Consciousness as Symbolic Construction: A Semiotics of Thought after Cassirer.

▶Purpose- In both analytic and continental philosophy, the linguistic turn jettisoned philosophical foundationalism and gave way to a new pragmatic-hermeneutic turn regarding understanding, truth, and meaning. Yet now intentional consciousness - i.e., the relation between thought and language - still poses an issue. At stake is the convincing reconstruction of consciousness based on symbolic mediation. ▶Method- In order to contribute to this discussion, the paper takes up Cassirer's argument for the necessity of "symbolic forms" for thought. It introduces an ideal-typical notion of the sign, and develops, on this basis, the relevance of Cassirer's arguments from symbolic synthesis and from symbolic articulation in order to finally assess the prospects of a theory of symbolic meaning after Cassirer. ▶Results- The paper shows that consciousness is prone to a semiotic analysis and points the way for future desiderata of a theory of meaning. ▶Implications- The results are relevant for philosophy, psychology, semiotics, as well as cultural studies. The paper projects a position of symbolic epistemic constructivism by reconstructing the mind and world, or subject-object, as emerging from the prior source of symbolic mediation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]