The most resilient support for the “symbolic animal” is not an argument but a picture.
It is the picture of a continuum.
This picture does a great deal of work. It allows us to say, without quite saying it, that:
meaning emerges from signalling
language develops from interaction
symbols are refined signals
And because each step appears modest, the overall transition appears natural.
Nothing dramatic happens. No rupture. No discontinuity.
Just more of the same.
1. The Comfort of Gradation
The appeal of the continuum lies in its smoothness.
Where there is no clear boundary, there is no need for a decision. One does not have to say where signalling ends and meaning begins, because the model denies that such a boundary is required.
Instead, we are offered a gradient:
signal → complex signal → proto-symbol → symbol → meaning
Each term inherits from the previous one. Each appears as a refinement.
This allows incompatible descriptions to coexist without conflict. Behavioural coordination can be described in the same breath as interpretation; neural activation can be placed on the same scale as semantic structure.
The continuum absorbs the differences.
2. What the Continuum Requires
For this picture to hold, a specific assumption must remain in place:
that signalling and meaning are variations of the same underlying process.
This assumption is rarely stated outright. It operates as a background condition, enabling the language of emergence, development, and elaboration.
But once stated, it becomes questionable.
Because it commits us to the claim that:
meaning is, in principle, describable as a form of coordination
interpretation is a complex instance of response
semantics is continuous with behaviour
If this were the case, then increasing the complexity of signalling should, at some point, yield meaning.
The problem is that it does not.
3. Where the Scale Breaks
Consider what is required for signalling.
A signal coordinates behaviour. It establishes a relation between:
a state of affairs
and a response
This relation can be highly sophisticated. It can involve memory, modulation, probabilistic weighting. It can be embedded in complex systems of interaction.
But it remains, structurally, a matter of value-based coordination.
Now consider what is required for meaning.
Meaning is not exhausted by response. It involves construal: the taking of something as something. It introduces a different kind of relation:
not state → response
but construal → significance
This is not an elaboration of the first relation. It is a different operation.
No increase in the complexity of coordination produces construal. One can refine signals indefinitely without ever crossing into meaning.
The scale does not extend. It breaks.
4. The Fiction of “Proto-Meaning”
The continuum survives this break by introducing intermediate terms:
“proto-meaning”
“pre-symbolic representation”
“incipient semantics”
These terms perform a stabilising function. They name a supposed transitional zone where signalling is no longer merely coordination, but not yet fully meaning.
The difficulty is that these terms have no independent criteria.
They do not describe a distinct kind of operation. Instead, they mark a hesitation: an unwillingness to abandon the continuum, combined with an inability to justify it.
What is called “proto-meaning” is typically one of two things:
either complex coordination, redescribed in semantic language
or meaning, tacitly assumed but not acknowledged as a break
In neither case does the intermediate category do real explanatory work.
It patches a gap that the model itself created.
5. Smuggling Meaning
At this point, the mechanism of the continuum becomes visible.
Meaning does not emerge from signalling. It is introduced into the account in advance, and then projected backwards along the scale.
Descriptions of signalling systems begin to incorporate terms like:
information
representation
interpretation
These terms carry semantic weight. Once in place, they allow coordination to be redescribed as if it were already meaningful.
The continuum is thus maintained not by demonstrating a transition, but by smuggling meaning into the lower end of the scale.
What appears as emergence is, in fact, re-description.
6. The Cost of Continuity
The price of maintaining the continuum is the loss of distinction.
If signalling and meaning are placed on a single scale, then one of two things must happen:
either meaning is reduced to coordination
or coordination is inflated into meaning
In the first case, semantics disappears. Meaning becomes a convenient label for complex behaviour.
In the second, everything becomes meaningful: chemical gradients, hormonal responses, reflexes.
Both moves dissolve the phenomenon they were meant to explain.
The continuum does not unify the domains. It flattens them.
7. Replacing the Scale with a Cut
If the continuum fails, what replaces it?
Not a more finely grained scale, but a cut.
Signalling and meaning do not occupy different positions along a gradient. They belong to different systems:
signalling operates within value-based coordination
meaning operates within semiotic construal
These systems do not share a common metric. One cannot be measured in terms of the other. There is no axis along which one becomes the other.
The relation between them is not one of development, but of non-continuity.
8. After the Break
Once the continuum is abandoned, several familiar claims become untenable:
that meaning “evolves from” signalling
that language is a “complex signalling system”
that symbols are “refined signals”
These claims rely on the very scale that has now been withdrawn.
What replaces them is more austere.
We can still describe:
increasingly complex forms of coordination
increasingly elaborate semiotic systems
But we no longer treat them as stages of a single process.
They are distinct, and must be analysed as such.
9. The Work of Separation
The remainder of this series depends on holding this break in place.
It is not enough to assert that signalling and meaning differ. The temptation to slide back into continuity is persistent, because the language of gradation is so deeply embedded.
The task, then, is one of discipline:
to describe coordination without importing semantics
to describe meaning without reducing it to behaviour
to resist intermediate categories that blur the distinction
Only under these constraints can the relation between systems be examined without distortion.
The continuum offered an attractive simplification: a single story in which life becomes meaning by degrees.
Its rejection leaves us with a more demanding situation.
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