Abstract

What role does language play in the process of building worldviews? To address this question, in the first section of this paper we will clarify what we mean by worldviews and how they differ, in our perspective, from cosmovisions. In a nutshell, we define worldviews as the biological interpretations agents create of the world around them and cosmovision the more general cultural-based reflections on it (which, of course, include also agents’ worldviews). After presenting our definition for worldview, we will also present the multi-shaped viewpoint that frames our analysis, adopting three concepts that can help us explain how agents construct and develop their worldviews: saliences, pregnances, and abduction. While the notions of saliences and pregnances will explain how agents recognize anomalies in their worldview, the concept of abduction will help us discuss how they can learn to approach, explain, and use these anomalies to get new skills and abilities. This other point will lead us to discuss the role of language in this process, which will be describe as an artifact that permits the agent to use abduction to “normalize” and exploit anomalies, being now the ultimate artifact (for human agents) to build, develop, and update their worldviews.

Highlights

  • This paper is the product of the combination of different background theories and theoretical points of view

  • What role does language play in the construction of worldview as we presented them? To answer this question we need to incorporate our eco-cognitive perspective in a semio-physical framework

  • That we presented in which sense our framework has semio-physical features, we can introduce two relevant notions that make them pop out as relevant for our purposes, which follows from the catastrophe theory of the mathematician René Thom (1988): saliences and pregnances

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Summary

Introduction

This paper is the product of the combination of different background theories and theoretical points of view. As a forewarning to the reader, we should point out that this paper discusses in an interdisciplinary fashion concepts that pertain to philosophy (in particular philosophy of science, logic, and epistemology), semiotics, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology. In this multi-shaped framework, language can, be approached and described in many ways. The first section of this paper will clarify what we mean by worldviews and how they differ, in our perspective, from cosmovisions. After presenting our definition for worldview, we will present the multi-shaped viewpoint that frames our analysis, adopting three concepts that can help us explain how agents construct and develop

Worldviews from an Eco‐Cognitive and Semio‐physical Perspective
Worldviews and Cosmovisions
Worldviews are Shaped Up by Saliences and Pregnances
Abduction and Changing of Worldviews
Language as a Cognitive Tool
Language as the Ultimate Artifact to Build
Conclusions
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