The Architecture of Meaning: Reconstructing Luhmann's Dimensional Framework

Editors

• Michal Kaczmarczyk, University of Gdańsk
• Krešimir Žažar, University of Zagreb
• Lars Clausen, University College London

Description

This special issue examines Luhmann's concept of meaning as a central medium for both psychic and social systems, structured across three canonical dimensions: factual, temporal, and social. The call argues that while these three dimensions are foundational to systems theory, the underlying logic of why meaning should be organized into exactly these three dimensions remains unresolved. Recent scholarship suggests that meaning may be better understood as a potentially expandable framework responding to basic questions of observation, with additional dimensions such as spatial, modal, and motivational warranting exploration.

The special issue aims to revisit and extend meaning theory in response to contemporary societal complexities, particularly the technological mediation of meaning through artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems, as well as challenges like polarization and meaninglessness. It invites interdisciplinary contributions that employ reflexivity and second-order observation to explore how meaning is currently being observed, transformed, and contested across different media and inter-systemic relations.

Potential topics

• Theoretical work revisiting or extending established three-dimensional models of meaning (factual, temporal, social), including introduction of novel distinctions such as spatial, modal, or motivational dimensions and expanded sub-programmes within systems theory
• Studies focusing on second-order observation, reflexivity, and the inherent paradoxes of observation within social and psychic systems
• Analyses of how artificial intelligence, artificial communication, and algorithmic decision premises impact meaning-processing systems, technological co-evolution, and structures of expectation
• Explorations of forms of meaning that resist operational closure, reduction, or authoritarian simplification, including the role of imagination, counterfactuals, and non-necessary social orders
• Systems-theoretical approaches to current societal challenges, encompassing values, political polarisation, populism, inter-systemic relations, strategies for complexity reduction, and pathologies of meaninglessness
• Renewed theoretical and empirical engagement with sense-making, consciousness, psychology, and psychotherapy, with a focus on identity formation and the structural coupling between psychic and social systems