The Becoming of Possibility: 12/18/25

Thursday, 18 December 2025

From Readiness to Commitment: How Meaning Becomes Binding: 2 Proposals That Stick: Uptake, Alignment, and Expectation

In the previous post, we framed the central puzzle of this series: how futures move from being merely available to being binding. We identified commitment not as a feature of intention or value, but as a second-order semiotic phenomenon — one that emerges when meaning begins to stick.

The first place where this sticking occurs is not in the speaker, but in interaction. More specifically, it occurs in what systemic functional linguistics calls uptake.

Proposals Do Not Bind by Being Uttered

A proposal, by itself, does nothing.

An offer, a request, a command, or an invitation projects a possible course of action. It makes a future thinkable. But projection alone leaves the future suspended in readiness — open, reversible, and uncommitted.

Consider:

“We could meet tomorrow.”

Until something happens next, this utterance has no binding force whatsoever. It neither obliges nor commits. It merely opens a possibility.

This is a crucial point: meaning does not bind at the point of projection. No amount of grammatical force, modal strength, or speaker intention can, on its own, create commitment.

Binding begins elsewhere.

Uptake: The First Turn Where Futures Change Status

Uptake is the moment where a projected meaning is responded to as a live option. It is not agreement, and it is not compliance. It is something more basic and more consequential.

Uptake answers the question:

Is this proposal being treated as one that now matters?

Responses such as:

“Okay.”
“Yes, that works.”
“I can do that.”
“Let’s do it.”

do not yet create obligation. What they do is shift the semiotic status of the proposal. The future it projects is no longer merely available; it is now jointly oriented to.

This is the first crack in readiness.

Alignment: From Individual Orientation to Shared Trajectory

Uptake becomes significant when it produces alignment.

Alignment is not sameness of desire, belief, or intention. It is the coordination of orientation toward a projected future. Participants may be differently motivated, differently constrained, or differently invested — and still aligned.

What alignment achieves is simple but powerful:

it transforms a possible action into a shared reference point.

Once alignment occurs, the proposal has entered a new phase. It is no longer “something someone suggested.” It is now “something we are oriented toward.”

At this point, the future begins to acquire trajectory.

Expectation: When the Future Starts to Press Back

Expectation is where binding begins to become visible.

An aligned proposal generates expectations not because anyone has promised, but because meaning has begun to stabilise across turns. The future is now presupposed in subsequent discourse:

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
“Before the meeting, can you send the file?”
“Since we’re meeting tomorrow…”

Expectation is not yet obligation. But it introduces something new: a cost to non-actualisation. When expectations exist, failure to act is no longer neutral; it requires accounting, explanation, or repair.

This is the moment where futures start to press back on the present.

Why This Is Still Not Commitment

It is important not to overstate what has happened.

At the level of uptake, alignment, and expectation:

no moral force has been invoked
no authority has been exercised
no value has been imposed
no subject has been bound by fiat

What has occurred is purely semiotic:

a proposal has been taken up
orientation has been coordinated
expectation has been sedimented

Binding has begun, but it has not yet crystallised.

This distinction matters, because it prevents us from mistaking early stabilisation for obligation — and from treating commitment as a sudden leap rather than a process.

From Readiness to Stickiness

We can now refine the picture introduced in Post 1.

Meaning readiness opens futures.

Uptake selects among them.

Alignment gives them direction.

Expectation gives them weight.

This is how meaning starts to stick — not through force, but through shared orientation over time.

In the next post, we will examine how this stickiness becomes more durable, more resistant to reversal, and more recognisably binding. To do so, we will return to modulation, and show how obligation emerges as a semiotic stabilisation of readiness, not as a moral or psychological essence.

That is where binding truly takes shape.

From Readiness to Commitment: How Meaning Becomes Binding: 1 The Problem of Binding Futures

In the previous series, meaning was approached not as a static structure or a repository of representations, but as a field of potential — a landscape of semiotic options poised for actualisation. Central to that account was the notion of meaning readiness: the perspectival availability of semiotic options for action and understanding.

Meaning readiness explains how futures become thinkable.

What it does not yet explain is how some of those futures become binding.

This series begins with that gap.

Why Readiness Is Not Enough

Meaning readiness captures availability, not attachment.

A speaker may be ready to assert a proposition, to offer a proposal, or to entertain a possibility — but readiness alone does not commit anyone to anything. Readiness opens the space of action; it does not close it. It marks what could be actualised, not what must be.

This distinction is not trivial. It points to a persistent puzzle in the analysis of meaning-making:

Why do some utterances merely float as possibilities, while others take hold?
Why do some proposals evaporate, while others bind participants across time?
How does a future move from being merely available to being owed, expected, or required?

Put simply:

Readiness ≠ commitment
Availability ≠ obligation

If meaning is fundamentally about potential, then commitment is the problem of selective hardening within that potential.

The Puzzle of Binding Futures

Consider the difference between:

“We could meet tomorrow.”
“We will meet tomorrow.”
“We are expected to meet tomorrow.”

Each involves a future. Each presupposes readiness. Yet only the latter two begin to bind. Something has happened between possibility and obligation — but it is not simply a change of mental state, nor the insertion of a moral force.

What has changed is the semiotic status of the future itself.

Binding is not a property of individuals, intentions, or values. It is a property of configurations of meaning that have become stabilised, shared, and durable. This is why commitments can outlast the people who made them, why institutions remain bound even as agents rotate, and why responsibility can persist without continuous desire.

The question, then, is not why people feel committed, but:

How does meaning come to bind at all?

Binding as a Second-Order Semiotic Phenomenon

To address this, we need to treat binding not as a primitive, but as a second-order semiotic phenomenon.

First-order meaning:

projections (propositions and proposals)
qualified by modality and modulation
made available through readiness

Second-order meaning:

expectations about those projections
alignments around uptake
stabilised orientations toward future action

Binding emerges not at the moment of projection, but at the moment where projections begin to generate shared expectations about their own persistence.

In other words, commitment is not about what is said or desired; it is about what is expected to continue to hold.

This shift — from possibility to expectation — is where meaning begins to stick.

What This Series Will Trace

This series does not begin by explaining commitment; it begins by locating the problem.

Across the posts that follow, we will trace how:

readiness becomes alignment
alignment becomes expectation
expectation becomes obligation
obligation becomes institutionalised
and how all of this can also unravel

We will examine:

how proposals acquire uptake
how modulation stabilises over time
how responsibility emerges without sovereign subjects
how institutions function as commitment-preserving devices
and how binding can decay into hollow form

Throughout, the guiding constraint remains firm:

value systems are not meaning systems
obligation is not a moral substance
commitment is not reducible to intention

Binding will be treated as what it is:

a relational, semiotic achievement, emergent from meaning itself.

Standing at the Threshold

Meaning readiness opens futures.

Commitment selects among them.

The problem of binding is the problem of how selection occurs without collapse — how futures harden without becoming fixed, how obligation emerges without becoming essence.

That problem is where we now stand.

In the next post, we turn to the first mechanism in that process: uptake — the moment where proposals stop being merely offered and begin to be taken up, aligned with, and expected.

This is where commitment begins.

Mapping Meaning: 6 Implications for Meaning-Making: Futures, Agency, and the Semiotic Field

Over the course of this series, we have traced a layered architecture of meaning-making:

Orientations of the mind: cognition and desire
Projections: propositions and proposals
Qualification: modalisation and modulation
Interfaces with value systems: desires and fears mediating biological and social pressures
Meaning readiness: the perspectival availability of semiotic options

Together, these elements reveal a central insight: meaning-making is the negotiation of potential. It is the process by which futures are rendered thinkable, actionable, and shareable in the semiotic field.

Futures as Semiotic Landscapes

Language does not merely describe the world; it constructs a landscape of possibilities:

Cognitive processes with propositions and modalisation open horizons of what might be true.
Desiderative processes with proposals and modulation open horizons of what might or should be done.
Both operate within and against value pressures, which render certain possibilities more salient, urgent, or consequential.

The semiotic field thus becomes a space of coordinated potential, where agents can navigate epistemic and practical uncertainty, negotiate action, and co-actualise futures without being determined by them.

Agency through Meaning Readiness

Central to this framework is the notion of meaning readiness: the structured, perspectival availability of semiotic options. It is through readiness that agents exercise agency:

Selecting which propositions to assert, question, or explore
Choosing which proposals to advance, with what degree of commitment or obligation
Coordinating action in response to both social and biological stakes

Agency, in this sense, is relational: it emerges at the intersection of potentialities, projections, qualifications, and value pressures. Meaning-making is thus not merely expressive; it is operative, enacting futures through semiotic negotiation.

The Semiotic Field as a Medium

By foregrounding readiness and projection, this framework reframes the semiotic field itself:

Not as a static repository of symbols or meanings
Not as a mirror of social or biological value
But as a dynamic medium of relational potential, where thought, desire, and action converge

In this medium, every utterance, proposition, or proposal participates in shaping futures, orienting attention, and coordinating possibilities. The semiotic field is simultaneously a map of potential and the terrain of actualisation.

Why This Matters

Understanding meaning in terms of readiness, projection, and relational orientation has profound implications:

For linguistics: It provides a coherent bridge between SFL’s cognitive/desiderative processes and modality systems, highlighting the relational dynamics often implicit in theory.
For philosophy of meaning: It shifts focus from meaning as representation to meaning as negotiation of potential, foregrounding temporality, orientation, and agency.
For practical discourse: It illuminates how we navigate uncertainty, coordinate action, and make futures thinkable through language.

Meaning-making is thus the semiotic art of shaping what could be, of navigating indeterminacy, and of coordinating action within relationally emergent horizons of possibility.

Closing Thoughts

This series has traced a path from mental orientations to projections, modalities, and value interfaces, culminating in the concept of meaning readiness. The framework invites us to see language not as a set of fixed structures but as a living field of potential, a medium where cognition, desire, and social pressures intersect to create futures that are thinkable, negotiable, and actionable.

In the landscape of meaning, we are always at the edge of what could be. The work of language is to make that edge visible, navigable, and responsive — and it is this work that underpins all human meaning-making.