On Meaning as Possibility: 1 Manifesto for System-First Ontology

This series begins from a simple but far-reaching claim:

System is primary. Instance is perspectival.

This is not a methodological preference, a political stance, or a pedagogic convenience. It is an ontological commitment about what must already be in place for meaning, interpretation, disagreement, or creativity to be possible at all.

To take system seriously is not to privilege abstraction over experience, nor structure over agency. It is to recognise that without system, nothing could count as an instance in the first place.

1. System is not an explanation of instances

A persistent misunderstanding in theories of meaning is the assumption that systems exist in order to explain instances. On this view, the system sits behind or above particular acts of meaning, generating them, constraining them, or accounting for their form.

This series rejects that framing entirely.

System does not explain instances.

System is the condition of intelligibility for anything to be recognisable as an instance at all.

Without a system of potential distinctions, there is no way to identify:

• what counts as a choice,

• what counts as variation,

• what counts as difference,

• or even what counts as the same thing again.

System is therefore logically prior, not temporally prior. It does not come “before” instances in time, and it does not cause them. It is simply what must already be in place for instances to be meaningful, describable, or disputable.

2. System is meaning-potential, not meaning-in-waiting

In the Hallidayan tradition, system is understood as meaning potential. This phrase is often repeated, but rarely taken to its full ontological consequence.

Meaning potential does not mean:

• meanings waiting to be selected,

• options queued up for activation,

• or structures lying dormant until used.

It means something stronger and more radical:

System is the space of possible meanings within which any actual meaning can appear.

This space is not empty. It is structured, constrained, historically sedimented, and socially shared. But it is not itself an event, an act, or a performance. It is a condition of possibility.

What is primary, then, is not meaning, but the possibility of meaning.

This is why a system-first ontology does not begin with texts, utterances, practices, or actions. It begins with the structured potential that makes such phenomena intelligible as phenomena at all.

3. Instantiation is a perspectival cut, not a process

Once system is understood in this way, instantiation must be reconceived.

Instantiation is not:

• a movement from system to instance,

• a process of descent,

• a trajectory through levels,

• or a developmental pathway.

Instantiation is a shift in descriptive vantage.

It is the system viewed as actualised in a particular construal. The system does not move. The system does not unfold. The system does not travel anywhere.

What changes is the perspective from which the system is apprehended.

From one vantage, we see meaning as potential: a network of distinctions, affordances, and constraints.

From another vantage, we see meaning as phenomenon: a particular utterance, text, action, or event.

These are not two different things. They are two ways of construing the same semiotic reality.

Instantiation, in this sense, is not temporal, causal, or directional. It is perspectival.

4. System-first is not anti-agency

A common anxiety about system-first thinking is that it diminishes agency, creativity, or responsibility. This anxiety arises only if system is misconstrued as a mechanism that governs or determines action.

But a system-first ontology says the opposite.

Agency is not prior to system.

Agency is made possible by system.

To act meaningfully is to act within a space of distinctions that others can recognise, contest, or reinterpret. Creativity is not the breaking of rules, but the recombination of possibilities within constraint. Disagreement is not a failure of shared meaning, but evidence that a shared system is in play.

Far from erasing agency, a system-first ontology explains how agency can be intelligible, consequential, and socially legible at all.

5. Why this series, and why now

This series is an attempt to articulate a fully positive account of system-first ontology: one that does not define itself against rival metaphors, polemics, or misreadings, but develops its own internal coherence and reach.

Over the coming posts, we will explore:

• instantiation as perspectival construal,

• culture as a historically sedimented possibility space,

• pedagogy without teleology or stages,

• and the extension of system-first thinking beyond language, into music, myth, and social meaning more broadly.

The aim is not closure or completion. There is nothing to climb, finish, or arrive at.

A system-first ontology does not promise endpoints.

It opens a horizon.

And it begins from this simple commitment:

Meaning does not come first.

Possibility does.