Learning and knowing as semiosis: Extending the conceptual apparatus of semiotics

Abstract

If all knowing comes from semiosis, more concepts should be added to the semiotic toolbox. However, semiotic concepts must be defined via other semiotic concepts. We observe an opportunity to advance the state-of-the-art in semiotics by defining concepts of cognitive processes and phenomena via semiotic terms. In particular, we focus on concepts of relevance for theory of knowledge, such as learning, knowing, affordance, scaffolding, resources, competence, memory, and a few others. For these, we provide preliminary definitions from a semiotic perspective, which also explicates their interrelatedness. Redefining these terms this way helps to avoid both physicalism and psychologism, showcasing the epistemological dimensions of environmental situatedness through the semiotic understanding of organisms’ fittedness with their environments. Following our review and presentation of each concept, we briefly discuss the significance of our embedded redefinitions in contributing to a semiotic theory of knowing that has relevance to both the humanities and the life sciences, while not forgetting their relevance to education and psychology, but also social semiotic and multimodality studies.

A “Strong” Approach to Sustainability Literacy: Embodied Ecology and Media

“…This task, we argue, requires the crucial understanding that mediality is embodied. We aim to arrive at a satisfying and meaning-based sustainability literacy theory, by critically reengaging with some of the key concepts and ideas from multimodal and social semiotic approaches to literacy through a (bio/eco-)semiotic theory of learning, again, to which we have been contributing [9,10,16].…”

“…All living systems model their environments, while not all animals necessarily cognize or use and produce symbols. This follows from a notion of learning-as-modeling, in line with research alignments between edu-and biosemiotics [9,16,[45][46][47]. As some of us (see p. 90 in [10]) have observed recently: "To learn about something is to develop models of it, a process which evokes new affordances."…”

“…To draw from Gibson's [65] celebrated concept, culture, like environment, is developed according to the affordances that the landscape presents to an organism, including the competency in extending and enhancing these affordances through technology. The landscape thus admits semiotic resources, as potential affordances [9,66], within the unfolding sphere of activity and action that an organism enacts within an environment, or what has been called the taskscape. 2 Stables (with Bishop, [12]) initially embraced the Saussurean notion of sign to account for the subjectivity of learning, arguing that studies on environmental literacy "have not explored the ramifications of a view of the environment itself as text (see also [35])" (p. 90).…”

“…Varela et al [3] explain that the embodiment notion supposes "first, that cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and second, that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context." This paper presents an embodiment approach to literacy, the need of which has been revealed, in part, by a recent semiotic approach to philosophy of education (starting with Stables [6,7]) and to which these authors have been contributing (e.g., [8][9][10]). By explicating this approach, we also demarcate the position that we take in the current academic debates on educational philosophy, literacy and sustainability.…”

Emergence of Organisms

“…For these reasons, the notion of affordance is a key concept in biosemiotics, where it has been discussed and extended since its original formulation [ 37 ]. Particularly suitable to the perspective taken in this paper is the definition of affordance provided by Campbell et al [ 42 ], who propose defining “affordances as potential semiotic resources that an organism enacts (detects, reads, uses, engages) to channel learning-as-choice in its environment”.…”