Mapping Meaning: A Series on Mental Processes, Readiness, and the Semiotic Field

Meaning is rarely static. Every act of speaking, writing, or thinking is a negotiation with potential — a moment where the world, the self, and others meet at the edge of possibility. Yet the ways we construct and navigate meaning often go unnoticed, buried in the assumptions we carry about language, thought, and desire.

This series seeks to make those assumptions visible, systematic, and interrogable. At its heart lies a distinction that is deceptively simple but profoundly generative: the difference between cognition and desire in our mental life. When we think, we orient toward what is or could be. When we desire or fear, we orient toward what should, could, or must be done. These two orientations underpin the ways meaning emerges, unfolds, and becomes actionable.

In the coming posts, we will explore how these orientations manifest in language, using insights from systemic functional linguistics as a foundation. Cognitive processes project propositions — statements or questions that construe possible realities. Desiderative processes project proposals — offers, commands, or invitations that construe potential courses of action. These are not mere semantic categories; they are lenses through which meaning is actualised, negotiated, and experienced.

We will also examine the subtle but crucial role of modality: the degrees of usuality, probability, obligation, and readiness that shape our expressions of thought and desire. Here, epistemic uncertainty — about what is or could be — meets practical readiness — about what might or must be done. By tracing these axes, we begin to see how meaning-making is never neutral: it is always an orientation toward futures, toward action, toward the semiotic field that surrounds us.

Finally, we will consider the interface between meaning and value. Biological and social value systems generate pressures, stakes, and orientations. Meaning does not contain value, but it mediates it: rendering desires, fears, and commitments negotiable, discussable, and interpretable within a semiotic framework. Understanding this mediation is key to understanding the dynamics of human meaning-making at both individual and collective levels.

This series will unfold step by step, moving from the foundations of mental processes, to propositions and proposals, to modality, to readiness, and finally to the relational implications for meaning-making itself. Each post is an invitation: to see language not merely as a tool for communication, but as a field of potential, a horizon of readiness, a landscape of futures awaiting actualisation.

Welcome to the exploration. The journey begins at the intersection of thought, desire, and the semiotic potential that bridges them.