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Social Structure and Semantic: The Logic of a Systemic Distinction

Authors

  • Rudolf Stichweh Universidad de Bonn

Abstract

The present paper addresses the theoretical link between social structure and semantic in a critical way, so as to advance in a productive understanding of this relationship for research. Different conceptions of semantics and its links with social structures are described and analysed. Along with the above, a possible interrelation between both concepts is questioned, and it is replaced with an approach nearer to system theory and evolutionary theory. The paper concludes with a proposal for the distinction between semantic and social structure, which emphasizes the chances that society describes its possible structures by means of its own semantics. This approach would allow an approach to semantics in an anticipatory, reconstructive and constitutive way with regard to social structures.

Keywords:

Social structure, Semantics, Social Systems, Functional differentiation, History of ideas

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