Abstract. Th e semiosphere is arguably the most infl uential concept developed by Juri Lotman, which has been reinterpreted in a variety of ways. Th is paper returns to Lotman's original "anthropocentric" understanding of semiosphere as a collective intellect/consciousness and revisits the main arguments of Lotman's discussion of human vs. nonhuman semiosis in order to position it in the modern context of cognitive semiotics and the question of human uniqueness in particular. In contrast to the majority of works that focus on symbolic consciousness and multimodal communication as specifi cally human traits, Lotman accentuates polyglottism and dialogicity as the unique features of human culture. Formulated in this manner, the concept of semiosphere is used as a conceptual framework for the study of human cognition as well as human cognitive evolution.Keywords: semiosphere; cognition; polyglottism; dialogue; multimodality; Juri Lotman Th e concept of semiosphere is arguably the most infl uential concept developed by the semiotician and literary scholar Juri Lotman , a leader of the TartuMoscow School of Semiotics and a founder of semiotics of culture. In a way, it was the pinnacle of Lotman's lifelong study of culture as an intrinsic component of human individual and collective consciousness and as a precondition of all modelling processes, including cognition and thinking. It was also the synthesis of the core principles of Lotman's semiotics that can be formulated as the principle of cultural isomorphismwhich postulates that all semiotic entities from individual consciousness to the totality of human culture are based on similar heterogeneous mechanisms of meaning-generationand the principle of textuality of culture, the assumption that culture is an exceptionally complex text that in turn consists of texts within texts.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.