Martin Helmhout

The semiotic actor: From signs to socially constructed meaning

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).

Social constructs and boundedly rational actors

In this paper we sketch a framework for multi-actor simulation of organisations. This framework elaborates the interaction and cooperation of actors based on social constructs. Because of the demands of the task environment, in which tasks often cannot be done alone, actors have to cooperate. Cooperation is only possible based on intertwined habits and mutual commitments that are expressed in sign structures, such as agreements, contracts and plans. At a semiotical level of description, these sign structures are seen as social constructs. Social constructs guide the formation and reinforcement of habits of individual actors that are aimed at cooperation, coordination and socially accepted behaviour. In contrast to many approaches to multi-actor simulation, we design the actors as cognitively plausible actors. We use the cognitive architecture ACT-R for modelling the individual actors. This cognitive architecture implements a part of Simon’s bounded rationality. In the recent discussion about bounded rationality, fast and frugal heuristics play an important role. Some of these heuristics will be included in the simulation model as a compensation mechanism for the limits to rationality.