Morphogenesis III: Language as Reflexive Culture: 5 Reflexive Semiosis

Semiotic systems are distinctive in their capacity for reflexive semiosis: the ability to generate meaning about meaning. This reflexivity extends the relational logic of biology and value into the symbolic domain, enabling culture and language to self-construct, self-monitor, and evolve.

Meaning About Meaning

Reflexive semiosis occurs whenever a semiotic act construes or comments upon other acts of meaning. Examples include metalinguistic statements, storytelling about storytelling, ritualised reinterpretations, and analytic discourse. Each act both actualises semiotic potential and modifies the collective field, producing recursive layers of meaning.

In this way, culture becomes capable of self-reflexivity: it can observe, reinterpret, and regulate its own structures while sustaining coherence across the community. Individuals, as instantiators of semiotic potential, participate in this reflexive loop, aligning their construals with existing patterns while expanding possibilities for future interpretation.

Instantiation and Reflexive Feedback

Reflexive semiosis is inherently recursive. Each act of meaning modifies the collective potential, which shapes subsequent instantiations. This feedback loop mirrors the dynamics observed in biological and value systems: individuation occurs at the relational cut, instantiation actualises potential, and the system adjusts reflexively.

For example, the creation of a new metaphor or the reinterpretation of a ritual both instantiate semiotic potential and reshape the collective grammar, enabling emergent patterns of alignment and differentiation. Reflexive semiosis thus maintains adaptability, coherence, and innovation simultaneously.

Perspectival Alignment

As with previous domains, individuation in reflexive semiotic systems is perspectival. Each individual’s construal is realised relative to the collective potential, and the collective potential is reshaped by these instantiations. Reflexive semiosis ensures that symbolic culture is both coherent and dynamic, capable of sustaining shared meaning while accommodating divergence and novelty.

Implications for Symbolic Culture

Reflexive semiosis illuminates the ontological continuity from biology to value to semiotic systems. Whereas cells and agents actualise potential in function, and colonies coordinate value, humans actualise potential in meaning. Reflexivity enables symbolic systems to observe, regulate, and transform themselves, producing a culture that is adaptive, emergent, and self-sustaining.

Conclusion

Reflexive semiosis demonstrates the unique generativity of semiotic systems: individuals instantiate meaning in relation to collective potential, and the system reflexively evolves in response. This recursive alignment produces symbolic coherence, adaptability, and the capacity for culture to construe itself.

In the next post, Language as Morphogenetic Reflex, we will examine how language operates as a continuous morphogenetic process, structuring semiotic potential while shaping the very horizons of symbolic life.