Prelude to Semiosis — The Shift from Relation to Meaning

Semiosis begins where relationality starts doing something more than composing: it begins where relational potential orients itself toward value—not social value, but symbolic value.

Up to now, the focus has been on:

• relational potentials,

• perspectival cuts,

• structural alignments, and

• the open-ended ecologies of higher-order coherence.

But semiosis requires a new kind of cut—a relational re-entry in which meaning is not just construed within the relational field, but construes the field in return. Semiotic systems are not merely higher-order relational systems; they are reflexive relational systems, systems whose operations include the construal of their own horizon.

Three transitions mark the movement into the semiotic domain:

1. From Softness to Interpretability

Soft relational horizons become semiotic when their modulations count as symbolic distinctions—when a shift in alignment means something.

2. From Perspective to Metaperspective

Construal is not merely a viewpoint; it is a semiotic act that re-theorises the system even as it instantiates it. This opens the door to recursive meaning-making.

3. From Open Cosmos to Meaningful Cosmos

Meaning is not injected into the cosmos from above; it is a mode of living within relation—a way of stabilising, modulating, and extending cuts across horizons, across scales, across contexts.

This sets the stage for the next arc: a movement from relational ontology into the evolution of meaning itself, the emergence of symbolic life forms, and the mythic scaffoldings that allow them to flourish.