On Meaning as Possibility: 2 Instantiation Clarified: Perspective, Not Process

If system is primary, instantiation must be rethought from the ground up.

This post makes one central claim:

Instantiation is not how meaning moves.

Instantiation is how system appears.

Much confusion in theories of meaning arises not from disagreement about systems themselves, but from a persistent tendency to smuggle movement, sequence, or development into what is fundamentally a matter of perspective.

Clarifying instantiation is therefore not a technical refinement. It is an ontological necessity.

1. The mistake: treating instantiation as a process

Instantiation is often described as if it were something that happens:

• meanings move from system to text,

• abstract potential is actualised step by step,

• general resources are progressively specified,

• or cultural patterns are enacted through stages.

These descriptions differ in detail, but they share a common assumption: that instantiation is a trajectory.

Once this assumption is in place, a series of further commitments follow almost automatically:

• directionality,

• ordering,

• progress,

• and eventually evaluation relative to endpoints.

But none of this is entailed by the system–instance relation itself.

The problem is not that these metaphors are imprecise.

The problem is that they reintroduce temporal logic into a relation that is not temporal at all.

2. Instantiation as a perspectival cut

In a system-first ontology, instantiation names a relation of construal, not a relation of production.

System and instance are not two things linked by a pathway. They are the same semiotic reality viewed from different vantage points.

• From one perspective, meaning is construed paradigmatically: as potential, as a network of distinctions and affordances.

• From another perspective, meaning is construed phenomenally: as an event, a text, a situation, an experience.

Instantiation is the cut that makes one of these perspectives salient.

Nothing moves.

Nothing unfolds.

Nothing is executed.

The system does not become the instance.

The instance is the system, apprehended as actual.

3. Why instantiation is not semogenesis

A common source of confusion is the conflation of instantiation with semogenesis.

Semogenesis concerns the emergence and evolution of meaning systems over time: phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and logogenetic processes through which semiotic potential expands, reorganises, and stabilises.

Instantiation is not this.

Instantiation does not describe how systems develop, change, or grow. It describes how a system is made visible as meaningful in a particular construal.

To treat instantiation as semogenesis is to mistake:

• a perspectival relation
  for

• a developmental one.

This mistake leads directly to the idea that meaning must travel from potential to actuality, rather than simply be apprehended as actual.

4. Stratification is not instantiation

Another crucial distinction must be restored here: the distinction between stratification and instantiation.

Stratification concerns levels of symbolic abstraction within a semiotic system. In language, this includes:

• semantics,

• lexicogrammar,

• and expression systems.

These strata are related by symbolic recoding: wording symbolises meaning; expression symbolises wording. Stratification is about how meaning is organised symbolically, not about how meaning comes into being.

Instantiation, by contrast, concerns system and instance — a relation that cuts across strata, not between them.

Every instance of meaning is simultaneously:

• semantic,

• lexicogrammatical,

• and expressive.

Instantiation does not move meaning between strata. It construes the whole stratal complex from the perspective of actuality.

Confusing these relations leads to the idea that:

• strata “make meaning,”

• instantiation proceeds through levels,

• or meaning is assembled incrementally.

All of these are category errors.

5. Context and instantiation: co-appearance, not traversal

The same logic applies to context.

In a Hallidayan frame, instantiation operates:

• within language (system ↔ text), and

• within context (culture ↔ situation).

But these are not two separate instantiation processes. They are the same perspectival cut, apprehended across different semiotic systems.

A text and a situation do not come into being sequentially. They co-appear as mutually constraining construals of meaning-in-context.

There is no moment at which culture “enters” language, nor any stage at which situation is progressively specified. Culture is construed as situation in the same act by which system is construed as text.

Instantiation is therefore co-actualisation, not transmission.

6. What changes when instantiation is clarified

Once instantiation is understood perspectivally, several consequences follow immediately:

• Meaning is not directed toward completion.

• Variation is not deviation from a path.

• Creativity is not movement beyond structure.

• Disagreement is not misalignment between levels.

Instead:

• each instance re-construes the system,

• each construal slightly reshapes what the system is taken to be,

• and system remains accountable to what actually happens.

There is no endpoint against which instances are measured — only the ongoing tension between potential and phenomenon.

7. Looking ahead

If instantiation is perspectival, not procedural, then system must be understood as something more than a descriptive inventory.

In the next post, we will argue that system is best understood as a space of possibility: historically sedimented, socially shared, and continuously reconfigured by the very instances through which it is apprehended.

This is where a system-first ontology fully reveals its stakes.

Not meaning first.

Possibility first.