The Evolution of Ability: From Field Competence to Semiotic Capability

If inclination gives reality its leaning, ability gives it articulation. Yet ability is not fixed; it evolves with the architectures of relation through which potential is organised. The history of the cosmos can therefore be read as the gradual complexification of registerial ability—the emergence of increasingly reflexive competencies for actualisation.

At the quantum level, ability manifests as field competence: the capacity of a field to sustain local excitations according to its relational configuration. These are not “particles” in any naïve ontic sense but events of ability—transient enactments of what the field can do. The field’s readiness is structured by its symmetries, its couplings, its modes of fluctuation. Its ability is the patterned consequence of that structure.

At the thermodynamic and chemical level, ability becomes the capacity for persistence and recombination. The relational architectures of energy gradients and molecular bonds allow matter to maintain certain configurations against entropic drift. Here ability takes on the character of maintenance through transformation: systems capable of regenerating their own form through exchange with an environment.

With biological emergence, ability internalises: readiness becomes embodied. Organisms instantiate a local theory of how to persist, adapt, and reproduce. Their ability lies not merely in what they can do physically, but in how they construe their surroundings as affordances for action. Life is the materialisation of relational ability—a system’s self-sustaining construal of readiness.

In social formations, ability becomes distributed and symbolic. Coordination requires not just energy and structure but meaning—shared construals of possibility. The ability of a social system thus depends on its semiotic architectures: the languages, rituals, institutions, and infrastructures that synchronise collective readiness. These systems can not only act; they can construe their own ability to act.

Finally, in reflexive semiosis, ability folds back upon itself. Symbolic systems acquire the meta-capacity to construe their own construals, to reshape the very frameworks of readiness that underlie their operation. This is the ability of abilities—the competence for re-architecting potential.

Across these phases, the evolution of ability is the history of relational self-structuring: from field to form, from organism to meaning. At each juncture, reality develops a new layer of readiness—more differentiated, more recursive, more capable of sustaining worlds.

Thus the ability of reality is not a hidden power but a cascading articulation of relational constraint. The cosmos leans toward expression; through each emergent order, it learns how to do so.