Writing about sociocultural evolution is always a complicated enterprise, because the subject is not only difficult in a scientific way but also in a political one. In particular since the events of September 11, 2001 the debates about the differences between cultures and their evolutionary developments have left the fields of pure scientific research once and for all. However, there have probably never been scientific discourses that did not touch the realms of political discussions - Darwin, Marx, the atomic physicists and the recent debates about genetic engineering are just a few...

In this book, the authors demonstrate how an integration of hermeneutical understanding and scientific explanation can be done via the construction of suited geometrical models with neural networks of processes of understanding. The goal is a unified science.

This book originated in the last four years when we were lecturing both in communication and computer science at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Therefore, it was rather obvious for us to integrate these two sci- tific disciplines and to analyze the problem of the general logic of communicative processes by the use of suited computer models and mathematical concepts. The result of these efforts is this book and it is up to the readers if our attempts are successful. We could never have finished this study without the enthusiastic interest of many students in both sciences. Several...