Kultuurisõltelise tähendusloome teoreetilised mudelid
Culture-dependent meaning-making: Theoretical models

Summary/Abstract: The paper examines the ways the process of meaning-making (or: meaning-formation) is conceptualized in hermeneutics, phenomenology, semiotics, and cultural psychology. Meaning-making is understood here as a semiotic process by means of which the human world is organized into meaningful, and hence recognizable, familiar and customary things, units and processes. Culture-dependency of this process refers to the fact that at least some results of the meaning making process of human beings depend on a social and cultural context. In other words, the process of human meaning-making is culturally patterned. The paper reviews and compares the ways in which the culture-dependency of human meaning-making is viewed in hermeneutics, phenomenology, semiotics and cultural psychology. We will show that all four disciplines argue for a certain structure of collective meanings that functions as a “cultural language” or a “secondary modelling system”. This structure makes the outcome of meaning-formation dependent on a social and cultural context, and distinguishes the options of meaning-making of one social group from another.

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