Toward a Mythos of Meaning: 7 Metaphenomena and the Ontology of Story

Having established the mythic turn, we now explore how stories emerge within semiotic ecologies and the role of second-order semiotic phenomena—metaphenomena—in structuring symbolic life.

This post examines the distinction between first-order meaning and higher-order patterns, and how narrative arises as a systemic self-interpretation of semiotic fields.

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1. First-Order Meaning vs. Second-Order Metaphenomena

• First-order meaning: the immediate construal, the semiotic event actualising relational potential within a horizon.

• Second-order metaphenomena: emergent patterns across multiple semiotic events; structures that arise from, but are not reducible to, individual construals.

Metaphenomena are not representations. They are observable regularities in relational alignment, persistent patterns that acquire interpretive leverage over subsequent semiotic activity.

Examples include:

• Narrative arcs that emerge across multiple stories.

• Archetypal motifs stabilising across generations.

• Cultural or symbolic conventions that shape new construals without being explicitly “encoded.”

Metaphenomena are the scaffolding of semiotic self-interpretation.

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2. Story as Systemic Self-Interpretation

Story is a mode of relational recursion:

1. It aggregates first-order meanings into coherent, cross-event patterns.

2. It interprets the semiotic ecology, revealing structure in apparent flux.

3. It produces interpretive affordances: constraints and possibilities for future semiotic events.

In this sense, stories are not narrative entertainment. They are tools through which semiotic systems interpret themselves, recognising relational alignments and modulating them for coherence, generativity, and resonance.

Story is the semiotic system looking at itself and producing a pattern that guides its own evolution.

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3. Why Myth Systems Arise Spontaneously

Given a sufficiently rich semiotic ecology:

• Relational horizons interact recursively.

• Repeated patterns of construal stabilise into recognisable motifs.

• Semiotic drift, innovation, and collapse generate systemic regularities.

These regularities do not require conscious design. They arise spontaneously because meaning-bearing ecologies tend toward pattern formation:

• Local construals influence future construals.

• Recurrent motifs propagate through symbolic horizons.

• Patterns that enhance coherence, interpretability, or cross-scale alignment persist.

Thus, myth systems are emergent phenomena, inevitable wherever symbolic potential is recursively actualised.

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4. Implications for Semiotic Evolution

• Metaphenomena provide higher-order coherence without collapsing relational openness.

• Story functions as an interpretive lens: construals are stabilised, but horizons remain soft and generative.

• Myth and narrative co-evolve, producing robust, scalable, and adaptive semiotic ecologies.

In other words, symbolic life is self-organising, and story is the medium through which semiotic systems recognise and modulate their own structure.

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5. Takeaway

• First-order meaning: semiotic events actualising potential.

• Second-order metaphenomena: emergent structures that organise, interpret, and stabilise semiotic horizons.

• Story: systemic self-interpretation that arises naturally in meaning-bearing ecologies.

• Myth: the high-order horizon that enables stories and semiotic recursion to propagate.

With this understanding, we are prepared to examine how semiotic potential itself evolves cumulatively, from individual construals through stories and myths, into the becoming of possibility—the generative site where symbolic life continuously extends relational horizons.