Semiotics and Semantics (Lecture) — Course home

All right, hello and welcome everyone. This is the course Active Inference for the Social Sciences in 2023. It's August 30th or maybe a different date depending on where you are. And today we're in the Semiotics and Semantics section. We'll be hearing a lecture from Lorena Zaganzerla, and then we're going to have a little bit of a discussion. So Lorena, thank you a lot for joining and off to you for the lecture. Okay, hello everyone. I'm based in Australia. Yeah, I'm Lorena. I'm doing actually my PhD in philosophy here. I work in cognitive sciences and philosophy. I work with him from concepts and notions of information. So I'm very interested in foundational understanding of cognitive sciences and information and how these kind of things cash out. And this is why I was interested in talking about semantics and social cognition to see how these things can show. I have a few ideas on how semiotics can be compatible with like active imprints. And I try to organize a little bit of this semiotic notion and active imprints to see if they pan out. Maybe they don't. So let's see how it goes. So let's talk about active inference, formal semantics, and social cognition. What's up there? Okay, I cannot move my slides. Now I can. So I will first have a very short introduction for you guys. I have out here. So what are you going to do? Like we have a short introduction. I'm going to talk a little bit of theories of meaning. And then we're going to talk a little bit the free energy of the logic principle and active inference. And how shared symbols and social cognition can be thought together. I bring one case that I find interesting and then we draw some conclusions. So let me know what you think in the comments and after we can have a little discussion or in the next session. So the background introduction that I want to first point to is we're talking about biological agents and how they act. So we're always thinking in terms of biological agents acting to express, in a way that express information of sensitivities to context dependent relevance to their environment and things that involve communities. However, how this very minimal way of talking about what motivates and what is relevant to people becomes stable enough as a self-sustaining pattern of interactions? Like are they stable and how they become that stable? So how can those information sensitivities ground values, norms, and goals consistently and over time? Assuming that those values and goals are necessary for meaningful interactions. So we have to align motivations to behavior, right? That's not really obvious. And ultimately how meaning is brought about? I don't think I'm going to answer that, but I want to point to some directions and how people have been thinking about these questions over time. So the problem of meaning has a brief account, right? Like traditionally approaches to cognition localize meaning inside individual organisms and more specifically inside their minds. So meaning pertains to I mean to content in this kind of thing. So meaning have, however, like meaning have a developmental history. So it's hard to catch those two things together if it's inside people's minds, how we can have an evolutionary and developmental history. Assuming that meaning are things that we can learn over time and they happen in shared context. They don't happen out of nowhere in a vision from nowhere. In a sense, like we can say that it's not really trivial that conventionalized words. Like for example, meaning the conventionalized meaning of a word, for instance, cat means cat, have evolutionary histories. The one thing does not come from the other. We need a broader understanding to cache this meaning out. And that's where I'm stepping from. Like that's my grounding. Like we need to cache these things out in terms of community of language users. Which brings a problem, right? We have goals and values that can be defined in terms of those communities and you have material and…