Something can matter without meaning anything.
A nutrient matters to a bacterium. Light matters to a plant. A predator matters to its prey.
But none of this, by itself, requires meaning in the human sense.
Meaning enters the world when significance becomes organised within a system of signs.
This is a very different development.
A chemical gradient can guide an organism towards nourishment without being a symbol for nourishment. A bird's alarm call can affect the behaviour of other birds without necessarily functioning like a human sentence.
There is a continuum here, but it is important not to erase the distinction.
Biological systems are already responsive to significance.
Social organisms add something new: their activities can become coordinated through signals produced and interpreted within a shared way of life.
A signal can therefore acquire a significance that depends not simply on what it does physically, but on how it functions within a social system.
This is where the distinction between mattering and meaning becomes useful.
Mattering is rooted in the organisation of a living system.
Meaning is rooted in a system of distinctions that can be used to make significance available within a social world.
The difference is not that meaning suddenly becomes detached from biology.
It grows out of it.
Social life provides new possibilities for significance because organisms can respond not only to their physical environment but to one another.
A movement can become a signal.
A signal can become conventionalised.
A distinction can become shared.
And once a community has a repertoire of such distinctions, members can use them to coordinate action, attend to things that are not immediately present, and construct possibilities that no individual organism could establish alone.
This is where Halliday's account of language becomes especially useful.
Language is not simply a collection of labels attached to an already completed world. It is a meaning potential: a socially available resource for making distinctions and enacting relationships.
Meaning is therefore not merely something that happens inside individual minds.
It is realised through social activity.
A child learning a language is not simply learning names for things. The child is entering a system through which experience can be organised, relationships enacted and possibilities construed.
The world that already mattered biologically can now become a world that is meaningful socially.
This suggests a useful way of understanding the broad movement from the physical to the biological, the social and the semiotic.
At the physical level, differences occur.
At the biological level, differences can matter.
At the social level, differences can become significant for coordinated activity between organisms.
At the semiotic level, significance can be organised as meaning.
These are not sealed compartments, nor necessarily stages through which every organism must pass.
They are increasingly elaborate forms of organisation.
And meaning does not replace mattering.
A word for water still matters because water matters.
A warning still matters because something may be dangerous.
A story matters because the lives and relationships it construes matter to the people who participate in its culture.
Meaning extends the reach of significance.
It allows organisms to act upon possibilities that need not be immediately present.
A sign can point beyond itself.
A remembered event can be reconstructed.
A future can be imagined.
An absent person can be spoken of.
A possible world can be described.
With language, the world becomes extraordinarily more than a field of biological affordances.
It becomes a field of things that can be meant.
And this changes the nature of perspective.
A biological perspective is shaped by what matters to a particular organism.
A social perspective is shaped also by the perspectives of others.
A semiotic perspective can include perspectives upon perspectives: what you think I mean, what I think you expect, what we take this sign to mean.
The world can now be shared without becoming identical for everyone.
This may be one of the great achievements of language.
It does not abolish perspective.
It makes perspectives communicable.
We began this series with a universe in which nothing needed to matter to anything.
We have arrived at a world in which things can matter, be sensed, be valued, be experienced, be remembered—and eventually be meant.
But there is still a problem.
If every organism has its own way of being oriented within the world, how can there be one world shared by many perspectives?
How can the bee, the octopus, the tree and the human inhabit the same world without experiencing it in the same way?
Perhaps the answer lies not in choosing between one world and many.
Perhaps there can be many perspectives on one world.
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