Observing Society: Meaning, Communication, and Social Systems By ...

present definitions of information, meaning, recursion, and culture that will be used throughout the book.

In the second chapter, we define Niklas Luhmann's path-breaking conception of communication as an “improbable” synthesis of information, utterance, and understanding. A focus on communication as the unit of sociological analysis is revolutionary. For readers well versed in traditional sociology, this chapter may be difficult to digest because it ultimately breaks with established patterns of analysis. It also substantially modifies Claude Shannon's and Warren Weaver's famous model of communication, in which information is transmitted between a sender and a receiver (1949). We sincerely hope that any difficulties readers experience will be tied to the intellectual controversy over how sociologists ought to define their subject matter, rather than to our efforts to present the theory in a comprehensible manner. The idea that communication must be observed as a synthesis of three distinct selections is theoretically complex and for this reason we have included many illustrations and practical examples.

Social system theory places the problem of understanding at the heart of every investigation. In chapter 3, we outline the contours of a basic problem: people have different brains, so how is understanding among members of a group possible? To provide a sociological context, from which our theory eventually emerges, we critically evaluate a diversity of theories about how members of society share “intersubjectivity.” We also show that pioneering sociologists focused a lot of attention upon the power of communication to cultivate forms of subjectivity and inform social meaning, but their work has failed to establish an adequate and integrated theory of how society produces understanding for its observers.

In chapter 4, we describe language as a medium of communication. Building on the previous discussion of how each observation involves a two-sided distinction, we explain that all communicative operations make use of the binary structure of language. Although it is a highly improbable contrivance, language works because it takes form within the medium of acoustic or optical noise and can therefore serve as a structural coupling between different people. To convey information to an