One should distinguish carefully between information and meaning;1 or in the language of semiotics between signals and codes. 2 When Courtial describes "information content as a combination of novelty and network effects," he tends to confuse the two. Courtial comments on the relations between signals and codes, while my paper is on the relations between signals and noise as generated by the LEXIMAPPE system. Indeed, words and co-words are both signals, and meaning can be attributed to them with reference to a system. 3 In the "sociology of translation" the system of reference is the so-called "semiotic" or "actor-"network, in which the words figure as "actants. "4 Consequently, the words which indicate the dusters should no longer be considered as semantically meaningful, but merely as indicators of the development of the semiotic network, i.e., as unique labels for the (sometimes emerging) clusters in the dynamics of the representation. 5 This theoretical frame of reference has to be kept in mind to understand the argument. For example, when Courtial states above that LEXIMAPPE "detects emergent clusters within the network which are in a position to structure it," one may wonder how it is possible to infer from the results of a relational algorithm conclusions with respect to positions. Indeed, such inference is impossible without reference to the "sociology of translation. "6 The relational algorithm informs us only about how the system reconstructs the information in the data; it tells us nothing about what this change means within the network. Thus, the algorithm signals changes in the data, on the basis of which a sociological theory can then predict that this will have certain effects. However, the scientometrician is interested not in change, but in the significance of change; not in prediction per se, but in the quality of a prediction. The specific sociological theory fails us in answering these questions, since it only specifies that the information is coded, but it specifies neither how and why, nor to which extent and in which respects