Göran Sonesson – författare

Summarizing his life-long engagement with the field of semiotics and extending this with cognitive science and phenomenology into the transdisciplinary science of cognitive semiotics, the author asks key questions like: What is meaning in general and sign use in particular? What is specific about the picture sign? What is communication? The book is divided into three parts, followed by an extensive case study on visual rhetoric. Edited posthumously by his closest colleagues, the book sediments the legacy of Göran Sonesson as one of the leading semioticians of our times. It is bound to become a classic in the fields dedicated to the pursuit of meaning.

This book, which presents a cognitive-semiotic theory of cultural evolution, including that taking place in historical time, analyses various cognitive-semiotic artefacts and abilities. It claims that what makes human beings human is fundamentally the semiotic and cultural skills by means of which they endow their Lifeworld with meaning. The properties that have made human beings special among animals living in the terrestrial biosphere do not derive entirely from their biological-genetic evolution, but also stem from their interaction with the environment, in its culturally interpreted form, the Lifeworld. This, in turn, becomes possible thanks to the human ability to learn from other thinking beings, and to transfer experiences, knowledge, meaning, and perspectives to new generations.