Managing abductions in working memory: the influence of percepts

In: Cognitive semiotics, Volume 16, Issue 1, p. 23-43

Abstract

Abstract
This inquiry addresses how working memory underpins abductive inferences, given their means to objectify meanings. Binding experiences in WM: integrates features with objects, makes obvious object situatedness, and determines impingement of objects upon other objects. These meaning chunks verify how events affect consequences, tracing episodic profiles. WM binding is essential to the evolution of sign meanings, when hatching inferences about which objects/events should be included in the same image, illustrating how WM bindings are implicated in constructing Percepts. Percepts mark the starting point when new meanings are attributed to objects (7.671). These new meanings materialize consequent to implied predicative alterations. WM chunks consist in locative and/or descriptive predicates; they can be implicit in Terms, or explicit in Propositions (1908: 8.373). As Terms with implied predicates, percepts provide the building blocks to attribute new meanings to event profiles, complying with Peirce's proviso that interpretants "have to be much widened" (1906: 4.538).