Semiosis and Normative Sciences: Towards a Semiotic Modeling of Knowledge and Cognition

The thesis we defend here is that human knowledge and cognition are inseparable from their (rhetorical) modalities of expression, from the (ethical) practices they support and from the (aesthetic) feeling they generate. We will therefore analyse and synthetize Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory, focusing on the notion of semiosis, on Peirce’s three onto‐gnoseo‐logical categories (Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness) and, finally, on Peirce’s treatment of the so-called normative sciences (Aesthetics, Ethics and Logic). The aim is to try to specify, from a theoretical point of view, the aesthetic‐ethical‐rhetorical dimension of human knowledge and the relation that can be established between this dimension and the processes of semiosis.