meaning

Meaning is an important analytical category of EE and one of the conceptual bridges to "Geisteswissenschaften". In >communication, meaning refers to the cognitive processes that are triggered in an actor by the message of another actor (>cognition). This implies that meaning is always determined by the receiving actor’s mental state, and not exclusively by the intentions of the sending actor. Meaning is always affected by interpretation. This is one of the important sources of >novelty in economic systems. For example, the same >technology can be used very differently by different actors, and some may discover a new meaning in terms of a new function.

Interpretation is a cognitive process that reaches further than communication, because every phenomenon that is perceived by an actor can be the object of interpretation (>perception). Meaning, hence, is the way how actors see everything as >knowledge, so that it is the link between non-referential and referential knowledge, yet independent from the truth of the latter.

An important case is the meaning of >order for the actors. Meaning constitutes the >culture of a territory that stabilizes the given order and fosters the actors’ commitment to the different institutions. Thus, culture is always dependent on the interpretive activity of the actors, which is a source of cultural change.

In evolutionary processes, meaning is a special case of function, as in the distinction between >information and enformation. From that view, the function of a particular regularity can be called the meaning of the >rule which is the bimodal counterpart of that regularity. For example, the meaning of a certain routine in a firm is its function in the firm processes insofar as this function is described by an observer as a rule. Meaning and function, therefore, can diverge in terms of referential and non-referential knowledge.


Semantic Field
rules/regularity
meaning   cognition