Ecologies of Possible Meaning: Semiosis through a Relational Ontology: 3 Ecologies of Practice: How Social Patterning Shapes Meaning Potential

If construal is ecological activation — the perspectival cut that actualises a phenomenon from the relational field — then we must ask: what shapes the field itself? What stabilises some potentials, foregrounds some stances, and makes certain worlds easier to activate than others?

The short answer is: ecologies of practice.

An ecology of practice is not a social structure, nor a cultural framework, nor a cognitive schema. It is the historically sedimented weave of ways-of-meaning that a community enacts and sustains. These ecologies do not stand behind semiosis; they are among the potentials that make semiosis possible.

Semiosis unfolds within these ecologies like flight unfolds within an atmosphere — not determined, not constrained, but conditioned.

1. Practice as Patterned Relational Potential

In a relational ontology, social formations are not entities. They are patterns of potential across bodies, habits, histories, genres, technologies, and settings.

Call this an ecology of practice:

• patterned relational potentials that can be activated;

• habitus without the metaphysics;

• history without the substantialism;

• social life as potential for construal, not determinant of it.

An ecology of practice does not prescribe what one must construe. It makes certain construals available, likely, and coherent within that domain.

2. Context Revisited — Halliday Without the Container Metaphor

Halliday’s context (field–tenor–mode) is not a box surrounding discourse. It is the social-semantic organisation of potentials that construal activates.

Aligning this with our ecological framing gives a clean articulation:

• Field: patterned potentials for doing (types of activity).

• Tenor: patterned potentials for relating (social relations).

• Mode: patterned potentials for channeling (semiotic organisation).

These are not “variables” that determine meaning; they are ecological potentials that become meaning when cut through by a construal.

Ecologies of practice are thus sociohistorical contexts as potential, not as external determinants.

3. How Ecologies of Practice Shape What Can Be Activated

Each ecology stabilises certain patterns of activation:

• In scientific practice, construals that foreground causal abstraction become natural.

• In bureaucratic practice, construals that foreground categorisation and obligation become routine.

• In ceremonial practice, construals that foreground value-affiliation and relational alignment become salient.

These are not cognitive habits — they are ecological affordances of semiosis. To move through a practice ecology is to inhabit a patterned field of potential construals.

4. Social Patterning Without Reification

A key constraint of our ontology: meaning is relational, not representational; social patterning cannot be reified into entities or structures.

Thus:

• An ecology of practice is not “society”.

• It is not a system standing behind meanings.

• It is the relational weave of patterned potentials that become actual in semiosis.

This avoids both individualism and holism: what matters is the cline between individual and collective potentials, which is where construal takes place.

5. Why Ecologies of Practice Are Central to Ecosocial Semiosis

They allow us to say:

• The world one construes is never simply “personal”; it is socially patterned.

• Social patterns are not imposed on individuals; they are potentials individuals can activate.

• Meaning is always localised activation within a historically sedimented field.

• Social life is a matrix of meaning potentials, not a container of meanings.

In short: ecologies of practice are the social ecology in which construal occurs.

The next post introduces the semiotic dimension explicitly: how these ecological activations become semiotic ecologies — systems of meaning potentials that evolve through social action.