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The icon is the type of sign connected to efficient representational features, and its manipulation reveals more information about its object. The London Underground Diagram (LUD) is an iconic artifact and a well-known example of representational efficiency, having been copied by urban transportation systems worldwide. This paper investigates the efficiency of the LUD in the light of different conceptions of iconicity. We stress that a specialized representation is an icon of the formal structure of the problem for which it has been specialized. By embedding such rules of action and behavior, the icon acts as a semiotic artifact distributing cognitive effort and participating in niche construction.

Habit in semiosis can be modeled both as a macro-level in a hierarchical multi-level system where it functions as boundary conditions for emergence of semiosis, and as a cognitive niche produced by an ecologically-inherited environment of cognitive artifacts. According to the first perspective, semiosis is modeled in terms of a multilayered system, with micro functional entities at the lower-level and with higher-level processes being mereologically composed of these lower-level entities. According to the second perspective, habits are embedded in ecologically-inherited environments of signs that co-evolve with cognition. Both descriptions offer a novel approximation of Peirce's semiotics and theoretical findings in other areas (hierarchy theory, evolutionary biology), suggesting new frameworks to approach the concept of habit integrated with its role in semiosis.

Poems are treated by translators as hierarchical multilevel systems. Here we propose the notion of "multilevel poetry translation" to characterize such cases of poetry translation in terms of selection and rebuilding of a multilevel system of constraints across languages. Different levels of a poem correspond to different sets of components that asymmetrically constrain each other (e. g., grammar, lexicon, syntactic construction, prosody, rhythm, typography, etc.). This perspective allows a poem to be approached as a thinking-tool: an "experimental lab" which submits language to unusual conditions and provides a scenario to observe the emergence of new patterns of semiotic behaviour as a result. We describe this operation as a problem-solving task, and exemplify with Augusto de Campos' Portuguese translation of John Donne's poem "The Expiration."

RESUMO: O principal propósito deste trabalho é fornecer uma ontologia semiótica para redescrição do externalismo cognitivo ativo, desenvolvido recentemente pelo paradigma 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended cognition). Nessa abordagem, sistemas cognitivos distribuídos (SCDs) são descritos como semiose, ou signos em ação. Explora-se a relação entre semiose e cognição, como concebida por C. S. Peirce, em associação com a noção de sistema cognitivo distribuído (SCD). Introduz-se a abordagem externalista peirciana, com ênfase na noção de distribuição temporal da semiose, e se descrevem SCDs, e seus elementos, como “ação dos signos”. Para desenvolver esse argumento, examina-se um exemplo de SCD - improvisação verbo-musical do repente, repentismo, ou cantoria de viola. Trata-se de um fenômeno de improvisação verbo-musical que tem a forma de um desafio em poesia oral versificada. Explicita-se esse fenômeno como a incorporação da estrutura formal de uma tarefa cognitiva e de um processo inferencial. Essa incorporação corresponde a uma semiotização das performances do repente como SCD. A tendência temporalmente distribuída do repente organiza o SCD como um sistema que realiza experimentos metassemióticos sobre a ação dos signos.

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Here we describe Peircean post-1903 semiosis as a processualist conception of meaning, and relate it to contemporary active externalism in Philosophy of Cognitive Science, especially through the notion of cognitive niche construction. In particular, we shall consider the possibility of integrating (a) the understanding of “semiosis as process” within Peirce’s mature semiotics with (b) an elaboration of the concept of cognitive niche from the point of view of niche construction theory and process biology research.