Density and the Evolution of Semiotic Possibility: 3 Development as Density Reconfiguration

In Posts 1 and 2, we explored instantiation as a vertical cline and individuation as a lateral cline. Each text is an actualisation of systemic potential, and each individual exhibits patterned density across the system. Yet these density patterns are not fixed. Over time, they shift, producing what we call development.

Development is the dynamic reconfiguration of density within an individual’s lateral cline. Some regions of potential become thicker — more accessible, more likely to be actualised — while others may thin, becoming less stable or marginal. These changes are cumulative and patterned:

• Thickening reflects repeated actualisation, practice, or entrenched fluency.

• Thinning reflects disuse, neglect, or displacement by alternative choices.

We can visualise an individual’s cline at two points in time:

Time 1                       Time 2

Individual A:             Individual A:

█ █ █ █ █        █ █ █ █ █ █   ← thickened regions

█ █                        █                              ← thinned regions

Development is not simply learning in the cognitive sense. It is the reshaping of density across systemic potential, guided by interaction with the environment, social practices, and repeated actualisation. Each individual’s lateral cline evolves, producing trajectories of expertise, preference, and variation.

At the collective level, these individual density shifts feed back into the system. Repeated actualisation across members gradually redistributes potential, laying the groundwork for collective evolution, the topic of our next post.

Several points are crucial:

1. Development is perspectival: it looks different from the instance pole (observing actual texts) versus the potential pole (observing shifts in density patterns).

2. It is relational: individual changes depend on both systemic potential and interaction with other individuals.

3. It is dynamic: density distributions are continuously reshaped, never static.

By framing development as density reconfiguration, we see how semiotic systems remain flexible yet patterned, and how individuals’ engagement with systemic potential produces trajectories that are both personal and relational.

In the next post, we will expand from individual development to collective evolution, showing how repeated actualisation across individuals reshapes the semiotic field over time.