Surviving in the Bermuda Triangle of Semeiosis

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 ale 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 methodolory for (formal) specification.