The Readiness of Meaning: 6 Meaning as Horizon Management

Semiosis as Stewardship

If meaning requires room, then semiosis — the production and circulation of symbolic value — is the practice of managing readiness across horizons.

It is not mere signal transmission, nor mechanical coordination, nor the faithful mirroring of external reality.

Semiosis is horizon management: ensuring that every act of construal consumes potential without exhausting it, so that relational space remains open for future symbolic actualisations.

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Where Meaning Emerges

Meaning emerges in a precise relational window:

• Construal consumes potential
  Each act actualises a distinction, stabilising symbolic value in experience.

• Relational room is preserved
  Sufficient potential remains to support further differentiation, reinterpretation, or elaboration.

A successful semiotic system balances these two imperatives constantly. It neither starves meaning by over-closure, nor dissipates coherence by leaving too much undifferentiated potential.

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Characteristics of Good Semiotic Systems

Good semiotic systems demonstrate:

• Tolerance of ambiguity
  They allow uncertainty to exist without collapse, recognising that some potential must remain unactualised to sustain future meaning.

• Resistance to premature closure
  They avoid declaring distinctions final before relational capacity allows them to participate in further interpretations.

• Support for reinterpretation
  They maintain relational axes along which meanings can evolve, adapt, and be co-actualised by participants.

In other words, good semiotic systems manage readiness rather than exhaust it.

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Characteristics of Bad Semiotic Systems

Conversely, bad systems tend to:

• Enforce clarity prematurely
  They over-actualise distinctions before relational space is sufficient, collapsing potential for further construal.

• Drain readiness
  They consume horizon without replenishment, leaving symbolic value brittle or inert.

• Produce dogma or noise
  Dogma arises when inclination persists without ability; noise emerges when structural over-closure generates incoherence.

Both are predictable outcomes of failing to steward readiness effectively.

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Forward Applications

Understanding meaning as horizon management has immediate implications:

• Education
  Teaching can cultivate readiness by allowing learners to engage with uncertainty, fostering interpretive space rather than over-determined answers.

• AI and language models
  Systems can be designed to respect the potential space of users’ interpretations, avoiding over-closure even while providing guidance.

• Science communication
  Meaningful explanations require relational room for questions, alternative frameworks, and co-interpretation, rather than imposing pre-digested certainty.

• Culture and myth
  Stories, rituals, and art can sustain symbolic potential, allowing reinterpretation and relational engagement across generations.

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Payoff: Meaning as Relational Stewardship

By reframing semiosis in terms of readiness and horizon management, we redefine meaning itself:

• Not as representation,

• Not as information,

• Not as mere coordination.

Meaning is relational stewardship: the conscious management of potential space to allow symbolic value to survive, propagate, and evolve.

Where readiness is managed, meaning flourishes.

Where it is ignored, symbols persist but meaning collapses.

This completes the series: from fragility to collapse, from grammar to coordination, from potential to horizon — showing that meaning is not what we have, but what we keep possible.