Semiosis begins not with signals, codes, or information, but with relation itself. The task of this post is to articulate the ontological foundation of meaning—what it is, how it arises, and why it cannot be reduced to the conventional scaffolds of computation or representation.
1. Meaning as Symbolic Value, Not Biological or Social Value
In conventional discourses, meaning is often conflated with biological utility or social coordination. A neuron fires, a hormone shifts, a culture codifies a norm—and we call these “meaningful.” But in a Hallidayan, relational ontology, this is a category error.
Meaning is symbolic value, not value in the sense of:
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metabolic cost or readiness (biological), or
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social consequence or coordination (social).
Symbolic value is recognisable by two properties:
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Perspectival Actualisation — the moment when a relational potential is stabilised as experience or construal.
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Cross-Horizon Legibility — the moment when this stabilisation can participate in further relational alignment, enabling recursive patterns of meaning to emerge.
Biological and social value are adjacent phenomena, but they are not meaning itself. Confusing the two collapses the semiotic into the instrumental—a trap relational ontology explicitly avoids.
2. The Cosmology of Construal: How Meaning Actualises Worlds
Semiosis is cosmogenic. Each construal is a cut through relational potential that selects, stabilises, and projects certain possibilities. In other words:
To construe is to make a world present for action, thought, or reflection.
A single instance of meaning does not merely “represent” something. It entangles itself with the horizon in which it arises:
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The world is not a pre-given container of symbols.
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The world is actualised through construal.
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Horizons are not neutral; they are structured potentials that guide what counts as possible and relevant.
Meaning is thus world-generative. To construe is to bring forth a relational ecology in which some pathways are realised and others remain virtual.
In this sense, the cosmos of semiosis is open-ended: each act of meaning-making reshapes the horizon for future acts, recursively expanding the possibilities of the system.
3. Why Semiosis Cannot Be Reduced to Computation, Information, or Representation
Modern theory often reduces meaning to:
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Computation: symbol manipulation according to formal rules, or
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Information: probabilistic or entropy-based measures, or
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Representation: internal models that “mirror” an external reality.
Relational ontology rejects all three:
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Computation assumes discrete states and algorithmic determinacy.Semiosis is not deterministic; it is horizon-modulating and perspectival.
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Information theory measures correlations, not construals.Shannon-style bits capture transmission potential, not symbolic actualisation.
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Representation presupposes a pre-given world and a mirror-like internal mapping.Semiosis, by contrast, constitutes the world it engages, through relational cuts. There is no “unconstrued phenomenon” to map; there are only horizons in tension.
In short:
Meaning is not computation.Meaning is not information.Meaning is not representation.Meaning is the active, perspectival actualisation of relational potential.
4. The Takeaway
The relational ground of semiosis is therefore pre-symbolic, pre-representational, and ontologically primary. Meaning arises whenever relational potential is cut, stabilised, and projected into further potential alignments.
From this ground, symbolic systems—language, myth, culture, science—emerge not as overlays on reality, but as modes of relational actualisation: systems of recursively stabilised construals that extend the horizon of possibility.
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