• Per-Aage Brandt, Centre for Semiotics, University of Aarhus, Denmark
• Peer Bundgaard, Centre for Semiotics, University of Aarhus, Denmark
• Merlin Donald, professor emeritus, Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada
• Bruno Galantucci, Laboratory of Experimental Semiotics, Yeshiva University, New York City, USA
• Göran Sonesson, Centre for Cognitive Semiotics, University of Lund, Sweden

Per Aage Brandt is professor of cognitive science at Case Western Reserve (retired 2011). He is the founding director of the Center for Cognition and Culture at Case Western, the founding director of the Center for Semiotics at the University of Aarhus, and a founding co-editor of the journals Poetik, Poetica et Analytica, Semiotik, Almen Semiotik, and Cognitive Semiotics. His research fields include structural semantics, cognitive linguistics and poetics, philosophy of science, cognition, and music.

Peer Bundgaard is associate professor at the Center for Semiotics. His work divides into two major domains. First is the semiotics of aesthetic cognition: that is to say, the nature of aesthetic cognition in relation to plain cognition; second, the crossovers between phenomenology and cognitive semantics. In both domains, his focus is on the ontological and psychological constraints on human meaning making.

Merlin Donald is professor emeritus in the department of psychology and faculty of education at Queen’s University.  A cognitive neuroscientist with a background in philosophy, he is the author of numerous scientific papers and two influential books: Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition and A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness.

Bruno Galantucci is assistant professor in psychology at Yeshiva University, where he directs the Experimental Semiotics Laboratory. He is a research affiliate at Haskins Laboratories, where he has conducted research on the psychology of language — including speech perception, word recognition, and sentence processing. In recent years, he has focused on studying experimentally how humans establish and develop novel forms of communication, contributing to the foundation of Experimental Semiotics.

Göran Sonesson is professor of semiotics at Lund University, where he has directed the semiotics seminar since 1986. He is the head of the Centre for Cognitive Semiotics and the initiator of the doctoral program in semiotics. He was the first president of the Swedish Society for Semiotic Studies and is the current president of the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies, as well as secretary general of the International Association for Visual Semiotics.

• table of contents
• publicity flyer

Contributors: Jean Petitot, Peer F. Bundgaard, Wolfgang Wildgen, Ivan Darrault-Harris, Zoï Kapoula , Qing Yang, Marine Vernet, Maria-Pia Bucci, Alessandro Pignocchi, Ellen Dissanayake, Michael Kimmel.

Cognitive Semiotics #4 (Spring 2009). ISSN 1662-1425.

200 pages. Paperback. Art. No. 81608

Click here for: Table of Contents (pdf)

Click here for: Editorial Preface & article abstracts (pdf)

Finally, click here to: order online at peterlang.com (for print or electronic version. However, if you’re ONLY interested in the electronic version, here’s a direct link to the Metapress hosting site for that:
http://peterlang.metapress.com/content/120905).

http://uwf.edu/tprewitt/ssa.htm

The editors of Cognitive Semiotics are scheduled for two sessions, both under the heading “Semiotics and Cognitive Studies”.

Session 1 is Friday 16 October: 14:00 -15:30

Session 2 is Saturday 17 October: 10:15 – 12:15

The full program can be viewed here:

http://www.uwf.edu/tprewitt/2009SSAprogram.htm

We hope to see some of you there!

Cognitive Semiotics #3 (Fall 2008). ISSN 1662-1425

166 pages. Paperback. Art. No. 81606.

Click here for: Table of Contents (pdf)

Click here for: Editorial Preface & article abstracts (pdf)

Finally, click here to: order online at peterlang.com (for print or electronic version. However, if you’re ONLY interested in the electronic version, here’s a direct link to the Metapress hosting site for that:
http://peterlang.metapress.com/content/120905).

Cognitive Semiotics #2 (Spring 2008). ISSN 1662-1425

196 pages. Paperback. Art. No. 81605.

Click here for: Table of Contents (pdf)

Click here for: Editorial Preface & article abstracts (pdf)

Finally, click here to: order online at peterlang.com (for print or electronic version. However, if you’re ONLY interested in the electronic version, here’s a direct link to the Metapress hosting site for that:
http://peterlang.metapress.com/content/120905).

Cognitive Semiotics #1, Fall 2007. ISSN 1662-1425

148 pages. Paperback. Art. No. 81602.

Click here for: Table of Contents (pdf)

Click here for: Editorial Preface & article abstracts (pdf)

Finally, click here to: order online at peterlang.com (or click here to download printable order form instead). Alternatively, click on the corresponding links in the sidebar to the right.

- When ordering online, you have the choice to subscribe to either the print version or the electronic version of the journal.

We are pleased to present this very first issue of Cognitive Semiotics. The journal will publish two print issues a year, one in the spring and one in the fall. Additionally, in December each year (starting 2010) a special issue of the Companion to Cognitive Semiotics, our free online complement to the printed journal, will be published on this website which also serves as a vital resource for the journal.

Issue #0 (Spring 2007) – click here for a full version of the cover

As a whole Cognitive Semiotics offers its readers the opportunity to engage with ideas from the European and American traditions of cognitive science and semiotics, and to follow developments in the study of meaning -  both in a cognitive and in a semiotic sense – as they unfold internationally. The intention of the journal is to create and facilitate dialogue, debate, and collaboration among those interested both in human cognition and in human semiotic experiences and behavior.

This intention is inherited from its Danish antecedent, the journal Almen Semiotik, published by the Aarhus University Press (1990-2002). The initiative to create a transatlantically based journal comes from the Center for Cognition and Culture, at the department of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University, and from a group of researchers trained at the Center for Semiotics, in Denmark, and based in Aarhus and Copenhagen. These joint editors identify the present issue as issue number “0″ to signify its transitional status. We are happy that Cognitive Semiotics will be published by Peter Lang Publishing Group, where the book series European Semiotics, created in 1999, is also housed.

Let us briefly explain the general content of this journal, the field of thinking and research we name cognitive semiotics.

Human minds ‘cognize’ and ‘signify’ as complementary aspects of their capacity to think and feel. If we accept the metaphor of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ levels of cognition, and the idea of seeing the ‘higher levels of cognition’ as those responsible for abstraction, language, discourse, institutions, law, science, music, visual arts, and cultural practices in general, grounded in the use of conventionally established and intentionally used signs (often called symbols), then semiotics is the discipline committed to the study of these ‘higher levels’. Relying predominantly on expressionbased communication, the contents of these higher-level cognitive feats can be shared by expressive exchanges of signified meanings (GE: Bedeutungen; FR: sens).

These meanings, in turn, can be made the subject of inquiry, their semiotic structure and significance indicators of how minds cognize together, and of the cognitive mechanisms which make their production and comprehension possible in the first place.

The mental activities of thinking and communicating are importantly interrelated in our species. Human societies and cultures, and civilization at large, are the results of cooperating and conflicting minds, connected through cognitive-semiotic functions and processes. To gain scientific knowledge about these often still unexplored phenomena, found increasingly important by the scientific community, the journal is devoted to high quality research, integrating methods and theories developed in the disciplines of cognitive science with methods and theories developed in semiotics and the humanities, with the ultimate aim of providing new insights into the realm of human meaning production and the modalities of its embodiment and disembodiment.

Cognitive Semiotics (and Companion to Cognitive Semiotics) will publish peer-reviewed manuscripts according to a doubleblind protocol. We invite authors to submit manuscripts on the above-mentioned and related topics to the editors at info@cognitivesemiotics.com. Also, we encourage everyone to visit our website frequently for relevant updates and news, and to sign up for our electronic newsletter to be informed of the upcoming editions of the journal (you do so by sending your name and email address to info@cognitivesemiotics.com).

- The editorial board

PS: A free, electronic version of issue #0 is available for download and personal distribution. Just click on the link in the sidebar.

The first issue, due for publication in April 2007, bears the theme “Agency” and contains articles by Shaun Gallagher, Merlin Donald, Rick Grush, Søren Overgaard & Thor Grünbaum, Kristian Tylén, and Mikkel Holm Sørensen & Tom Ziemke.

This inaugural issue will in turn celebrate the successful transition from being a locally based endeavour at Aarhus University, Denmark to becoming a true international journal with prominent editorial board members positioned on both sides of the Atlantic; in Denmark at the University of Aarhus and the University of Copenhagen, and in the United States at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. The latter will also serve as the official future home for the journal.

More info will follow as the journal and our international cooperation progresses. This is just a short welcome to let you know of our existence and, hopefully, to spark your interest in our journal!