The General Ecology of Meaning: 4 Relations as the Unit of Analysis

Why systems alone are insufficient, and why the true locus of meaning is the dynamic relation

Up to this point we’ve established the ecological ground on which semiosis becomes possible:

• Systems have horizons.

• Fields stabilise relational potentials.

• Meaning is the actualisation of a cut through a horizon within a field.

Now we make the decisive move:

The relation — not the system, not the field, not the representation — is the fundamental unit of meaning.

Not because relations connect things,

but because relations are what allow “things” to appear in the first place.

A system is a stabilised nexus of relations.

A field is an extended ecology of relations.

A meaning is an actualised relation.

Everything semiotic is relational first, and systemic only by derivative construal.

The myth of the system as a meaning-bearing entity

Western metaphysics defaults to substance ontology:

entities first, relations later.

This results in a false picture:

• A mind has meanings.

• A model stores representations.

• A system contains knowledge.

• A language encodes content.

But this requires meaning to be conceived as something that could be possessed.

Relational ontology rejects this premise:

No system can possess meaning because no system exists outside the relational ecology that constitutes it.

Systems are not the bearers of meaning.

They are the sites where relational patterns temporarily concentrate enough to generate phenomena.

A system is a checkpoint.

The relation is the flow.

Relations precede entities: the ontological inversion

In a relational ontology:

• A relation is not between pre-given entities.

• An entity is a stabilisation within an ongoing relational process.

This inversion is not cosmetic; it is structural.

A system is real only by virtue of being a local equilibrium within a field of relations.

Once the relational patterns shift, so does the system.

This applies to:

• organisms

• minds

• collective actors

• conversational partners

• AI systems

• conceptual constructs

• even the “self” as a persisting identity

Nothing semiotic has independent substance.

Everything is relationally co-individuated.

Meaning actualises in the cut — the minimal relational event

Meaning is the activity of cutting a difference.

But a cut always requires:

• a horizon

• a field

• a system

• and a relation that links them

The cut is not inside the system.

It is a relational event that temporarily crystallises a phenomenon.

Phenomena are the “first-order meanings” in our ontology:

the experiential forms that arise from an actualised relation.

There is no meaning before the cut,

and no meaning beyond the cut.

The cut is the meaning.

Why the relation is the only adequate unit of analysis

Consider what happens when we use systems as the analytic primitive:

• We describe internal states.

• We imagine stored representations.

• We treat meaning as a kind of property or content.

• We fall back into the mind-centric picture.

We lose the ecology.

But if the unit of analysis is the relation, we automatically:

• include horizon, field, and system in a single configuration

• capture constraint, affordance, and actualisation

• avoid internalism entirely

• explain novelty and evolution without invoking homunculi

• allow semiosis to scale across heterogeneous systems

• stay consistent with Hallidayan stratification

The relational event is the smallest complete semiotic unit.

Everything smaller is mechanistic.

Everything larger is ecological.

The relation is where they meet.

Relations are dynamic, not static

Crucially, relations are not structures frozen in time.

They:

• flicker in and out of stability,

• shift with each construal,

• propagate across the field,

• and leave residual constraints that shape future relations.

Semiosis is relational metabolism.

Meaning lives in the movement.

Systems are only intelligible as relational configurations

Once we take relations as primary, systems become:

• transient coherences,

• perspectival apertures,

• patterns of constraint,

• localised stabilisations.

This is why no system — biological or artificial — can be the sovereign site of meaning.

Meaning does not live in systems.

Meaning lives in the ecology of relations that traverse systems and fields alike.

And with this, the ground is set for the next movement:

5. Ecologies of Novelty and Constraint — how new potentials emerge and how constraints propagate through an ecology.