There is another way of approaching the question we have been asking.
Paul Thibault, drawing on J. J. Gibson's notion of affordance, challenges the idea that meaning is something contained within a semiotic system.
An affordance is not simply a property of an object.
A chair affords sitting.
But it does so only in relation to something capable of sitting.
The possibility belongs neither entirely to the object nor entirely to the organism.
It belongs to the relation between them.
This is important.
It suggests that meaning need not begin inside a system of signs. It can begin much earlier, in the ways a world makes possibilities available to organisms participating in it.
This brings us back to something we encountered near the beginning of our journey:
mattering.
A difference matters when it enters into the conditions of further difference.
An affordance is one way in which this can happen.
Something in the environment makes a difference to what an organism can do. The organism's capacities, in turn, make some possibilities in that environment available.
Meaning therefore does not have to be imagined as something added to an otherwise meaningless world.
But neither should we identify meaning with affordance itself.
A difference can matter without yet being meaningful.
A stone can obstruct an animal's movement without the obstruction becoming a distinction within a system of meaning.
Something more has to happen.
Mattering has to become organisable.
A possibility has to become available as a distinction that can enter into further distinctions.
This is where our account begins to meet Halliday.
Gibson helps us see how an organism can be coupled to a world without requiring an internal representation standing between them.
Thibault extends this insight into languaging: meaning emerges through the ongoing activity of organisms and their material, social and cultural environments rather than being contained within an autonomous linguistic system.
Halliday gives us another part of the picture.
A semiotic system is a potential for meaning.
It organises possibilities for construing experience.
The two perspectives therefore need not compete.
Perhaps they describe different stages in the same movement.
And now something we said near the end of our series takes on a new significance.
The world pushes back.
If meaning were entirely immanent within a semiotic system, the system could in principle generate its own distinctions indefinitely.
But it cannot.
The world continually presents differences that exceed the distinctions currently available.
An organism encounters what it cannot accommodate.
A languaging system encounters what it cannot yet say.
A theory encounters an instance that does not quite fit.
The system changes.
A new distinction becomes possible.
The horizon moves.
This means that affordances are not merely opportunities offered by a pre-existing world.
They may be part of the ecological history through which a world becomes articulate.
The world does not first become meaningful and then offer affordances.
Nor does meaning simply arise from affordances.
Rather, through participation, differences become consequential; through organisation, consequences become distinctions; through semiotic articulation, distinctions become available for further meaning.
And perhaps this gives us a way of avoiding two opposite mistakes.
We need not imagine meaning as immanent in signs.
But neither need we imagine meaning as constructed by minds.
Between these lies something more interesting:
a world of affordances, organisms, systems and meanings, continually altering one another.
Perhaps the deepest lesson of Gibson, Thibault and Halliday is therefore not a theory of meaning at all.
It is a different picture of where meaning lives.
Not inside the organism.
Not inside the sign.
Not outside in the world.
But in the ongoing relations through which a world becomes capable of mattering, and through which what matters can become articulate.
The world pushes back.
And perhaps that is precisely how it teaches us what it can mean.
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