Traditionally, the concept of cognition has been tied to the brain or the nervous system. Recent work in various noncomputational cognitive sciences has enlarged the category of “cognitive phenomena” to include the organism and its environment, distributed cognition across networks of actors, and basic cellular functions. The meaning, scope, and limits of ‘cognition’ are no longer clear or well-defined. In order to properly delimit the purview of the cognitive sciences, there is a strong need for a clarification of the definition of cognition. This paper will consider the outer bounds of that definition. Not all cognitive behaviors of a given organism are amenable to an analysis at the organismic or organism-environment level. In some cases, emergent cognition in collective biological and human social systems arises that is irreducible to the sum cognitions of their constituent entities. The group and social systems under consideration are more extensive and inclusive than those considered in studies of distributed cognition to date. The implications for this ultimately expand the purview of the cognitive sciences and bring back a renewed relevance for anthropology and introduce sociology on the traditional six-pronged interdisciplinary wheel of the cognitive sciences.

Meaning has been established pervasively as a central concept throughout disciplines that were involved in cognitive revolution. Its metaphoric usage comes to be, first and foremost, through the interpreter’s constraint: representational relationships and contents are considered to be in the “eye” or mind of the observer and shared properties among observers themselves are knowable through interlinguistic phenomena, such as translation. Despite the instability of meaning in relation to its underdetermination by reference, it can be a tertium comparationis or “third comparator” for extended human cognition if gauged through invariants that exist in transfer processes such as translation, as all languages and cultures are rooted in pan-human experience and, thus, share and express species-specific ontology. Meaning, seen as a cognitive competence, does not stop outside of the body but extends, depends, and partners with other agents and the environment. A novel approach for exploring the transfer properties of some constituent items of the original natural semantic metalanguage in English, that is, semantic primitives, is presented: FrameNet’s semantic frames, evoked by the primes SEE and FEEL, were extracted from EuroParl, a parallel corpus that allows for the automatic word alignment of items with their synonyms. Large Ontology Multilingual Extraction was used. Afterward, following the Semantic Mirrors Method, a procedure that consists back-translating into source language, a translatological examination of translated and original versions of items was performed. A fully automated pipeline was designed and tested, with the purpose of exploring associated frame shifts and, thus, beginning a research agenda on their alleged universality as linguistic features of translation, which will be complemented with and contrasted against further massive feedback through a citizen science approach, as well as cognitive and neurophysiological examinations. Additionally, an embodied account of frame semantics is proposed.