Sign,Meaning,Knowledge: An Essay in the Cognitive Philosophy of Language

How well does linguistics ‘know’ language? What are the essential properties of language? Where do signs come from, and how is knowledge ‘represented’ in them? These and other related questions are in the focus of discussion in Sign, Meaning, Knowledge. The book offers a conceptual synthesis of the vast theoretical and empirical data accumulated by the cognitive science. As a result of such synthesis, a unified methodology for treating language as a natural phenomenon is proposed. Taking the semiotic nature of language as a starting point, and drawing on the epistemological framework of autopoiesis as the organization of the living, the author attempts to describe the knowledge-representational function of language as the function of a biological system in its adaptive interactions with the environment. This takes linguistics a step further toward its integration with biology and other natural sciences.