Anticipation in Social Systems
Paper to be presented at the Int. Conference on Computing Anticipatory Systems (CASYS'03), Liege, August 2003.
Preprint versions available at http://www.leydesdorff.net/casys03

Loet Leydesdorff & Daniel Dubois

Abstract:
In social systems, meaning can be communicated in addition to—and on top of—underlying processes of the information exchanges. It can be shown that the sole assumption of social relatedness as a variable among groups of agents provides sufficient basis for deriving the logistic map as a first-order approximation of the social system. The anticipatory formulation of the logistic map can be derived when anticipation is assumed in either the interaction term among or in the aggregation of the subgroups. By recombining the incursive meaning processing and recursive information processing an observer can be generated as a reflection on the system under observation. Observers can also observe one another’s observations. By using cellular automata it can be shown that the resulting representation at the level of the second-order or social system can improve on the representations entertained by each of the observing or first-order systems.