Related papers: Anticipation and the Non-linear Dynamics of Meanin…
Social order cannot be considered as a stable phenomenon because it contains an order of reproduced expectations. When the expectations operate upon one another, they generate a non-linear dynamics that processes meaning. Specific meaning…
In social systems, meaning can be communicated in addition to underlying processes of the information exchange. Meaning processing incurs on information processing with hindsight, while information processing recursively follows the time…
The sociological domain is different from the psychological one insofar as meaning can be communicated at the supra-individual level (Schutz, 1932; Luhmann, 1984). The computation of anticipatory systems enables us to distinguish between…
Psychological and social systems provide us with a natural domain for the study of anticipations because these systems are based on and operate in terms of intentionality. Psychological systems can be expected to contain a model of…
The communication of meaning as different from (Shannon-type) information is central to Luhmann's social systems theory and Giddens' structuration theory of action. These theories share an emphasis on reflexivity, but focus on meaning along…
In biological systems, the capacity of anticipation--that is, entertaining a model of the system within the system--can be considered as naturally given. Human languages enable psychological systems to construct and exchange mental models…
Socio-cognitive action reproduces and changes both social and cognitive structures. The analytical distinction between these dimensions of structure provides us with richer models of scientific development. In this study, I assume that (i)…
Purpose: In the tradition of Spencer Brown's (1969) Laws of Form, observation was defined in Luhmann's (1984) social systems theory as the designation of a distinction. In the sociological design, however, the designation specifies only a…
Following a suggestion of Warren Weaver, we extend the Shannon model of communication piecemeal into a complex systems model in which communication is differentiated both vertically and horizontally. This model enables us to bridge the…
Opinion dynamics of a group of individuals is the change in the members' opinions through mutual interaction with each other. The related literature contains works in which the dynamics is modeled as a continuous system, of which behavioral…
When studying the evolution of complex systems one refers to model representations comprising various descriptive parameters. There is hardly research where system evolution is described on the base of information flows in the system. The…
Behavior of systems that are functions of anticipated behavior of other systems, whose own behavior is also anticipatory but homeostatic and determined by hierarchical ordering, which changes over time, of sets of possible environments that…
The study of inter-human communication requires a more complex framework than Shannon's (1948) mathematical theory of communication because "information" is defined in the latter case as meaningless uncertainty. Assuming that meaning cannot…
I elaborate on the tension between Luhmann's social systems theory and Habermas' theory of communicative action, and argue that this tension can be resolved by focusing on language as the interhuman medium of the communication which enables…
The development of discursive knowledge presumes the communication of meaning as analytically different from the communication of information. Knowledge can then be considered as a meaning which makes a difference. Whereas the communication…
This paper considers the relationships among meaning generation, selection, and the dynamics of discourse from a variety of perspectives ranging from information theory and biology to sociology. Following Husserl's idea of a horizon of…
Actors are embedded in networks of communication: the relations of the actors can be represented as the rows of a matrix, while the column vectors represent their communications. The two systems are structurally coupled in the co-variation:…
Self-organization is ubiquitous in nature and mind. However, machine learning and theories of cognition still barely touch the subject. The hurdle is that general patterns are difficult to define in terms of dynamical equations and…
Luhmann (1984) defined society as a communication system which is structurally coupled to, but not an aggregate of, human action systems. The communication system is then considered as self-organizing ("autopoietic"), as are human actors.…
Stochastic processes offer a flexible mathematical formalism to model and reason about systems. Most analysis tools, however, start from the premises that models are fully specified, so that any parameters controlling the system's dynamics…