Over the last few decades, enactive approaches have convincingly challenged the notion of mental representation inherited from classical cognitive science. Within that framework, cognition is understood as the computational manipulation of internal symbols encoding a pregiven external world, and the mind is consequently conceived as an essentially individual, internal, and brain-bound system, while the body, the environment, social interaction, culture, and history are relegated to marginal roles. Enactivism rightly rejects this model: cognition is not the passive reconstruction of an independently given reality but an activity through which embodied organisms bring forth meaningful worlds in their ongoing interactions with their environments (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991; Thompson, 2007). The enactivist critique thus provides an indispensable corrective to the computationalism, internalism, and cerebrocentrism of classical cognitive science (Falzone & Pennisi, 2016). It does not follow, however, that every notion of mental representation should be rejected. Regrettably, enactivist theories extend their criticism of classical representation to representational content as such. Although this position may plausibly account for elementary perceptual and sensorimotor processes, its extension to so-called higher cognition – and especially to language – creates a serious explanatory gap. Symbolic cognition enables subjects to refer to absent, possible, remembered, or imaginary objects and events: precisely the kinds of representation-hungry phenomena that cannot easily be explained through immediate organism–environment coupling alone (Clark & Toribio, 1994). A mind capable of language cannot, therefore, be an “empty” mind (Diodato, 2020). While some enactive semiotic perspective follows an anti-representationalist stance (Paolucci, 2021), I argue that semiotics offers an alternative notion of representation that is fully compatible with the central insights of enactivism. In both the Peircean and Saussurean traditions, a sign is something produced or apprehended (by a mind) that stands for something else (for an interpreting mind). The sign function presupposes a differentiation and an asymmetrical relation between an expression and a content: the expression is directly presented but becomes thematic by referring beyond itself (Sonesson, 2007, 2026). Yet signs are neither static inner pictures nor amodal symbols stored in an isolated brain. They emerge from embodied activity, depend on historically constituted practices, and acquire their value within intersubjective systems of interpretation – that is, within publicly shared codes. In this sense, signs are enactive by definition. Enactivist accounts nevertheless tend to avoid explaining the “threshold” between pre-conceptual and symbolic cognition. From a phylogenetic perspective, the sign function emerges from pre-signitive, embodied forms of interaction, imitation, gesture, tool use, and shared attention – meaning-making practices probably shared, to varying degrees, with other animals (Donald, 1991; Deacon, 1997; Logan, 2007; Zlatev, 2018; Tomasello, 2019). From an ontogenetic perspective, however, individuals do not begin anew, inventing a sign whenever one is required. If they did, meaning would become radically private, in the absence of the public norms that orient its attribution and interpretation. Signs arise from situated activities, but – and this is crucial from a semiotic perspective – they also attain relative autonomy and acquire “a body of their own” (Sonesson, 2007). They become sedimented, publicly available artifacts that shape, reshape, and sometimes constrain shared cognitive and communicative practices. Significantly, when enactivism turns to language, it is itself compelled to reintroduce something functionally equivalent to representation in order to bridge the gap between online and offline cognitive activity (de Bruin & Kästner, 2012; de Bruin & de Haan, 2012), even when it adopts a different vocabulary, such as that of the “linguistic body” (Di Paolo, Cuffari, & De Jaegher, 2018). This is because semiotic mediation is a necessary condition for explaining how embodied and historically situated subjects can transcend the hic et nunc of individual experience and jointly construct a common Lifeworld.

Observação: esta atividade será conduzida em inglês.

As pessoas inscritas na modalidade online receberão, por e-mail, o link de acesso 15 minutos antes do início da atividade.