Signs of Unmeaning. A Response to Sonesson's "What is Cognitive Semiotics?"

Brian Kemple's response to “What is Cognitive Semiotics?”, a lecture offered by Göran Sonesson as part of the activities of the 2022 International Open Seminar on Semiotics: a Tribute to John Deely on the Fifth Anniversary of His Passing, cooperatively organized by the Institute for Philosophical Studies of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, the Lyceum Institute, the Deely Project, Saint Vincent College, the Iranian Society for Phenomenology at the Iranian Political Science Association, the International Association for Semiotics of Space and Time, the Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Semiotic Society of America, the American Maritain Association, the International Association for Semiotic Studies, the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, the International Center for Semiotics and Intercultural Dialogue, Moscow State Academic University for the Humanities and the Mansarda Acesa with the support of the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education of the Government of Portugal under the UID/FIL/00010/2020 project.

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Göran Sonesson, Professor Emeritus at the Division of cognitive semiotics, Lund University, holds doctorates in general linguistics from Lund and in semiotics from Paris. He has published numerous papers, both theoretic and experimental, on pictorial, cultural, and cognitive semiotics, as well as on the semiotics of communication and translation and the evolutionary foundations of semiosis. Apart from anthologies, his papers have appeared in journals such as Semiotica, Cognitive Semiotics, Cognitive Development, Sign System Studies, Degrés, Signa, Signata, Sign and Society, Frontier of Psychology, etc. His main book-length works are Pictorial Concepts (1989), which is a critique of the critique of iconicity, and Human Lifeworlds (2016), which is a study in cultural evolution. His new book, The Pictorial Extensions of Mind will soon be published by deGruyter.

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Brian Kemple holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of St. Thomas, in Houston TX, where he wrote his dissertation under the inimitable John Deely. He is the Founder and Executive Director of the Lyceum Institute.

Philosophical interests and areas of study include: Thomas Aquinas, John Poinsot, Charles Peirce, Martin Heidegger, the history and importance of semiotics, scholasticism, phenomenology; as well as ancillary interests in the liberal arts, technology, and education as a moral habit. He has published two scholarly books—Ens Primum Cognitum in Thomas Aquinas and the Tradition (Brill: 2017) and The Intersections of Semiotics and Phenomenology: Peirce and Heidegger in Dialogue (De Gruyter: 2019), as well as a number of scholarly articles, popular articles, and his own Introduction to Philosophical Principles: Logic, Physics, and the Human Person (2019) and the forthcoming Linguistic Signification: A Classical Course in Grammar and Composition (2021).

In addition to being the Executive Director of the Lyceum Institute, he is the Executive Editor of Reality: a Journal for Philosophical Discourse.

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IO2S DEELY - International Open Seminar on Semiotics: a Tribute to John Deely on the Fifth Anniversary of His Passing

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