Scaffolding Meaning: 1 Why Value Is Not Meaning (and Why That Matters)

Any serious account of meaning must begin with a refusal.

Specifically: a refusal to treat coordination as meaning, value as semiotic, or behaviour as interpretation. These conflations are not harmless shortcuts; they are category errors that quietly dismantle the very phenomenon they claim to explain.

Relational ontology begins elsewhere. It insists on a foundational distinction between value systems, which coordinate action and maintain viability, and semiotic systems, which generate symbolic meaning through construal. This distinction is not a matter of emphasis or degree. It is ontological.

Value Systems: Coordination Without Meaning

Value systems are ubiquitous. They appear wherever behaviour must be stabilised under constraint:

• Biological regulation

• Collective synchronisation

• Social norm-following

• Feedback-driven adaptation

What unites these systems is not interpretation but coordination. They operate by aligning actions with conditions of viability. They stabilise patterns. They constrain what can and cannot happen next.

Crucially, they do all of this without meaning.

There is no “aboutness” here. No phenomenon is apprehended as such. No first-order meaning is produced. A value system does not construe; it regulates. It does not interpret; it coordinates.

This is not a deficit. It is their power.

Semiotic Systems: Meaning Without Coordination Guarantees

Semiotic systems, by contrast, are fragile, unstable, and rare. They require:

• Construal

• Perspective

• The emergence of phenomena as meaningful

Where a value system aligns behaviour, a semiotic system produces meaning. It does not merely stabilise action; it brings phenomena into view as something. Meaning is not a signal transmitted or a pattern detected; it is an actualisation of potential through a perspectival cut.

And importantly: semiotic systems do not, by themselves, guarantee coordination. Meaning can destabilise as easily as it can organise. Interpretation can fracture consensus. Symbolic systems are powerful precisely because they are not bound to viability alone.

The Temptation to Collapse the Distinction

Many theories cannot tolerate this asymmetry. They respond by collapsing the distinction in one of three familiar ways:

1. Proto-meaning stories
   Coordination is treated as “incipient” or “nascent” meaning.

2. As-if semantics
   Behaviour is described as if it were interpretive, even when no construal is present.

3. Information-theoretic reduction
   Meaning is equated with signal processing, correlation, or entropy reduction.

All three manoeuvres smuggle meaning in through the back door while claiming to explain its emergence. The result is not continuity but explanatory dilution. If everything coordinates meaningfully, then meaning explains nothing.

Relational ontology refuses this move. Meaning is not everywhere. And this is precisely why it is interesting.

Why the Distinction Matters

Preserving the value/meaning distinction allows us to say things that collapsed theories cannot:

• Coordination can exist without interpretation.

• Behaviour can be organised without being meaningful.

• Meaning can emerge without being guaranteed.

• Symbolic systems can fail, drift, or destabilise coordination.

In short: meaning is not the condition of order; it is a particular way order can be taken up.

This distinction is not an obstacle to explaining emergence. It is the precondition for explaining it non-trivially.

Looking Ahead

This episode has drawn the line. The next steps are constructive.

In the episodes that follow, we will:

• Develop a clean account of coordination systems on their own terms

• Show why meaning cannot “scale up” from value through gradualism

• Introduce semiotic scaffolding as the mechanism by which meaning becomes possible without collapse

• Trace how construal enters, and with it, the semiotic proper

• Build a model of hybrid systems where value and meaning are entangled but distinct

For now, the claim is simple and non-negotiable:

Meaning does not precede coordination.

Coordination does not contain meaning.

And confusing the two explains neither.

That refusal is the ground on which the rest of the series stands.