Lingvistkredsens årsmøde efterfulgt af Jordan Zlatev: The evolution of meaning

The concepts of meaning and communication are proverbial for their different “meanings”, both within and between fields. More recently, the notion of embodiment has served as something of a rallying call – against cognitivist and computationalist theories, and for basing interdisciplinary research (in linguistics, semiotics, cognitive science, gesture studies, culture studies) on the structures, dynamics and experiences of the (human) body. However, “embodiment” has also suffered from extensive ambiguity and lack of coherence. In an effort to redeem this, I here present a conceptual and evolutionary framework distinguishing between four general levels of meaning (related, respectively, to life, consciousness, signs and language), and show how these corresponds to respective levels of (a) “the body” and (b) forms of communication. Finally, I briefly touch on a possible way to explain the transitions to the two highest levels, based on a model with growing empirical support: the Mimesis Hierarchy.