Scaffolding Meaning: 3 Semiotic Scaffolding

If coordination does not contain meaning, yet meaning nonetheless appears in systems that are thoroughly coordinated, then the problem is not one of gradual enrichment but of structural accommodation.

This episode introduces semiotic scaffolding: not as a metaphor for “early meaning”, but as a precise way of describing how conditions for construal can be stabilised within non-semiotic coordination regimes—without collapsing the distinction between value and meaning.

The guiding question is simple but unforgiving:

How can a system that does not construe nevertheless come to host construal?

Why ‘Emergence’ Is the Wrong Word

The standard answer is emergence: meaning emerges from coordination as systems grow complex.

But this explanation does too much work with too little structure.

Emergence, in most uses, refers to:

• Aggregate effects

• Nonlinear interactions

• Unexpected macroscopic patterns

None of these explain the appearance of aboutness, phenomenality, or perspectival actuality. They explain behavioural novelty, not the arrival of a phenomenon appearing as something.

Meaning is not a higher-order behaviour.

It is a different mode of eventhood.

So instead of emergence, we need an account of enablement without instantiation.

What Scaffolding Is (and Is Not)

Semiotic scaffolding is a configuration of coordination that:

• Remains non-semiotic in operation

• Stabilises repeatable relational patterns

• Creates reliable sites for differentiation

• Preserves distinctions across contexts

Crucially, scaffolding does not:

• Interpret

• Represent

• Refer

• Construe

It does not mean anything.

It does not “point to” anything.

It does not contain proto-signs.

It merely holds a place where construal could occur.

This distinction is essential. If scaffolding already meant something, it would not be scaffolding—it would be meaning, badly theorised.

The Logic of Hosting Without Collapsing

To scaffold is to host without performing.

A coordination regime can:

• Maintain stable couplings

• Enforce boundary conditions

• Constrain transitions

• Reproduce internal asymmetries

Such features can make it possible for a perspectival cut, once performed, to:

• Be repeatable

• Be shared

• Be re-invoked

• Be coordinated across agents

But none of this requires the regime itself to construe.

This is the crucial asymmetry:

• Coordination can host construal

• Construal cannot be reduced to coordination

Scaffolding is therefore not a bridge between value and meaning.

It is a support structure that remains ontologically on the value side.

A Minimal Example (Without Semiotic Smuggling)

Consider a biological collective that reliably differentiates states of its environment through action coupling—approach/avoid, activate/inhibit, synchronise/desynchronise.

These distinctions:

• Are real

• Are effective

• Are stabilised

• Are enforced by value constraints

But they are not experienced as distinctions.

Now imagine that within this regime, a perspectival operation becomes possible: a cut that actualises one of these distinctions as a phenomenon.

Nothing in the coordination changes.

No new value function is introduced.

No representation is added.

What changes is that a phenomenon appears for a perspective.

The pre-existing coordination did not contain meaning—but it made it possible for meaning, once actualised, to persist and propagate.

That persistence is scaffolding.

Why Scaffolding Is Fragile

Scaffolding is not a guarantee. It is a constraint-sensitive condition.

Without continued coordination:

• Construal collapses

• Phenomena dissolve

• Meaning fails to stabilise

This is why meaning is always:

• Situated

• Context-bound

• Historically contingent

Yet none of this makes meaning reducible to coordination.

It makes it dependent without being derivative.

This dependence relation is frequently misdescribed as “grounding”.

A better term is hosting.

What This Allows Us to Say (And What It Forbids)

With semiotic scaffolding in place, we can now say:

• Meaning is not everywhere

• Coordination does not secretly interpret

• Value systems are not proto-semiotic

• Meaning requires a perspectival cut

• But meaning is not metaphysically unmoored

At the same time, this framework forbids:

• Gradualist stories of “more meaning”

• Metaphorical talk of signals “standing for” things

• Appeals to information as a halfway house

• Any account that treats coordination as already meaningful

Scaffolding is the line that lets us talk about interaction without collapse.

Looking Ahead

In Episode 4, we turn to the most delicate question of all:

How does construal, once actualised, come to coordinate with other construals?

This is where semiotic systems begin to interact—not by synchronising meanings, but by aligning scaffolds across perspectives.

Only then do communication, social meaning, and symbolic systems become possible.

But they do not arrive gently.

They arrive under constraint.