Toward a Mythos of Meaning: 6 The Mythic Turn

In the preceding posts, we traced semiotic events, symbolic horizons, and the evolution of semiotic potential. We now arrive at the mythic turn: the emergence of highest-order construals, where meaning does not merely instantiate relational potential but orients further meaning-making itself.

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1. Myth as the Highest-Order Construal

Myth is not a story, a narrative, or a set of cultural fictions. In relational terms, myth is the semiotic event that structures the possibility of future events:

• It is first-order construal applied to semiotic horizons themselves.

• It orients meaning with respect to meaning, producing a recursive field where semiotic potential is actively shaped.

• It stabilises otherwise soft and indeterminate horizons, enabling cumulative and scalable symbolic alignment.

Where construal actualises local symbolic potential, myth scales across horizons, producing patterned stability in relational ecologies that would otherwise remain open and fluid.

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2. Myth as Horizon of Interpretability

Rather than treating myth as a “story,” we define it as a horizon of interpretability:

• It is the space within which semiotic events can be construed as meaningful.

• It defines what counts as coherent, salient, or legible in symbolic ecologies.

• It orients perception, construal, and subsequent semiotic events without prescribing their exact form.

In this sense, myth is structurally prior: it frames the semiotic landscape, creating soft boundaries that guide recursive meaning-making.

Myth is the ecology in which semiotic potential can propagate, diversify, and stabilise.

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3. The Relational Function of Myth in Stabilising Soft Infinities

Relational horizons, symbolic potentials, and semiotic ecologies are inherently soft and unbounded:

• Semiotic fields extend indefinitely, recursively modulating their own potential.

• Without higher-order structuring, this openness risks instability, incoherence, or drift into uninterpretability.

Myth stabilises this soft infinity by:

1. Aligning recursive semiotic events along patterned horizons.

2. Producing reference points for successive construals, enabling coherent propagation of symbolic potential.

3. Maintaining adaptive flexibility: myth does not rigidly fix meaning, but scaffolds it across scales.

Thus, myth is simultaneously structuring and generative: it stabilises relational infinity while enabling its recursive expansion.

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4. Implications for Semiotic Ecology

1. Myth transforms local semiotic events into system-wide interpretive patterns.

2. It is relational, not representational: meaning is produced in the field of symbolic potential, not imposed externally.

3. Myth enables human symbolic life to scale: from individual construals to cultural memory, shared norms, and generative symbolic traditions.

4. Myth is the engine by which soft horizons become robust yet extensible, permitting symbolic ecologies to flourish over time.

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5. Takeaway

The mythic turn shows that:

• Meaning can orient meaning—a recursive property unique to symbolic life.

• Myth is the highest-order construal, not a story, not a fixed narrative, but a horizon of interpretability.

• Myth stabilises relational potential while preserving the soft infinity of semiotic ecologies, allowing symbolic life to expand without collapse.

In the next post of this arc, we will examine metaphenomena and the ontology of story, connecting mythic horizons to the emergence of narrative structures, second-order semiotic effects, and the generative evolution of symbolic systems.