Peer Bundgaard (sempb@cc.au.dk) Center for Semiotics – Aarhus University, Denmark A brief history of cognitive semiotics: schemas and putting claims to the test The predicate ”cognitive” in Cognitive Semiotics is likely to take on several different, not equally compatible meanings dependent on the theoretical frameworks in which they are employed. For example, “cognitive” could be taken in its German sense, as it were, as something pertaining to the structure of knowledge, Erkenntnis – in the anti-psychologistic tradition of Peircean semiotics, this is usually how the term would be understood (Stjernfelt 2007, 2014); i.e. as referring to a priori structures constraining meaning-making or semiosis at large. In the tradition Cognitive Linguistics (or Cognitive Semantics, Cognitive Grammar), however, “cognitive” refers to the psychologically real, empirical goings-on in the human mind and brain and how these are reflected in, specified and displayed in language. These two traditions are, on this point, rather irreconcilable: the former is resolutely non-psychological, the latter is resolutely non-aprioristic. Cognitive Semiotics, as I have seen it develop since the mid-80’s (Brandt 1992, Petitot 1986) emerged with a foot in each of them. On the one hand, if “Semiotics” has been dubbed “cognitive” in Aarhus, Denmark, where the first MA Program in Cognitive Semiotics was launched in 2001, it is due to the decisive impact scholars from Cognitive Linguistics, such as Len Talmy, Eve Sweetser, Charles Fillmore and Ron Langacker, had on semioticians like Per Aage Brandt and Jean Petitot already around 1985. The first pivotal element in this encounter was the notion of “schema”, as it had been elaborated, in a Kantian and Catastrophe Theoretical framework by Jean Petitot (1986, 2011; Thom 1972), and as it was used in the cognitive linguistic tradition; the second pivotal element was their common refutation of formal linguistic and semiotic theories of language and meaning. Both Petitot’s Cognitive Morphodynamics and Cognitive Linguistics aimed at bringing “meaning back into the world”. In the first part of this paper, I shall unravel elements of this history, and point to affinities and differences between the morphodynamic and cognitive linguistic understanding and definition of the notion of “schema”. Now, if Cognitive Semiotics, in its origin, appeared as an articulation of the above two, respectively a priori and psychological, conceptions of “cognitive”, today it seems to have taken a definite psychological turn, in that it studies (human) meaning-making relative to the empirical mental processes and structures responsible for the production, consumption and communication of meaning at an individual and an intersubjective level. This implies, that empirical methods an increasingly important role in the investigation of the dynamics of meaning-making, in language, experience, action and interaction. In the second part of this paper, I will account for the empirical turn of Cognitive Semiotics; i.e. the supposition that claims about humans as semiotic animals are empirical claims, and it should therefore be possible to put them to the test. => I ask that this talk, if admitted, be part of the Theme Session “The Development of Cognitive Science” that I organize with Todd Oakley and Irene Mittelberg. Literature: Brandt, P.Aa. 1992. La charpente modale du sens. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press Petitot, J. 1986. Morphogénèse du sens. Paris: PUF. Petitot, J. 2011. Cognitive Morphodynamics. Bern: Peter Lang. Stjernfelt, F. 2007. Diagrammatology. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Stjernfelt, F. 2014. Natural Propositions. New York: Docent P