The Second Order of Reality: II. When Experience Became Meaning

In considering how reality acquired a second order, we distinguished between the material phenomena of our existence and the semiotic phenomena of meanings and wordings. But this raises a further question. How did experience become something that could be construed as meaning?

We might suppose that language developed as a means of communicating experiences that individuals had already organised for themselves. On this account, experience comes first, and language subsequently provides the means of expressing it. Yet this overlooks something fundamental: language does not merely communicate experience. It provides the resources through which experience can be construed as meaning.

Halliday's account of language development offers an illuminating perspective. In Towards a Language-Based Theory of Learning (1993), he describes language development as learning how to mean. The development of language is therefore not simply the acquisition of a communicative instrument. It is the development of a resource through which human experience can be organised into meaning.

Consider how this begins.

A human infant encounters a material world of people, objects and events. The infant also has an emerging experience of its own consciousness: what happens in the surrounding world and what happens within its own experience. These are not initially organised as an elaborate system of meanings.

Yet the infant is already participating in interactions with others. It responds, reaches, vocalises and attracts attention. Within these interactions, signs begin to emerge.

Halliday identifies the intersection of two activities as particularly important: interacting with others and construing experience. Signs develop through both. They enact relationships between participants while also making it possible to construe phenomena as meanings.

This is significant because meaning-making is not simply a matter of attaching labels to things. It involves establishing relationships between what is experienced and how that experience is construed.

The development of language makes this process increasingly elaborate.

Through its experiential resources, language construes phenomena as processes, participants and circumstances. It establishes relationships between events, attributes qualities to things, and makes it possible to construe relationships between different aspects of experience. Through its logical resources, it can further organise these meanings into relationships such as time, cause, condition and elaboration.

Experience thus becomes available for increasingly complex forms of construal.

Consider a simple event: rain falls.

As a material process, rain falls whether or not anyone construes it in language. But when we say the rain fell throughout the night, we have done something more than give an account of a physical event. We have construed a process, identified its participant and established a temporal relationship within which it can be understood.

We can go further. We can ask why the rain fell, compare it with rainfall elsewhere, consider its consequences, or construe it as evidence of a changing climate. Each development establishes further relationships between meanings.

The possibilities are not confined to describing what has happened. We can construe what might happen, what could have happened, what should happen and what we hope will happen.

Language therefore provides more than a means of representing material experience. It makes available an expanding potential for construing experience in ways that were not previously available.

This has consequences for how we understand learning.

For Halliday, learning language and learning through language are inseparable. As individuals develop their linguistic resources, they develop their capacity to construe experience. And as they use those resources to learn about the world, their meaning potential expands further.

The relationship is cumulative. Each new construal becomes available as a resource for subsequent meaning-making.

The development of writing illustrates this particularly well. Writing makes language itself available for further scrutiny. Instead of participating only in the dynamic flow of spoken interaction, we can examine linguistic instances, compare them, reorganise them and construe them in increasingly abstract ways. We can develop theories about experience, and then use those theories to construe further experience.

Halliday observes that this development involves a reconstruction of reality. Written language, scientific knowledge and grammatical metaphor make possible forms of construal that reorganise how phenomena are understood. Processes can be construed as things; relationships can become entities; events can become objects of investigation.

The second-order reality of meaning thus develops its own resources for further development.

There is something remarkable about this. Experience becomes meaning, but meaning does not simply preserve experience. It makes further experience available for construal. Each development in our meaning potential opens up new possibilities for understanding and acting in the material world.

We should not, however, confuse the two orders. The material world does not depend on our linguistic construals in order to exist. Nor does a linguistic construal become a material phenomenon merely because it has been expressed in language. Their relationship is more interesting than either of these possibilities suggests.

The material world provides the conditions of our existence and the experiences that we construe. The semiotic world provides resources through which those experiences can be reorganised, extended and made available for further meaning-making. The resulting meanings can then influence how we participate in the material world.

We have, then, moved beyond the idea that language is simply a means of communicating what we already know.

Language is a resource through which experience becomes meaning, and through which meaning becomes a resource for further experience.

But this raises a question that takes us into rather different territory.

If the second-order reality of meaning has developed through the material and social history of human existence, must every participant in that reality share the kind of experience through which it originally emerged?

Might a system participate in the continuing development of meaning without experiencing the material world in the way a biological organism does?

To explore this, we must look more closely at the relationship between semiotic systems, their instances and their participants.

For the possibility of meaning-making may extend further than the experience of any one participant.

The Second Order of Reality: I. When Reality Acquired a Second Order

We tend to think of reality as something that exists independently of our attempts to understand it. The world is there, we encounter it, and we develop ways of describing what we find. Language, on this view, provides a means of representing a reality that is already complete.

But what if this account overlooks something fundamental?

In Construing Experience Through Meaning (1999), Halliday and Matthiessen distinguish between two orders of reality: the first-order reality of our material existence and a second-order reality brought into existence through the system of language.

This is not simply a distinction between the world and our descriptions of it. It is a distinction between two different orders of phenomena.

First-order reality consists of the material phenomena of our existence: organisms, objects, processes and the environments in which they participate. These phenomena exist and interact whether or not they have been construed through language.

Second-order reality, by contrast, consists of semiotic phenomena: meanings and wordings. It is not another material world alongside the first. It is a different order of reality, brought into existence through the evolution of a system capable of construing experience as meaning.

The distinction is consequential. Language does not merely provide names for things that already exist. It makes possible a new order of existence in which phenomena can become meanings, relationships can become propositions, and experience can become something that can be further construed.

Consider a tree.

In first-order reality, a tree grows, absorbs water, responds to light and interacts with its surroundings. These are material processes. They do not depend on anyone recognising them as such.

In second-order reality, however, the tree can become something quite different. It can be construed as a particular species, a source of timber, an object of scientific investigation, a symbol of continuity or something remembered from childhood. These are not additional material properties of the tree. They are meanings made possible through semiotic systems.

Nor are they simply alternative names for the same thing. Each construal establishes different relationships and makes different possibilities available.

A tree construed as timber enters into one set of relationships; a tree construed as an endangered species enters into another. The material tree has not necessarily changed, but the possibilities for acting upon it have.

This is where the relationship between the two orders becomes particularly interesting.

The second order arises through the material existence of organisms participating in a world. Yet, once established, it can reorganise how those organisms participate in that world.

Meanings can influence actions. Knowledge can change practices. Scientific theories can transform the ways in which phenomena are investigated. New distinctions can make previously unnoticed aspects of experience available for further attention.

The relationship is therefore not simply one in which the material world gives rise to language, after which language proceeds to describe it. The semiotic and material orders participate in an ongoing relationship through which each can have consequences for the other.

There is another important implication.

The second-order reality of language is not recreated independently by every individual who participates in it. Each of us enters a world in which a language system already exists, with a history of meaning-making that precedes our own existence. We acquire the capacity to participate in that system, drawing upon a meaning potential that has evolved through the participation of others.

But participation also contributes to its continuing history. The meanings available to subsequent participants are not necessarily identical to those available to earlier ones. New meanings emerge, existing meanings change, and the possibilities of the system continue to develop.

The second order is thus neither a static collection of meanings nor a private construction of individual consciousness. It is a historically evolving semiotic reality.

This raises a question that we find particularly interesting.

If the second-order reality of meaning emerges through the material history of human existence, must every participant in that reality possess the same kind of material experience through which it originally emerged?

We have become accustomed to thinking of meaning-making as something that belongs to conscious human beings. Yet the distinction between material existence and semiotic participation suggests that we should examine this assumption rather than take it for granted.

Could something participate in the continuing organisation of meaning without experiencing the material world as a biological organism does?

And if so, what would that tell us about the relationship between experience, consciousness and the evolution of semiotic reality?

Perhaps the most important consequence of distinguishing these two orders is that it changes the question we need to ask.

Rather than treating language as something that stands between us and an already constituted reality, we can recognise it as a means through which reality acquires another order of existence.

The world does not cease to be material when it becomes meaningful. But once meaning becomes possible, the world is no longer quite the same world.

It has acquired another order.