Context: Recent decades have seen the development of new branches of semiotics, including biosemiotics, cognitive semiotics, and cybersemiotics. An important feature of these concepts is the question of the relationship between the linguistic and extralinguistic world: in particular, the constructivist question of the role of observation and the observer in semiosis. Problem: Our understanding of the observer’s role in the framework of second-order cybernetics is incomplete without understanding where in the observation the significant activity, semiosis, takes place. By describing this process, we will see that semiosis has the structure of an eigenform. I will concentrate on linguistic semiosis, and will illuminate the role of the sign and interpretation, emphasizing the scheme and logic of this process. Method: I use theoretical and conceptual methods of argumentation, such as logical (deductive) and philosophical (phenomenological) proofs and thought experiments. Results: My argumentation underlines the importance of including interpretation (via the observer) in the process of signification. It reveals the reciprocal connections among all three elements (sign, object and interpretant) and their cyclic nature. I show that semiosis works according to the principle of an eigenform because of the cyclic and recursive nature of semiotic interpretation. Implications: My conclusions have productive implications for epistemic theories, linguistic theories, philosophy of language, theories of semiology, and semantics. They support the idea that we are unable to understand the world beyond language. Linguistic semiosis is an eigenform that creates the world in itself and through itself. The sign and the object are mutually and referentially related to each other. Constructivist content: Using the concept of eigenform helps to clarify how linguistic semiosis allows people to exist in language, bring forth objects and meaning potentials and construct reality. In this process, human beings self-fabricate as observers and, using aspects of “language,” become interpreters.

Key words: Eigenform, interpretation, interpretant, linguistic semiosis, object, recursion, semiotics, semiosis, sign.

In this article, a semiotic approach is proposed to explain how human agents use and give meaning to art in complex contexts. Inspired by the psycho-historical approach on art appreciation, which attempts to embrace psychological and cognitive aspects of art sense-making, as well as the art-historical context dependence of artworks, an extended theory is suggested: an agent’s art use and interpretation can be described using three general categories of meaning grounding: phylogenetic recurrence, ontogenetic recurrence and collective recurrence. These categories explain how a certain meaning of a sign is possible and justifiable, supported by human agents’ capabilities and purposes. This article also proposes that it is possible to narrate, using such categories of meaning grounding, how different agents enact art, that is, give meaning and act upon art in different circumstances. Finally, I offer some examples about how the model can be used in real art contexts. The objective of this narrative-enactive approach, even though it offers a limited and edited focus, is to offer an orderly and comprehensible method to explain the dynamic nature of art meaning and how biologic, individual and collective grounding and purposes intertwine.

Key words: agentive semiotics, art theory, cognitive semiotics, enactivism, institutional theories of art, recurrences.

Departing from the theoretical framework of the semiotic hierarchy (Zlatev, 2009), realizing a form of cognitive semiotics based on ‘integrating methods and theories developed in the disciplines of cognitive science with methods and theories developed in semiotics and the humanities’i (cf. www.cognitivesemiotics.com) the paper analyzes the concepts of embodiment and communication along an evolutionary progression of four levels: biological, phenomenological, significational (sign-based) and extended/normative. Examples of human and animal communication are provided in order to clarify these distinct levels. Further, the concept of bodily mimesis and the model of the mimesis hierarchy (Zlatev, 2008, Zlatev & Andrén, 2009) that is predicated upon it are offered as conceptual and empirical tools in order to help explain the transitions leading to the two highest meaning levels: to sign use proper (from pre-sign meanings), and from this to normative, and eventually body-independent, objectified sign systems such as those of writing and mathematics. The leitmotif of the paper is the risk of either exaggerating or down playing the bodily bases of meaning and communication.

Open peer commentary on the article “Semiosis as Eigenform and Observation as Recursive Interpretation” by Diana Gasparyan. Abstract: Gasparyan sketches a semiotic theory where world, mind and language - the latter a stand-in for all semiosis - collapse into one “recursive” whole. In contrast, cognitive semiotics differentiates life-world from subject and perception from signification, as well as between different semiotic systems, of which language is only one.