The Understanding Machine: Machinosemiotics

Bys: Zundel, Armin and Berkling, Kay

Current theories of meaning - from Saussure through Grice, Gadamer, and speech-act theory - treat communication as compression: a structured situation flattened into words, partially reconstructed by the listener. This book argues that AI-mediated communication constitutes a qualitatively different operation: *transduction*, a structure-preserving mapping between non-identical context-models, in which meaning is carried as relational topology rather than lexical content.

Drawing on Peircean semiotics, distributed cognition, and computational pragmatics, the framework introduces a five-dimensional field model (situational content, causal-temporal structure, goals, interpersonal relations, epistemic status) and applies it across twelve case studies spanning aphasia recovery, cross-linguistic mediation, institutional communication, and clinical follow-up. The analysis yields four falsifiable theses - on transduction, substrate-independence, compression-override, and distributed authorship - alongside design principles for transparency, speaker veto, and field-depth symmetry.

The book is written for researchers in philosophy of language, HCI, and AI ethics, and for informed practitioners working at the intersection of computational systems and human meaning-making.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 3948789037
• ISBN13: 9783948789039
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Inline Internet Online Gmbh
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 0.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.2"