The goal of the present paper may be described as the revelation and elucidation of the discursive technique, which distorted, concealed or produced the dominant meanings of the Philosophy of Mind. We examined this discourse as a secondary one. We proceed from Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic theory, namely Peircean consideration of rhetoric as the science of the essential conditions of interpretation; he discovered epistemology of rhetoric based on the distinction in the semiosis between a sign as representment and a sign as interpretant. We applied “rhetorical” approach to solve the double task: firstly, to understand how and why the philosophy changed its conceptual and rhetorical interface during the transition from Consciousness to Mind; secondly, to outline a range of issues, space, strategy and prospects of interaction of Cognitive Sciences and Philosophy of Mind. We argued that the manifestation of cognitive problems as the trigger of the terminological shift and successive naturalization of the term Mind in philosophy accompanied the invention of new metonymically equivalents of Mind, namely “language”, “memory”, etc.; qualia has become the general “metonymical term” for the definition of Mind; the metaphor of “coontogenetic structural drift” can be used as the tool for describing the mechanism of semantic extension of the concept of Mind.
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