This thesis outlines the three phases of cognitivism, which emerged in the first half of the 20th century as a reaction to the anti-mentalist tradition of philosophical thinking (represented by Charles S. Peirce and Charles Morris), and which was made possible in particular by the so- called linguistic turn in science (especially within analytic philosophy), which replaced mental units, regarded as non-scientific, with linguistic units, conceived as reflecting mental states and, moreover, allowing for adequate investigation. The thesis is largely guided by Thomas C. Daddesio's On Minds and Symbols, which is considered to be one of the first explicit attempts to formulate a cognitive-semiotic perspective, and wherein the author traces the previous development of the cognitive paradigm. Thus, first the factors that made the emergence of cognitivism possible are described, followed by an account of its development, which can be divided into two phases, as per Daddesio's model. This paper, however, goes beyond Daddesio's book and establishes a third phase, where cognitivism emerges as a separate field of inquiry within semiotics, i.e., cognitive semiotics. Within this development, the work traces in particular the transformation of the conception of the relationship between language and mind, which is...