Meaning Before Language: 5 Signs Without Foundations

Semiosis after meaning

The previous instalment ended with a claim that runs directly against much of twentieth‑century thought: meaning came first; signs came later. If that is right, then semiosis cannot be the foundation of meaning. It must instead be a specialisation — a technology for stabilising, transporting, and coordinating constraints that already exist.

This post examines what signs are once representation is no longer treated as their defining function.

The representational trap

Most theories of signs begin with a picture: a sign stands for something else. A word stands for an object, a symbol stands for a concept, a formula stands for a structure. Meaning, on this view, is the relation between sign and referent.

But this picture quietly assumes what it claims to explain. It presupposes that there is already something determinate that can be stood for, and a subject for whom the standing‑for makes sense. Meaning has already been smuggled in.

Once meaning is treated as prior, representation stops looking foundational and starts looking derivative.

Signs as constraint devices

Relationally understood, a sign is not a mirror of meaning but a constraint device. It does not create meaning; it channels it. A sign stabilises a pattern of possible construals and makes that pattern portable across time, space, and participants.

To use a sign is to accept a constraint: this mark, sound, or gesture must be taken in this way rather than that. Semiosis is the practice of coordinating such constraints across a system.

This is why signs can fail, drift, or be re‑purposed. Their meaning is not intrinsic; it depends on the relational constraints that are taken up in use.

Meaning without signs

We can now say clearly what earlier posts only implied. Meaning does not require signs. Organisms coordinate with environments long before symbolic systems appear. Constraints are enacted, responded to, and stabilised without representation.

What signs add is not meaning but detachment. They allow constraints to be lifted out of immediate coupling and re‑applied elsewhere. This detachment is powerful — and dangerous. It enables abstraction, planning, and culture, but also reification, alienation, and the illusion that symbols themselves are the source of sense.

Semiosis as a late arrival

Seen this way, semiosis is historically and logically late. It presupposes:

• pre‑symbolic meaning

• stabilised patterns of constraint

• shared practices of uptake

Only once these are in place can signs function at all. There is no such thing as a self‑interpreting sign. Interpretation is itself a constrained activity embedded in a broader system of meaning.

Why foundations keep failing

Attempts to ground meaning in language, symbols, or formal systems repeatedly collapse into circularity. Signs need interpretation; interpretation needs meaning; meaning cannot be conjured from marks alone.

The failure is not accidental. It arises from mistaking a powerful specialisation for a foundation. Signs are extraordinarily effective tools, but they do not hold the world up.

Clearing the ground

With semiosis now repositioned, several long‑standing confusions dissolve. Language no longer needs to be the origin of thought. Mathematics no longer needs to be the language of reality. Physics no longer needs to describe what is.

What remains is the work of mapping how different systems enact different cuts, and how symbolic technologies reshape those cuts without originating them.

That task belongs to the next series.

Meaning came first.

Signs came later.

The cut comes next.