures and their relation to the sense of self and intentional action. According to him, complex animals and some forms of autonomous AI experience self-consciousness as immediate, punctual, and not extended in time; in other words, as signs that may contain non-conceptual content, only events. He terms this the 'minimal self', which might have a sense of self-agency but not self-ownership for actions. On the other hand, the 'narrative self' involves personal identity and continuity in time; a more or less coherent self-image constituted including the present, past, and future orientations. This temporal continuity is achieved by means of human language acquisition and the ability to make the kind of cause-effect semiotic connections present in the human telling. The development of a self-image coexists with the 'narrative self', involving narrative competency and the capacity for self-narrative and explanation of one's actions. This distinction amounts to modulation of agency, since the 'minimal self' might be aware of self-agency but not have the sense of self-ownership for actions, a continuity only achieved through the development of the ability to make the kind of cause-effect connections present in human language [42, 43].

Gallagher also moves beyond Vittorio Gallese's notion of automatic resonance systems built into human motor experiences and their replications through mirror-neuron structures to a more complex understanding of the relationship between intersubjective experiences, the building of empathy, and the 'narrative self ' [44, 45]. Along similar lines, the "Interactive Brain Hypothesis" [46, 47] has argued that narratives modulate intersubjective experiences through affordances and complementarity between a given environment and human social cooperation, trying to demonstrate that even less obvious interactive situations, like reading and writing, have interactive origins.

Additionally, Gallagher describes enactivism as 'philosophy of nature' [45], situating mind and behaviour in a holistic pragmatic perspective, a Life-Mind [47] already present in Peirce's theories.
