ABSTRACT

This Handbook introduces neurosemiotics, a pluralistic framework to reconsider semiosis as an emergent phenomenon at the interface of biology and culture.

Across individual and interpersonal settings, meaning is influenced by external and internal processes bridging phenomenological and biological dimensions. Yet, each of these dyads has been segregated into discipline-specific topics, with attempts to chart their intersections proving preliminary at best. Bringing together perspectives from world-leading experts, this volume seeks to overcome these disciplinary divides between the social and the natural sciences at both the empirical and theoretical levels. Its various chapters chart the foundations of neurosemiotics; characterize linguistic and interpersonal dynamics as shaped by neurocognitive, bodily, situational, and societal factors; and examine other daily neurosemiotic occurrences driven by faces, music, tools, and even visceral signals.

This comprehensive volume is a state-of the-art resource for students and researchers interested in how humans and other animals construe experience in such fields as cognitive neuroscience, biosemiotics, philosophy of mind, neuropsychology, neurolinguistics, and evolutionary biology.

chapter |10 pages

Introduction

Semiosis, brain, and context: The unmet need for a transdisciplinary framework

part I|86 pages

Prolegomena to neurosemiotics

chapter 1|17 pages

Neurosemiotics

A brief history of its development and key concerns

chapter 4|16 pages

Experimental semiotics

Past, present, and future

chapter 5|15 pages

Beyond the human animal

Towards a cross-species neurosemiotics

part II|121 pages

Language and its pathways to meaning

chapter 6|14 pages

Neural bases of multimodal semantics

chapter 8|15 pages

The figurative brain

chapter 10|15 pages

How grammar means

chapter 11|16 pages

Discourse and the brain

Capturing meaning in the wild

chapter 13|14 pages

How do sign languages mean?

part III|104 pages

The neurosemiotics of social dynamics

chapter 16|12 pages

The neurosemiotics of social interaction

Insights from second-person neuroscience

chapter 17|20 pages

Joint epistemic engineering

The neglected process in human communication

chapter 19|16 pages

Neurosemiotics and ideology

A linguistic view

part IV|83 pages

Further semiotic domains

chapter 22|13 pages

Musical signs and the human organism

chapter 23|16 pages

The meaning of tools

The pragmatic value of semantic knowledge

chapter 24|12 pages

Interpreting the signals within

Meaning and prediction during interoception