Peirce e la semiotica cognitiva

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to contribute in celebrating the just occurred centenary of Charles S. Peirce’s death, by underlining the link between some elements of the semiotic theory due to him with some relevant aspects and authors of contemporary cognitive science. Such a purpose will be achieved by developing three different and consequential steps: the first one will concern the main issues allowing to qualify as cognitive the peircean semiotic theory, taking in strong account the theory of knowledge underlying such a semiotics; the second one will quickly review the human information processing topics, which stand at the origin of cognitive science as it is nowadays known; the third one will discuss one particular author, Ulric Neisser, who greatly contributed to establish contemporary cognitive psychology, and elaborated the concept of perceptual (and cognitive) schemata, which connect together the (visual) perception of an environmental stimulus, the previous knowledge already stored in the perceiver’s memory and the action performed by him as an answer to the former perceptual stimulus. According to such a topic, it will be shown how much some aspects of peircean semiotics, namely the triadic structure of sign, are comparable with some points of the ecological approach to perception and cognition, developed by James Gibson as well as by Neisser itself.