The manifesto established the principles: constraint over foundation, complementarity as universal, participation over mirroring, directionality over hierarchy. Now we ask: what does this look like in practice? How does a post-ladder epistemology operate when we analyse language, meaning, and semiotic patterns?
1. Fields, Not Strata
Traditional linguistics often treats text types, genres, and registers as strata or fixed categories. Post-ladder thinking reframes them as fields of structured potential:
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A register is not a configuration of field, tenor, and mode; it is a subpotential of language that actualises certain semiotic affordances within a given context.
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A text type is not an essential category; it is a positional artefact, the viewpoint from which a subpotential has been actualised.
From this perspective, analysing a text does not mean placing it into a fixed hierarchy. It means navigating the relational field of possibilities: what distinctions are drawn? what potentials are realised? how durable is the pattern across shifts in context or observer?
2. Mapping Constraint
A core move in directional epistemology is identifying durable constraints:
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Which linguistic choices recur reliably across different actualisations?
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Which patterns collapse under minor repositioning or context shift?
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Which constructions guide further possibilities within the semiotic system?
These are not “laws” in a classical sense. They are structural regularities revealed through directional exploration of the field.
Example: examining clause structures across scientific writing. Rather than declaring “passive voice = objective,” we observe how certain constructions persist under different rhetorical positions, enabling reproducible meanings. Constraint is discovered through positional durability, not through appeal to elevated normativity.
3. Complementarity in Action
Complementarity allows us to treat the same phenomenon as instance and potential simultaneously. In linguistics:
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The use of a certain modality in one text is an instance of a broader potential.
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That same potential, viewed from another perspective, becomes a theory of possible actualisations.
This dual view enables flexible, non-hierarchical generalisations. We do not climb to a meta-level; we move directionally across the field, observing how subpotentials actualise, constrain, and interact.
4. Participation, Not Mirroring
Directionality replaces mirroring. When we describe a discourse, we do not reproduce an independent object of language. We participate in its structured potential:
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Analysis is an act of actualisation, not replication.
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Interpretation is a positional engagement, constrained by affordances of the system.
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Knowledge emerges from responsible navigation, testing durability and coherence across positions.
The field is alive. Our descriptions are moves within it, not detached reflections.
5. From Principle to Practice
Implementing directional epistemology in semiotics and linguistics involves:
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Identifying relational potentials: mapping semiotic resources available for construal.
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Tracing actualisations: observing how these potentials are realised across texts, situations, and contexts.
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Testing durability: repositioning, recontextualising, and seeing which patterns persist.
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Recording constraints: noting which relations structure the field, allowing for generalisations without hierarchy.
Even the simplest linguistic analysis — say, comparing modality across reports — becomes a directional navigation rather than classification. The field itself, not an elevated category, provides the measure.
6. Implications
This orientation:
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Preserves rigour without recourse to elevated foundations.
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Maintains objectivity as robustness across positional shifts.
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Respects the relational nature of language, meaning, and context.
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Enables flexible, domain-independent epistemic practice, applicable across semiotics, science, and pedagogy.
It also opens new questions: how can these methods be formalised? How can students be trained to navigate relational fields responsibly? How can other domains (science, social theory) benefit from the same orientation?
7. The Next Step
This post illustrates the first moves on the threshold: applying directional epistemology concretely.
The next post can explore cross-domain synthesis, showing how the same principles illuminate scientific experimentation, modelling, and even pedagogy — demonstrating that the relational field is not domain-bound, but universal.
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