In the previous post, we moved from construal to coordination, showing how meaning is actualised relationally and how alignment is achieved without appeal to interior content. The question that now presses is this: if meaning is neither in minds nor transmitted between them, what accounts for the remarkable stability of linguistic coordination across texts, situations, and time?
The answer lies entirely in system networks and probabilities of choice. No additional organising construct is required.
Systems as Theories of Possibility
A system network specifies a structured space of potential distinctions. It is not a catalogue of meanings, nor a representation of cognitive content, but a theory of what can be chosen at a given point in meaning-making.
Each system is organised by relations of dependency: selecting one option makes others unavailable while opening further regions of choice. Meaning arises not from the substance of an option, but from its position within this network of alternatives.
What is crucial here is that systems are prior to instances in an explanatory sense. They do not emerge from individual acts of meaning; rather, they are the semiotic resources through which any act of meaning is possible at all.
Probability Does the Coordinating Work
Coordination does not depend on shared intentions or matched mental contents. It depends on probability.
Across histories of use, some choices come to be made more often than others in particular kinds of situations. These recurrent selections weight the system, making certain pathways through it more likely to be taken again. Probability, in this sense, is not psychological expectation but semiotic tendency.
When participants in an interaction draw on the same probabilistically weighted systems, coordination appears smooth and immediate. When probabilities diverge — because of disciplinary difference, institutional change, or shifting social practice — coordination falters, revealing the underlying structure.
Nothing interior needs to be invoked to explain this. The alignment is in the system.
Register and Situation
Register plays a decisive role here. Situation types, characterised by field, tenor, and mode, activate particular regions of the system network. In doing so, they shape which distinctions are likely to be actualised.
This is not a matter of applying rules or following templates. It is a matter of semiotic ecology: certain choices are more viable, more expectable, and more readily taken up in some situations than in others.
As a result, texts produced in similar situations tend to resemble one another — not because they belong to a category, but because they are instantiations of similar probabilistic conditions within the same system.
Textual Histories Without Reification
Stability across texts is often mistaken for evidence of an organising form beyond the system. In fact, it is fully explained by recurrent instantiation.
As similar situations recur, similar selections are made. These selections sediment as probabilities, shaping future acts of meaning. Over time, pathways through the system become well worn, while others remain marginal or dormant.
Crucially, nothing is stored, transmitted, or remembered by subjects. The system itself carries its history in the weighting of its options.
This is how language changes without needing inner representations: innovation reweights probabilities; repetition reinforces them; shifts in social practice redirect them.
Why This Matters for Analysis
Once system networks and probability are taken seriously, linguistic analysis gains both rigour and economy.
The analyst does not ask what speakers intended or what texts encode. Instead, analysis focuses on:
which choices were actualised,
which alternatives were bypassed,
how probabilities were exploited or resisted,
and how situation types channelled selection.
Explanation stays where the evidence is: in observable patterns of choice and their histories.
This post establishes the infrastructural core of the series. In the next post, we will extend this account temporally, examining how histories of use transform systems themselves, and how the evolution of semiotic possibility unfolds without appeal to interiors.
No comments:
Post a Comment