The semiotic actor: From signs to socially constructed meaning
-
Martin Helmhout
Abstract
A semiotic actor creates, uses and transfers or communicates meaning with the help of signs in order to interact with other actors and society. For a complete understanding of the cognitive and social phenomena related to this process, we state that social science and cognitive science cannot stay in their own arenas. The use of social constructivism or construction sheds light on the relationship and interaction between the individual (cognition) and society.
The semiotic actor is not merely a stimulus response actor that exchanges signs; it has a cognitive system that creates new signs, modifies (the meaning of) signs, and forgets signs (cognitive limited semiosis). Secondly, the semiotic actor has the capability to incorporate and influence the environment (semiotic Umwelt or “outer” world) as part of its cognitive “inner” world. And thirdly, linguistic capabilities allow it to socially construct and share meaning with others, thereby empowering itself and others to create social structures and express social behavior (e.g., reciprocity, empathy).
The contribution of our work is to emphasize that social construction needs to be grounded in cognitive science, i.e., the semiotic actor or homo semioticus enables us to reason that signs in social science are represented as signs in cognition and the other way around (semiotic resonance).
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Signification and space
- Towards an anthropological theory of space and place
- Spatial reification, or, collectively embodied amnesia, aphasia, and apraxia
- Spatial representation, activity, and meaning: Children's images of the contemporary city
- The performance of secrecy: Domesticity and privacy in public spaces
- The choretic work of history
- Art, land, and the gendering of Parnassus
- The semiotics of the Vitruvian city
- Space complexity and architectural conception: Revisiting Alberti's treatise
- Meaning of space and architecture of place
- Ship as a space locus, architecture as a space fabrica
- Introduction: Organizational semiotics and social simulation
- A conceptual linkage between cognitive architectures and social interaction
- The semiotic actor: From signs to socially constructed meaning
- Information systems actability: Tracing the theoretical roots
- Norms-based simulation for personalized service provision
- Universities as producers of evolutionarily stable signs of excellence for academic labor markets?
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Signification and space
- Towards an anthropological theory of space and place
- Spatial reification, or, collectively embodied amnesia, aphasia, and apraxia
- Spatial representation, activity, and meaning: Children's images of the contemporary city
- The performance of secrecy: Domesticity and privacy in public spaces
- The choretic work of history
- Art, land, and the gendering of Parnassus
- The semiotics of the Vitruvian city
- Space complexity and architectural conception: Revisiting Alberti's treatise
- Meaning of space and architecture of place
- Ship as a space locus, architecture as a space fabrica
- Introduction: Organizational semiotics and social simulation
- A conceptual linkage between cognitive architectures and social interaction
- The semiotic actor: From signs to socially constructed meaning
- Information systems actability: Tracing the theoretical roots
- Norms-based simulation for personalized service provision
- Universities as producers of evolutionarily stable signs of excellence for academic labor markets?
