Cognitive Semiotics : Integrating Signs , Minds , Meaning , and Cognition

laudio, enactivism is the attempt to think about cognition in a non-representational way, but semiotics is intrinsically representationalist. So they cannot be together.” These words by Jean Petitot have stuck with Claudio Paolucci ever since 2003, when he was working under the former’s mentorship at the CRÉA, the Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée. In Paris, Petitot had been a close collaborator of Francisco Varela, and Paolucci could definitely see the merit of their enactivist ideas, but doing away with semiotics was out of the question, especially for one of Umberto Eco’s last students. Having reflected on those words for almost two decades, Paolucci (2021) is now ready to assertively proclaim that “Yes, semiotics and enactivists can be together and they have to be together.” Such is the author’s confidence in this union that he recently spearheaded the establishment, in Bologna, of the International Centre for Enactivism and Cognitive Semiotics. His latest book thus comes not as a self-standing monograph concerned with its author’s idiosyncratic interests, but as a manifesto of sorts for the now institutionally enshrined idea that enactivism and semiotics belong together. Yet, putting the representational and anti-representational together is no small feat. It takes C