Appropriation
The notion of the meaning-making (semiogenetic) trajectory thus provides a way of conceptualizing how body-brains contextually integrate information deriving from different perceptual modalities (e.g. seeing, hearing, moving) in the here-now of their own and others’ bodily activities to events, activities, and so on, on other space-time scales, both in the actual past and in the anticipated future, involving either the same or other participants (see Thibault 2000a: 303-6; 2003b). It is in this way that infants are integrated, through their active participation in such events, to the higher-scalar ecosocial processes and dynamics where semiotic entities such as, for example, ‘wants’, ‘beliefs’, ‘intentions’ and ‘desires’ are recognized and used as the basis both for adjusting to and accounting for the behaviour of others qua selves to whom we attribute such things as wants, beliefs, intentions, and desires (see Matthiessen 1993; Thibault 1993; see also Zelazo 1999).
On this view, intentions are not, as I pointed out above, epistemically private mental states that belong to an ontologically distinct domain of ‘mind’ with independent causal powers. Instead, they are meaning-making resources that belong to the higher~scalar system of interpretance of some ecosocial semiotic system. As such, agents use them for the purposes of interpreting and orienting to each other in discourse, in the process adjusting their own activity on the basis of the belief in our culture in the notion that persons are in possession of intentions qua epistemically private mental states that can be read of behaviour as evidence for the existence of a private mental realm that language simply serves to reveal. This account is essentially a realist one: intentions have a separate existence in the mind with respect to the signs that refer to them. In my account, intentions, desires, wants, and so on are semiotic categories that agents appropriate from the interpersonal moral orders in which their actions are recognized, understood, and accounted for (Harre 1983). As such, they are not independent of the semiotic resources that we use in discourse to construe and enact them. They function in meaning-making activity to interpret and orient our own and others’ activities.
excerpted from the Introduction; Brain, Mind and the Signifying Body. Paul Thibault. Continuum 2004
Description from Continuum Books
Brain, Mind and the Signifying Body is an exploration of a multimodal theory of cognitive science. Using linguistic theories first developed by Saussure and more latterly by M. A. K. Halliday, Paul Thibault analyses how social and biological systems interact to produce meaning. This fascinating study will be of interest to undergraduates and academics researching cognitive linguistics and advanced semiotics.
The book engages with the current dialogue between the human and life sciences to ask questions about the relationship between the physical, biological aspects of a human being, and the sociocultural framework in which a human being exists. Paul J. Thibault argues that we need to understand both the semiotic, discursive nature of meaning making, and the physical context in which this activity takes place. The two are inseparable, and hence the only way we can understand our subjective experience of our environment and our perceptions of our inner states of mind is by giving equal weight to both frameworks. This ‘ecosocial semiotic’ theory engages with linguistics, semiotics, activity theory, biology and psychology. In so doing, the book produces a new way of looking at how a human being makes sense of his or her environment, but also how this environment shapes such meanings
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