Beyond Representation: Recovering Instantiation as a Fundamental Semiotic Relation

Human thought has long been dominated by a single semiotic habit: representational thinking.

This mode construes the world as if phenomena were objects with independent existence, and treats potential as a pre-existing store of contents awaiting selection. In doing so, it systematically privileges stratification — the semiotic relation between levels of symbolic abstraction (e.g., content ↔ expression) — while neglecting the equally fundamental semiotic relation of instantiation.

This imbalance is not simply incomplete — it is generative of philosophical paradox.

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1. Stratification vs Instantiation

In Hallidayan linguistics and relational ontology, two distinct semiotic relations organise meaning potential:

Stratification

• The relation between symbolic strata, such as semantics ↔ lexicogrammar ↔ phonology/graphology (content ↔ expression).

• Explains how meaning potential is organised across abstraction levels.

Instantiation

• The relation between systemic potential and a specific actualisation in context.

• The perspectival cut that selects, construes, and brings meaning into first-order phenomena.

• Not temporal, but epistemic–ontological: it is how something becomes intelligible as something.

Representational thinking mistakes stratification for explanation of actuality.

It treats phenomena as if they were realisations of an abstract code, rather than perspectival construals from potential.

This yields philosophical, scientific, and cognitive confusions.

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2. How Representational Thinking Distorts Understanding

By overstating stratification and ignoring instantiation, we find recurring pathologies across inquiry:

Philosophical paradoxes

• Free will vs determinism: systemic readiness is misconstrued as obligation or necessity.

• Gödelian incompleteness: instances (specific propositions) are treated as if contained exhaustively by the system.

• Ship of Theseus: identity is objectified as inherent rather than perspectivally construed.

Consciousness and experience

• Qualia & the Hard Problem: experience is objectified rather than understood as first-order phenomenon arising from instantiation.

• The “gap” appears only if experience is required to be a realised thing rather than a construed phenomenon.

Language and meaning

• Reference & symbol grounding: meaning is misread as mapping between sign and object rather than relational actualisation within context.

• Davidson’s triangulation: misconstrued as external coordination rather than co-instantiation of meaning.

AI & cognition

• Frame Problem & Chinese Room: computation is structure; understanding is instantiation.
  Treating one as the other is a category error.

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3. Instantiation as Corrective

Foregrounding the instantiation relation clarifies:

Concept	In Representational Thinking	In Relational Ontology
System	Repository of contents	Organised potential
Event/Entity	Object with inherent identity	Perspectival actualisation
Experience	Internal object	First-order construal
Meaning	Reference to object	Relational enactment

Thus:

• System = structured potential

• Instance = perspectival actualisation

• Construal = first-order phenomenon (not representation)

There is no unconstrued actuality and no meaning outside relational perspective.

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4. Implications Across Domains

Philosophy

Paradoxes dissolve because they depend on treating phenomena as objects with identity independent of construal.

Physics

Measurement problems arise from confusing potential (wave-like possibility space) with forced object-identity.

Linguistics & semiotics

Reference models fail when symbolic strata are mistaken for actualisation.

AI

Scale of structure never converts into first-order phenomenon.

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5. Conclusion: From Representation to Relational Awareness

Representational thinking is not incorrect — merely incomplete and misapplied.

It offers one semiotic relation (stratification) but ignores the other (instantiation).

When both are held together:

• Systems remain rich organised potentials

• Actualities are perspectival construals

• Meaning is enacted, not stored

• Paradoxes dissolve, rather than being solved

The confusion is not in phenomena, but in the semiotic habit used to construe them.

When instantiation is foregrounded,

reality ceases to be a puzzle, and becomes intelligible as relation.