The Process of Meaning Construction: Dissecting the Flow of Semiotic Activity

The Process of Sign Construction: Meaning Making versus Meanacting

A person creates signification by way of a sign in a here-and-now-to-future context. The sign, as constructed here and now, has two functions. First, it represents something in the here-and-now context—a function that is well-known through the analyses of signs in semiotics. However, the sign has also a second function that goes hand in hand with the first: It orients the sign constructor (user) toward the immediately potential future. The sign prepares the person for new encounters with the world that might happen, but that are not to be taken for granted.

Construction of signs is thus in part the action of preadaptation. It is a process that proceeds as an inseparable part of the “stream of consciousness” (James, 1890). This processual nature of sign constructing is not well captured by the usual reference to signs as meanings as if these were fixed, objectlike tools that are just utilized as givens in psychological functioning. Hence we refer to this process as meanacting (“acting toward creating meaning”). We offer this purposefully artificial technical term in order to overcome the essential, product notion of meaning that is entailed in the more common concept of meaning making. The latter term implies that meanings are products or fixed outcomes, whereas meanacting focuses on the process of acting-to-mean something on the basis of something else. This meanacting orientation entails directionality—a created sign reflects what is in conjunction with the person's expectations of what might (or ought to) become.

However, our coverage in this chapter is limited to elucidation of the basic processes of meanacting. We attempt to expand upon a “dialogical approach” to meanacting. We demonstrate how our theoretical scheme of meanacting works on the simplest possible sign material (word meaning construction) in the intrapersonal realm; subsequently, we provide empirical data about similar (yet more complex) phenomena of persons' meaning construction about their own selves in interpersonal contexts. Our perspective allows for a reinterpretation of some old empirical data from the [Page 259]Würzburg school of psychology of thinking. However, we use these old data for our present theoretical purposes.

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