If instantiation is a perspectival cut, then system cannot be understood as a catalogue of meanings, nor as a structure that sits behind instances explaining them.
System must be understood as possibility.
This post makes the core ontological move of the series explicit:
What is primary is not meaning, but meaning-potential.
From this perspective, culture, language, creativity, and disagreement all appear in a new light.
1. From meaning to meaning-potential
It is tempting to treat systems as repositories of meanings — as if language or culture were stocked with semantic items waiting to be deployed.
But this framing is already too concrete.
Meanings do not exist independently of their construal. What exists prior to instantiation is not meaning, but the conditions under which meaning can occur.
A semiotic system is therefore best understood as:
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a structured space of distinctions,
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a field of affordances and constraints,
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a topology of possible construals.
Meaning is what appears when this space is apprehended from the perspective of actuality.
2. Culture as a historically sedimented possibility space
When system is understood as meaning-potential, culture can no longer be treated as a background variable or a contextual container.
Culture is the highest-order semiotic system: a historically evolved space of possible meanings within which language itself has emerged and continues to function.
This space is:
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socially shared, not individually owned,
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historically sedimented, not synchronically complete,
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probabilistic, not deterministic.
Cultural systems do not prescribe what must be meant. They shape what is likely, recognisable, contestable, and meaningful.
Every situation is a construal of culture — not a selection from it, but an actualisation of its possibilities under particular conditions.
3. Constraint as generative, not limiting
One of the most persistent myths about systems is that they constrain creativity.
From a system-first perspective, the opposite is true.
Constraints do not limit meaning; they make meaning possible.
A space with no constraints has no internal structure. Without structure, there are no distinctions. Without distinctions, nothing can count as meaningful difference.
Creativity, therefore, is not:
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transgression of system,
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escape from constraint,
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or movement beyond structure.
Creativity is recombination within a structured possibility space.
What appears as novelty is not the absence of system, but the productive reconfiguration of its affordances.
4. Evolution as reorganisation of possibility
If system is meaning-potential, then semiotic evolution cannot be understood as the accumulation of meanings.
It must be understood as the expansion, contraction, and reorganisation of possibility spaces over time.
This applies across scales:
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in the evolution of language,
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in the historical transformation of cultures,
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in the development of specialised discourses,
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and in the emergence of new genres and practices.
New meanings matter not because they are new tokens, but because they reshape what can now be meant.
Evolution, on this view, is not directional. It has no inherent telos. It is a history of shifting affordances — of what becomes thinkable, sayable, and contestable.
5. Disagreement as evidence of shared system
A system-first ontology radically reframes disagreement.
If meaning were transmitted or aligned, disagreement would signal failure: miscommunication, misalignment, or breakdown.
But if meaning emerges from shared possibility spaces, disagreement becomes evidence of system, not its collapse.
To disagree meaningfully, participants must:
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share distinctions,
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recognise alternatives,
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and orient to a common semiotic space.
Disagreement shows that the system is sufficiently rich to sustain multiple construals of the same potential.
Far from threatening coherence, disagreement is one of the strongest indicators that a semiotic system is alive.
6. Culture without closure
Because possibility is primary, culture cannot be closed.
There is no complete inventory of meanings, no final map of distinctions, no endpoint at which the system is finished.
Cultural systems persist precisely because they remain open to re-construal — not infinitely open, but structurally generative.
This openness is not a weakness to be corrected. It is the ontological condition of meaning itself.
7. Looking ahead
If system is meaning-potential and instantiation is perspectival, then pedagogy cannot be about alignment with endpoints, nor assessment about measuring progress toward completion.
In the next post, we will explore what follows for teaching, learning, and evaluation once teleology is removed from the theory altogether.
What does pedagogy look like when its task is not to move students somewhere, but to help them explore the space they already inhabit?
That is where we turn next.
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