The emergence of meaning is often treated as if it were obvious: organisms began producing signals, and those signals came to mean things.
But this familiar story quietly smuggles in the very phenomenon it claims to explain. Signals can exist without meaning. Behaviour can coordinate social interaction without ever becoming semiotic.
To understand how meaning emerges, we must begin earlier — with systems that organise behaviour without semiosis.
These are value systems.
Value systems: coordination without semiosis
A value system organises behaviour through differential consequences. Certain states of affairs are reinforced; others are avoided. The system stabilises patterns of interaction by distributing positive and negative feedback across possible actions.
Such systems are ubiquitous in biological and social life. Predator avoidance, dominance hierarchies, infant–caregiver regulation, and collective hunting all depend on finely tuned coordination mechanisms that guide behaviour without requiring symbolic meaning.
A wolf baring its teeth does not necessarily mean “back off.” The behaviour produces consequences that reliably result in retreat, but the interaction operates through causal coupling rather than semiosis. One action triggers another because the organisms are dynamically aligned with each other and with their environment.
In value systems, the organising relation is therefore not meaning but orientation. Behaviour is modulated according to the organism’s relation to desirable or undesirable states of the world.
These systems can be extraordinarily sophisticated. Yet they remain fundamentally constrained.
The limitation of value systems
Value systems operate only on what is present to interaction. Their regulatory mechanisms depend on stimuli, actions, and consequences occurring within the immediate situation.
This imposes a structural limitation.
A purely value-based coordination system cannot organise behaviour around:
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events that are spatially absent
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states of affairs that lie in the future
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remembered situations
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hypothetical possibilities
Coordination occurs in the moment, driven by direct engagement with the environment.
As social organisation becomes more complex, however, this constraint becomes increasingly restrictive. Organisms must begin coordinating their actions around things that are not immediately present: distant resources, anticipated threats, remembered events, and negotiated alliances.
At this point the coordination system encounters a problem it cannot solve using value alone.
Something new must emerge.
The threshold of semiosis
The step from value systems to meaning systems is therefore not a simple matter of adding signals to behaviour. Signals already exist within many value systems. Alarm calls, threat displays, and affiliative gestures are widespread across the animal kingdom.
The crucial shift lies elsewhere.
The transition occurs when behaviour ceases to function purely as an action and becomes available as a selectable resource within a shared system of construal.
At this point the system is no longer merely coordinating behaviour. It is coordinating interpretation.
And with that shift, semiosis begins.
The ontological significance of the transition
This moment marks a genuine transformation in the organising principle of interaction.
In value systems, behaviour is linked through causal coupling:
action → response.
In semiosis, behaviour is mediated through construal:
signal → construed meaning → response.
Meaning does not reside inside the signal itself, nor does it reside in the external world. It exists only within the relational system through which participants coordinate how signals are interpreted.
The emergence of semiosis therefore marks the appearance of a new kind of potential in the world: a system of possible meanings whose instances are semiotic acts.
From this point onward, behaviour is no longer merely coordinated. It is construed.
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