Ecologies of Possible Meaning: Semiosis through a Relational Ontology: 1 The Ecology of Possibility

We tend to imagine “ecology” as something external to meaning: the physical environment, the social world, the wider surround in which language operates. In linguistics, this ecological framing usually enters through metaphor: language as adaptive, behaviour as situated, semiosis as responsive to context. These accounts bring important insights, but they lean heavily toward an externalist picture — the world “out there” as the ground against which signs operate.

This series begins from a different premise.

Ecology is not external to semiosis. It is the field of possibility that semiosis cuts.

In the relational ontology that guides this work, a phenomenon is not an object but a perspectival actualisation of potential. Meaning does not attach to an already-structured world; meaning is the structuring. Reality is not the substrate to which language refers; meaning is reality — the reality of a phenomenon as construed.

With this shift, the notion of ecology transforms.

It becomes:

the patterned relational potential from which phenomena can be actualised.

Ecology, in this sense, is neither biological nor social.

It is not a domain of organism–environment couplings, nor a container of sociocultural activities.

It is the relational background of affordance, the structured potential for construal.

This background is not homogeneous or amorphous.

It has internal differentiation: gradients, boundaries, tensions, relational possibilities. These do not exist “in themselves” but emerge in the very same relational fabric that makes any phenomenon possible.

To call this an ecology is to mark three things:

1. It is relational rather than substantive

There are no pre-given objects waiting to be labelled.

Instead, there are relational dispositions that may become objects if cut by an appropriate operation of construal.

2. It is patterned rather than chaotic

Potential is structured.

Not fully determined, not fixed, but rich with differentiations that constrain what can be actualised.

3. It is ecological because it is a field

A field of possibility.

A field in which relations acquire stability, affordance, and salience—not because they are given, but because they are available to be cut.

This conception allows us to speak of:

• material ecology: the patterned potential of the living world, not as an independent “environment” but as structured relational possibility.

• semiotic ecology: the patterned potential encoded in a meaning system, not as a storehouse of forms but as the relational theory a language provides.

• metasemiotic ecology: the patterned potential of interpretive operations that themselves reconfigure potential.

These are not separate domains.

They are different cuts across the same relational field, viewed at different levels of abstraction.

The point of starting here is simple:

semiosis only makes sense when we recognise that meaning emerges by cutting into an ecology of possible meaning, not by mapping linguistic forms onto an external world.

What we call “context” is not a space outside of language, nor a container of situational factors. It is the ecologically relevant subset of potential that a semiotic system can recognise and make meaningful. But that is the topic of a later post.

For now, we mark the first and fundamental move:

Meaning emerges through operations that actualise phenomena from an ecology of possibility.

In this sense, ecology is not what surrounds meaning.

It is what makes meaning possible.

Next post: From World to Meaning: Construal as Ecological Activation.