ABSTRACT
Finding common ground between neuroscience and semiotics requires reframing neurological processes as semiotic processes and vice versa. In the neurosciences, this requires abandoning both the computational metaphor and the view that the basic functional unit of cognition is an individual neuron’s response properties. In semiotic theory, this requires abandoning a structuralist conception of the sign relation and adopting a process perspective that treats iconic, indexical, and symbolic relations as phases in a hierarchically recursive interpretive process. To achieve this, I argue that iconic interpretation is the most basic neurosemiotic operation and that neurosemiotic interpretants take the form of neural dynamical attractors. The ensuing framework paves the way for a semiotic cognitive neuroscience.
