On Meaning as Possibility: Coda: The Open Horizon

This series has argued for a simple but demanding claim:

Meaning does not begin with instances.

It begins with possibility.

Everything else has followed from that.

1. Nothing has been climbed

A system-first ontology does not culminate in mastery.

There is no ladder completed, no summit reached, no vantage point from which the system can be surveyed in full.

If system is primary, then it is never exhausted by its instantiations — and never owned by them.

Every instance:

• makes something of the system visible,

• leaves much of it untouched,

• and alters what can be seen next.

There is no “arrival” point where meaning settles.

2. Why openness is not vagueness

Open does not mean indeterminate.

A semiotic system is structured — often rigidly so. It constrains what counts, what coheres, what resonates, and what fails to make sense at all.

But its constraints are conditions of intelligibility, not instructions.

They do not tell us what to say, only what could be said meaningfully.

This is why disagreement is not a threat to meaning.

It is evidence that meaning is still alive.

3. Theory without closure

A system-first ontology refuses a familiar comfort: the idea that theory should settle things.

Instead, theory here functions as:

• clarification of distinctions,

• repair of confusions,

• and protection of possibility.

Its task is not to close debate, but to keep the system accountable to its own instantiations — and vice versa.

Where theory hardens into procedure, possibility contracts.

Where it remains descriptive and reflexive, possibility expands.

4. The future is not downstream

If instantiation is not a trajectory, then the future is not something meaning “moves toward”.

The future emerges as:

• recombination of existing resources,

• reweighting of constraints,

• and novel construals within shared systems.

Culture evolves not by climbing, but by re-patterning possibility.

This makes history neither linear nor random, but semiotically sedimented.

5. What remains to be done

Nothing in this ontology dictates its own applications.

It does not prescribe:

• a pedagogy,

• a politics,

• or a methodology.

What it demands instead is vigilance:

• against teleology,

• against reification,

• against mistaking perspective for process.

The work ahead is not to extend the system upward, but to stay with it — critically, creatively, and collectively.

6. The horizon, left open

A horizon is not a destination.

It is what makes movement intelligible.

To think system-first is not to arrive at certainty, but to remain oriented — toward meaning as shared possibility, toward disagreement as productive, toward creativity as recombination rather than transgression.

Nothing has been completed here.

And that, finally, is the point.

Meaning does not end.

It continues — as long as possibility remains in play.