The reciprocal inherency of self and context. Notes for a semiotic model of the constitution of experience.

Abstract

The idea of the context as something outside the mind and as such affecting, framing, regulating, feeding it is unsatisfactory. In this work I propose an alternative view, based on a dynamic, dialogic, and semiotic model of the process of the constitution of the experience. Accordingly, the context is inherently linked to the mind. Mind and context cannot be conceived as separate entities interacting with each other. Rather, they are forms of description, on different spatial-temporal scales, of the same basic dynamics of semiotization. The self and context are the same thing – two sides of the same coin. In the second part of the paper I draw some implications from the theory of context proposed. I show how it entails the idea that, in the final analysis, the context is the ground of the sense of continuity and fullness of the self and the experience of the world. A rather radical change of perspective is involved here: it is not the ontological quality of the world that grounds the sense of continuity of the experience. Rather, it is the sense of continuity of the experience that feeds our embodied feeling of the ontological subsistence of the world.