Abstract

The chapter introduces Ernst Topitsch’s concept of sociomorphic modelling and advocates for the semiotic study of human culture and society while paralleling Bruno Latour’s approach of examining individual actors and their relationships. Topitsch’s work builds on Jakob von Uexküll’s ideas, which explore how organisms create their own ‘worlds’ through interpreting their environment. Topitsch extends this to the human culture: he suggests that to comprehending cultural and societal developments, we need to understand the network of meanings and relationship. This approach is applied to the history of science, in particular on the example of myrmecology, which shows how scientific fields evolve within their cultural and social contexts.