Empirical and Semiotic Environments

The Narrative and Cognition Lab in the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities invites you to an online and in-person talk presented by Richard Walsh at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University, on 15 November 2024 3:00 - 4:30.

Cognition, in the largest sense, is an organism’s engagement with an environment, and so a relational, embodied, and enactive concept at its core. The nature of the relation invites closer scrutiny of the concept of "environment" itself, as itself relational and importantly different from the totality of the material reality within which the organism finds itself.

We might begin by specifying an environment as everything that is available to cognition, in principle, for a given situated organism, within the constraints and horizons that necessarily apply. We might then consider how that conception of environment relates to the concept of the implicit in cognition. Is the implicit actually a compound concept, with different senses in pre- and post-representational contexts?

When cognition turns reflexively upon its own processes, the concept of environment acquires a distinct sense, being no longer merely an empirical context, but a semiotic one. How does such a view of environments square with the arguments of biosemiotics, in which the environment is always semiotic? And do such considerations bear tellingly upon the staple notion, within narratology, of a stroryworld?

This event will be chaired by Dr Marco Bernini from the Narrative and Cognition Lab in the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities.

This event is free to attend.

Zoom details will be circulated closer to the event.