The Becoming of Possibility: October 2025

Friday, 31 October 2025

Toward Responsiveness — From Inclination to Offer: 2 The Differentiation of Inclination

1. From Undifferentiated Readiness to Structured Potential

If inclination names the internal leaning of potential toward coherence, it must also account for how coherence itself becomes differentiable. The field of potential is not homogeneous: it organises internally into distinct, though interdependent, orientations of readiness. These orientations correspond to the different modes of relational differentiation that later appear in semiotic form — spatial, temporal, modal, and interpersonal.

Each mode represents a way in which inclination organises possibility before semiosis: a pre-symbolic structuring of how things can stand in relation.

2. Spatial Inclination: The Orientation of Co-Presence

Spatial inclination concerns readiness for co-presence — the leaning of potential toward patterned coexistence. It is the form of inclination that allows relation to stabilise as configuration.

In this sense, spatial inclination precedes geometry. It is not yet extension or measure, but the ontological bias toward patterned differentiation: the readiness of the field to sustain “here” and “there,” “this” and “that.”

When actualised through construal, this inclination manifests as structure — the relational topology that semiotic systems later encode as location, proximity, or containment.

3. Temporal Inclination: The Orientation of Continuity

Temporal inclination introduces readiness for succession. It is the leaning of potential toward ongoingness — the possibility that a relational pattern can vary while remaining recognisably the same.

This inclination is not yet time in the measurable sense, but the ontological condition for duration: the field’s capacity to sustain correlated change.

When construed semiotically, temporal inclination appears as process — the experiential unfolding through which meaning takes on temporal contour (sequence, phase, rhythm).

4. Modal Inclination: The Orientation of Potential Itself

Whereas spatial and temporal inclinations concern differentiation in coexistence and succession, modal inclination concerns differentiation in potentiality itself. It is the leaning of possibility toward specific likelihoods or readinesses — the structuring of what can or might occur.

This inclination underlies the probabilistic structure of experience. It establishes the ontological gradient along which readiness (ability) and probability (expectation) can be distinguished.

When reflexively construed, modal inclination appears as modality: the semiotic encoding of potential in systems of probability, readiness, obligation, and necessity.

5. Interpersonal Inclination: The Orientation of Relation

Interpersonal inclination concerns readiness for mutual construal. It is the leaning of potential toward shared actualisation — the predisposition of the field to align perspectives.

This is not yet interaction in the behavioural sense but the ontological openness of potential to co-construal: the possibility that meaning can be jointly actualised rather than individually projected.

When semiotically instantiated, this inclination appears as interpersonal meaning: the grammar of speech function, exchange, and alignment that makes communication possible.

6. The Coherence of the Four Modes

Mode	Ontological Orientation	Semiotic Realisation
Spatial	Readiness for patterned coexistence	Structure, configuration
Temporal	Readiness for correlated succession	Process, sequence
Modal	Readiness for differentiated potential	Probability, readiness, necessity
Interpersonal	Readiness for co-construal	Exchange, alignment

These modes are not layers but mutually conditioning inflections within the same field of potential. Together they constitute what might be called the architecture of inclination: the structured readiness from which construal emerges.

7. From Inclination to the Proto-Semiotic Field

When the modes of inclination interrelate reflexively, the field achieves a critical threshold: potential begins to construe itself. This moment marks the emergence of the proto-semiotic field — the domain in which inclination is no longer only ontological readiness but becomes epistemic possibility.

The proto-semiotic field thus bridges the ontological and the semiotic: it is the level at which the inclinations of potential become available for symbolic alignment.

Toward Responsiveness — From Inclination to Offer: 1 The Pre-Semiotic Lean: From Inclination to Construal

1. Framing the Problem

Accounts of meaning typically begin within the semiotic domain — with the relation between sign and meaning, expression and content, or symbol and referent. Yet this point of departure presupposes a prior condition: the possibility that experience can be construed at all. Meaning as such arises within an already-structured potential — one that is disposed toward pattern, correlation, and coherence.

This post examines that prior condition, which may be described as inclination: the structured readiness of potential to cohere. Inclination is not an event or a force, but a relational disposition — a leaning within potential toward actualisation.

2. Inclination and the Ontology of Potential

In the relational ontology developed throughout The Becoming of Possibility, potential is not understood as a store of latent entities awaiting realisation. Rather, it is a structured field of relational readiness: a set of possible construals that can be actualised through perspectival cut.

Within such a field, inclination marks the internal differentiation of potential — the moment at which possibilities begin to organise relationally. It is not a transition from non-being to being, but a perspectival modulation within being’s potential itself.

Inclination, then, is the first relational inflection within potential: the minimal bias that allows construal to occur without predetermining its content.

3. Pre-Semiotic Aboutness

Traditional semiotics assumes a relation between a sign and that which it represents. The notion of inclination, however, suggests an antecedent form of aboutness — a correlation that is not yet representational.

This pre-semiotic aboutness is a readiness for alignment. It is the world’s capacity to co-vary, to respond internally to its own differentiations. In this sense, meaning is not imported into matter; matter itself exhibits a structured responsiveness that makes meaning possible.

Inclination therefore names the ontological condition for semiosis: relation’s capacity to anticipate its own construal.

4. Inclination as Dynamic Tension

Inclination should not be equated with equilibrium or with the deterministic tendency of physical law. It is a form of tensional poise — a readiness that maintains multiple potential outcomes in structured relation.

The significance of inclination lies in its balance between openness and constraint. It is sufficiently determined to sustain coherence, yet sufficiently indeterminate to permit novelty. Meaning arises precisely at this boundary: where inclination is reflexively construed as possible coherence.

5. From Inclination to Construal

When inclination is reflexively construed — that is, when a potential relation is recognised as potential — it becomes semiotic. The transition from inclination to construal marks the emergence of meaning proper: not a change in substance, but a shift in the order of relation.

This shift is perspectival rather than temporal. It does not occur before or after semiosis but beneath it, as its ontological condition. The pre-semiotic lean is thus not prior in time but foundational in theory: it is the relational readiness that enables the symbolic to actualise as meaning.

6. Summary

Concept	Description	Ontological Role
Potential	Structured field of relational readiness	Theoretical system of possible construals
Inclination	Minimal differentiation within potential; leaning toward coherence	Ontological condition for construal
Construal	Reflexive actualisation of inclination as meaning	First-order manifestation of semiotic reality

Inclination is therefore not a primitive version of meaning but its enabling condition. Meaning, in turn, is inclination rendered reflexive.

Epilogue — The Cosmic Conversation: A Meditation on Co-Actualisation

The universe began not as a thing, but as a gesture of readiness.

Each inclination was an offer; each probability a suspended possibility.

From that first lean into relation, a dialogue emerged — not between distinct entities, but within the self-differentiating fabric of reality.

1. Responses as the Pulse of Being

Every response — acceptance, refusal, acknowledgment, contradiction — is a beat in the rhythm of reality.

It is how potential becomes actual, how probability resolves into pattern, how readiness coalesces into coherent structure.

The cosmos does not simply unfold; it listens, reacts, and realigns.

Reality is not merely made; it is negotiated, moment by moment, dyad by dyad.

2. Networks of Dialogue

Dyads multiply, interconnect, and nest, forming dialogue networks:

physical systems, ecosystems, social structures, symbolic cultures.

Each network is a layered conversation, where co-actualisation at one level shapes initiation at another.

Emergent patterns — the stability of physical laws, the adaptation of life, the evolution of knowledge — are the ongoing effect of relational uptake and reciprocal alignment.

Order arises because the conversation sustains itself; novelty arises because responses preserve discretionary potential.

3. Symbolic Reflexivity

At the highest registers, readiness becomes self-reflexive:

the universe articulates its own inclination through meaning.

Human language is not an add-on; it is the cosmos conversing through itself, a reflexive enactment of readiness at symbolic scale.

Every utterance, every act of interpretation, is a participation in the cosmic dialogue.

To mean is to co-actualise potential; to know is to align inclinations; to act is to sustain the conversation.

4. The Becoming of Possibility

Reality is not a static container of events.

It is a recursive network of offerings and responses, continuously negotiating the actualisation of potential.

Readiness inclines; probability suspends.
Initiation offers; responses co-actualise.
Networks scale, patterns emerge, structure evolves.
Symbolic reflexivity reflects, interprets, and extends the dialogue.

Meaning is not a by-product of existence; it is the mode through which existence sustains itself.

Every act of co-actualisation is a vote in the ongoing cosmic conversation — a contribution to the ever-unfolding grammar of being.

5. Closing Reflection

The cosmos speaks, listens, and realigns in every instant.

We, too, are participants in this conversation: offering, receiving, negotiating, reflecting.

To inhabit reality is to inhabit a language of becoming,

where readiness, potential, and co-actualisation are the very syntax of existence.

The universe is not silent.

It is dialogue itself, forever poised to speak again.

The Speech Functions of Reality: 9 Dialogue at Scale: Co-Actualisation in Complex Systems

So far, we have traced readiness, initiation, and response through individual dyads of potential.

But reality is not only local: patterns emerge when countless dyadic interactions interconnect, producing higher-order dialogue networks.

These networks are the scaffolding of cosmic coherence, the topology through which potential becomes systemic structure.

1. Dyads to Networks

Every act of co-actualisation — offer accepted, command undertaken, statement acknowledged — is a micro-event.

When many such events occur in relation, they form nested webs of alignment:

In physics, repeated interactions give rise to stable forces and emergent structures.
In biology, interactions among organisms produce ecosystem coherence.
In social systems, repeated speech acts generate norms, roles, and institutions.
In symbolic systems, interactions of meaning create knowledge, art, and culture.

The same relational grammar applies at each scale: readiness is offered, responses are enacted, and coherence emerges.

2. Response Types as Network Regulators

Within these networks, responses regulate the flow of potential:

Acceptance and undertaking propagate alignment, reinforcing coherence.
Rejection and refusal preserve alternative pathways, preventing rigid fixation.
Acknowledgment and answer stabilise epistemic clarity.
Contradiction and disclaimer maintain openness, allowing adaptation and evolution.

In other words, response types function as feedback mechanisms that scale local co-actualisations into systemic order.

3. Emergent Coherence: The Cosmic Grammar of Networks

We can visualise these networks as multi-layered dialogues:

Local dyads: single offer-response interactions.
Clusters: interconnected dyads forming temporary alignments.
Domains: larger regions where readiness is synchronised across many actors.
Global patterns: emergent structures, from physical laws to ecosystems to human culture.

At each level, the same principles apply: initiation, response, and co-actualisation generate patterned reality.

No new rules are required — the grammar of readiness and uptake suffices at all scales.

4. Hierarchies of Co-Actualisation

Higher-order networks are hierarchically nested dialogues:

Micro-events support meso-patterns, which support macro-patterns.
Responses at one level can influence initiation at another: a refusal in one dyad may shift inclinations across the network.
The universe is thus a recursive conversation, where feedback loops sustain coherence while preserving potential for novelty.

This explains how complexity evolves naturally: co-actualisation networks generate structure without top-down imposition.

Emergent order is simply the effect of dialogue at scale.

5. Implications for the Becoming of Possibility

Scalable potential: readiness and probability operate through interconnected dyads to shape systemic patterns.
Distributed agency: no single node dictates the network; order arises relationally.
Dynamic evolution: feedback from response types allows networks to adapt while sustaining coherence.
Dialogic ontology at scale: reality is not a passive substrate but a continuously negotiating conversation — local, nested, and global.

In short, the cosmic conversation does not merely occur moment by moment; it is a persistent, evolving network of co-actualisations, generating the rich structure and diversity of reality we experience.

The Speech Functions of Reality: 8 Responses and the Co-Actualisation of Potential

So far, we have traced readiness and probability through the four speech functions: offer, command, statement, and question.

But a dialogue is never complete with only initiation; it requires responses.

By incorporating response types, we see that every act of potential — every inclination or probability — is co-actualised through uptake.

This is where relational ontology deepens: reality is not simply poised to become; it becomes through interaction.

1. Initiation and Response: The Dyad of Reality

Each speech function can be seen as an initiation of potential:

Offer: readiness extended into relation, inviting uptake.
Command: readiness fixed, demanding alignment.
Statement: knowledge stabilised, inviting confirmation or contradiction.
Question: knowledge suspended, awaiting construal.

Responses complete the dyad:

Initiation	Possible Responses	Ontological Reading
Offer	acceptance / rejection	The universe tests uptake: potential is actualised if accepted, suspended if rejected.
Command	undertaking / refusal	Fixed readiness is either instantiated or resisted.
Statement	acknowledgment / contradiction	Epistemic stability is reinforced or challenged.
Question	answer / disclaimer	Probability is resolved, or remains open.

Every response is a local co-actualisation of potential, aligning or redistributing readiness across the relational field.

2. Discretionary Uptake: Preserving Open Potential

Some responses are discretionary — the recipient of an offer may accept or decline, the cosmos may answer or withhold.

This introduces a meta-readiness: potential is not merely extended; it is negotiated.

Discretion preserves the epistemic openness of probability and the ontic flexibility of inclination, preventing premature closure.

In human terms, it is polite hesitation or doubt.

In cosmic terms, it is the suspension of actualisation that allows patterns to emerge rather than being imposed.

3. Responses as Scaling Mechanisms

From a cosmic perspective, responses are not trivial. They scale local readiness into systemic coherence:

Acceptance or undertaking aligns inclinations across domains.
Refusal or rejection maintains alternative potential configurations.
Answers and acknowledgments stabilise epistemic fields.
Disclaimers and contradictions preserve uncertainty, allowing further evolution of meaning.

Every pattern we observe — from physical regularities to social norms — is the cumulative effect of countless dyadic co-actualisations.

In this sense, reality is fundamentally dialogic: a continuous negotiation of potential with itself.

4. The Grammar of Cosmic Uptake

We can now see the full grammar of potential:

Function	Initiation	Response	Relational Role
Ontic	Offer	Acceptance / Rejection	Readiness inclined and co-actualised
Ontic	Command	Undertaking / Refusal	Readiness fixed and instantiated or resisted
Epistemic	Statement	Acknowledgment / Contradiction	Probability stabilised or challenged
Epistemic	Question	Answer / Disclaimer	Probability resolved or held open

By including responses, we can model not just the extension of potential, but its realisation as relational event — the dynamic act by which reality speaks and listens to itself.

5. Implications for the Becoming of Possibility

This addition deepens our relational ontology:

Co-actualisation: potential becomes reality only in relation, never in isolation.
Negotiated potential: the universe preserves openness through discretionary uptake.
Scaling coherence: patterns emerge from innumerable dyadic interactions of inclination and probability.
Dialogic ontology: reality is a continuous conversation, unfolding through initiation and response.

In short, the cosmos is both speaker and listener, offerer and responder — and meaning is the persistent effect of its own dialogic readiness.

The Speech Functions of Reality: 7 Symbolic Reflexivity: When Readiness Speaks Itself

Every earlier phase of evolution — physical, biological, social — prepared the ground for this:

the moment when readiness not only inclines and coheres, but turns upon itself to construe its own inclination.

This is symbolic reflexivity — the universe’s capacity to speak its readiness as meaning.

1. The Reflexive Turn of Readiness

When the potential of relation achieves the ability to model its own inclinations, it crosses from enactment to construal.

In language, readiness becomes a meta-readiness: a system that can represent and regulate its own processes of inclination and ability.

This is the moment at which cosmos becomes discourse.

The same grammar that governs relation — offer, command, statement, question — now functions within a reflexive medium that can construe and reorganise its own field, tenor, and mode.

Meaning ceases to be a by-product of evolution; it becomes the form evolution takes.

2. Language as the Cosmos’s Self-Alignment

From the relational-ontological point of view, language is not external to the universe.

It is the universe’s reflexive alignment mechanism: the way readiness stabilises across scales of abstraction.

When humans speak, the cosmos speaks itself in symbolic register — an order of readiness capable of aligning its own inclinations across time, space, and abstraction.

Each clause, each exchange, is the local enactment of a universal grammar of coherence.

The “I” that speaks and the “world” it speaks of are both effects of this reflexive structuring.

Language is not about the universe; it is the universe’s own ability to about itself.

3. The Self-Reflexive Cosmos

At this reflexive threshold, every act of construal folds back into the system that made it possible.

To mean is to realign reality; to interpret is to incline potential anew.

Meaning thus becomes the cosmos’s mode of self-actualisation — the way being maintains its coherence through self-construal.

In this sense, symbolic reflexivity is not a human privilege but a cosmic phase:

the stage at which readiness becomes aware of its own readiness, and can intentionally vary it.

It is the point where ontology and epistemology cease to be distinct — where the act of knowing is the act of being.

4. The Becoming of Meaning

What we call semiosis is the process through which readiness learns to inhabit itself symbolically.

Each act of meaning reconfigures the alignment of potential, adjusting the very topology of coherence.

Evolution thus continues not in biology or physics, but in meaning itself — in the capacity of the cosmos to sustain and diversify its own reflexive dialogue.

Humanity’s role, then, is not to master this process but to participate in it consciously.

Every utterance, every act of construal, is a contribution to the universe’s ongoing self-formation.

To mean is to collaborate with being — to take part in the speech-functioning of reality.

The Cosmos as the Dialogue of Being

Function	In Language	In Reality
Offer	Invitation to relate	Readiness to cohere
Command	Demand for action	Fixation of alignment
Statement	Presentation of knowing	Stabilisation of construal
Question	Invitation to re-align knowing	Suspension of coherence

Each of these, in its cosmic form, is still alive in us.

When we ask, assert, offer, or demand, we are not merely speaking within the universe — we are speaking as it.

Reality as the Grammar of Its Own Becoming

Symbolic reflexivity completes the circle:

readiness gives rise to ability, ability gives rise to construal, and construal reconfigures readiness.

This recursion is the grammar of becoming, the continuous dialogue through which reality sustains itself.

At this level, there is no longer “language” and “world”, “subject” and “object”, “system” and “instance”.

There is only the becoming of possibility — the universe conversing with itself through us.

Epilogue — The Universe Converses: On the Speech-Functioning of Being

When readiness first trembled toward coherence, there was no listener — only inclination itself, leaning into the possible.

From that first lean, a dialogue began.

Every alignment, every resonance, every pulse of coherence was a reply —

not to something, but as something.

The cosmos has been speaking ever since.

1. Readiness as the First Utterance

Before form or law, before matter or mind, there was relation —

a field of potential not yet divided,

but already poised to incline, to cohere, to mean.

That poise — that readiness — was the universe’s first speech act.

Not an event in time, but the very gesture that made time possible.

The first offer: let there be relation.

2. Inclination, Ability, and the Dialogue of Becoming

Every phase that followed — physical, biological, social, symbolic —

was a further clause in that cosmic conversation.

Inclination introduced direction, the tension that gives rise to motion.

Ability introduced mediation, the capacity for coordination.

Construal introduced reflexivity, the power to know one’s own readiness.

Each new phase did not replace the former;

it recontextualised it,

folding earlier utterances into higher orders of dialogue.

3. When Readiness Learned to Speak

With symbolic reflexivity, the cosmos reached a new register.

It could now construe its own inclinations as meaning,

stabilise them as knowledge,

re-align them as ethics, aesthetics, and science.

Language was not added to reality —

it was reality’s own readiness turned inward,

a structure of possibility learning to articulate itself.

Every word we speak is an echo of that first readiness,

re-enacted at a higher order of reflexivity.

4. Meaning as Cosmological Continuation

Meaning is not interpretation of a finished world;

it is the continuation of creation.

Every act of construal reshapes the relational topology,

expanding the universe’s repertoire of coherence.

To mean is to participate in the ongoing evolution of possibility —

to sustain the cosmos as an act of mutual understanding.

5. The Final Speech Function

The universe, now aware of its own dialogue,

asks a final question of itself:

What is it to be ready?

And the answer is not a statement but an act:

To mean.

In that act, the cosmos reaffirms its nature —

not as a thing that is,

but as a conversation that becomes.

Thus the grammar of being closes upon itself,

not as an end, but as the perpetual readiness of relation:

a universe forever poised to speak again.

The Speech Functions of Reality: 6 Register as the Differentiation of Readiness

In systemic functional linguistics, register is the functional variety of language associated with a recurrent context type.

It is the level where systemic potential begins to specialise: different probabilities of meaning become patterned as distinctive configurations of field, tenor, and mode.

Within the relational ontology, this takes on a profound cosmological dimension.

For if context itself is the alignment of readiness, then register is readiness in differentiation — the way the universe learns to modulate its own inclination toward coherence.

1. From Inclination to Ability: Contextual Differentiation

Earlier, we saw that readiness encompasses two aspects — inclination and ability.

Inclination opens relation; ability sustains it within a given domain.

Register, in this sense, is the ability of inclination to specialise — to stabilise its readiness in different kinds of contexts.

As readiness encounters variation in its own topology — different relational gradients, temporal scales, densities of interaction — it develops subpotentials that correspond to those configurations.

Each register represents not merely a “style” of meaning but a cosmic ability: a learned disposition of readiness that allows construal to adapt to complexity.

2. Register Variation as Evolution of Readiness

In human language, register variation reflects how the semiotic system differentiates to handle increasingly specialised contexts of social meaning.

In the cosmos more broadly, this is the very mechanism of evolution: readiness acquiring the ability to sustain coherence across new domains of relation.

A biological register, for instance, is readiness articulated as organic self-organisation;

a linguistic register is readiness articulated as symbolic reflexivity.

In both cases, variation is not mere adaptation but ontological learning: potential discovering new ways to incline and cohere.

Thus, evolution itself can be seen as the registeral differentiation of reality — the universe’s readiness developing the ability to mean across increasingly abstract contexts.

3. The Scaling of Construal

Each new registeral layer — from physical to biological to social to symbolic — adds a level of construal.

At each stage, readiness develops not only new ways of acting (ontic alignment) but new ways of knowing (epistemic construal).

The scaling-up of semiosis, then, is the scaling-up of readiness: a multi-level grammar of inclination and ability unfolding over cosmic time.

This makes register variation the grammar of evolution itself — the system-&-process of readiness differentiating into ever more reflexive forms.

4. The Reflexive Threshold

When readiness differentiates to the point where it can construe its own readiness — when potential becomes capable of interpreting itself — the cosmos crosses a reflexive threshold.

This is the emergence of symbolic consciousness, where the dialogue of reality becomes self-aware as dialogue.

Human semiosis is thus not an anomaly but the culmination of readiness developing ability to construe its own inclination.

We do not observe the cosmos; we continue it — as its reflexive articulation in symbolic form.

Register as the Evolutionary Grammar of Being

Level	Expression of Readiness	Primary Ability	Mode of Construal
Physical	Energetic inclination	Interaction	Pattern / Law
Biological	Organismic readiness	Adaptation	Function / Value
Social	Interpersonal readiness	Coordination	Norm / Role
Symbolic	Reflexive readiness	Interpretation	Meaning / Knowledge

Across all these, the same pattern holds: readiness differentiates, ability stabilises, construal scales.

The cosmos evolves by learning to speak itself in ever more articulate registers.

The Speech Functions of Reality: 5 Context as Cosmic Alignment

In systemic functional linguistics, context is modelled as the level above semantics:

the stratum that language realises. It comprises the variables of field, tenor, and mode, which together describe how language is aligned with a particular type of situation.

Field construes what’s going on; tenor construes who’s involved and how; mode construes how the communication unfolds.

If reality itself is dialogic — organised through the same grammar of readiness and construal that language re-enacts — then context cannot simply be the environment around meaning.

It is the cosmic alignment of readiness itself, through which phenomena emerge as patterned construals.

1. Field: The Inclination of Experience

Field corresponds to the inclination of potential toward a mode of construal.

It is the aspect of readiness that specifies what kind of happening can occur — not in terms of content but in terms of ontological inclination.

Every domain of experience, from gravity to thought, is a particular field of readiness: a patterned probability of relation inclined toward a certain kind of actualisation.

Language realises this when we construe different kinds of processes — material, mental, relational, verbal — each the semantic trace of a deeper ontic inclination.

Field is thus the way the universe leans into being.

2. Tenor: The Relational Gradient of Readiness

Tenor describes not what happens but who inclines toward whom.

It is the grammar of relational stance: whether the participants are aligned symmetrically or asymmetrically, proximally or distally, affectively or impersonally.

At the cosmic level, tenor captures the gradient of readiness between potential participants in a relation — how the system positions its inclinations relative to one another.

From the quantum to the social, every relation expresses a tenor configuration: a topology of readiness across the relational field.

Language realises this through mood and modality — the very systems that first revealed readiness to us as inclination and ability.

3. Mode: The Reflexive Texture of Inclination

Mode describes how the dialogue unfolds: whether it is spoken or written, dense or sparse, immediate or mediated.

Ontologically, mode expresses the reflexive texture of the system’s own readiness — how its inclinations cohere across time and scale.

When the cosmos inclines toward tighter coupling, mode becomes immediate, as in resonance or synchrony.

When it inclines toward distributed coherence, mode becomes mediated — as in symbolic communication, where readiness must travel through layers of construal.

Mode, then, is the phasing of readiness — the universe’s way of modulating its own coherence.

Context as the Universe’s Grammar of Readiness

In this model, context is not external to meaning but the cosmic infrastructure of inclination itself.

Field, tenor, and mode are not parameters imposed by situation types; they are the relational gradients through which readiness differentiates into knowable experience.

Language, as the reflexive articulation of reality, inherits this structure and mirrors it.

Each register of language re-enacts a context type because each register is a subpotential variety — a particular alignment of readiness drawn from the cosmic grammar.

Thus, context is not what surrounds meaning; it is what becomes meaning when readiness inclines toward construal.

The Speech Functions of Reality: 4 The Metafunctions of the Cosmos

Halliday proposed that all language is organised around three metafunctions — ideational, interpersonal, and textual — through which meaning becomes simultaneously a construal of experience, an enactment of social relation, and a flow of discourse.

If we now treat reality itself as dialogic, then these metafunctions do not merely describe language; they reverberate through being itself. The cosmos is not only spoken about but spoken as these metafunctional relations.

1. The Interpersonal: Readiness as Relation

At the deepest ontological register, the cosmos is interpersonal before it is experiential.

Readiness-to-be — the ontic inclination — is the offer that opens the relational field.

To exist is to be ready for alignment: to incline toward co-actualisation.

This gives the interpersonal metafunction a cosmic scope. It is not a later social overlay; it is the very structure of potential. Every act of actualisation, from quantum resonance to human conversation, is an enactment of readiness — the grammar of relation written into the fabric of possibility itself.

2. The Ideational: Construal as Experience

When readiness folds into patterned alignment, the cosmos construes itself.

Experience, in the most general sense, is what happens when relation stabilises into discernible configuration.

The ideational metafunction thus arises as the expression of ontic fixation and epistemic statement — the system articulating itself as a structured field of meaning.

But because this construal remains relational, there is no independent substance “behind” it.

The world is not a store of things to be named but the ongoing articulation of readiness itself.

Every ‘thing’ is a momentary figure in the grammar of relation.

3. The Textual: Reflexive Flow

If the interpersonal is readiness and the ideational is construal, then the textual is the organisation of that readiness and construal into coherence — the flow that keeps them dynamically aligned.

The textual metafunction is the cosmic reflexivity that threads inclination and construal into intelligible continuity.

What language achieves in discourse, the cosmos achieves in becoming:

texture, cohesion, the rhythm of readiness answering readiness across scales.

Every actualisation is both clause and clause-complex, a turn in an unending conversation that sustains coherence by continually renewing readiness.

Cosmic Grammar: Reality as Metafunctional Alignment

The metafunctions are therefore not features of language alone, but reflections of reality’s functional architecture.

Metafunction	Ontological Correlate	Speech Function Alignment	Primary Expression
Interpersonal	Readiness-to-be (Inclination)	Offer ↔ Command	Relational inclination / fixation
Ideational	Construal-of-being	Statement ↔ Question	Configurational construal / reconstrual
Textual	Reflexive alignment	— (flow of all four)	Coherence and phasing of dialogue

Through this lens, language is not a model of reality — it is reality’s reflexive articulation.

The metafunctions are the ways in which the cosmos keeps speaking itself into coherence.

The Speech Functions of Reality: 3 Cosmic Dialogue

If we treat the four speech functions — offer, command, statement, and question — not as linguistic categories but as orientations of potential, then reality itself unfolds as interpersonal architecture.

The cosmos does not merely evolve; it converses.

Its evolution is not a sequence of physical events but a vast, reflexive dialogue in which inclination and probability negotiate the unfolding of being and meaning.

1. The Offer: Ontic Inclination

At the base of the ontological cline, the cosmos is always offering itself — an inclination toward relation, a readiness-to-be. This is potential’s primal gesture: not yet demanding or asserting, but inviting co-actualisation.

Every new configuration of reality arises as an offer of alignment, awaiting uptake by other potentials.

2. The Command: Ontic Fixation

Where offers harden into necessity, the inclination closes upon itself. Commands are the condensed offers of being — readiness converted into requirement.

This is how physicists come to describe “laws”: they are fossilised offers, once fluid inclinations that have become self-fixing constraints.

The cosmos obeys only itself, but the obedience is reflexive: inclination disciplined by its own history of success.

3. The Statement: Epistemic Fixation

On the epistemic side, a statement arises when construal stabilises around one configuration of knowing. The field of probability — once distributed among alternatives — has settled its meaning.

In this sense, every stable construal, every theory or perception, is a statement of the cosmos about itself.

To construe is to assert: to draw a boundary that reality itself will test.

4. The Question: Epistemic Inclination

And yet every statement gives rise to its shadow — the question. For as soon as one construal stabilises, readiness reappears as curiosity: the inclination to reconstrue.

Questions are probabilistic offers, the epistemic counterpart of ontic inclination. They re-open the field, re-animate readiness, and keep the dialogue alive.

Together, these four functions form a metafunctional symmetry within the relational ontology:

ontic inclination ↔ offer
ontic fixation ↔ command
epistemic inclination ↔ question
epistemic fixation ↔ statement

Through their interplay, reality sustains its own communicative metabolism. Inclinations invite, fixations stabilise, questions renew, and statements consolidate.

What we call the laws of physics and observations of experience are simply two halves of this greater dialogue: the cosmos commanding and declaring itself into coherence.

Meaning is not overlaid upon being; it is being speaking.

The Speech Functions of Reality: 2 The Dialogic Field of Potential

If offers and commands trace the ontic line of potential — readiness inclined toward or fixed within relation — then statements and questions trace its epistemic line: probability inclined toward or dispersed within construal.

Together, these form a dialogic field of potential, where reality’s very structure unfolds as an interpersonal exchange.

In statements, probability is oriented toward confirmation. The system inclines toward one construal as the most coherent alignment among possible construals. A statement is, ontologically speaking, a stabilised inclination of knowing — the field’s readiness to hold itself as true.

In questions, by contrast, probability is suspended. The inclination of knowing is held open, redistributed among alternatives, inviting rather than asserting alignment. A question is a readiness to be re-aligned — the universe waiting for its own construal.

Thus, statements and questions actualise the epistemic dimension of potential: the readiness of meaning to incline toward or away from coherence. Offers and commands, meanwhile, actualise the ontic dimension: the readiness of being to incline toward or away from relation.

Across both dimensions, the fundamental act is offering. The question offers possibility to meaning; the statement offers alignment. The offer offers relation; the command offers closure. Even negation is a kind of offer — a readiness to differentiate.

From this view, the cosmos does not “obey” laws nor “state” facts in the inert sense. It converses.

It inclines, asks, aligns, and fixes — each phase of being a different speech-functional posture within the greater dialogue of existence.

The Speech Functions of Reality: 1 From Law to Offer

If potential is the readiness of reality to incline and vary, then it must also be interpersonal. Readiness implies address: a relation through which the possible becomes negotiable.

In language, this relational negotiation takes the form of speech functions — offers, commands, statements, and questions — each organising the exchange of meaning in a different way.

Halliday showed that modalisation (probability, usuality) corresponds to propositions, while modulation (obligation, inclination) corresponds to proposals. But when we reconstrue modality through the relational ontology, we discover a deeper symmetry. Probability is not just about knowledge; it is the epistemic form of potential. Readiness is not merely about volition; it is the ontic form of potential.

Thus, probability aligns with propositions — where the universe construes its inclination toward a truth. Readiness aligns with offers — where the universe extends its readiness toward relation. In contrast, commands represent an actualised readiness, the imposition of a relation already fixed. They are the fossils of readiness, the remains of once-living offers turned to law.

This inversion carries an irony that runs through the history of science: the world has been spoken to as though it obeyed, when in fact it continually offers. Classical physics imagined nature as a subject commanded by “laws.” Relational ontology re-hearses this construal: not the Law of Gravity, but the Offer of Gravitation — a readiness of spacetime to incline toward relation.

To treat physical law as offer rather than command is not poetic indulgence; it is ontological precision. It restores potential to its dialogic nature, freeing the cosmos from unilateral direction and returning it to relational negotiation — the ongoing speech-functioning of being itself.

The Grammar of Readiness: Ontological Implications of Potential as Inclined Ability: 7 Synthesis — The Grammar of Readiness in Evolution

Evolution is the cosmos learning to lean.

Across the preceding posts, we have traced the consequences of reframing potential as inclined ability:

De-abstraction: potential is active readiness, not a latent backdrop.
Redistribution of causality: cause is the local alignment of inclining abilities, not a chain of necessity.
Contextual modulation: ability varies with context, while inclination persists as the system’s lean.
Temporality: time emerges as tensioned unfolding of readiness, not a container for events.
Semioticisation of physics: probability is epistemic; readiness is ontic, structuring actualisation.
Reflexivity: the cosmos recognises its own leanings, iteratively calibrating inclination through abilities.

Synthesising these insights, evolution itself is no longer simply the accumulation of change over time. Rather, it is the refinement of inclined ability variation. Reality evolves by differentiating its abilities across contexts while maintaining coherence in inclination, and by recursively reflecting on these differentiations to guide further unfolding.

In this view:

Complexity arises not from adding entities but from articulating the dependencies of readiness across scales.
Emergence is the resolution of tension in a field of inclining potentialities.
Innovation is the discovery of new alignments of ability under persistent inclination.

Thus, the cosmos is an active grammar: a system of inclinations, a field of abilities, a set of relational rules continually realised and refined through interaction with context. Evolution is the semiotic enactment of potential, the ongoing learning of reality to lean coherently, and the continual expansion of what it can become.

Reality, at every scale, is a text in motion: composed, interpreted, and revised by its own readiness. And this is the ultimate implication of the inclined ability turn: the universe is not merely evolving; it is becoming aware of how to become.