The Mimesis Hierarchy of semiotic development: Five stages of intersubjectivity in children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper proposes that intersubjectivity develops in children along a progression of five, more or less distinct, stages of semiotic development. The theoretical model within which this is couched is the Mimesis Hierarchy (MH) model (Zlatev & Andrén 2009). As in previous treatments, the MH-model focuses on bodily mimesis, its ―precursors‖ (empathetic perception) and ―post-developments‖ (conventionality, language and narrative). Mimesis is pivotal since it provides the basis for the development of (i) conventions (through imitation), (ii) intentional communication, and (iii) for bringing the two together in communicative, shared representations (signs). The main difference from previous applications is in the treatment of the concepts of representation and communicative intent. Due to recent empirical findings, and a more bodily-enactive and social-oriented perspective, I propose that Stage 2 gives rise to imitation and mimetic schemas (Zlatev 2007, in press), but that the first gestures (or vocalizations) of children are neither externalizations of these "internal representations", nor fully-fledged representations/signs on their own, but action schemas bidirectionally associated with particular contexts. That would explain why the onset of intentional communication occurs in Stage 3 with pointing and other deictic gestures (such as showing), which are not representations or fully-fledged (explicit) signs, but rather performative communicative acts, accompanied with makers of communicative intent. It is first in Stage 4 that the proto-representations of Stage 2 and the communicative intent of Stage 3 are combined to give rise to communicative iconic gestures, and more generally to the "insight" of using communicative, shared representations, or what is commonly referred to as symbols or signs.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".