The General Ecology of Meaning: Prologue: Meaning as an Ecological Condition

If the recent trilogy traced the deep evolution of potential, The General Ecology of Meaning takes up the next problem:

How does meaning take place as an ecological condition—distributed, stratified, and co-individuating across the relational field?

Not an ecology of representations, nor a metaphorical borrowing from biology, but an ecology in the strict sense:

a system of mutually conditioning potentials whose instances actualise only through the relational cut.

Here ecology means:

• a field of structured potential (system) that precedes and exceeds any given event;

• a dynamic of co-instantiation, where each act of meaning shifts the very conditions of meaning’s future possibilities;

• a relational topology that holds phenomena, metaphenomena, and theories of meaning in perpetual tension.

Meaning, in this view, is not a content transferred, nor an interior state expressed outwardly. Meaning is:

the semiotic form of ecological coordination, the symbolic dimension of how a social collective actualises its own potential to mean.

And crucially—per our canon—meaning is symbolic value, not social or biological value.

This ecology is not a “system” in the reductive cybernetic sense, nor an organismic unity, nor a neutral medium. It is a stratified relational interiority, a meaning-bearing milieu that organisms do not live in, but co-instantiate through construal.

The key commitments guiding the series:

1. Meaning is ecological because it is relational and stratified, not contained within minds or utterances but distributed across the system/instance dynamic.

2. Context (field, tenor, mode) remains a contextual stratum realised by semantics—not collapsed into register nor confused with social value systems.

3. Every act of meaning shifts the ecology, because actualisation is perspectival: each instance re-cuts the potential, altering the field of future possible construals.

4. Meaning is not grounded in representation but in relational individuation: the co-emergence of perspectives, potentials, and phenomena.

5. Ecology is not metaphorical—it is the most precise concept for the dynamic organisation of symbolic potential.

This post establishes the stance:

Meaning is not a message; it is an ecological process of co-individuation in symbolic form.