A relational ontology, once consistently pursued, exerts a familiar pressure on inherited distinctions. If relation is taken as primary, and if instantiation is understood as the selective actualisation of relational potential, then it can appear that everything that occurs is, in some sense, already meaningful.
This is a tempting conclusion. It arises naturally from the extension of relational thinking: if all determination is relational, and if all relational differentiation is structured in its potential and actualised through cuts, then it may seem that meaning is simply another name for this general process.
But this conclusion depends on a collapse that must be resisted.
Not all relational differentiation is meaning.
To treat it as such is to erase a distinction that is not optional, but constitutive of any account of semiotic organisation.
Meaning does not name every instance of relation. It names a specific stratum within relational differentiation: the stratum in which relational configurations are construed as semiotic.
This requires careful formulation. Meaning is not something added to relation from outside, nor is it a general property distributed across all forms of interaction, coordination, or physical process. It arises where relational differentiation is taken up within a semiotic order—that is, where it is construed as capable of being organised, stabilised, and varied as meaning potential.
From this perspective, much of what occurs in relational fields does not qualify as meaning at all. Biological regulation, physical interaction, and non-semiotic coordination may all be fully real as modes of relational differentiation without thereby being meaning-making in a semiotic sense.
To erase this distinction is to lose explanatory precision. It turns meaning into a universal property of being, and in doing so, removes the very conditions under which meaning can be analysed as a specific mode of organisation.
A relational ontology does not require this expansion. On the contrary, it requires the maintenance of stratification: the recognition that relational differentiation can be organised in different ways, and that meaning arises only where a particular organisation is in play.
This is where the notion of semiotic construal becomes decisive. Meaning is not identical with relation, but with relation as it is construed within a semiotic system. It is a mode of organisation, not a general feature of occurrence.
This also clarifies why meaning is always finite. If meaning arises through semiotic construal of relational differentiation, then it is necessarily selective. It does not exhaust the relational field from which it emerges. It does not coincide with all that is occurring. It is always a partial articulation of a broader field of potential.
This finitude is not a limitation of meaning, but a condition of its existence. Without selectivity, there is no construal; without construal, there is no meaning.
From this follows a crucial consequence: meaning is always situated within relational differentiation, but relational differentiation is not always meaning.
The distinction is not hierarchical in the sense of privileging one domain over another. It is stratificational. It marks a difference in mode of organisation within the same ontological field.
Meaning arises where relational differentiation becomes semiotically organised. Where it does not, relation remains operative but not semantic.
This allows us to preserve both the ontological primacy of relation and the analytical specificity of meaning. Relation is not divided into meaningful and non-meaningful domains; rather, meaning is a particular construal of relational differentiation under conditions of semiotic organisation.
The next step is to consider how this stratification interacts with temporality and cosmological description, where the temptation to treat structure and time as primitives re-emerges in more subtle forms.
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