The Morphogenesis of Language: 3 Semiosis and Reflexivity — The Communal Mind Takes Form

As conventions and patterns stabilise, language evolves into a reflexive semiotic system, capable of interpreting itself across individuals and contexts. Each communicative act is no longer merely a transmission; it is a morphogenetic event within a communal mind, shaping and being shaped by the semiotic field it inhabits.

Reflexivity arises because the field interprets the signals of its constituents while simultaneously constraining them. A speaker chooses forms with awareness of how they will be received, and the receiver interprets not only the content but the relational significance. Each act of communication recursively aligns individual construals with the collective semiotic topology.

This communal reflexivity produces emergent conceptual spaces. Words, gestures, and sequences no longer refer solely to external objects; they signify relational meanings, intentions, and potential actions. The semiotic field itself acquires memory, anticipation, and interpretive depth, enabling coordination, prediction, and shared understanding on scales far beyond individual cognition.

Language, in this sense, transforms the social field into a distributed mind. It generates a topology in which individual potentials are actualised in relation to collective patterns, and collective potentials are realised through individual acts. The communal mind takes form not as a literal entity, but as a living field of semiotic reflexivity, where meaning, coordination, and identity co-emerge.

Through semiosis and reflexivity, the evolution of language demonstrates that collective cognition is an emergent property of relational alignment, the product of continuous negotiation, differentiation, and recursive actualisation of communicative potentials.