30 June 2025

Semiotic Engines: Reconstructing the Architecture of Thought

1 A World Not of Things, But of Relations

We are used to imagining thought as something that occurs in the mind, as though it were a substance held within a vessel. But what if thought is not a substance at all? What if it is not even located in the mind? This series proposes a radical shift: to reconceive thought as a semiotic process, emergent not from brain matter alone, but from the relational architecture of meaning itself.

Our goal is not simply to describe how we think, but to reconstruct what thought is by attending to its semiotic conditions. And we begin with a foundational claim:

Thought is not a thing; it is a relation.

More precisely, thought is a phase in the actualisation of meaning potential. It is not the expression of a private interiority, but the dynamic interplay of signs across semiotic strata. The architecture of thought, then, is not built from neurons or ideas as such, but from semiotic relations: between system and instance, between speaker and situation, between what is potential and what becomes actualised.

In the history of philosophy, thought has often been framed in representational terms: as the mind's picture of the world. Even attempts to move beyond this framing, such as process philosophy or embodied cognition, often retain a substrate ontology beneath the process: there is still a "thing" doing the thinking.

Our relational ontology inverts this. It does not seek to ground thought in a substance or self, but in the structured potential of meaning systems. What we call "mind" is itself an emergent configuration of systemic relations. What we call "consciousness" is the instantial unfolding of those relations in context.

This is why we invoke the metaphor of the semiotic engine: not as a machine that produces thought, but as a dynamic system in which thought is a function of semiotic movement.

In the parts that follow, we will:

Unpack how SFL's clines of instantiation and individuation can reframe cognition.
Show how grammatical structures, far from merely expressing thought, enact its architecture.
Reinterpret common metaphysical categories (like mind, reason, or will) as frozen instances of semiotic processes.

We are not building a theory of thought; we are revealing that thought is itself a theory, made real in language.

2 Systems, Potentials, and the Machinery of Meaning

To understand thought as relational, we must start with how meaning itself is structured in a relational ontology. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) offers two crucial dimensions: instantiation and individuation.

Instantiation: From Potential to Instance

Every semiotic system is a structured potential for meaning. When we say something, we are not pulling meanings from an interior storehouse. We are actualising features of this system in relation to the situation. This process is instantiation.

An instance of meaning (a clause, a thought, a gesture) is not an isolated unit. It is a realisation of a selection from the system — a semantic act in context. Over time, repeated instantiations contribute to the shaping of what is likely to be instantiated again, subtly altering the system’s probabilistic architecture.

Thought, from this view, is never purely internal. A “private” idea is still a patterned semiotic act — a clause projected mentally, say — and it draws on shared systems. Even our most personal reflections are thus instantiations of culturally distributed meaning potential.

Individuation: From Shared Potential to Personal Repertoire

But people are not just passive reproducers of a collective system. As we engage in meaning-making across contexts, we develop a unique constellation of semiotic potential — a personal meaning repertoire. This is individuation.

Individuation is not the inheritance of a fixed set of categories. It is the ongoing relational differentiation of meaning potential within the field of culture. Our idiolects, personal styles, values, and habitual ways of meaning are shaped through social interaction — through the meanings we have access to, those we repeatedly instantiate, and those that are reinforced or marginalised.

In relational ontology, a self is not a bounded substance. It is an emergent pattern of individuation — a history of selections, variations, and resonances within a semiotic ecology. Where instantiation unfolds across situations, individuation unfolds across persons. Together, they make up the dynamic architecture of semiosis.

Thus, what we call "thought" is an instance of a system, enacted by an individuated repertoire, in a context of meaning relations. No mind is private. No idea is freestanding. All are phases in the ongoing, relational actualisation of meaning.

3 Grammar as Infrastructure

If thought is a function of semiotic movement, then grammar is not merely its expression — it is its infrastructure.

We often imagine grammar as a set of rules we follow to communicate ideas already formed in the mind. But from a relational perspective, this gets the process backwards. Grammar does not represent prior thought; it enacts thought, making it possible by organising meaning into form.

In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), grammar is not a code for translating ideas into language. It is the resource for meaning-making itself — a system of choices that configures experience into meaning. It does so not by labelling a pre-given world, but by constructing a world of relations: who does what to whom, when, how, why, and under what conditions.

Grammar is not a mirror of reality; it is a relational engine for construing it.

Consider the clause. In SFL, the clause is not a container for information but a configuration of functional roles: Processes, Participants, and Circumstances. These are not labels for ontological entities, but roles within a semiotic relation — relations that construct rather than reflect reality.

In this view, what we call a “thought” is an instance of clause structure being enacted. A mental clause nexus like “I believe it will rain” is not a window into an interior belief system. It is a grammatical construal that projects one clause (it will rain) through another (I believe), staging a relation between speaker, modality, and proposition. The very idea of belief is grammatical before it is psychological.

Grammatical metaphor extends this infrastructure further. Nominalisations like “freedom” or “consciousness” repackage processes as things, enabling us to build abstract domains — science, law, theology — atop reified semiotic relations. In doing so, grammar doesn’t just shape what we can say. It shapes what we can think.

The architecture of thought is grammatical — not because language limits thought, but because language enables it by providing the scaffolding of relations.

This is not to say that all thought is linguistic. But even non-verbal meaning — gesture, image — is structured semiotically. And in humans, it is language that makes thought reflexive: able to turn on itself, build models of itself, and evolve into theory.

So when we ask, “What is thought made of?” — we might answer: it is made of grammar, understood not as syntax, but as relational structure. Grammar is the infrastructure of the semiotic engine. It does not decorate cognition; it constructs it.

4 Reifying the Ghost — Mind, Will, and the Metaphysics of Meaning

If grammar is the infrastructure of thought, then metaphysics is what happens when we mistake that infrastructure for the world itself.

Western metaphysics is haunted by ghosts of its own making: mind, will, soul, consciousness — all reified abstractions, lifted from grammar and mistaken for substances. This isn’t merely a philosophical misstep; it’s a semiotic phenomenon. Our language doesn’t just enable us to construe these entities — it invites us to treat relations as things.

How? Through the grammatical process known as ideational grammatical metaphor: reconfiguring processes and relations as nominal entities. “I decide” becomes “my decision”; “I know” becomes “my knowledge.” This nominalisation enables abstraction, but it also obscures the relational nature of meaning. It reifies the process, freezing movement into object.

The “mind” is not a thing that thinks; it is the name we give to a pattern of semiotic activity construed grammatically as an entity.

This is not to deny experience. But when we say “I have a mind” or “my will is strong,” we are invoking metaphors with long histories of grammatical reification. The subject (“I”) is construed as possessor of an object (“mind,” “will”), as though selfhood were a container for inner things. In SFL terms, this is a relational clause construing an attributive relation — but mistaken for an ontological truth.

Here, the relational ontology offers a crucial corrective: there are no inner substances waiting to be accessed or explained. There are only semiotic processes unfolding in relation — across strata (from semantics to grammar to sound) and across instances (from social potential to individual expression). “Consciousness” is not a metaphysical constant but an instantial emergence: the unfolding of meaning potential through context.

This has powerful consequences for how we understand personhood, freedom, responsibility. If there is no ghost in the machine — no inner homunculus piloting thought — then what we call “will” is not an inner force but a socially instantiated pattern of meaning-making. And what we call “self” is not a metaphysical substance but a semiotic individuation, always becoming in relation.

We do not think because we have minds. We think because we inhabit — and are inhabited by — systems of meaning.

Rewriting these ghosts doesn’t dispel experience. It deepens it, releasing us from the illusion that meaning lives inside us, and allowing us to see that we live inside meaning.

Epilogue: Engines That Make Themselves

We began this series with a provocation: What if thought is not something we have, but something we do — or better yet, something that happens through us, as meaning is made actual?

Over four parts, we’ve unfolded a radical proposal: that thought is not a thing in the mind, but a relational actualisation of semiotic potential. Its architecture is not neural or metaphysical, but systemic and stratified — made of grammars, discourses, and contexts that precede and exceed the individual thinker.

To summarise:

In Part 1, we rejected the substance ontology of thought and replaced it with a relational view: thought as a phase in the unfolding of semiotic systems.
In Part 2, we explored how the clines of instantiation and individuation (from SFL) model the dynamic movement from potential to instance, and from collective to personal meaning — making thought both systemic and situated.
In Part 3, we examined grammar as infrastructure, showing how grammar doesn’t merely express thought, but constrains and enables its very form. Grammar is not a mirror of thought but one of its engines.
In Part 4, we exposed the metaphysical illusions born of grammatical reification — “mind,” “will,” and “self” — and offered a reframing: not inner substances, but semiotic constructs, instantiated in and through language.

So where does this leave us?

With a new kind of engine. Not one that sits in the skull or hides behind the eyes, but a semiotic engine: a self-organising system of meaning, where thought is not produced by us but produced with us — as we move through the systems that move through us.

We are not sovereign minds who deploy language; we are language systems that instantiate thought.

This is not a loss of agency. It is the recovery of a deeper one: not the illusion of control over meaning, but participation in a living system of meaning-making. We do not think in isolation. We instantiate thought in relation — to other speakers, to contexts, to histories, to potentials we did not choose but may yet transform.

In this view, consciousness is not the ghost in the machine. It is the engine that makes itself — not by magic or fiat, but through the patterned actualisation of semiotic potential.

And that is what it means to think:

To enter into relation,

To move across meaning,

To become, moment by moment,

An instance of the possible.

29 June 2025

When Grammar Pretends to Be God: A Relational Ontology Perspective

Introduction

This companion series to When Grammar Pretends to Be God deepens the critique by turning to ontology itself. It asks how grammar — specifically the grammar of the clause — has shaped not just what we say about the world, but what we believe the world is. Drawing on a relational ontology informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), we explore how grammar enacts a world of relations — and how Western metaphysics forgets this enactment, reifying those relations into things. God, force, consciousness — these are not pre-existing entities that language names, but interpretive relations that language actualises. When grammar forgets its own semiotic architecture, it performs a sleight of hand: a god trick. This series aims to expose that trick — and offer another way of thinking.

1 Relations, Reified

Western metaphysics has long mistaken its own language for the world.

The clause — that smallest unit of meaning which binds a Subject to a Process and a Complement — is not a mirror of reality. It is a semiotic act: a way of making meaning through relation. And meaning is how reality comes into being. The clause does not depict a world already there; it enacts a relation, and in doing so, actualises a world.

Yet across theologies and sciences alike, this grammatical architecture has been misread as ontology. Relations encoded by grammar have been mistaken for things that exist.

In Christian theology, the Subject becomes God-as-agent, the Process becomes divine action ("created," "redeemed"), and the Complement becomes the world — a patient, acted upon. But these roles are not ontological categories. They are functional meanings in a clause, projected into metaphysical space. The clause gives us not just God's Word, but God's grammar.

Science, too, inherits this scaffolding. Forces act. Energy flows. Laws govern. But what is "energy" apart from our need to assign agency in a transitive clause? What is a "law" but an interpersonal projection of obligation onto the cosmos? Even the Big Bang, the ultimate Process in cosmological grammar, is framed as if it had a Subject, a cause, and a trajectory.

Our relational ontology offers a different reading.

Instead of reifying Subject, Process, and Complement as existing entities, we read them as semantic functions — relational positions within a meaning instance. These roles do not reflect the architecture of the world. They enact a relation within the architecture of meaning.

And meaning is not a thing among things. It is potential — the structured readiness of a system to be actualised in relation. And when it is actualised, that is reality: not something described, but something enacted between speakers, strata, and systems.

This series will lay bare how Western thought has mistaken the architecture of language for the architecture of being. It will show that God, like gravity, may not be a substance at all — but a clause misunderstood.

The Word was not made flesh. The clause was made God.

And it's time we read it differently.

2 The Clause as the Lie That Tells the Truth

The clause is a marvellous fiction.

It construes a world of doing, sensing, being — a world in which agents act, things happen, events unfold. But this is not because the world is like that. It is because our grammar makes it like that. The clause tells a story of reality by fabricating relations between functions: Subject, Process, Complement. It is not the world's camera — it is its stage.

And what appears on this stage?

In transitivity, every clause is a little drama. A Process (e.g. creates, destroys, understands) is a happening or doing. It is relational, a semantic phase between participants. But Western metaphysics reinterprets these relational roles as entities: the Actor becomes an agent (e.g. "God"), the Goal becomes a patient (e.g. "the world"), and the Process becomes a force or power — as if these were parts of being rather than roles in meaning.

This is what our relational ontology seeks to reverse.

The Subject is not an entity, but a semantic function — an interpersonal role in the exchange of meaning. The Process is not a force, but an experiential relation. The Complement is not a substance, but another interpersonal role. These do not exist in the world before language. They exist in language as our way of construing the world — and in doing so, they actualise a world of kinds: agents, forces, causes, selves.

It is only when these relational functions are reified — frozen into ontological status — that grammar becomes metaphysics. We forget that "God created the heavens and the earth" is not a description but a construal — a construal with history, ideology, and theology woven into every function.

Our ontology reintroduces meaning as relational potential, not as categorical presence. In this model:

The clause is an instance of meaning — and meaning is how reality becomes actual.
The world construed by grammar is semiotic — and that is what being means.
Grammar enacts relation; it does not discover substance.

The so-called "lie" of the clause — that there are Subjects and Complements in the world — is also its truth. For by telling this lie, we do make meaning. We enact a shared world. But to believe that world precedes the meaning that brings it forth — to treat the clause as a report, not a relation — is to mistake enacted actuality for independent substance.

The clause is not fiction. It is formation.

3 Reification and the Ontology of the Frozen Relation

Grammar is not innocent. It does not simply name what is there — it brings it into being, and then forgets that it did so. This forgetting is what we call reification.

A relational function — like "Subject" or "Process" — becomes a thing, a substance, an entity. The clause enacts a semantic relation, but we read it as if it refers to a metaphysical reality. In this sleight of hand, grammar pretends to be God.

Let's take a familiar example:

Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.

This clause enacts a relational Process ("is") linking two Participants — one Token ("consciousness"), one Value ("an emergent property of the brain"). In SFL terms, this is an identifying relational clause: it construes one meaning as being equivalent to another. But when read ontologically, it makes a much stronger claim — that "consciousness" is, as if it exists independently, out there, waiting to be found.

What our relational ontology reveals is this:

This clause doesn’t uncover a truth — it instantiates a relation. It’s not mapping the world; it’s making meaning. It is semiotic, not metaphysical. And once we see that, the implications are profound.

God exists is not a statement of ontology, but an identifying relation: it actualises a potential relation between a Subject and a Process.

The mind causes action is not the discovery of a causal agent, but the instantiation of a transitive clause structure: Actor – Process – Goal.

Time moves forward is not a metaphysical law, but a projection of temporal Process onto an abstract Participant.

Each is a clause. Each enacts a construal. And each has been reified — taken as a representation of what is. But when we treat these semiotic enactments as ontological realities, we confuse grammar for being.

The antidote is not to discard grammar, but to see it for what it is: a powerful engine of relational construal — not a mirror of a world, but a world-making tool. In this view, meaning does not refer to pre-given entities. It brings forth relational actualities. And metaphysics is the forgetting that we did this ourselves.

4 The Metaphysics of the Clause — And How to Undo It

When grammar pretends to be God, it pretends not just to mean but to be. It takes the fleeting, contingent nature of semiotic choice — and freezes it into ontology.

What enables this sleight of hand?

The clause.

In SFL, the clause is a figure — a quantum of meaning that construes experience in terms of processes and participants. It does not represent an objective world. It offers one way of construing meaning from potential: a snapshot of what is being meant now.

But from a Western metaphysical stance, the clause gets misread as a report of reality. It shifts from being an act of meaning to a statement of fact. From semiotic construal to metaphysical claim.

This happens most insidiously in relational clauses:

God is love.
Force is mass times acceleration.
Reality is language.

Each of these is structurally an identifying clause. Each equates two participant roles. And each, in philosophical hands, has been taken as a metaphysical truth.

But a relational ontology — informed by SFL — sees it differently:

These clauses instantiate meaning; they don’t discover it.
The copula is enacts a relation; it does not reveal a hidden essence.
The clause realises a semiotic relation, not an ontological identity.

This does not mean that such clauses are wrong. It means they are doing something different than metaphysics has assumed. They are not unveiling what exists. They are construing what means — in a particular context, through a particular semiotic system.

So what does it mean to undo the metaphysics of the clause?

It means returning to the clause as meaning in motion — not frozen truth. It means understanding that "God," "mind," "self," "reality" are not entities — but the names we give to dense knots of meaning, realised in semiotic relation. It means seeing that every clause is a move in meaning-making — not a mirror held up to the world. And it means recognising:

Grammar does not reflect being.
It enacts relation.
Only when we forget this, does grammar pretend to be God.

Epilogue: The World We Make With Grammar

We began with a provocation: that grammar pretends to be God. That, beneath the surface of metaphysical systems and ontological claims, lies a sleight of hand — a forgetting of how meaning is made.

Each part of this series has traced a path through that forgetting:

We saw how relational processes give rise to the illusion of substances — as if meaning were found, not made.
We examined how identities are not innate but enacted — instantiated in semiotic relation.
We uncovered how reification freezes relations into things — making thought look like the world.
And we reclaimed the clause itself as a unit of meaning, not of metaphysical fact.

At the heart of it all is a simple shift in perspective:

From things that exist to relations that are made.
From ontology as essence to ontology as instantiation.
From substance to actualisation.

This is not a retreat from reality — it is a shift in how we understand reality itself. For reality is not what lies behind meaning, but what comes into being through it.

What we call “the world” is not out there, waiting to be named. It is continually brought forth — actualised as meaning — through the dynamic interplay of systems in relation. Reality is not discovered; it is enacted. Not named, but made meaningful — again and again.

Grammar is not divine. But it is generative. It does not mirror the world. It makes worlds — worlds of meaning, of value, of relation.

When grammar pretends to be God, it forgets this. But when grammar is reclaimed as our own — as the architecture of meaning — we remember:

We are not prisoners of language. We are its participants. And the world it builds is not ours to reflect — it is ours to enact.

For meaning is not about things. Meaning is how things come to be.

28 June 2025

Becoming Through Meaning

1 The Self as Relation, Not Substance

Western thought has long imagined the self as a kind of substance — an essence that lies behind experience, that acquires language, that thinks. But the view we offer here begins elsewhere: not in essence, but in relation.

The child is not a bearer of meaning who gradually learns to express what was always inside. Nor is the child a blank slate waiting to be written upon by the world. Instead, the child is a site where meaning unfolds — a meaning potential that becomes actual through relation. The self is not a substance that uses language, but a semiotic emergence that is language in the making.

We do not start as selves who then relate; we relate, and in doing so, instantiate a self. Meaning does not clothe an interior mind — it constitutes the self from the start, through the patterned interaction of voices, gestures, responses, and roles. The baby’s cry, the caregiver’s reply, the shared gaze, the naming of things — each is not just communication, but ontogenesis: the coming-into-being of a self that is never private, always relational.

This is the lens of relational ontology. The self is not a hidden presence within; it is the trace of meaning-making across time, the shape that relation takes when actualised as instance. It is not given once and for all, but unfolded again and again, a semiotic becoming through others.

There is no 'I' without 'you'. And neither is a thing. Each is an instance of the other’s potential — actualised in time, through meaning, by relation.

2 Instantiation and the Birth of Meaning

To understand how the self comes into being, we must turn to the semiotic engine that makes it possible: instantiation. In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), instantiation refers to the relation between a system of meaning potential and its actualisation in context — the meaning instance. And in our relational ontology, this is not just a technical process of language; it is the very mode by which being unfolds.

At birth, the child enters a world already rich with meaning: a social semiotic system shaped by generations of patterned action and response. But this system is not inherited as a set of fixed categories. It is realised only in the moment of meaning — when a potential is actualised in a specific context, with a specific other. Each cry, each glance, each co-produced routine is not a repetition of the same, but a new instantiation — a bringing-forth of self in relation.

The self does not precede this process. It is not the speaker of a cry, but the cry-in-relation. The infant’s sound becomes meaningful only because it is taken up, interpreted, folded into a semiotic exchange. It is this exchange that actualises a point of view — a perspective, a self — from within the potential. In other words, the child is not a pre-existing source of meaning, but a site of emergence, where relational meaning becomes actual.

This reframes learning: not as the accumulation of knowledge by an individual, but as the increasing delicacy of instantiation — the refining of patterns, the growing capacity to actualise finer distinctions from the system. The child becomes more and more able to occupy specific roles, adopt stances, construe experience — not by acquiring things, but by becoming patterns of relation.

Importantly, this process is always bidirectional. The self is actualised through others, but each instance also updates the system. With every new exchange, the child’s meaning potential is subtly reshaped. Certain patterns become more probable, others less so. This is not learning as input–output, but ontogenesis through relation: a dynamic interplay between the system and the instance, between what could be and what has just become.

In this way, instantiation is not just how meaning happens — it is how selves happen. Not as fixed substances behind words, but as histories of actualised relation: the delicate tracery of what has been made real through others, again and again.

3 Individuation as Ontological Development

If instantiation is the process by which selves emerge in context, then individuation is the longer arc: the unfolding of a unique meaning potential from shared semiotic ground. In traditional views, individuation is often mistaken for the carving out of autonomy — the formation of an individual as a bounded unit distinct from others. But in our relational ontology, individuation is not separation — it is differentiation through relation.

Each person begins life immersed in the collective meaning potential of a culture: the semantic system that makes being-with-others possible. But no individual can actualise all of this system. Instead, through repeated patterns of instantiation — shaped by caregivers, peers, contexts, and contingencies — certain selections become more probable than others. The child’s meaning potential begins to diverge.

This divergence is not a withdrawal from the collective, but a reconfiguration within it. A person’s individuation is a partial trace: not the system itself, but a lived contour of co-selection, a history of what has been actualised and can be again. In this sense, the self is not a container of meaning, but a probabilistic modulation of the social semiotic field — a localised tuning of what can be meant.

This reframes identity as ontological, not categorical. We are not born with fixed traits, nor do we simply acquire them. Rather, we come to be who we are through patterns of relation that instantiate certain potentials over others. These patterns sediment, not as fixed essences, but as biases in becoming — tendencies toward certain selections, postures, values, alignments.

Individuation is thus a trajectory of potential, shaped by the relational architecture of meaning. It does not oppose sociality, but deepens it: my individuation is recognisable only within a system that allows for such divergence, and it is meaningful only because others orient to it. Even resistance, even rupture, is semiotically shaped.

This is not to deny material conditions, power, or constraint. On the contrary, individuation always unfolds within specific material-semiotic environments. But it is precisely in this materiality of relation — not in the illusion of an isolated soul — that the human self comes to be.

We are never outside the system. We are only ever particular unfoldings of it.

4 Becoming Real Through Others

If instantiation makes meaning real in context, and individuation shapes a trajectory of potential across time, then their interdependence finds its fullest expression in relation — the semiotic fabric through which selves become actual. In this final move, we name what has always been implicit: to be real is to be related.

We do not instantiate meaning alone. Even the most private thought — a whispered clause to the self — is made possible by systems learned from others, and is shaped in expectation of intelligibility. Projection, in Systemic Functional Linguistics, is always a relation: one clause enacts another, one voice presupposes a hearer. In this way, even our solitude is dialogic. We speak ourselves into being through the horizon of otherness.

This is why the child must be hailed to become a self. The infant cries, but it is only when that cry is interpreted — when it enters into a relation of meaning — that it begins to function as a sign. And the signs the child is offered do not merely name the world — they name them, position them, fold them into social space. 'You’re hungry.' 'You’re a good girl.' 'You’re always so difficult.' These are not descriptions. They are semiotic acts of individuation.

Across the life course, this pattern continues. We are always being brought into reality by others — through recognition, misrecognition, affiliation, resistance. But recognition is not simply a mirror. It is the actualisation of latent meaning — the difference between potential and presence. To be seen is to be made semiotically real.

In relational ontology, then, the self is not a precondition of relation; it is its outcome. There is no substance behind the pattern, no essential agent orchestrating the process. What exists is the ongoing unfolding of semiotic relations, some of which sediment into recognisable tendencies, orientations, habits of meaning: what we call persons.

This reframes autonomy not as detachment, but as semiotic differentiation within a shared system. The more deeply a person’s meaning potential is instantiated and recognised across contexts, the more individuated they become. And the more individuated, the more they contribute back to the potential of the system — expanding it for others.

The self, then, is not the origin of meaning. It is the threshold where meaning passes into being — again and again, in the gaze, the clause, the act of address.

To become real is always to become real with.

Epilogue: The Relational Pulse of Being

We began with a question: what kind of ontology is implied by the theory of meaning we practice?

Through four steps, we have followed meaning from potential to instance, from instance to person, from person to world — and back again. Along the way, we have reframed concepts often taken as givens: identity, thought, autonomy, even being itself. What emerged is not a world of entities, but of semiotic unfoldings — not a theatre of substances, but a web of relations in motion.

Instantiation shows that meaning is not inherent but enacted — that it becomes real not as presence, but as selection within a context.

Individuation reveals that the self is not a container of meaning but a path through it — a semiotic history made visible in each act.

Potential is no longer a storehouse waiting to be tapped, but a structured horizon shaped by what has already been made actual.

And relation is not a bridge between pre-given things, but the very pulse by which things become.

To live, in this view, is not to possess meaning, but to participate in its actualisation. We do not stand apart from language, using it to represent a world. We are folded into it, made real through each clause, each recognition, each response. Meaning is not a property. It is a relation — stratified, instantiating, always emerging.

This is not a metaphor. It is a reframing of ontology itself.

We do not propose a new set of substances to replace the old. We propose that substance itself is an artefact of forgetting — a trace left behind when semiotic movement is reified into static form. Our aim is not to deny the felt reality of the self or the world, but to re-understand them as modes of becoming real — through others, through history, through the relational architectures we call meaning systems.

Language, in this light, is not a mirror of the world.

It is the medium through which the world becomes.

And so, when we ask what it means to be, we must now answer:

To be is to mean — and to mean is always to relate.

27 June 2025

The World is Not Made of Things: A Relational Ontology of Meaning

Preface: A New Architecture of Meaning

What if the foundations of our understanding — of self, reality, and knowledge — were built on a hidden assumption? A tacit belief that the world is made up of isolated things, discrete entities locked in place?
This series challenges that assumption by proposing a relational ontology of meaning: a view where meaning is not static or contained but is dynamic, emergent, and fundamentally interwoven with interaction.
From the birth of the self in the semiotic interplay of caregiver and child, to the ghosts of metaphysical grammar haunting theology and science, to the reconstruction of thought itself as a semiotic engine, this collection explores how meaning potential underpins everything we know and are.
Drawing on systemic functional linguistics, semiotics, and contemporary philosophy, we unravel how meaning is enacted and individuated — and how our reality is less a world of things than a web of relations.
Whether you are a student of language, philosophy, cognitive science, or simply a curious mind, these essays invite you to rethink what it means to be.
To read these pages is to embark on a journey where to mean is to be, and to be is to relate.
Welcome to the architecture of meaning — the world remade.

1 Not Substance, but Relation

Western thought has long been preoccupied with things — with substances, entities, and essences. Philosophers have searched for the ultimate building blocks of reality: atoms, ideas, selves, substances, subjects. But what if this entire metaphysical project has been shaped not by insight into the world, but by the form of the language used to describe it?

This piece argues for a relational ontology of meaning: a view in which reality is not made of things with properties, but of meanings enacted through relations. Meaning is not contained in objects or residing in minds; it emerges through patterned interaction — semiotically, socially, and systemically.

In place of a world composed of static entities, we are invited to see a world construed in motion — not because reality itself is reducible to language, but because language is the means by which we make sense of what-is. And the model of language we draw on makes all the difference.

From Substances to Systems

Traditional metaphysics begins with things: God, soul, matter, mind, truth. These are often conceived as self-subsistent entities — each with its own inner nature, existing independently of its relations. This view is so deeply ingrained that it is rarely questioned.

But from a systemic-functional perspective, this starting point is itself a theoretical choice — one heavily shaped by the architecture of the clause. When grammar makes meaning in terms of Subject + Process + Complement, it predisposes us to see the world in terms of agent + action + patient. This, as earlier series have explored, is not an innocent projection. It is an ontological commitment, albeit an unconscious one.

In contrast, a relational ontology begins not with things but with systems of options. In the SFL tradition, the architecture of meaning is not substance-based, but relational:

A system is a set of options — potential ways of meaning.
An instance is a selection from those options.
Meaning arises through relation: between selected features, between strata, between individuals and collectives, between potential and actual.

This model reverses the metaphysical default. It does not treat meaning as carried by forms or stored in minds. It treats meaning as a pattern of relations instantiated through use.

Three Planes of Relation

In place of metaphysical dualisms (e.g. mind vs body, idea vs matter), a relational ontology recognises three interwoven planes of meaning-making:

Stratification – the relation between levels of symbolic abstraction
(semantics realised by lexicogrammar, which is realised by phonology)
Instantiation – the relation between potential and actual
(a system of meaning is instantiated as text, and texts accumulate into system)
Individuation – the relation between collective and personal meaning potential
(the self is not given, but formed through differential access and repeated instantiation)

Each plane is constituted by relation, not by substance. Stratification is not a stack of layers; it is a system of realisation relationships. Instantiation is not a sequence of outputs; it is a dynamic of probabilistic actualisation. Individuation is not the revelation of a pre-existing inner essence; it is the ongoing shaping of a personal semiotic profile through patterned participation in collective meaning.

These planes are not metaphorical. They constitute a semiotic ontology: an account of reality in which what-is is construed not through things, but through the patterned unfolding of meaning in context.

2 Reification as Ontological Error

If the world is not made of things but of relations, then how did it come to seem otherwise? The short answer is: we reified our own semiotic resources. We mistook our ways of meaning for the structure of the world. And once reified, those ways of meaning began to masquerade as metaphysical truths.

This is not a new insight. Philosophers from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein have warned of the perils of treating language as a transparent window on reality. What a relational ontology adds is a precise account of how reification works, and how deeply grammar is implicated in it.

From Meaning Function to Metaphysical Category

In the systemic-functional model, grammatical structure enacts meaning across three simultaneous metafunctions:

Experiential: construing experience as configurations of process, participant, and circumstance
Interpersonal: enacting roles and relationships between speakers
Textual: organising information flow in context

These are not domains of content, but functions of language in use. The clause functions simultaneously in all three ways — not to describe what is, but to enact meaning in context.

But when these grammatical functions are stripped of their semiotic role and treated as ontological categories, reification occurs:

The Subject becomes the essential Self
The Process becomes an Action or Force in the world
The Complement becomes a Thing that is acted upon

This is not simply a mistake in philosophical interpretation — it is a structural risk built into the architecture of the clause. Language construes meaning through function, but those functions are easily misread as entities.

God as Grammatical Projection

As explored in the earlier Grammar and the Ghost in the Machine series, one of the clearest examples of reification is theological:

In the beginning, God created...

This clause is not merely a declaration of faith. It is a projection of a particular semantic configuration: a Subject acting on a Complement through a transitive Process. And it sets the template for an entire metaphysics of agency. God becomes the ultimate Subject; creation becomes the ultimate action.

But this is not a neutral observation — it is a grammatical decision mistaken for metaphysical fact. The clause did not merely express belief in a creator; it structured belief around the transitive grammar of action. It became possible to imagine divinity itself in the image of the clause.

The same holds for Cartesian metaphysics. I think, therefore I am presumes that “I” is an independent Subject, thinking is an autonomous Process, and “being” is a resultant state. But each of these is a grammatical projection. There is no necessity that existence be transitive, or that subjectivity be singular and stable. The metaphysics derives from the syntax.

Science in the Image of the Clause

The same transitive logic finds its way into scientific discourse:

Gravity pulls.
Electrons flow.
Forces act.
Laws govern.

These are not simple descriptions. They are clauses: structured configurations of Subject, Process, and Complement. The world, in scientific narration, becomes a cascade of entities acting upon entities. Even where science resists metaphysical speculation, it often cannot escape grammatical reification.

In this light, both theology and science are not merely different genres of thought. They are semantic enactments shaped by the same underlying architecture: the clause as the organising unit of meaning, projected onto the cosmos.

Undoing the Illusion

To unthink reification is not to abandon meaning, but to locate it properly: not in the things language names, but in the systems of choice from which language draws.

This is the heart of Halliday’s system/instance framework. Systems are not categories of things; they are sets of potential relations. An instance does not point to an essence; it selects from a network of meaning possibilities. And over time, these selections form patterned tendencies — probabilistic potentials that evolve with use.

Reification short-circuits this dynamic. It freezes potential into substance. It treats the instantiation as the reality, and forgets the system that made it possible. It mistakes functional relation for ontological identity.

A relational ontology refuses this move. It keeps meaning in motion, refusing to let a semantic configuration harden into a metaphysical object.

3 Relational Being and the Cline of Instantiation

If language is not a system of labels for things, but a semiotic system for enacting meaning in context, then our ontology must reflect this. Being is not a state. It is a relation — and more precisely, a relation in motion.

This is the insight encoded in what Halliday called the cline of instantiation. The cline describes the relation between the system (the total meaning potential of a language or a speaker) and its instances (actual selections made in context). Meaning does not exist in either pole alone — it is the tension between them that constitutes semiosis.

To apply this to ontology is to say: what is, is what has been instantiated from potential. And what is not (yet) is still real — as potential.

Being as Selection from Meaning Potential

The cline of instantiation is not a continuum of degree, but a semiotic relation: a functional dependence of instance on system, and of system on the sum of its instantiations.

In this view:

A system is not a repository of rules or forms, but a structured potential — a network of options available for meaning.
An instance is not an object or utterance per se, but a selection: a particular realisation of meaning from that potential.

And over time, the instances themselves modify the potential. Meaning potential evolves by use.

This means that being is not fixed, but is inferred from patterns of instantiation. What something is cannot be defined in isolation, only in relation to the systems it realises and the contexts in which it is realised.

Relational Ontology: Not Essence, but Relation

Traditional metaphysics looks for essences — underlying substances or forms that define what a thing is. But in a relational ontology grounded in semiosis, essence gives way to relation:

A clause is not a thing, but a relation among systemic choices.
A person is not an essence, but a trajectory of instantiations across time and context.
Even identity is not a fixed self but a pattern of semiotic individuation — a personalisation of shared potential.

This perspective reshapes how we understand everything from agency to knowledge. A scientific law, for instance, is not a truth about reality but a pattern of meaning instantiations, regularised in a way that allows prediction. It is a kind of grammatical condensation: a semantic habit mistaken for a necessity.

Grammatical Being Is Not Ontological Being

The implications here are profound. If being is construed semiotically — and instantiated through grammar — then we must learn to distinguish grammatical being from ontological being.

To say The universe expands is not to identify an objective fact in neutral terms. It is to deploy a clause, with a Subject (the universe) and a Process (expands), in a transitive configuration. That configuration construes experience in a particular way — but does not prove that the universe is a ‘thing’ that ‘does’ something.

The clause realises a semantic construal, not a metaphysical entity.

And that is enough. For meaning does not require metaphysical guarantees — it requires semiotic accountability: coherence within a system of relations.

The Metaphysics of the Actual

In a relational ontology, the actual is not more real than the potential. It is simply more contextually salient. Potential meaning is not a shadowy prelude to reality — it is part of the architecture of being.

Every instance draws from a system; every system is shaped by instances. This reciprocal movement is the ontological rhythm of meaning: from potential to actual, and from actual back into potential, through memory, abstraction, and re-selection.

To be is to be instantiated.

To become is to be instantiated again — differently.

Part 4: The Individual as a Meaning System

What is a person?

Western thought often answers with some version of essentialism: the soul, the self, the rational mind, the subject of consciousness. But if we take the cline of instantiation seriously — if we understand meaning as a structured potential realised in context — then the individual is not a thing at all.

The individual is a system of meaning potential, continually reshaped by the meanings it instantiates and the meanings instantiated around it.

This is not a metaphor. It is a semiotic fact.

From System to Instance: Personalisation of Meaning

In Halliday’s framework, every speaker draws from the larger system of language — what he called the “meaning potential of the language as a whole.” But no individual realises the full system. Instead, each speaker develops a subsystem: a personalised repertoire of choices shaped by the contexts they’ve lived through, the meanings they’ve made, and the communities they inhabit.

This is individuation: the relation between the meaning potential of the system and the meaning potential of the individual.

Just as instances actualise the system, individuals are partial, patterned systems of the collective semiotic potential. The self is not separate from language. It is a particular way language has been actualised — and can be actualised again.

Instantiating the Self: Meaning as Becoming

If an individual is a system of meaning potential, then personhood is not a static identity but a trajectory of instantiations:

The meanings I have made are my history.
The meanings I can make are my potential.
The meanings I am making now are my becoming.

Every utterance is a selection — not just from the lexicon, but from the self. And over time, these selections accrue. Just as language evolves through use, so does the self. We become what we mean.

This is not a metaphorical claim. It is a grammatical one. The self is not a substance that uses language — it is a pattern of language in use.

The Individual as a Site of Semiotic Tension

What gives rise to individuality, then, is not separation from the system, but a particular relation to it.

Each individual negotiates tensions between:

Collective potential (language, culture, discourse)
Personal potential (the individual’s meaning system)
Instantial variation (the selections made moment by moment)

This triadic tension is where individuation lives. The self is not reducible to its system, nor to its instances. It is a site of semiotic resonance — where systemic meaning meets contextual selection in ways that are never fully predictable, never fully stable, and never entirely repeatable.

To speak is not only to mean. It is to become.

You Are Not a Thing. You Are a System.

This reframes our understanding of identity, agency, and social life. It means:

You are not a self-contained subject.
You are a semiotic self — a personalised organisation of meaning potential.
Your individuality is not prior to language.
It is realised through language, over time.

This also has ethical force. If each person is a system of meanings in motion — not a fixed category — then dialogue is not just interaction. It is a site of mutual becoming. To engage another person is to enter a shared field of potential. And what emerges is not given in advance.

5 The Relational Ethics of Meaning

Ethics as Semiotic Responsibility

If the individual is not a self-contained substance but a semiotic system of meaning in relation, then ethics is fundamentally about how we engage with that system—how we participate in each other’s meaning-making and individuation.

Ethics is not primarily about rules or laws. It is about responsibility in the unfolding of meaning.

To speak, listen, respond, and interpret is to affect the semiotic potentials of others — to alter their fields of possible meanings and identities.

Meaning is Never Solo

Because meaning is always realised in interaction — always relational — every act of communication is an ethical act.

When we speak, we do not simply transmit information. We enter into a dynamic process where:

We acknowledge the other’s meaning potential.
We negotiate meanings without fixing or reducing.
We create openings for alternative instantiations.

To deny the semiotic personhood of another — to treat them as a fixed object or a mere conduit — is to close down their potential to become.

The Ethics of Indeterminacy

Relational ontology acknowledges that meaning is never fully determined. This uncertainty is a source of creativity — but also of vulnerability.

Ethical meaning-making requires:

Tolerance for ambiguity — allowing meanings to unfold without premature closure.
Openness to transformation — embracing that identities and meanings evolve through interaction.
Careful listening — respecting how others instantiate their meaning potentials.

The ethical act is to support the semiotic freedom of the other, even when it challenges our own meanings.

Interdependence and Semiotic Ecology

Ethics emerges not just between isolated individuals, but within a web of semiotic relations — a shared ecology of meaning.

Our meanings depend on others’ meanings, and the community’s shared potentials.

This demands a relational humility:

Recognising that our own meaning potentials are co-constituted by others.
Understanding that we are part of a larger semiotic system, not autonomous islands.

Ethics is care for this semiotic ecosystem — nurturing the conditions for meaningful dialogue and shared becoming.

Conclusion: Ethics as Semiotic Praxis

In this relational ontology, ethics is an ongoing praxis of meaning — a continuous engagement with the semiotic potentials of self and other.

It demands that we approach communication as a shared creation, not a mere transaction.

And in doing so, we participate in the co-creation of selves, societies, and realities — always in flux, always becoming.

Coda: Becoming in Relation — The Future of Meaning

As we conclude this journey through a relational ontology of meaning, a vital insight emerges: the world is not composed of isolated things, but of relations — of meaning always in motion, always becoming.

This view invites us to rethink long-standing assumptions about self, knowledge, and reality itself. The individual is never a fixed entity, but a semiotic process continuously shaped by interaction with others. Meaning is not a static code or mere representation, but a living architecture enacted and re-enacted in dialogue.

Such a perspective transforms philosophy, science, and theology — revealing how much of what we call “reality” is an unfolding semiotic performance, a dance of potentials actualised through encounter.

The implications are profound:

For identity: We are not born but made — constantly individuating through relation.
For knowledge: Truths are not fixed but provisional, emerging through semiotic negotiation.
For ethics: Responsibility lies in nurturing others’ meaning potentials, sustaining the shared semiotic ecosystem.
For being: Existence itself is less a “thing” and more a becoming, a dynamic web of relational meaning.

To embrace this is to live with humility and openness — to recognise that our own meanings and selves are intertwined with the world’s ongoing story.

The path ahead is one of continuous dialogue — with others, with ourselves, and with the ever-unfolding semiotic cosmos.

In the end, to be is to mean — and to mean is to relate.