The previous post argued that social systems differ primarily in the degree and complexity of their coordination.
Swarms, herds, packs, and human societies all organise possibility through mutual constraint.
What varies is the structure of coupling through which possibilities become organised across a collective.
This perspective provides a continuous account of sociality.
Yet human societies appear to possess capacities that extend beyond the forms of coordination found elsewhere.
Among the most significant developments within some social systems is semiosis.
The question is how meaning should be understood within the framework developed throughout this series.
The traditional assumption
Meaning is often treated as the foundation of social life.
Communication creates coordination.
Language creates society.
Shared meanings generate collective organisation.
From this perspective, social systems are frequently understood as products of semiosis.
Yet the preceding posts suggest a different possibility.
Coordination exists long before meaning.
Possibilities may be organised collectively without representation, communication, or language.
Sociality therefore cannot depend upon semiosis.
The relation between them must be understood differently.
Sociality before meaning
The previous posts proposed that social systems emerge when value-guided actualisations contribute to the organisation of possibilities available to others.
This process already produces collective organisation.
Possibilities become coupled.
Constraints become shared.
Patterns of coordination emerge.
None of this requires meaning.
The social therefore precedes the semiotic.
Semiosis emerges within an already existing field of coordinated possibility.
A new form of organisation
What, then, does meaning contribute?
The answer proposed here is not that meaning creates possibility.
Possibility already exists.
Nor does meaning create coordination.
Coordination already exists.
Instead, meaning introduces a new way of organising possibility.
Through semiosis, possibilities can themselves become objects of organisation.
Potential actions, imagined futures, hypothetical situations, absent events, and alternative worlds may all participate in the organisation of behaviour.
The scope of possibility expands dramatically.
Beyond immediate actualisation
Value-guided systems organise possibilities primarily through ongoing relations with their environments.
Semiosis introduces a remarkable extension.
Possibilities no longer need to be immediately available in order to influence behaviour.
They may be anticipated.
Remembered.
Imagined.
Projected.
Discussed.
The organisation of possibility therefore becomes partially independent of immediate circumstances.
Meaning makes absent possibilities socially consequential.
Collective organisation through meaning
Semiosis also transforms collective organisation.
In non-semiotic systems, possibilities are coupled primarily through behaviour itself.
In semiotic systems, possibilities may be organised through meanings.
Participants can coordinate around possibilities that are not currently actualised.
They can organise collective action toward future events.
They can maintain institutions, traditions, plans, obligations, and expectations.
The collective therefore acquires new capacities for organising possibility across time and space.
Meaning as second-order organisation
This suggests a useful way of understanding semiosis.
Meaning is not merely another form of behaviour.
Nor is it simply a mechanism for transmitting information.
Rather, semiosis may be understood as a second-order organisation of possibility.
Value systems organise possibilities directly.
Semiotic systems organise the organisation of possibilities.
They allow possibilities to be represented, transformed, projected, combined, and collectively coordinated in ways unavailable to purely value-based systems.
Meaning therefore operates upon an already existing architecture of organised possibility.
Continuity and transformation
This perspective preserves continuity between social and semiotic organisation.
Semiosis does not appear as a miraculous rupture.
Nor does it require a fundamentally different ontology.
The same basic principle remains in place.
Possibilities are organised.
What changes is the manner in which they are organised.
Meaning introduces a new level of organisation built upon social coordination rather than replacing it.
The semiotic emerges from the social without reducing to it.
Repositioning human uniqueness
This perspective also allows human distinctiveness to be understood in a different way.
Human societies are not unique because they are social.
Many organisms are social.
Nor are they unique because they coordinate behaviour.
Many organisms coordinate behaviour.
What distinguishes human societies is the extent to which possibilities themselves become collectively organised through meaning.
The distinctive achievement of semiosis lies not in creating coordination but in transforming the range and complexity of possibilities that coordination can encompass.
Summary
Social systems organise possibility through value-guided coordination.
This organisation exists prior to semiosis.
Meaning therefore does not create sociality.
Rather, it emerges within an already social world.
The contribution of semiosis is to provide a new way of organising possibility.
Absent, hypothetical, remembered, anticipated, and imagined possibilities can now participate in collective organisation.
Meaning may therefore be understood as a second-order organisation of possibility built upon an existing architecture of social coordination.
This conclusion brings the series to its final step.
The next post will draw the argument together.
It will propose a general view of physical, biological, social, and semiotic organisation as successive transformations in the organisation of possibility itself.
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