II. The Stone Seat

The next morning, the traveller came upon a great stone beside the path.

It was flat on top and broad enough for a person to rest upon.

He sat down.

After some time, a child came along.

Without hesitation, she climbed onto the stone, jumped from it, climbed back again, and jumped once more.

“What are you doing?” asked the traveller.

“Playing,” she said.

“But it is a seat.”

The child looked surprised.

“No,” she said. “It is a rock.”

She jumped down and ran away.

The traveller remained seated.

A little later, an old man came carrying a bundle of wood.

He stopped beside the stone, placed the bundle upon it, and began to rearrange the branches.

“Useful table,” he said.

The traveller looked up.

“It is a seat.”

The old man laughed.

“Not from this side of it.”

When he had finished, he lifted the bundle and continued along the path.

The traveller was beginning to feel that the country had become unreasonable.

By midday, a fox appeared from the grass.

It climbed onto the stone, curled itself against the warmth gathered there, and fell asleep.

The traveller watched in silence.

Later still, a small bird landed upon the stone.

It pecked at an insect crawling across the surface.

For the bird, the stone had become a hunting ground.

By evening, rain began to fall.

The traveller crouched beside the stone, where its great bulk broke the wind.

The stone, he thought, was now a shelter.

The following morning, he found a young man standing beside it with a hammer and chisel.

“What are you doing?” asked the traveller.

“Breaking it.”

“But it is a seat.”

The young man looked at him strangely.

“Is it?”

The traveller stood.

“It is broad and flat. It supports a person.”

“Yes.”

“Then it is a seat.”

The young man tapped the stone with his hammer.

“It is also stone.”

“That tells me what it is made of.”

“And seat tells me what you do when you meet it.”

The traveller was silent.

The young man placed the chisel against the rock.

“I need smaller stones for the wall.”

He struck the chisel.

A sharp sound rang through the valley.

The traveller felt something almost like outrage.

“You are destroying the seat.”

The young man smiled.

“I thought you said it was a stone.”

And with another blow, he split away a piece.

The traveller walked on.

For several days he thought about the stone.

He remembered the child climbing it.

The old man using it as a table.

The fox sleeping in its warmth.

The bird hunting insects.

The young man breaking it apart.

He himself had sat upon it.

None of them had asked what the stone meant.

They had simply encountered it.

Yet none had encountered quite the same thing.

At last, the traveller returned to the place where he had first entered the country.

The wooden gate still stood between its posts.

He looked at it for a long time.

A fox passed beneath it.

A bird flew over it.

The traveller opened it and stepped through.

Then he stopped.

What was it?

A gate?

A barrier?

A frame?

A source of firewood?

A piece of timber standing upright in the ground?

He remembered the old woman.

What can happen between this thing and something else?

For the first time, the question seemed less like an answer than a door.

The gate had not changed.

It was still wood.

It still had hinges.

It still stood between two posts.

But what could happen there depended partly upon what approached it.

The fox did not need to open it.

The bird did not need to pass through it.

The traveller could open it, close it, lean against it, climb over it, or tear it down.

But he could not walk through it while it remained shut.

Something belonged to the gate.

Something belonged to him.

And somewhere between the two, possibilities appeared.

The traveller placed his hand upon the wood.

It did not tell him what it was.

It did not contain a list of uses.

It did not wait for him to discover its true purpose.

It stood there with its weight, its shape and its grain.

And he stood before it with hands, legs, memories and habits.

Between them was the possibility of opening.

Or not opening.

For a long time, the traveller remained there.

Then he smiled.

The country, he realised, was not made of things with instructions hidden inside them.

Nor was it made of shapeless stuff waiting for creatures to invent its possibilities.

It was something more troublesome.

Things met things.

And in the meeting, some ways became possible.

Others did not.

He opened the gate.

The gate said nothing.

But this time, neither did he expect it to.

I. The Silent Country

There was once a traveller who came to the edge of a country no map had named.

Before him stood a wooden gate.

Beyond it ran a path between low hills.

The traveller looked at the gate and smiled.

“Come in,” it seemed to say.

So he opened it and passed through.

The path continued before him.

“Follow me,” it seemed to say.

So he followed.

For many days the traveller moved through the country, and everywhere he found instructions.

A fallen tree seemed to tell him where to cross a stream.

A broad stone seemed to invite him to rest.

A narrow gap between two rocks seemed to offer a way through the hills.

When rain came, an overhanging ledge seemed to offer shelter.

The traveller began to think the country unusually hospitable.

Then, one morning, he came upon a great cliff.

He stopped at its edge.

Below him was nothing but distance.

“Do not come this way,” the cliff seemed to say.

The traveller stepped back.

By evening he had become convinced that the country was full of voices.

It told him where to go.

It showed him where to rest.

It warned him where not to step.

He began to wonder who had made it.

On the following day he met a fox.

The fox was standing beside a fallen tree.

“A fine bridge,” said the traveller.

The fox looked at him.

“A bridge?”

“Yes,” said the traveller. “It leads across the stream.”

The fox glanced at the water and then disappeared into the undergrowth.

The traveller watched it go.

“How strange,” he thought. “It does not understand the country's instructions.”

Later he came upon a bird resting on the branch of a tree.

“There,” said the traveller, “the branch has invited you to perch.”

The bird flew away.

The traveller stood beneath the tree.

The branch remained.

It did not repeat the invitation.

That evening he met an old woman gathering roots.

“The country is very generous here,” said the traveller. “It is always telling me what I may do.”

The woman looked around.

At the trees.

The stones.

The stream.

The distant cliff.

“Is it?” she said.

“Of course,” said the traveller. “That gate invited me to enter. The path invited me to follow. The cliff warned me away.”

The old woman said nothing.

The traveller waited.

At last she pointed to the path.

“Can you follow it?”

“Yes.”

She pointed to the stream.

“Can you cross it?”

“In places.”

She pointed to a narrow hole beneath a rock.

“Can you enter there?”

“No.”

The old woman nodded.

“Then perhaps the country has not been speaking.”

The traveller frowned.

“But these things make things possible.”

“Yes.”

“And some things impossible.”

“Yes.”

“Then what is the difference?”

The old woman picked up a stone and placed it in his hand.

“This,” she said, “will not carry you across the river.”

She pointed to the fallen tree.

“That may.”

She looked towards the bird now circling above them.

“For the bird, the branch carries something else.”

“And for the fox?”

“The stream has no bridge.”

The traveller looked again at the country.

Nothing had changed.

The gate stood where it had stood.

The path ran between the hills.

The branch reached over the water.

The cliff fell away into the distance.

Yet the voices had gone.

The gate was no longer saying enter.

The path was no longer saying follow.

The cliff was no longer saying beware.

There was only wood.

Earth.

Stone.

Water.

And the different things that different beings could do among them.

The traveller felt suddenly less certain that he understood the country.

“Then nothing here is meant for me?”

The old woman smiled.

“I did not say that.”

She placed the basket of roots upon her shoulder.

“You asked the wrong question.”

And she walked away.

The traveller remained beside the path until nightfall.

For the first time, he listened carefully.

The country said nothing.

But the gate could be opened.

The path could be followed.

The branch could bear weight.

The cliff could be fallen from.

And as the darkness gathered, the traveller began to understand why this silence was more difficult than speech.

For if the country gave no instructions, then he would have to discover what was possible.

And if what was possible depended partly upon what he was—

then another creature might inhabit the same country differently.

The traveller looked down the path.

It did not ask him to follow.

Nevertheless, he went.

And the country remained silent.

When Does a Difference Make a Difference?: X. The World of Differences

We began with a simple thought.

Nothing happens without difference.

But by the end of our journey, the thought no longer seems simple.

The world is full of differences.

Yet differences do not all do the same thing.

Some alter physical processes.

Some constrain what can happen.

Some matter to living systems.

Some become perceptually available.

Some indicate.

Some become signs.

Some acquire meaning.

Some become concepts through which still other differences become consequential.

There is therefore no single way in which a difference makes a difference.

There are worlds within worlds.

A temperature difference can alter the state of water.

For a plant, a temperature difference can affect growth.

For an animal, it can become perceptually significant.

For a scientist, it can become a measurement.

For a community, it can become evidence of climate change.

The physical difference has not disappeared at any point.

But neither has it remained the same kind of difference.

Its consequences have multiplied.

This suggests that reality is not divided neatly into separate domains.

The physical, the biological, the perceptual, the social and the conceptual are not different universes.

They are different organisations of relations.

A physical difference can enter into a living process.

A living process can generate sensitivities.

Sensitivities can support indications.

Indications can become signs.

Signs can participate in meaning.

Meanings can become concepts.

Concepts can become practices.

Practices can alter the world in which new differences arise.

The direction is not one-way.

It is a circulation.

And this means that later forms do not simply replace earlier ones.

Meaning does not abolish mattering.

Concepts do not abolish perception.

Signs do not abolish indication.

Biology does not abolish physics.

The same difference can participate in several orders at once.

A sound is a physical event.

It may become a signal.

It may become a word.

It may become an argument.

It may become a memory.

The sound has not ceased to be physical.

But its possibilities have changed.

Perhaps this is the central lesson.

A difference does not acquire a new significance by leaving one world behind and entering another.

It acquires new possibilities by entering new relations.

And relations have histories.

The footprint has a history.

The animal has a history.

The practice of tracking has a history.

The concept of evidence has a history.

Each history changes what the difference can do.

This is why possibilities have histories too.

What can happen now depends partly upon what has already happened.

A distinction once introduced can become a category.

A category can become an institution.

An institution can become part of the environment.

The environment can then make new differences available.

The world we encounter is therefore partly inherited.

Not only its rocks and rivers.

Not only its organisms.

But its paths, categories, practices, signs and concepts.

We inherit landscapes of possibility.

And we alter them.

This is where the question of mattering becomes especially interesting.

We have learned that not every consequence is mattering.

Something matters when a difference becomes significant within the continuation or organisation of a living system.

But human worlds add another layer.

Through signs and concepts, we can make differences matter to one another.

We can decide that a distinction is important.

We can organise institutions around it.

We can teach it.

Record it.

Measure it.

Argue about it.

We can even discover that the distinctions through which we have organised our world are no longer adequate to the differences we encounter.

Then the conceptual landscape itself can change.

A new distinction can open possibilities that were previously difficult to see.

An old distinction can become a constraint.

A neglected difference can become consequential.

The world can appear different without having become a different physical world.

This is perhaps why we should be suspicious of both extremes.

The first says that meaning is already everywhere, waiting to be discovered in the physical world.

The second says that meaning is something minds simply impose upon an otherwise indifferent reality.

Our journey suggests something stranger.

The world gives us differences.

Organisms enter into relations with them.

Life makes some differences matter.

Sensitivity makes some differences available for differential response.

Indication makes some differences informative.

Signs make some differences stand for others.

Meaning makes those differences available for shared construal.

Concepts organise the resulting field of distinctions.

And through action, those distinctions can become part of the world itself.

Nothing has been added from outside.

Nothing was secretly present from the beginning.

Something has become possible.

That may be the deepest continuity running through everything we have explored.

The world does not begin with meanings.

It begins with differences.

But differences can enter into relations.

Relations can become organised.

Organisation can become sensitive.

Sensitivity can become signification.

Signification can become meaning.

Meaning can become conceptual organisation.

And conceptual organisation can alter the conditions under which future differences occur.

The process has no obvious starting point.

Nor does it have a final form.

Every achieved organisation becomes part of the conditions for something else.

Every distinction opens some possibilities and closes others.

Every new possibility can generate new differences.

Every new difference can begin another history.

Perhaps, then, the world is not best imagined as a collection of things with properties.

Nor as a blank field upon which significance is later projected.

Perhaps it is better understood as a history of differences becoming consequential.

Some differences vanish without a trace.

Some redirect a river.

Some sustain a life.

Some guide an organism.

Some leave a footprint.

Some become signs.

Some become words.

Some become concepts.

And some concepts eventually change what a world is capable of being.

We began by asking:

When does a difference make a difference?

Perhaps we can now answer.

A difference makes a difference whenever it enters into a relation that changes what can happen next.

But that answer contains a world of possibilities.

Because what can happen next depends upon what kind of relation has been formed.

And relations themselves can become transformed.

So perhaps the better question is not simply:

When does a difference make a difference?

It is:

What can a difference become?

That question has no final answer.

Fortunately.

For every answer is another difference.

And every difference may be the beginning of something new.

When Does a Difference Make a Difference?: IX. How Concepts Change What Matters

Meaning allows differences to become available for shared construal.

But concepts do something more.

They organise distinctions.

And when distinctions become organised, some differences begin to matter in new ways.

Consider a forest.

Physically, it contains trees, soil, water, organisms, light and countless differences among them.

But there is no single way of construing what those differences amount to.

The forest can become timber.

Habitat.

Wilderness.

Property.

Carbon store.

Sacred ground.

Recreation.

Each construal makes some differences more consequential than others.

If the forest is timber, the size and quality of trees may matter.

If it is habitat, the presence of particular species may matter.

If it is property, boundaries and ownership may matter.

If it is wilderness, human disturbance may matter.

The physical forest has not changed simply because we have changed the concept through which we construe it.

But the landscape of human action has.

This is the peculiar power of concepts.

They do not merely add information to experience.

They organise what counts as relevant.

A distinction that was previously invisible can become decisive.

A difference that previously passed unnoticed can become evidence.

A feature that once seemed incidental can become a reason for action.

The concept changes the field in which differences can make a difference.

This is why conceptual change can be consequential without being magical.

Suppose we begin to think of a stretch of river as an ecosystem rather than merely as water.

Nothing has been added to the river.

But new relations become visible.

Fish populations matter.

Nutrient cycles matter.

Upstream activity matters.

Seasonal variation matters.

The river can now be understood as part of a larger organisation.

The concept has not created these relations.

It has made them available within a particular way of construing the world.

And once they become available, action can change.

This is where concepts begin to acquire histories of their own.

A concept can be built into a practice.

A practice can be built into an institution.

An institution can alter the environment.

The altered environment can then make different things matter.

The process is circular.

Concepts change what we attend to.

What we attend to changes what we do.

What we do changes the conditions under which future differences occur.

Those differences then become available for further conceptualisation.

The landscape of mattering can therefore be transformed without the underlying world becoming a different world in every respect.

A species can become endangered because its habitat has changed.

But the concept endangered species can also change what counts as a relevant difference.

A population that might once have been merely declining can now become an object of measurement, concern, regulation and protection.

The concept does not cause the animal's biology.

It changes the social consequences of knowing about it.

This distinction matters.

Concepts do not manufacture physical significance out of nothing.

They reorganise the relations through which differences become consequential for human practices.

A medical category can change how symptoms are interpreted.

A legal category can change what an action permits or prohibits.

An economic category can change what counts as a resource.

A scientific category can change what counts as an observation.

The world does not become whatever the concept says it is.

But the concept can change which differences we build our actions around.

This is why conceptual systems can become powerful.

They provide pathways through which some differences travel further than others.

A difference can become a measurement.

A measurement can become a statistic.

A statistic can become a policy.

A policy can become an institution.

An institution can change the lives of people who never encountered the original measurement.

The difference has travelled.

And by the time it reaches them, it may no longer resemble the difference from which the process began.

This is perhaps one of the strangest properties of meaning.

A distinction can acquire consequences far beyond the circumstances in which it was first made.

And because concepts can be inherited, these consequences can persist.

We may continue to organise the world according to distinctions whose origins we have forgotten.

The conceptual landscape can therefore become part of the environment.

It can constrain.

It can afford.

It can make some possibilities visible and others difficult to see.

It can determine what counts as a problem before anyone has begun looking for a solution.

But this does not make concepts omnipotent.

They remain constrained by the world.

A concept cannot make a forest grow faster.

It cannot make a species exist.

It cannot make a river flow uphill.

What it can do is alter the human pathways through which physical differences become consequential.

And this brings us back to the central question.

When does a difference make a difference?

Sometimes because it changes a physical process.

Sometimes because it constrains a possibility.

Sometimes because it matters to a living system.

Sometimes because an organism becomes sensitive to it.

Sometimes because it indicates something else.

Sometimes because it stands for something.

And sometimes because a concept has taught a community that the difference matters.

The progression is not a ladder from primitive to advanced.

These forms coexist.

A physical difference can remain a physical difference while simultaneously becoming a matter of life, a perceptual distinction, an indication, a sign and a conceptual category.

The same difference can participate in several worlds at once.

Perhaps this is why the world can seem so full of meaning.

It is not that everything inherently means something.

It is that layers of organisation have accumulated around differences.

Physical systems.

Living systems.

Perceptual systems.

Semiotic systems.

Conceptual systems.

Each can make differences consequential in its own way.

And each can alter the conditions under which further differences become consequential.

We began with the simple observation that nothing happens without difference.

We can now see that the really interesting question was never simply whether differences exist.

It was how differences acquire trajectories.

Some disappear.

Some constrain.

Some matter.

Some indicate.

Some signify.

Some become concepts.

And some concepts eventually change what a whole community takes to matter.

That leaves one final question.

If the world is continually generating differences, and organised beings are continually turning some of them into consequences, meanings and concepts, then perhaps the deepest question is not:

What differences exist?

but:

What happens to differences once they begin to matter?

When Does a Difference Make a Difference?: VIII. Why Meaning Makes a Difference

A difference can stand for another.

That is already remarkable.

But why does it matter?

Why does meaning make a difference?

The answer is not simply that meaning allows us to communicate.

Communication is important.

But something more fundamental is happening.

Meaning changes what a difference can do.

A physical difference can affect a process.

A constraint can alter what is possible.

A living system can come to matter.

A difference can indicate something absent.

A sign can stand for something else.

But once a difference has meaning, it can enter a world of shared possibilities.

Consider a word such as danger.

The sound itself is only a physical event.

Within a language, however, it can make a situation available for a particular kind of construal.

Something can now be dangerous.

Someone can warn us about danger.

We can remember it.

Anticipate it.

Deny it.

Exaggerate it.

Argue about it.

The word has not merely indicated a condition.

It has made that condition available within a system of distinctions and relations.

And because the system is shared, the possibility can travel.

One person can make something available to another.

Something experienced here can become relevant there.

Something that happened yesterday can guide action tomorrow.

Something that has never happened can nevertheless become an object of thought.

Meaning therefore stretches the temporal and spatial reach of possibility.

This is one reason language is so powerful.

A physical constraint operates where it operates.

A sign can travel beyond the event that produced it.

A meaningful sign can travel even further.

It can be detached from the immediate situation and brought into new relations.

A word can be written down.

Copied.

Stored.

Quoted.

Translated.

Recombined.

It can become part of another sentence, another argument, another story.

The original event may disappear.

The meaning can remain available.

Meaning therefore gives differences a kind of historical mobility.

But it also gives them combinatorial power.

A single sign can participate in many relations.

Words can be combined into clauses.

Clauses into arguments.

Arguments into theories.

A small number of linguistic resources can therefore generate an enormous space of possible construals.

The sign has become productive.

It no longer merely points towards something.

It participates in the construction of possibilities that did not previously exist in that form.

This is why meaning cannot be reduced to information.

Information can tell us that something is the case.

Meaning allows us to ask what follows from it.

It allows us to relate it to other things.

To evaluate it.

To question it.

To imagine alternatives.

To formulate possibilities that are not yet actual.

Meaning therefore changes the temporal structure of action.

We can act on what is absent.

We can prepare for what has not happened.

We can organise ourselves around what might happen.

We can preserve what happened long ago.

A meaningful distinction can become part of the conditions for future action.

And here we encounter another feedback loop.

The world makes differences possible.

Living systems become sensitive to some of them.

Signs allow some differences to stand for others.

Meaning allows signs to participate in shared systems of construal.

Those systems organise practices.

Practices alter the world.

The altered world generates new differences.

And those differences become available for further meaning.

Meaning therefore does not sit on top of the world like a commentary.

It becomes part of the world's history.

This is why concepts can eventually change landscapes.

A meaningful distinction can become a rule.

A rule can become an institution.

An institution can alter behaviour.

Behaviour can alter material arrangements.

The material arrangements then become part of the environment in which new meanings arise.

Meaning has entered causality indirectly, through the practices it makes possible.

But we should be careful here.

Meaning does not make everything possible.

The physical world remains stubborn.

Words cannot remove gravity.

A description cannot dissolve a wall.

A concept cannot make every action feasible.

Meaning operates within constraints.

Indeed, perhaps meaning is powerful precisely because it operates through constraints.

A map does not create the terrain.

It makes some possibilities of movement available within the terrain.

A timetable does not create trains.

It organises possibilities for coordinating with them.

A law does not abolish physical reality.

It changes what people can legitimately do within a social order.

Meaning therefore does not replace affordance.

It creates new kinds of affordance.

A written instruction affords a different kind of action from a physical doorway.

A promise affords a different kind of expectation from a weather forecast.

A concept affords a different kind of inquiry from a perceptual distinction.

The meaningful world is therefore not a second world added to the physical one.

It is a new organisation of possibilities within the world.

And perhaps this is why meaning makes such a difference.

It allows differences to become available not merely to individual organisms, but to communities, histories and systems of practice.

It allows possibilities to be inherited without the original experience being inherited.

A child can learn a word for something that happened before the child was born.

A scientist can reason about an entity no human has directly encountered.

A society can organise itself around possibilities that exist only as legal, moral or political constructions.

Meaning allows a world to become cumulatively organised.

Each generation inherits not only a physical environment, but a landscape of distinctions.

Some are useful.

Some are misleading.

Some open possibilities.

Some close them.

Some have become so familiar that they are almost invisible.

The important point is that they have histories.

And once meanings have histories, they can evolve.

They can be extended.

Repurposed.

Combined.

Rejected.

Transformed.

The difference that means something today may mean something different tomorrow.

Meaning therefore does not end our story.

It accelerates it.

It gives becoming another medium.

The world contains differences.

Living systems become sensitive to them.

Signs make some differences stand for others.

Meaning makes those signs available for shared construal.

And shared construal can change what becomes possible next.

Which brings us to a curious reversal.

We began by asking how a difference can make a difference.

Now we can ask something more specific.

How can a way of construing difference change what matters?

That is where concepts enter the story.

When Does a Difference Make a Difference?: VII. The Difference That Stands For Another

A footprint can indicate an animal.

But a footprint does not necessarily stand for an animal.

The distinction may seem small.

It is not.

A sign is not simply a particularly informative difference.

Something changes when a difference can stand for another.

Consider a red light.

Physically, it is a particular arrangement of electromagnetic radiation.

It can also affect the eye.

But in a traffic system, it does something more.

It stands for stop.

The relation is not simply that red is caused by stopping.

Nor does red physically contain the instruction to stop.

The relation has been organised.

A community has established a practice in which one difference can function in relation to another possibility of action.

The red light becomes a sign.

This is why the distinction between indication and sign matters.

Smoke can indicate fire because fire can cause smoke.

But smoke does not mean fire merely because the relation exists.

A traffic light does not indicate stopping in the same way.

It signifies it.

The difference has entered a system.

And once it has done so, it acquires possibilities that it did not possess as a merely physical difference.

Red can be displayed without there being any fire.

A word can refer to something that is absent.

A flag can stand for a country.

A gesture can stand for an instruction.

A diagram can stand for a process.

The sign is no longer tied to the physical presence of what it signifies.

This is a remarkable new freedom.

Indication is constrained by the relation that makes it informative.

A footprint can indicate an animal because the animal left the footprint.

But a sign can be detached from such a causal relation.

The sign can be repeated.

Moved.

Copied.

Modified.

Stored.

Combined with other signs.

It can travel.

A word spoken yesterday can mean something today.

A symbol can survive the disappearance of the person who first used it.

A diagram can describe something that has never existed.

The semiotic relation therefore opens a new kind of possibility.

A difference can now participate in the organisation of something absent, distant, future or imaginary.

But this does not mean that signs float free of the world.

They require material differences.

Ink on paper.

Sound in air.

Light on a screen.

A gesture made by a body.

The sign depends upon a physical event.

What changes is not the material difference itself.

It is the relation in which that difference participates.

The same sound can be noise in one context and a word in another.

The same colour can be pigment in one context and a signal in another.

The same movement can be accidental in one context and a gesture in another.

The physical difference remains.

Its semiotic function changes.

This is why meaning cannot simply be located in the sign itself.

The sign becomes meaningful within an organised system of relations.

And those relations are historical.

A sign works because there is a practice in which it can work.

A traffic light is meaningful because there is a system of traffic regulation.

A word is meaningful because there is a language.

A mathematical symbol is meaningful because there is a mathematical practice.

The sign therefore introduces something new into our story.

Differences can now be socially organised as possibilities for construal.

The world was already full of differences.

Living systems had become sensitive to some of them.

Some differences could indicate others.

Now differences can be organised so that one can stand for another.

And once this happens, the world acquires a new dimension.

A thing can be present without being physically present.

An event can be represented without occurring.

A possibility can be discussed before it is actual.

An absence can become available.

This is not yet the whole story of meaning.

For signs can be used without necessarily exhausting what they make possible.

A word can acquire different meanings in different contexts.

A gesture can be ambiguous.

A symbol can be reinterpreted.

Signs can enter into relations with other signs and thereby alter what each can do.

The semiotic world is therefore not merely a warehouse of representations.

It is a dynamic field of possibilities.

And language will make that field extraordinarily productive.

For when signs can be combined systematically, something remarkable becomes possible.

We can no longer merely stand for things.

We can construe relations among them.

We can distinguish.

Classify.

Compare.

Question.

Negate.

Imagine.

The sign has opened a door.

Language will turn it into a landscape.

But before we follow it there, we should pause over what has happened.

A difference first became consequential.

Then it became part of a constraint.

For living systems, some differences became matters of continuation.

Some systems became sensitive to differences.

Some differences began to indicate.

And now some differences can stand for others.

At each stage, nothing magical has been added to the world.

A new relation has become possible.

And perhaps that is the deepest continuity in the whole story.

Difference does not become meaning by becoming more complicated.

It becomes meaning when it enters into a new kind of relation.

The next question is what that new kind of relation makes possible.

Why does meaning make a difference?

When Does a Difference Make a Difference?: VI. When Difference Indicates

A system can be sensitive to a difference.

But sometimes the difference does more than affect it.

It tells us something.

Or, more carefully, it can indicate something.

A dark cloud can indicate rain.

A footprint can indicate an animal's passage.

A chemical gradient can indicate the direction of a concentration difference.

A fever can indicate a change in the body's condition.

In each case, one difference is related to another.

The important word is related.

The cloud does not mean rain.

The footprint does not mean animal.

The fever does not mean infection.

They can indicate these things because there is some relation between what is present and what is not immediately present.

This is already more than simple sensitivity.

A system responds to a difference.

But an indication allows a difference to function as information about another difference or state of affairs.

Something present makes something else available to inference, prediction or action.

The footprint is particularly instructive.

The footprint is here.

The animal may not be.

Yet the footprint can make the animal's presence relevant.

It is a trace left by an earlier event, and its relation to that event allows what is absent to become accessible.

Nothing needs to have intended this.

The animal did not necessarily leave the footprint in order to tell anyone anything.

The footprint can indicate without communicating.

This is a crucial distinction.

Information does not require intention.

Nor does indication require meaning.

A thermometer can indicate temperature without knowing anything about temperature.

A tree ring can indicate something about past conditions without anyone having designed it to do so.

A footprint can indicate an animal without being a message from the animal.

Indication can therefore exist before signs.

And perhaps this gives us a more precise way to think about the transition from sensitivity.

A sensitive system can respond differently to different conditions.

An indicative relation goes further.

The difference encountered is correlated with something else in a way that can guide what happens next.

The chemical gradient does not merely affect the bacterium.

It can guide movement towards a concentration of nutrients.

The smoke does not merely alter visibility.

It can provide information about fire.

The difference has become informative.

But informative is not yet meaningful.

This distinction matters because it is tempting to treat information as the beginning of semantics.

If the footprint carries information about the animal, we might say that it "represents" the animal.

But that word can conceal the very transition we are trying to understand.

The footprint does not have to represent anything.

It can simply be a physical consequence of the animal's presence.

The relation between them may be entirely causal.

What matters is that the relation can be exploited.

A system capable of responding to the footprint can behave differently because the footprint makes another state of affairs available.

The indication therefore belongs to a relation between differences.

One difference is present.

Another is absent or not directly accessible.

The relation between them allows the first to provide access to the second.

This gives indication a peculiar temporal structure.

Sometimes the indication points backwards.

A footprint indicates something that happened.

Sometimes it points forwards.

A darkening sky can indicate what is likely to happen.

Sometimes it points sideways.

A smell can indicate something occurring nearby.

In every case, the present difference opens a route to something beyond itself.

But the route does not have to be symbolic.

A causal relation can be enough.

This is why we should resist the temptation to call every informative difference a sign.

The world is full of information.

But the world is not thereby full of meanings.

A difference can carry information without standing for anything.

A trace can guide behaviour without becoming a symbol.

A correlation can be exploited without being interpreted.

We are therefore approaching another threshold.

At some point in evolution, culture or practice, differences cease merely to indicate.

They begin to be used as signs.

And when that happens, the relation changes.

The sign is no longer simply a trace of what happened.

It can be produced, selected, recognised and shared as something that stands for something else.

The difference is no longer merely informative.

It has entered a semiotic system.

So the question becomes sharper still.

When does a difference that indicates become a difference that stands for another?

When Does a Difference Make a Difference?: V. Being Sensitive to Difference

A difference can matter without being noticed.

Water can matter to a plant without the plant representing water.

Light can matter to an organism without the organism having a concept of light.

But living systems can do something more.

They can become sensitive to differences.

Sensitivity is not simply being affected.

Everything is affected by something.

A stone is warmed by the sun.

A leaf is moved by the wind.

A molecule responds to a change in its surroundings.

But sensitivity implies a particular kind of organisation.

A system responds differently because the difference is different.

The distinction is subtle.

A system can be changed by its environment without its subsequent activity depending systematically upon the character of the change.

Sensitivity begins when differences in the environment can produce differential responses.

A plant grows differently in different conditions of light.

A bacterium moves differently according to a chemical gradient.

An animal changes its behaviour according to changes in its surroundings.

The organism is not merely undergoing change.

Its organisation allows differences to become differences in what it does.

This gives sensitivity a history.

It does not appear from nowhere.

The organism already possesses capacities and internal organisation that make certain environmental differences consequential.

Sensitivity develops within those relations.

And this means that sensitivity is selective.

An organism cannot be equally sensitive to everything.

It is sensitive to some differences and relatively insensitive to others.

The world may contain an enormous number of physical differences.

Only some enter into the organism's organisation as differences to which it can respond.

This is another way of saying that an organism inhabits a particular world.

Not the whole physical world in its entirety, but a world structured by the differences that its organisation can make consequential.

A bird can detect differences in movement that matter for flight.

A plant can respond to differences in light.

A bacterium can respond to differences in chemical concentration.

Their worlds overlap.

But they are not identical.

The difference is not necessarily in what physically exists.

It is in what can enter into their organisation.

This is where perception begins to come into view.

But we should resist moving too quickly.

Sensitivity is not yet perception in the richer sense.

A system may be sensitive to a difference without constructing an internal representation of what that difference is.

The important point is more elementary.

The organism's activity is differentially organised by differences in its environment.

That is already a significant development in our story.

We began with differences that simply occur.

Then we saw that some differences alter what can happen.

Some become constraints.

With life, some differences can matter to the continuation of an organised system.

Now we have a system whose own organisation allows differences to produce different responses.

The relation has become reciprocal in a new sense.

The environment affects the organism.

But the organism's organisation determines which environmental differences can affect it in particular ways.

This is why sensitivity cannot be located entirely inside either side of the relation.

The environment supplies differences.

The organism supplies a capacity for differential response.

Sensitivity emerges from their encounter.

And once sensitivity exists, the organism's world becomes richer.

A difference in light can be distinguished from a difference in temperature.

A chemical gradient can be distinguished from a mechanical disturbance.

Not necessarily as concepts.

Not necessarily as representations.

But as differences that have different consequences for the organism's activity.

The world is beginning to become differentiated through the organism's responses.

This is an important threshold.

For once differences can be differentially registered in a system, the organism can begin to respond not merely to what happens, but to which difference has happened.

And that opens the possibility of anticipation.

A difference can become relevant before the consequences it predicts have fully arrived.

A gradient can be followed.

A signal can trigger a response.

A trace can guide behaviour.

The organism can become responsive to something that stands in a relation to something else.

Now we are approaching indication.

But indication is not yet meaning.

A difference can carry information about another state of affairs without becoming a sign.

The crucial question is therefore no longer simply whether an organism can be sensitive to difference.

It is:

When can one difference indicate another?

That is our next threshold.

When Does a Difference Make a Difference?: IV. The Difference That Matters

A wall constrains movement.

A riverbank constrains a river.

A change in temperature can alter the state of matter.

These differences make a difference.

But they do not necessarily matter.

The distinction is easy to overlook.

We use matter to mean many things.

Something can matter because it has consequences.

Something can matter because it is valuable.

Something can matter because it is important to someone.

These are not the same.

A rock can alter the course of a stream without the rock mattering to the stream.

A constraint can shape a process without becoming significant to anything within that process.

So perhaps mattering requires something more than consequence.

It requires a system for which the difference can make a difference to its own continuation.

This is where life changes the picture.

A plant deprived of water does not merely undergo a physical alteration.

Its capacity to continue growing is affected.

Water is not merely one variable among others.

For the plant, differences in water availability enter into the conditions of its continued existence.

Light, temperature, nutrients and physical damage can similarly become consequential in ways that are tied to the organism's ongoing organisation.

The organism is not simply changed by the environment.

Its own organisation makes some changes more consequential than others.

This is a new kind of relation.

A difference can now affect whether the system can continue as the kind of system it is.

Perhaps that is what we mean by saying that something matters.

It matters when a difference becomes significant for the maintenance or development of an organised form of life.

This does not require thought.

It does not require language.

It does not even require awareness.

A plant does not have to think that water is important for water to matter to the plant.

Mattering can therefore precede meaning.

Indeed, it may precede perception.

The plant's relation to water does not begin when the plant recognises water.

The relation is already built into the organisation of its life.

This helps us distinguish mattering from constraint.

A constraint changes what can happen.

Mattering concerns what makes a difference to the continuation of an organised system.

The two can overlap.

A shortage of water constrains a plant's growth.

But it matters because the plant's organisation makes that constraint consequential to its continuing life.

The same physical difference can therefore be merely constraining in one relation and mattering in another.

A stone constrains the growth of a root.

But whether the stone itself matters to the plant depends upon how that encounter enters into the plant's ongoing organisation.

This gives us a richer picture of the relation between organism and environment.

The environment does not come neatly divided into things that matter and things that do not.

The organism's organisation establishes a field of differential consequence.

Some differences are absorbed without significant alteration.

Some alter the conditions of growth.

Some threaten continuation.

Some enable it.

The organism therefore lives in a world of unequal consequences.

And this inequality is not simply a matter of the observer's judgement.

It belongs to the organisation of the living system itself.

A difference matters because the organism is the kind of system for which that difference can alter its trajectory.

This also explains why mattering is not simply a more intense form of consequence.

A falling stone has consequences.

A plant's loss of water has consequences.

But the latter belongs to an organisation in which continuation itself is at stake.

There is something for which the difference matters.

The emergence of life therefore introduces a new possibility into our story.

The world does not merely constrain processes.

It can become significant within a process whose continuation depends upon how it responds to what happens.

This is still not meaning.

The water does not signify survival.

The light does not communicate growth.

The organism need not interpret either.

Something much more elementary is happening.

The organism's organisation establishes a difference between conditions under which its activity can continue and conditions under which it cannot.

The world has become differentiated from the point of view of life.

And perhaps this is the beginning of value.

Not value as judgement.

Not value as preference.

But value as the difference between what supports and what threatens the continuation of an organised form of life.

Once such differences exist, however, another possibility emerges.

The organism may become organised not merely to be affected by differences, but to discriminate among them.

It may become sensitive to some differences before they become overwhelming.

It may alter its behaviour in anticipation of what they make possible.

And now we are approaching a new threshold.

For the difference that matters may eventually become a difference that the organism can detect as a difference.

That is where we must go next.

What does it mean to be sensitive to a difference?

When Does a Difference Make a Difference?: III. When Difference Becomes Constraint

A difference becomes consequential when it changes what can happen next.

One of the most fundamental ways it does this is through constraint.

We usually think of constraint as something negative.

A constraint prevents.

It restricts.

It closes possibilities.

And sometimes it does exactly that.

A wall prevents passage.

A lack of water prevents growth.

A physical law prevents certain things from happening.

But constraint does something more interesting than merely saying no.

It gives processes a shape.

Imagine a river flowing across a perfectly flat and limitless surface.

It could go anywhere.

But because the world is not flat and limitless, the river follows channels, slopes and contours.

The constraints do not simply prevent movement.

They organise it.

The river becomes a river partly because it cannot flow in every possible direction at once.

This is the strange productivity of constraint.

By making some developments impossible, a constraint can make others possible.

A musical instrument works because its strings, body and materials constrain the sounds it can produce.

A language works because not every sound can mean anything in any way.

An organism exists because its processes are constrained into a particular organisation.

Without constraint, there might be change.

But there would be no particular form of becoming.

This allows us to see constraint in a different way.

A constraint is a difference that has entered into the conditions of a process.

The wall differs from open space.

The riverbed differs from the surrounding ground.

The cell membrane differs from the fluid around it.

And because of these differences, what can happen is altered.

The difference has become consequential because it has changed the topology of possibility.

Some pathways are closed.

Others become channels.

Some states can no longer be reached.

Others become more likely.

The constraint therefore does not stand outside the process as an external prohibition.

It becomes part of the process's organisation.

This is particularly clear in living systems.

A plant cannot grow in any direction without limit.

Its structure, environment and history constrain its development.

But those constraints do not merely restrict the plant.

They are part of what makes this particular form of growth possible.

The same is true of behaviour.

An animal's body constrains what it can do.

It cannot move like every other animal.

But those limitations are inseparable from its particular capacities.

A bird's inability to breathe underwater is a constraint.

Its wings are also constraints.

They limit some possibilities while opening an extraordinary range of others.

This is why we should resist the simple opposition between freedom and constraint.

Freedom is often imagined as the absence of limitation.

But a world without differences would offer no pathways at all.

If everything were equally possible, nothing would be organised.

A possibility becomes meaningful only against alternatives that are not equally available.

A pathway exists because there are places it does not go.

A form exists because there are ways in which it is not formed.

A process has direction because not every direction is equally open.

Constraint gives possibility its shape.

And this brings us back to difference.

A constraint is not necessarily a thing.

It can be a relation.

The distance between two objects can constrain whether they interact.

The timing of two events can constrain whether they coincide.

The absence of a necessary resource can constrain what an organism can do.

The difference lies not simply in an object but in the organisation of a situation.

Perhaps this is why constraint is so important to the question of becoming.

Nothing becomes just because possibilities exist.

Something becomes because some possibilities are available, some are unavailable, and some are more likely than others.

The world is not an empty space in which anything might happen.

It is a structured field of differences.

Those differences constrain.

The constraints organise.

And through that organisation, particular histories become possible.

This may be the first great paradox of difference.

A difference can make a difference by limiting what happens.

But in doing so, it can also create the conditions under which something new can emerge.

The river finds a channel.

The organism acquires a form.

The instrument produces a sound.

The concept follows a furrow.

Constraint does not simply stand at the edge of possibility.

It helps create its landscape.

And yet this is still not mattering.

The river does not care about its banks.

The plant does not need to experience its structural constraints.

The difference has become consequential without becoming significant.

That distinction now becomes crucial.

For some differences do not merely constrain what happens.

They begin to matter.

And that raises our next question.

When does a consequential difference become a difference that matters?

When Does a Difference Make a Difference?: II. Difference for What?

A difference makes a difference.

But for what?

The question changes everything.

A change in temperature makes a difference to ice.

At a certain point, the ice melts.

The same change may make little difference to a nearby stone.

A change in light makes a difference to a plant.

The plant alters its growth.

The same change may make no immediate difference to the soil beneath it.

So a difference is never simply consequential.

It is consequential for something.

This sounds like a small qualification.

But the word for is dangerous.

It can suggest purpose.

It can suggest experience.

It can suggest that something has recognised the difference and decided that it matters.

None of this is necessary.

The ice does not care about temperature.

The plant need not understand light.

The stone does not fail to notice anything.

A difference can be consequential for a system simply because the system is organised in such a way that the difference alters what happens within it.

The question is therefore not:

Who notices the difference?

It is:

What can be changed by it?

A difference in temperature can alter the state of water.

A difference in pressure can alter the movement of air.

A difference in chemical concentration can alter a reaction.

A difference in light can alter the growth of a plant.

In each case, the difference enters into a relation with an organised process.

And the process develops differently because of it.

Perhaps this is the first meaning of for.

Not purpose.

Not awareness.

Simply consequence.

A difference is for a system when it can participate in changing what that system becomes or does.

But this immediately raises another question.

Where does the system end?

If a change in temperature affects a plant, and the plant alters the surrounding soil, and the soil affects another organism, the difference has travelled.

It has become consequential across a network of relations.

Was the temperature difference for the plant?

For the soil?

For the ecosystem?

For all of them?

Perhaps the question has no single answer.

A difference can make different differences in different relations.

The same rainfall may nourish one plant, damage another and alter the behaviour of an animal.

There is no universal significance contained within the rain.

There are only consequences unfolding through different systems.

This suggests that for does not identify a hidden property inside the difference.

It identifies a relation.

The difference is not significant by itself.

Nor is the system simply inventing its significance.

The significance lies in what happens when the difference enters into the organisation of the system.

This is familiar territory, but perhaps we can now see it more clearly.

A branch affords perching for a bird.

A temperature difference affects melting for ice.

A chemical gradient guides movement for a bacterium.

The for names the relation within which something becomes consequential.

But now another question begins to appear.

How, exactly, does a difference alter what happens next?

One answer is that it changes the conditions under which a process can continue.

The rise in temperature does not simply add something to the ice.

It changes what states of the ice are possible.

The presence of a wall changes where a moving body can go.

A lack of water changes what a plant can do.

A difference can therefore become consequential by altering the field of possibility itself.

It can open one pathway.

It can close another.

It can redirect a process.

It can make one development easier and another impossible.

This is an important thought.

For we often imagine constraint as something opposed to difference.

But perhaps a constraint is itself a way in which a difference makes a difference.

The wall differs from empty space.

The dry soil differs from wet soil.

The colder environment differs from the warmer one.

And because of those differences, not everything can happen in the same way.

A difference has become a condition.

A condition has become a constraint.

And the constraint changes what is possible next.

Perhaps this is one of the most fundamental ways in which differences become consequential.

Not because anything notices them.

Not because they matter.

Not because they mean anything.

But because they alter the shape of what can happen.

The question we have been asking therefore changes once again.

A difference is consequential for a system when it enters into the conditions of that system's becoming.

But what happens when the difference does not merely alter a process?

What happens when it begins to limit, channel or organise the possibilities available to it?

That is where we must go next.

When does a difference become a constraint?

When Does a Difference Make a Difference?: I. Nothing Happens Without Difference

Nothing happens without difference.

At first, this seems obvious.

For something to change, it must become different.

For something to move, its position must change.

For something to grow, something must be added, transformed or rearranged.

For something to happen, the world must not remain exactly as it was.

But the more closely we look, the stranger the idea becomes.

The world is full of differences.

Temperatures differ.

Surfaces differ.

Sounds differ.

Organisms differ.

One moment differs from another.

Yet most differences appear to make no difference at all.

A grain of sand shifts on a distant beach.

A molecule changes direction.

A star brightens beyond the reach of any observer.

The difference is real.

But to what does it matter?

This question introduces an important distinction.

A difference can exist without making a difference.

The temperature may change by one thousandth of a degree without altering anything relevant to a particular system.

A sound may occur without being heard.

A colour may change without being seen.

A chemical reaction may take place without affecting anything beyond itself.

So perhaps the interesting question is not whether differences exist.

It is:

When does a difference become consequential?

Something must encounter it.

Or perhaps something must be organised in such a way that the difference can alter what happens next.

A difference in temperature becomes consequential to a thermostat.

A difference in light becomes consequential to a plant.

A difference in movement becomes consequential to a prey animal.

The same physical difference can therefore be irrelevant in one relation and decisive in another.

The difference alone is not enough.

But neither is the receiving system enough.

Something happens between them.

We have encountered this structure before.

A branch does not simply contain the affordance of perching.

It affords perching in relation to a particular kind of organism.

Likewise, a physical difference does not simply carry significance within itself.

It becomes consequential within a relation.

This does not mean that the difference is invented by the organism.

The temperature really changes.

The light really varies.

The predator really moves.

But whether those differences alter what happens depends upon the organisation of whatever encounters them.

This gives us a useful way of avoiding two familiar mistakes.

The first is to imagine that the world is already divided into significant and insignificant differences.

The second is to imagine that significance is simply projected onto an otherwise indifferent world.

Perhaps neither is quite right.

The world contains differences.

Organised systems make some differences consequential.

And once a difference becomes consequential, something new has happened.

The future is no longer exactly what it would have been without it.

A different pathway has opened.

Or closed.

A process has changed direction.

A response has become possible.

A new constraint has appeared.

This may be the most elementary form of history.

For history begins wherever a difference changes what can happen next.

And that suggests a curious possibility.

Perhaps a difference does not make a difference merely because it is noticed.

Perhaps noticing is itself one particular way in which a difference can become consequential.

Long before anything notices anything, differences can alter processes.

Long before anything matters, differences can constrain.

Long before anything means, differences can change what is possible.

We are therefore not beginning with meaning.

Nor even with mattering.

We are beginning further back.

With a world in which differences occur.

And with the strange fact that some of them change everything.

The question is why.

What is it that allows one difference to disappear into the world without consequence, while another becomes the beginning of a new process?

What must be present for a difference to make a difference?

That is the puzzle we will follow.

And perhaps the answer will turn out to be more complicated than the phrase suggests.

For once a difference has made a difference, the world itself is no longer the same.

And that altered world may now make further differences possible.

Perhaps this is how becoming begins.

Not with things.

But with differences that change what can happen next.