Semiotic mediations and complexity management: Paradoxes and regulative principles

Semiotic mediations have a number of roles in managing complexity. We review how they lead to paradoxes, but also how regulative principles emerge from them. We propose three complexity principles that researchers can successively apply when they must establish through language games how a new research domain will function: 1) the analogical approach, 2) the recursivity of distinctions, and 3) emergentism. We discuss tensions between open and closed systems, individual identities and cultural norms, and between characteristics of linguistic complexity. Using a language games lens, double binds and paradoxes are presented in regards to communication, language structure, and the theory-practice relation. Nevertheless, we argue that semiotic mediations are the solution for exploring relations between complex systems and the environment despite two noteworthy systemic ambitions of language.