1 From Language to Myth: Mapping the Reconstruals of Meaning
How does human consciousness transform raw experience into rich symbolic worlds? Language, science, myth, and philosophy each play distinct roles in this transformation—but how are they related? This post maps a pathway through four forms of symbolic activity, showing how meaning is not simply constructed once and for all, but reconstrued at progressively deeper levels of abstraction and integration.
1. Language: Construal of Experience as Meaning
Following Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), we begin with the premise that language is not a mirror of reality but a semiotic system that construes experience as meaning. What we commonly call “reality” is already shaped by this symbolic mediation. Language transforms the potential of experience into structured patterns of meaning.
Language is the first-order semiotic act that brings phenomena into being as meaningful. It does not merely name things already given; it makes them available to consciousness and communication. Meaning is not discovered; it is construed.
Language transforms experiential potential into symbolic meaning potential—creating our semiotic reality.
2. Science: Reconstrual of Meaning as Theory
Science begins not with raw experience, but with the meanings already construed by language. It operates as a reconstrual: a specialised, systematic, and often mathematically formalised reconstruction of semiotic reality into theory.
Scientific theory compresses meaning into models that are explanatory, predictive, and generalisable. These models are not direct representations of reality, but symbolic reconstruals of meanings originally made available through language.
Science is meaning made systematic, predictive, and provisional.
3. Myth: Reconstrual of Theory as Existential Orientation
In Joseph Campbell’s work, myth is not a primitive forerunner of science but a symbolic successor. Where science abstracts, myth re-integrates. Campbell reconstrues scientific theory not as myth in a reductive sense, but into myth: embedding theoretical knowledge into narratives that speak to the existential, emotional, and psychological dimensions of human life.
Myth restores the resonance of meaning by re-individuating abstract theory. In myth, the cosmos is no longer a neutral mechanism but a stage for symbolic participation. Myth does not reject science—it re-situates it within the total ecology of human meaning.
Myth is theory re-individuated—returned to the symbolic ecology of human life.
4. Philosophy: Reflective Reconstrual of the Whole
Philosophy occupies a unique and mobile position in this schema. It is not bound to any one level but operates across all of them. Philosophy reflects on the conditions and consequences of symbolic construal and reconstrual. It may critique the categories of experience, analyse the structure of language, interrogate the assumptions of science, or examine the role of myth.
Philosophy is meta-symbolic: it questions what it means to mean. Sometimes it allies with science, sometimes with myth. At other times, it sets out to reconstrue the entire hierarchy of meaning itself.
Philosophy is a meta-symbolic activity—reflection on the conditions and consequences of reconstrual.
Conclusion
This schema offers one way to understand the layered symbolic activities that shape human reality. Rather than seeing language, science, myth, and philosophy as rival approaches, we can recognise them as a hierarchy of reconstruals. Each plays a distinct role in the transformation of experience into meaning, and meaning into deeper forms of symbolic integration.
From language to science, from science to myth, and from myth to philosophical reflection, we witness not a linear progress but a spiral movement—each level reconfiguring the last, each returning us to the fundamental question: what does it mean to live meaningfully in a world we first bring into being through meaning?
2 Individuation and the Ecology of Meaning
In our previous post, we traced a sequence of symbolic reconstruals: from language to science, from science to myth, and from myth to philosophy. Each stage represented a deeper or broader integration of meaning, forming what we called a hierarchy of reconstruals. But this hierarchy does not operate in the abstract. It unfolds within a semiotic ecology populated by individuals.
This post introduces a second dimension to our model: individuation. If reconstrual explains how symbolic systems evolve and relate, individuation explains how meaning differentiates across persons. It is not merely a psychological process, but a semiotic one: the shaping of personal meaning potential within a shared symbolic order.
Individuation: Differentiation of Meaning Potential
In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), individuation refers to the relation between the collective meaning potential of a culture and the differentiated meaning potentials of individuals. While instantiation is about moving from potential to instance, individuation is about moving from collective to singular.
Individuation is the differentiation of reality as meaning potential across persons.
Each individual does not merely draw from a neutral system—they actively shape and are shaped by it. Meaning potential is never undifferentiated; it always appears as somebody’s semiotic repertoire, embedded in biography, community, and cultural history.
Reconstrual Across the Cline of Individuation
Let’s revisit our four stages of symbolic activity, now layered with the principle of individuation:
Language construes experience as meaning—but each speaker individuates the linguistic system differently, forming a unique register, idiolect, or symbolic style.
Science reconstrues meaning as theory—but each scientist or community brings their own history of interests, training, and theoretical commitments.
Myth reconstrues theory as existential orientation—but each hearer integrates myth into their own symbolic journey, often unconsciously.
Philosophy reflects on reconstrual—but always through a thinker’s singular engagement with the questions that most trouble or inspire them.
In this way, individuation ensures that symbolic activity is not just collective or cognitive, but personal and situated.
Each reconstrual of meaning is a negotiation between system and self.
The Hero’s Journey as Individuation
This model resonates strongly with Joseph Campbell’s interpretation of myth as a symbolic script for individuation. The hero myth does not simply recount a collective story—it invites the hearer to take up shared meaning potentials and reconstrue them as personal symbolic orientation.
The hero journeys into the unknown, not to escape the world, but to return transformed. So too does individuation involve venturing beyond given meanings in order to reconfigure one’s place within them.
Myth is theory re-individuated—lived, felt, and re-embodied as personal meaning.
Meaning as Semiotic Ecology
When we consider both reconstrual and individuation, we can begin to think of meaning not as a static structure, but as a living ecology. Meaning potential is distributed across persons and systems, across communities and timescales. Each individual is not an isolated node, but a distinct articulation of the system’s potential.
The human condition is not only to live in meaning, but to be a unique differentiation of it.
Individuation, then, is not the narrowing of meaning, but its diversification. It is how the symbolic life of a culture is sustained: not through repetition, but through differentiated resonance.
Conclusion
Individuation adds depth to our model of symbolic reconstrual. It reminds us that meaning is not only constructed and reconstrued at the level of systems, but always embodied, enacted, and transformed by individuals.
As we move from language to science, from science to myth, and from myth to philosophy, we do not move impersonally. We move as selves in the making—each of us a singular site of semiotic resonance, where the ecology of meaning takes shape again and again.
In our previous posts, we explored how meaning evolves through symbolic reconstrual—from language to science, to myth, to philosophy—and how this evolution is differentiated across persons through the process of individuation. But meaning does not exist solely as potential, whether collective or personal. It comes alive in context. This is the role of instantiation.
From Potential to Instance
In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), instantiation refers to the relation between a system of meaning potential and its activation in a particular instance. Language, for example, is not a fixed repository of meanings but a potential that gets instantiated in speaking, writing, gesture, or thought.
Instantiation is the unfolding of meaning in context.
If individuation answers the question who brings what kind of meaning potential to the table?, instantiation answers how does that potential become actual here and now?
A Dynamic Ecology
When we layer instantiation onto the ecology of meaning, we begin to see meaning not as a set of static forms but as an ever-changing field of contextual actualisation:
A scientific theory is not just a reconstrual of meaning—it is instantiated in a paper, a classroom explanation, a debate.
A myth is not merely a symbolic orientation—it is instantiated in storytelling, ritual, even dreams.
A philosophical reflection is not only a meta-level analysis—it is instantiated in dialogue, writing, or silent contemplation.
Each of these is a situated act, drawing on both collective meaning potential and individual differentiation to produce a specific, momentary construal of reality.
Meaning lives in the interplay between potential, person, and context.
Instantiating Across Orders
Instantiation also helps clarify how different symbolic orders interact. For example:
Language construes experience, but it does so through specific instantiations of semantic, lexicogrammatical, and phonological systems.
Science reconstrues language as theory, but each theory is instantiated in empirical practices, mathematical models, or explanatory metaphors.
Myth reconstrues theory as existential significance, instantiated through narrative arcs and ritual acts.
Philosophy reconstrues all these from a reflective stance, instantiated in critical discourse, dialectic, or systematic thought.
No symbolic order is actual apart from its instances. The reconstrual of meaning happens through instantiation, not above or outside it.
Individuated Instantiations
The intersection of individuation and instantiation is where meaning becomes most alive:
An individual scientist’s personal engagement with a theory instantiates that theory in a way no one else could.
A hearer’s resonant experience of a myth instantiates its symbolic potential within their own life narrative.
A philosopher’s conceptual framing instantiates a path of inquiry shaped by their own differentiated history of meaning.
Every instance is a signature. It bears the mark of the system, the context, and the self.
Conclusion: Meaning in Motion
With instantiation, we complete our model of meaning as living process. Meaning does not preexist in systems, nor reside permanently in individuals. It must be instantiated. Each instance is a moment of emergence, where the potential of the system and the individuation of the self meet the contingencies of the world.
Meaning is not a substance. It is an act.
In the final reckoning, it is through instantiation that reality is made semiotic, that potential becomes presence, and that the human story is continually written—one act of meaning at a time.
Over the last few posts, we've traced three key processes through which meaning becomes reality: reconstrual, individuation, and instantiation. Each offers a different vantage point on how meaning lives, evolves, and takes shape. This post brings them together into a single conceptual frame—a kind of semiotic triangle linking system, self, and situation.
1. Reconstrual: Evolving Meaning Across Orders
Reconstrual is the symbolic transformation of meaning across semiotic orders. In our earlier posts, we followed a particular lineage:
Language construes experience as meaning.
Science reconstrues that meaning as theory.
Myth reconstrues theory as existential orientation.
Philosophy reconstrues all of the above in reflexive thought.
Each symbolic order reorganises and reorients what has been construed before it. Reconstrual, then, is how systems evolve, layering new orders of meaning onto the semiotic ecology.
Reconstrual links symbolic systems in a vertical lineage of meaning.
2. Individuation: Differentiating Meaning Across Persons
Individuation accounts for how meaning potential is distributed and diversified across persons. Just as an ecosystem has niches, specialisations, and interdependencies, so too does the semiotic ecology:
No individual carries the whole of a language.
Each thinker, speaker, or artist develops a partial, patterned, perspectival relation to meaning.
This differentiation is not a deficiency but a condition of richness.
Individuation helps us understand who carries what potential, how subjectivities emerge, and how communities of meaning take shape.
Individuation distributes and diversifies meaning potential.
3. Instantiation: Actualising Meaning in Context
Instantiation is the unfolding of meaning potential in specific situations:
A scientific theory is instantiated in a paper, an experiment, or a lecture.
A myth is instantiated in a story told, a rite enacted, or a dream dreamt.
A philosophical insight is instantiated in dialogue, writing, or contemplation.
Instantiation shows how meaning is realised, moment by moment, act by act. No potential becomes real apart from its instantiation.
Instantiation brings meaning to life in context.
The Semiotic Triangle: System, Self, Situation
We can now see these three processes not as separate paths, but as interdependent dimensions of a single ecology of meaning:
Each act of meaning is shaped by:
the systems of meaning it reconstrues,
the selves through whom it is individuated,
the situations in which it is instantiated.
Meaning, in this view, is not a thing but a processual triangulation:
It evolves through reconstrual, differentiates through individuation, and comes alive through instantiation.
A Living Semiotic Ecology
This triangle does not close. It pulses. It breathes. It loops.
As meaning is instantiated, it reshapes the individuation of the person.
As persons interact, they participate in the evolution of the system.
As systems evolve, they change what can be instantiated in the world.
We are not outside this process. We are its participants. Every word we utter, every insight we form, every symbol we interpret is a movement within this semiotic ecology.
To mean is to live in the triangle.
And perhaps to live fully is to become more conscious of our part in it—as reconstruals of meaning, as individuated bearers of potential, and as active agents of instantiation.
5 Semiotic Dynamics: How Meaning Evolves Through System, Self, and Situation
In our previous post, we outlined a semiotic triangle linking reconstrual, individuation, and instantiation—three interdependent dimensions of how meaning becomes reality. But this triangle is not a static structure. It is dynamic. Meaning flows, mutates, and multiplies through the ongoing interaction of these dimensions. This post explores the dynamics of that interplay.
1. From Instantiation to System: How Use Becomes Structure
Each act of meaning (an instantiation) draws on potential. But repeated acts don’t just express potential—they shape it. Over time:
Innovations introduced in a local context may spread.
Patterns stabilise into norms.
Idiosyncrasies coalesce into registers.
This is how instantiation feeds back into system. In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), this process is sometimes referred to as "delicacy in flux": the system is never static, always reorganising as it is used.
Use reconfigures potential.
This feedback loop allows for reconstruals to emerge not just from theoretical reflection, but from practice—from meaning-in-action.
2. From Individuation to Reconstrual: How Subjectivities Enable Transformation
Individuated meaning potentials—the partial, patterned repertoires held by individuals or groups—do more than reflect the system. They mediate how systems evolve:
A community with a distinct repertoire may reconstrue a dominant discourse into a counter-discourse.
A thinker with an unusual semantic profile may reconstrue theory as myth, or vice versa.
A culture may resist or enable certain reconstruals depending on how meaning is individuated within it.
Who we are shapes what reconstruals are possible.
Reconstruals, then, are not abstract derivations. They are situated acts, made possible by particular individuations.
3. From System to Self: How Meaning Potentials Shape Persons
While individuation differentiates the system across persons, the reverse is also true: systems shape selves:
Educational, cultural, and discursive systems provide resources (and constraints) for individuation.
What meanings we can make depends on what systems we’ve had access to.
Our positions in a social semiotic field (e.g. centre vs margin) affect the density and range of our meaning potential.
Systems distribute the very conditions of individuation.
In this way, every instantiation carries both agency and inheritance: we act, but we do so within patterns that act on us.
The Pulse of Semiotic Evolution
These interrelations—system feeding into self, self enabling reconstrual, reconstrual reshaping system—form a kind of semiotic metabolism:
Meaning is actualised in situations.
Recurrent instantiations shape and shift the system.
Systems afford or deny individuation.
New individuations enable new reconstruals.
It is through this ongoing, recursive interplay that symbolic systems evolve. Not as pure abstractions, but as lived, enacted, and re-enacted structures.
Living Within the Flow
As participants in this ecology, we are never outside it. We are always:
Instantiating meanings that have been made possible,
Individuating meanings that have been distributed,
Reconstruing meanings that have been sedimented.
The more aware we are of these processes, the more consciously we can engage in them:
To live semiotically is to live in the flow of meaning’s evolution.
We are neither mere recipients nor sole creators of meaning. We are its co-instantiators, co-individuators, and co-reconstruers.
And in that dynamic, we find both our limits—and our possibilities.
6 Delicacy in Flux: Semogenesis Across Time-Scales
In previous posts, we've explored how meaning evolves through reconstrual, individuation, and instantiation. We've also introduced a new phrase—delicacy in flux—to describe how even the most fine-grained systems of meaning remain dynamic, not fixed. In this post, we expand the scope of that idea by situating it within the three orders of semogenesis: logogenesis, ontogenesis, and phylogenesis. These orders represent the unfolding of meaning across time-scales—from moment to lifetime to cultural history.
Logogenesis: Delicacy in the Moment
Logogenesis refers to the unfolding of meaning in the moment-by-moment flow of discourse. It is the domain of instantiation, where meaning potential becomes meaning actualised.
In any instance of meaning:
Choices are made within a system network.
These choices include very delicate distinctions (e.g. tense, mood, modality, conjunction).
Repeated choices in specific contexts may begin to pattern and stabilise.
Here, delicacy in flux describes the immediate pressure of context on systemic resources. Each utterance is a small nudge in the history of the system—a micro-evolution.
Meaning is always being tested, adjusted, and reweighted by its use in context.
Ontogenesis: Delicacy Across a Life
Ontogenesis refers to the development of meaning potential over the course of an individual's life. It is the domain of individuation, where each person acquires and personalises a subset of the system.
Across this developmental arc:
Not all delicacy is made available to everyone.
Some may acquire rich, subtle repertoires in specialised fields.
Others may remain excluded from key resources, genres, or registers.
Here, delicacy in flux refers to the shaping of the individual semiotic repertoire over time. Meaning potential is not evenly distributed; it is sedimented through interaction, education, power, and access.
Each person lives within a differently contoured system of delicacy.
Phylogenesis: Delicacy Across History
Phylogenesis refers to the evolution of meaning systems across generations. It is the domain of reconstrual, where systems are reshaped and reoriented over time.
In cultural history:
Entire regions of the system may be expanded, refined, or reconfigured.
Domains like science, law, or literature may generate new delicacies.
Myth may be reconstrued as theory, theory as myth.
Here, delicacy in flux refers to the cultural evolution of systemic complexity. The entire architecture of meaning may be transformed as practices shift and paradigms change.
The most delicate systems are the most sensitive to historical movement.
The Pulse of Semogenesis
When we see delicacy in flux across all three time-scales, we begin to appreciate the fluidity and responsiveness of the semiotic ecology:
Logogenetically, we see the pulse of choice.
Ontogenetically, we see the shaping of self.
Phylogenetically, we see the transformation of cultures.
And through all three:
Delicacy is never fixed. It lives. It changes. It responds.
Meaning is not merely made; it is remade, moment by moment, life by life, history by history. In the flux of delicacy, we find the living tissue of semiosis.
Toward a Living Linguistics
By foregrounding delicacy in flux, we move beyond static models of language. We begin to see systemic delicacy not as a frozen taxonomy, but as a living gradient of differentiation:
Dynamic in discourse
Distributed across persons
Reorganised across history
To study meaning, then, is not only to model a system—but to listen to the shifting pressures of its use.
To live meaningfully is to live inside that flux.
7 From Choice to Change: Integrating Semogenesis, Instantiation, Individuation, and Reconstrual
In recent posts, we’ve traced how meaning is actualised (through instantiation), personalised (through individuation), and transformed (through reconstrual). We’ve also introduced the metaphor of delicacy in flux to describe the dynamic, evolving nature of fine-grained system choices. Now, we take a step back and weave these threads together through the lens of semogenesis—the generation of meaning across three interconnected time-scales: logogenesis, ontogenesis, and phylogenesis.
What emerges is a picture of language as a living, moving system: shaped by its use in the moment, sculpted over a lifetime, and reoriented through cultural history.
Logogenesis and Instantiation: Meaning in the Moment
Logogenesis refers to how meaning unfolds in context, moment by moment. It is the time-scale of discourse.
Here, meaning potential becomes actualised through instantiation:
The system is activated by context.
Delicate choices are made—some habitual, some novel.
These choices leave faint impressions on the system.
In this frame, delicacy in flux captures the immediacy of meaning in motion. The semiotic system breathes with each utterance.
Ontogenesis and Individuation: Meaning in the Life-Course
Ontogenesis traces the emergence of meaning potential across a person’s development. It is the time-scale of learning and becoming.
Here, the system is individuated:
Some resources are acquired early; others remain inaccessible.
Social location, experience, and interaction shape the repertoire.
What is delicate for one may be basic for another.
Here, delicacy in flux signals the differentiation of the system across persons. Meaning potential is both shared and uneven.
Phylogenesis and Reconstrual: Meaning in Cultural Evolution
Phylogenesis reflects the transformation of meaning systems across generations. It is the time-scale of cultural semiosis.
Here, meaning is reconstrued:
Systems shift as practices, disciplines, and ideologies evolve.
What was once myth may become science—or vice versa.
New delicacies emerge, old ones fade.
Here, delicacy in flux refers to the historical reorganisation of the system itself.
Integration: A Living Model of Meaning
By aligning these three dimensions, we begin to see a recursive ecology:
Across all three orders:
The system is not fixed, but responsive.
Delicacy is not static, but contingent.
Meaning is not stored, but lived.
Language is a history of delicate becoming—moment by moment, person by person, culture by culture.
This is the power of semogenesis: to hold together the pulse of choice, the arc of development, and the sweep of history within a single, evolving semiotic field.
And this is the role of a theory of meaning that lives in time: not to describe a finished system, but to map its flux.