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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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