UCL - Sémiotique cognitive

[COMU2270]

[30h] 5 credits

This course is taught in the 1st semester.

Teacher(s): Pierre Fastrez

Language: French

Level: Second

Aims
Main themes
Content and teaching methods
Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Aims

By the end of the course, students will have acquired:
a sound knowledge of systemic epistemology, and of the main theoretical concepts developed in the framework of this epistemology;
the ability to deal with a theoretical problem within this framework;
the ability to characterise the phenomena of interaction and social communications in systemic terms.

Main themes

The course aims to introduce the epistemological and conceptual framework of the systemic approach, and to demonstrate its importance as a source of inspiration for the theoretical communications models that have developed in various fields, particularly those of social interaction and cognition.
The main issues to be addressed are:
cybernetico-systemic epistemology (notions of cybernetic organisation and of system);
the notion of organisational information;
the second cybernetics and the notion of self-organisation;
the systemic approach and social interaction;
the systemic approach to cognition;
- systemic (or systemically based) theories of communications.

Content and teaching methods

Contents
The course contains two parts:
1. Cognitive Science Paradigms and Views of Cognition. This part introduces students to cognitivism-computationalism, connexionism and experientialism, situates them in the historical perspective of their advent, and develops the different views of cognition they
yielded: cognition as information processing, as computation, as parallel distributed processing, as propagation of representational states, as embodied experience...
2. Communication and Cognition: Conceptual Tools. This part presents a set of concepts that underlie the semio-cognitive analysis of communication settings:
a. the notion of conceptual projection in the study of metaphor, analogy and conceptual integration;
b. the notion of cognitive system in the context of distributed cognition;
c. the notions of schema and schematicity and their entailments on the issues of representation and knowledge;
d. the notions of inference, relevance and coherence and the inferential-interpretative model of communication.

Methods
The course relies mainly on lectures, complemented by readings and a personal assignment that focuses on the application of concepts explained in class.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Evaluation
Evaluation includes a theoretical part as well as a part dedicated to the application of concepts explained in class to a communication situation.
Material
Course reader; detailed lectures outline.