Ecologies of Possible Meaning: Semiosis through a Relational Ontology: 7 Relational Ontology and Ecosocial Semiotics — What We Add

Throughout this series, we have explored semiosis, metasemiosis, and ecological activation from the standpoint of relational ontology. It is worth stepping back to see how this perspective compares with other ecosocial or metasemiotic approaches, including the work of Thibault, Lemke, Van Lier, and Jørgensen.

1. Existing Ecosocial Approaches

• Thibault: Focuses on metasemiotic layers and the semiotic-communicative interplay, emphasising the agency of Authors, Texts, and Readers.

• Lemke: Highlights ecological and social affordances in meaning-making, especially in learning and multimodal interaction.

• Van Lier: Emphasises co-action in ecological contexts, often through social interaction and perception.

• Jørgensen: Investigates multimodal and ecological semiotics in learning environments, focusing on affordances and constraints.

All of these frameworks foreground contextual, social, and ecological dimensions of semiosis. They treat meaning as emergent in interaction with environments and participants.

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2. What Relational Ontology Adds

While complementary to these frameworks, the relational-ontology approach offers distinct explanatory moves:

1. Perspectival individuation

   • Meaning is always actualised from a point of view, not merely emergent in the ecology.

   • Each construal is a cut into relational potential, making the notion of ‘instance’ central rather than secondary.

2. Metasemiosis as ecological reorganisation

   • Goes beyond “semiosis in context” to consider operations that restructure the ecology itself, not just activate pre-existing affordances.

   • Higher-order semiotic operations (grammar, theory-making, logic) are themselves ecological interventions, not mere representations.

3. System–context–construal triad

   • Relational ontology systematically distinguishes:

     • System: encodes possible cuts

     • Context: emerges from construal

     • Construal: perspectival activation of relational potential

   • This provides a coherent mapping from ecological potential to observable meaning-making, clarifying how systems and context are intertwined but not conflated.

4. Non-representational, relational grounding

   • Our model emphasises relations over entities, avoiding the need to treat words, objects, or contexts as pre-given.

   • Semiosis is the cutting of relational potential, metasemiosis reorganises that potential — the field itself is the primary locus of meaning.

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3. Illustrative Example

Consider a simple identifying clause:

“The Eleventh Edition defines the expression as a right related to or recognised by law.”

• Thibaultian reading: Focuses on meta-semiotic interplay — Author, Text, Reader.

• Relational-ontology reading: In addition, we can locate the operation in the ecology of meaning:

  • The Author construes the Token–Value relation

  • The clause performs a cut into ecological potential, activating and stabilising possibilities for further construal

  • The grammar itself reorganises the ecology for future interactions

This shows how relational ontology incorporates metasemiotic insights but situates them within a broader ecological and perspectival field.

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4. Conclusion

The relational-ontology approach does not discard the insights of existing ecosocial semiotics. Rather, it:

• Systematises the ecological and semiotic dimensions of meaning-making

• Makes explicit the perspectival and operational nature of construal

• Extends the notion of semiosis to metasemiosis, where meaning-making reshapes the field of possibilities itself

In doing so, it provides a unified, relationally grounded framework for understanding semiosis from world to meaning, and back to the world.

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Final Thoughts: A Relational Lens on Semiosis

Across this series, we have traced semiosis from the ecological potential of the world, through construal and metasemiosis, to the unfolding of meaning in context. Relational ontology allows us to see each act of meaning-making not as the passive realisation of pre-given categories, but as an active cut into a field of relational possibilities. Grammar, theory, and higher-order semiotic operations are themselves interventions in this field, reorganising it for future construals. By making explicit the interplay between system, construal, context, and metasemiosis, we offer a coherent, generative framework that situates language, thought, and action within the dynamic ecology of meaning itself. This is the promise of a relationally grounded semiotics: one that illuminates how words, worlds, and our engagements with them co-constitute each other.