Making Sense of Social Complexity through Strange Attractors

Strange attractors – emerging out of the chaotic dynamics of the thoughts and feelings constantly swarming in the mental space of each individual – encapsulate topologies of meaning-making units and offer a key to a unified semiotic and cognitive understanding of meaning. Being dynamic constructs, Strange Attractors of Meaning have both spatial and temporal characteristics. The spatial characteristic relates to ‘areas’ of context(s) where signs reveal their meaning; the temporal characteristic relates to the ability of meanings to evolve, transform and initiate new meanings that emerge as new attractors in the mental space of an individual (a group or society). Learning crucially depends on the potential of the strange attractors of meaning to lose their stability and undergo crises.