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- Keywords
@incollection{cezjah2026designpart3,
author = {C{\'e}zjah},
title = {Part III: The Architecture of Meaning},
booktitle = {How to Design an Emotion: The Deconstruction and Computation of Emotional Meaning from First Principles},
series = {Universal Moral Concepts},
number = {III},
publisher = {New Intellectual LLC},
address = {Miami, FL},
year = {2026},
isbn = {979-8-9898135-3-7},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.23631001}
}Abstract
In Part III, I ask how a concept that holds its identity comes to mean anything. Meaning is no property hiding inside ink, sound, or circuitry. A mind achieves it, and like every achievement, it can fail. Without an interpreter, symbols stay inert and correlations stay mute. I separate automatic attribution from interpretation, a conscious act under a goal you adopt, which fixes what matters and makes error possible. My answer is the Constructivist Semiotic Sign, with five constituents that must never merge: the Identifier, the Concept, the Construct, the Referent, and the Interpreter, a rational agent with a goal who coordinates the rest. I test the architecture in Unified Modeling Language diagrams and five C# programs, and each constituent must stay distinct under execution. I then audit the two great traditions of the sign against the same principles. From Ferdinand de Saussure I keep that signs hold identity through difference within a system, yet his sign collapses five constituents into two and cannot say which reading you mean or when you got it wrong. From Charles Sanders Peirce I keep that meaning requires interpretation, yet his chain of interpretants never closes. Telos, the purpose that governs the act, supplies the stop neither tradition can justify, and purpose makes error visible. I keep Saussure’s structure and Peirce’s process and run them under one discipline. Part III closes by asking whether an event starts an emotion the way a key starts an engine, or whether you construct it.
Key concepts
- Automatic attribution
- “A remark stings, and the word insult flashes before you think: what I call automatic attribution.” (Chapter 7)
- Interpretation
- “Interpretation differs in kind: a conscious act under a goal you adopt, which fixes what matters and makes error possible.” (Chapter 7)
- Constructivist Semiotic Sign
- “A sign with five necessary constituents: interpreter, identifier, concept, construct, and referent. Interpretation is the act performed on the sign, not a sixth constituent.”
- Constructivist Semiotics
- “The cognitive-semiotic architecture that specifies the structural requirements for constructing meaning through the Constructivist Semiotic Sign.”
- Telos
- “Telos, the purpose that governs the act, supplies the stop neither tradition can justify.” (Chapter 8)
Record
- Constructivist Semiotic Sign
- Constructivist Semiotics
- automatic attribution
- interpretation
- telos
- stopping condition
- semiotic drift
- interpretant
- semiotics
- theory of meaning
- Ferdinand de Saussure
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- Jacques Derrida