The Cognitive Semiotics of Pictorial Evolution and Development

The study of meaningful artifacts, such as pictures, has traditionally been caught between the humanities, which only take an interest in a selection of individual pictures, and psychology, which attends more to the majority reaction to pictures than to the nature of the pictures themselves. Some parts of semiotics, and, more, in particular, cognitive semiotics, endeavor to make use of all possible methods, including experiments, in order to make sense of pictures as meaningful artifacts. In this sense, cognitive semiotics is an instance of integrated science (in the sense in which science refers to all ways of creating knowledge about phenomena in the world). To throw some light on this claim, we will, in the present paper, first discuss the meaning of integrating the sciences and, then, after offering a sketch of the emergence of cognitive semiotics out of classical semiotics, we will account for what has been done so far, using different methods and approaches, within pictorial semiotics, and we will end with some considerations on the epistemology of cognitive semiotics.