The ecological approach to the study of language, communication and cognition

This article studies different aspects and perspectives on ecological approach - a new interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological paradigm that is applied to the investigation of the systems' communicative and distributed cognitive processes. The main focus of this work is on ecolinguistic, ecosemiotic and biosemiotic studies with their heterono-mous, system-first, context-oriented approach to understanding of sign systems and informational processes. It is shown that biological and social, cognitive and communicative processes are evolutionary integrated, mutually regulating and developing. Because of this the studies of the origin and evolution of various means of communication and information transmission have to consider at list three system characteristics: biological (genetic, epigenetic, environmental), social (cultural habits, social context, culturally inherited means of communication) and individual (cognitive skills, personal interpretations). It is argued that in biological and social systems a theoretical distinction between organism and environment is reasonable for research purposes, but in reality it is conventional. Many communicative and cognitive processes take place on system level where environment is essential part that implements, accumulates, transmits and regulates particular biological and social activities. Therefore, researchers can study as a special object of their investigation "territorial dialects" that maintain, direct and reproduce biological and social structures and informational processes. In the article a term "circle of representation" is also coined to refer to a process of representation where elements represent and are represented by the system, since in the framework of ecological approach the distinction between context and language is as well arbitrary as opposition of environment and organism. For instance, it is stated that not context reveals the meanings of particular, "opposed" to them signs (words), but context and signs are one system where the general process (or knowledge) reveals and determines the existence and content of the particular processes and is mutually revealed by them, like road signs reveal rules and are revealed by them as their concrete re-presentatives embodied into environment. Thus, ecological approach, by studying system "affordance" and "scaffolding" of cognitive and communicative processes and their role for the transmission and reproduction of biological and social systems, reveals their ontological nature and objective foundations of their existence and development.

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