Surviving in the Bermuda Triangle of semeiosis



                      Auke J.J. van Breemen 
                  Van Breemen Onderwijs Advies,
                    Nijmegen, The Netherlands 


                      Janos J. Sarbo
                  Radboud University Nijmegen,
                   Nijmegen, The Netherlands






What we think is part of reality and at least partly determined by reality 
at the same time. The advent of knowledge engineering asks for a shift from 
lifeless representational and blind reductionist models towards a relational
and teleological interpretation of cognition in order to embed the cognitive 
events in processes of meaning production or semeiosis. 

Such embedding is determined by the properties of perception (the senses) 
and the types of distinctions that can be made by semeiosis. The selection of
elements in such processes that are formalizable asks for a model in which 
the phases that make up the process, the decision moments, and their degrees 
of freedom are clearly indicated. 

In this paper we will outline such a model for two levels: the level of 
sign recognition and the level of response to a sign. The decision moments 
will only be indicated. The practical importance of this structure lies in 
its potential to be interpreted as a methodology for (formal) specification.



Keywords: 
C.S. Peirce, semeiosis, cognition, process, semiotics.