In this chapter, I want to argue that the cognitive turn that characterises the second half of the twentieth century has not been able to clear up the mystery of meaning. In the 1950s, the cognitive sciences replaced previous paradigms trying to make sense of human interaction such as the American traditions of pragmatism (Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer) and of behaviourism (particularly B. F. Skinner). Both behaviourism and pragmatism have a social focus. Cognitivism, on the other hand, is about the working of the individual mind. It has become a prominent scientific paradigm in many disciplines of the human and social sciences, for instance in psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy, but also, interestingly, in biology and the computer sciences.

The pragmatists look at symbolic interaction. This is the kind of behaviour to which people assign meanings, and includes the interpretations we, the people, assign to the interactive behaviour of other people. In his investigation of verbal behaviour, the behaviourist B. F. Skinner attempted to correlate the verbal and other symbolic input to which a person is exposed, with their linguistic output (the utterances that person makes). For behaviourists who wanted to observe social interaction, an individual's verbal behaviour seemed to offer the only access to an understanding of how meaning is assigned to interaction.