Meaning understood as juxtaposed networks of communications

Meaning as emergent phenomena is composed by two kind of constructive processes according to Luhmann’s SST. One of them is related to personal experience: memories and choices experienced by conscience. Other is related to cumulative social experience as a horizon of possibilities to choose. These choices make possible communication. This work presents an exploratory model to depict meaning as a process of cumulative experience enacted by signs or information organized in networks of communications. These networks are possible to be enacted by two analytical principles: distinction and aggregation. Aggregation identifies groups of communications by co-occurrence of forms, signs, information or some kind of marks. These groups are organized in time and could be considered as emergent cause they appear, vary, stabilize and disappear according with complexity and circumstances of communication events. Distinction enables a differentiation analysis. This could be understood as a process of validation: Not all co-occurrences and aggregation forms could show emergent meaning, but different kind of signs or information juxtaposed in those groups make possible identify emergent codes and all and new communication forms as signs of distinctions.

This two principles and social network analysis as tools to make maps of networks of communications is justified by an emergent kind of analysis that go beyond hermeneutics and classical phenomenology. This kind of analysis tries to unveil configuration of meaning in larger sets of communications (documents, papers, electronic writings, etc). In this way, meaning exploration as maps of past communications could be structured by these theoretical principles and use of social network analysis.