Why Language Matters – Realisation and the Architecture of Meaning Across Domains

1 Language as Theory’s Condition of Possibility

Scientific theories, philosophical arguments, religious cosmologies — each of these may seem to open a window onto something outside of language: a world of objects, of ideas, of truths. Yet none of them can be formulated, communicated, or even thought without language. Theories do not merely travel through language as a vehicle; they are realised in language as meaning. And because of this, the architecture of language is also the architecture of theorising.

This blog adopts a simple but far-reaching proposition:

A theory of language has the potential to reconstrue the language of theories — because theories are realised in language.

What does it mean to say that a theory is realised in language? In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), meaning is stratified: what we say (or write or think) involves relations between different levels of symbolic abstraction. At one level, there is semantics — the meanings we make. At another, lexicogrammar — the wordings we use to realise those meanings. At yet another, phonology or graphology — the sounds or written forms we use to realise the wordings.

These levels are not separate codes; they are linked through realisation — a symbolic relation in which one level is the expression of another. In this sense, the semantic content of a theory is not independent of its expression: it is made possible by the symbolic architecture through which it is realised.

This has profound implications. It means that when a scientist proposes a law of nature, or when a philosopher defines a category of thought, or when a myth-maker names the origin of things, they are drawing on the same semiotic resources: the capacity of language to make meaning across levels of abstraction. It also means that the categories of science, philosophy, and myth can be examined not only for what they claim about the world, but for how they function as construals of meaning.

Language, then, is not just the medium of theory. It is its material. And if we want to understand how theories work — how they construct their objects, project their categories, and shape our understanding of the world — we need a model of the semiotic processes at work.

SFL offers such a model. Unlike formal linguistic theories that treat language as a syntactic code, SFL treats language as a social semiotic: a meaning-making system shaped by and shaping human experience. It equips us with tools — like realisation, instantiation, and individuation — for mapping how meaning is structured, how it becomes actual, and how it varies across contexts and communities.

In the posts that follow, we will explore how these tools can illuminate the symbolic architecture behind scientific, philosophical, and cultural theories — not to judge them from the outside, but to make visible their internal logics. Our aim is not to replace disciplinary knowledge, but to deepen its foundations by asking:

What becomes possible when we take the architecture of meaning as a starting point for inquiry?

---

2 Realisation and the Architecture of Meaning

To understand how theories work, we need to understand how meaning works. At the heart of meaning-making in language is the concept of realisation: the symbolic relation between different levels of abstraction. In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), realisation is not just a matter of encoding meaning in words — it is a layered architecture that enables meaning to take form.

In the SFL model, meaning is stratified into levels:

• Semantics: the level of meaning — what is meant.

• Lexicogrammar: the level of wording — how the meaning is worded.

• Phonology/graphology: the level of sounding or writing — how the wording is expressed.

Each level realises the one above it. That is:

Wording is the realisation of meaning. Sound or writing is the realisation of wording.

This is not a material chain of causality, but a symbolic architecture. It is not that a thought causes a sentence or that a sentence causes a sound. Rather, each level is a symbolic abstraction of the one below it, and each meaning instance is an enactment of this relation: a semantic structure is realised in a grammatical structure, which is realised in a phonological or graphical structure.

To say that realisation is a symbolic relation is to highlight its character as identifying: it says what this is at a higher level of abstraction. For example:

• A given grammatical structure is the expression of a particular semantic structure.

• A sequence of phonemes is the expression of a particular grammatical structure.

In this sense, realisation organises language as a hierarchy of construal. The higher stratum construes experience in more abstract, semantic terms. The lower stratum construes that semantic meaning in terms of linguistic form. And it is only through these layers that meaning can be actualised in the world — in speech, in writing, in thought.

So why does this matter for theory?

Because every theory — scientific, philosophical, cultural — must travel through this architecture. Its concepts are not free-floating ideas; they are meanings realised in wordings. And those wordings are not neutral containers; they are structured, patterned, and shaped by the systems of grammar and discourse in which they are embedded.

If a theory defines “energy” as the capacity to do work, or “being” as that which is, or “grace” as divine favour, it is drawing on semiotic resources to make those categories meaningful. The theory’s sense of what exists, what is possible, and what is real depends on the symbolic architecture through which such meanings are construed and realised.

To understand a theory, then, is not only to trace its logic or test its claims. It is to examine how its meanings are realised — what symbolic systems they depend on, what assumptions they encode, what alternative construals they exclude.

This is not a purely linguistic concern. It is epistemological. It opens the possibility of seeing theory as constructed meaning, and invites us to explore how different theoretical traditions draw on different architectures of meaning — different ways of realising experience.

In the next post, we will examine the second major semiotic relation in the SFL framework: instantiation — the relation between meaning potential and meaning instance. If realisation explains how a theory is structured, instantiation explains how it is used.

---

3 Instantiation – From Potential to Instance

If realisation is the symbolic relation between levels of abstraction — semantics, grammar, and expression — then instantiation is the relation between what is possible and what is actual. It is the semiotic process through which meaning potential becomes meaning instance.

In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), every language is a system of choices. At any given moment, speakers draw from a vast repertoire of possibilities — a meaning potential — to produce a particular text. That text, whether spoken or written, is an instance of that potential.

So, what does this mean?

It means that language is not a fixed code. It is a system organised around potential, and every instance of language use is a selection from that potential. Over time, repeated instances contribute to the probabilities of future instances — reinforcing or shifting the contours of the system itself. In this way:

The system shapes the instance; the instance reshapes the system.

This dialectic between potential and instance lies at the heart of all meaning-making, and by extension, all theorising.

Theories, too, have meaning potentials. A theory of gravity does not exist solely in a single equation or paragraph. It exists in the full range of meanings that can be activated within its conceptual framework. A given explanation or application is an instantiation — one realisation of many possible ones.

Importantly, the concept of instantiation also applies beyond language. It offers a lens through which we can understand scientific models, philosophical arguments, and even cultural performances as instances of broader semiotic systems. For example:

• A climate model is an instantiation of the potential meanings available in climate science.

• A legal ruling is an instantiation of the interpretive potential of legal precedent and statute.

• A ritual is an instantiation of a culture’s potential meanings about life, death, or the sacred.

By thinking in terms of instantiation, we resist the illusion that theories are static bodies of knowledge. We see instead that they live through their use — in what they make possible, in how they are deployed, and in what they bring into being.

This has deep implications for how we understand inquiry. It shifts us from a model of truth as correspondence (matching a theory to reality) to a model of meaning as selection — of what we bring forth, highlight, or foreground in the act of making meaning. Theories are not simply mirrors; they are modes of participation in a semiotic system.

In our next post, we will turn to the third major SFL relation: individuation — the relation between the collective meaning potential of a community or system and the particular meaning potentials of individual users. Individuation will help us understand how theories vary, evolve, and specialise through their deployment by different communities of meaning.

---

4 Individuation – Meaning, Community, and Difference

Language is not just a system of options (potential) and their expressions (instances). It is also a shared resource. And yet, no two speakers mean in exactly the same way.

This tension between the collective and the particular is what Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) calls individuation — the relation between the meaning potential of a community (the system) and the meaning potential of individual users (their repertoires, voices, registers, styles).

Individuation acknowledges that:

We don’t all have equal access to the same systems of meaning. Our histories, communities, and experiences shape how — and what — we are able to mean.

In linguistic terms, individuation helps us understand why a physicist, a poet, and a child all speak English but do so with vastly different resources. Their meaning potentials are differently developed. The physicist has access to specialised semantic domains; the poet might foreground affect and rhythm; the child is still building their systemic repertoire.

But the principle extends far beyond language.

In science, individuation explains why different disciplines have different interpretive frameworks. The language of neuroscience is not the language of anthropology — even when they investigate overlapping questions. Each field instantiates meanings from a shared cultural and linguistic pool, but through distinct, individuated systems.

Even within a field, individuation plays out in schools of thought, methodological preferences, or regional traditions. A scientist trained in Kyoto may not frame their work in the same way as one trained in Chicago — not because of a failure of reason, but because of differences in meaning potential: in disciplinary lineage, educational environment, conceptual metaphors, and more.

Individuation also provides a powerful counter to the idea of a "view from nowhere." Every act of meaning is shaped by its locatedness in a history of practice, a community of discourse, and a personal trajectory. To individuate is to participate with difference — to speak as someone, somewhere, with some kind of voice.

And this matters deeply for theory. Because theories are realised in language, their very shape is influenced by the individuated meaning potential of those who build them. The more diverse our communities of inquiry, the richer and more reflexive our theories can become.

Individuation, then, is not a barrier to objectivity — it is a precondition for depth. It reminds us that the richness of our theoretical systems lies not in erasing difference, but in cultivating and accounting for it.

In our final post of the series, we will bring these insights together to consider what it means to use a theory of language to reconstrue the language of theories, and why this might be one of the most generative moves available to human thought.

---

5 Why Language Matters – The Architecture of Meaning Across Domains

Why use a theory of language to reconstrue science, philosophy, or myth? Because all of them are realised in language.

Language is not a passive medium into which ideas are poured. It is a semiotic architecture that makes ideation, abstraction, and system-building possible in the first place. Its internal organisation — its relations between potential and instance, between content and expression, between the collective and the individuated — provides a grammar for theory itself.

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) gives us tools for recognising this grammar. With its distinctions between:

• Instantiation: the relation between system and instance,

• Realisation: the relation between levels of symbolic abstraction,

• Individuation: the relation between shared meaning systems and individual repertoires,

…we are equipped to understand how ideas take form, move through communities, and become structured systems of knowledge.

This meta-series has made a modest claim: that these linguistic distinctions have explanatory power beyond language. They are not metaphors imported into other domains — they are formal relations intrinsic to the systems in which those domains are expressed.

When we say a gene is instantiated through its activation, or a scientific tradition individuates knowledge through its lineage of thinkers, or a myth is realised in narrative and ritual, we are not drawing loose analogies. We are uncovering homologous architectures of meaning — recurring structural patterns that help us understand how knowledge becomes knowable.

This is not to reduce science, philosophy, or religion to language, but to acknowledge that their articulation, transmission, and evolution are linguistically mediated. Any field that relies on theorisation, explanation, or modelling relies — whether tacitly or explicitly — on a semiotic infrastructure.

And so, we offer this orientation:

This blog uses a theory of language to reconstrue the language of theories.

Because theories are realised in language, a theory of language has the potential to renovate the entire history of human thought.

Such renovation is not an act of demolition, but of reflexive architecture. It helps us see the scaffolding beneath the walls — to understand how knowledge is constructed, sustained, and made to mean.

And that is why language matters.

Relational Biology: Applying SFL’s Semiotic Architecture to Life

1 Not Meaning Systems, but Meaningful Distinctions

Biology is not a meaning system. Cells do not speak. Genes do not form clauses. Proteins do not interpret messages. Yet it may still be possible — and indeed clarifying — to use semiotic distinctions to understand biological processes.

In this series, we propose that certain core concepts from systemic functional linguistics (SFL), especially the distinctions of instantiation, realisation, and individuation, offer powerful tools for describing how biological systems are organised. These concepts arise in the study of meaning-making in language, but they are not confined to language. They are structural distinctions that help us understand how potential becomes actual, how different levels of organisation interact, and how differentiation emerges within systems. And these are precisely the kinds of questions that biology must ask.

Importantly, we are not claiming that biology is a semiotic system. Rather, we are asking: what if we treat certain biological relations as if they instantiate the same kinds of structural distinctions found in meaning-making? Might this approach allow us to see familiar processes — such as gene expression, cell differentiation, or organismal development — in a new and more integrated way?

Distinctions, Not Analogies

This is not an exercise in metaphor. We are not likening the genome to a text or reading language into molecules. Instead, we are proposing that the SFL architecture of meaning provides analytical distinctions that help us map relations within any complex system, including biological ones.

To be clear:

• We are not saying that genes mean proteins.

• We are saying that the relation between a gene and the protein it specifies has a similar structural form to the semiotic relation between content and expression.

By distinguishing between potential, instance, and realisation — and between system-wide potential and individual differentiation — we gain tools to describe biological organisation without reducing it to code or chemistry.

Why Use SFL?

Systemic functional linguistics is unique in offering a mature, explicit theory of how meaning is structured across multiple levels. Crucially, it distinguishes:

• Instantiation: the relation between a system of potential and its individual instances;

• Realisation: the relation between levels of symbolic abstraction (e.g., content and expression);

• Individuation: the relation between collective systems and the differentiated potential of individuals.

These are not merely linguistic constructs. They are ways of mapping relations in complex systems. And because biological systems are rich in layered organisation, these distinctions may help illuminate the logic of developmental and evolutionary processes — in a way that avoids both mechanistic determinism and vague holism.

A Shift in Perspective

This approach invites us to move away from thinking of biological parts as discrete units with fixed meanings (e.g., the gene as a blueprint or programme) and toward viewing them as participants in patterned systems, whose behaviour depends on how they are instantiated, realised, and individuated in context.

It’s a shift from static substance to dynamic relation. From code to configuration. From inheritance as replication to inheritance as potential.

What’s to Come

In the posts that follow, we will explore:

• how the concept of instantiation helps us rethink gene activation and cellular development;

• how realisation clarifies the layered structure of biological processes;

• how individuation sheds light on differentiation within organisms and populations;

• and how these distinctions, when integrated, allow us to describe living systems with new precision.

This is not a metaphorical import from linguistics into biology. It is an attempt to test whether semiotic distinctions, developed to model complex meaning systems, can do useful analytical work in another domain of systemic complexity: life itself.

---

2 Instantiation — From Genetic Potential to Cellular Actuality

One of the foundational distinctions in systemic functional linguistics is that between meaning potential and meaning instance — linked by the process of instantiation. The system of language offers a structured potential for meaning, but each text (or utterance) is an instance: a particular actualisation of that potential in context. This same structural logic can help us understand how biological potential becomes biological actuality.

In this post, we explore how instantiation can illuminate biological processes — particularly the activation of genes and the development of cells — by distinguishing between what can happen and what does happen, and how the one becomes the other.

---

Gene Activation as Instantiation

At the molecular level, the genome does not operate like a program that runs from start to finish. It provides a potential — a structured, constrained field of possibilities — but only some genes are activated in any given context. This process of activation is deeply contingent: it depends on environmental cues, cellular conditions, regulatory signals, and epigenetic marks.

From a relational perspective, we can say:

• The genome constitutes the meaning potential of the organism.

• A gene activation event is an instance of that potential.

• The process of instantiation selects particular elements from the potential and actualises them in response to contextual conditions.

This allows us to shift from a static view of the genome as a code to a dynamic view of genetic potential as something instantiated in context — not unlike how a speaker selects meanings from the system of language to produce a specific utterance in a specific situation.

---

Development as a Cascade of Instantiations

Instantiation does not occur once. It unfolds over time, with each instance influencing future selections. In multicellular organisms, early instantiations (e.g. in embryogenesis) set the stage for subsequent ones. Gene expression patterns become increasingly specialised, as certain potentials are actualised while others are held in reserve or excluded.

This gives us a way to understand:

• Development not as the execution of a predetermined plan, but as a progressive, branching cascade of instantiations;

• Contextual modulation as central to development, since each instantiation reconfigures the context for the next;

• Plasticity and constraint as two poles of potential — with instantiation navigating between them.

Seen this way, development is not a pipeline but a dialogue between genetic potential and environmental context, where meaning emerges through use.

---

Instantiation Across Levels

Although we’ve focused on gene activation, the logic of instantiation applies at many levels in biology:

• In cellular signalling, where potential responses are instantiated in actual behaviour;

• In immune systems, where a structured potential for recognition is instantiated in particular antigen responses;

• In neural plasticity, where learning instantiates specific patterns of connectivity within a system of latent affordances.

In each case, we can distinguish the system of potential from the instance, and the process that links them: instantiation as contextually contingent actualisation.

---

Not Just Activation — But Selection in Context

This perspective also clarifies that instantiation is not mere activation or triggering. It is selection in context, shaped by the system’s internal architecture and by its ongoing relations with its environment. It always implies:

• an internal structuring of potential;

• a contingent actualisation;

• a shaping role for context.

It is this structural clarity that the concept of instantiation provides. It invites us to describe biological processes not only in terms of mechanism, but in terms of potential, constraint, and the pathways from one to the other.

---

In the next post, we turn to realisation, the second of our semiotic distinctions, to explore how different levels of biological organisation are linked — not by cause-and-effect, but by relations of symbolic abstraction.

---

3 Realisation — Linking Levels of Biological Meaning

In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), realisation is the relation that links levels of symbolic abstraction. Semantics is realised by lexicogrammar, which is in turn realised by phonology or graphology. Realisation is not a causal process but an identifying one: a relation of symbolic mapping between strata of meaning.

This post explores how the concept of realisation can illuminate biological systems — especially the relationship between genetic sequences and their functional products, and between different levels of organisation in living systems.

---

Realisation Is Not Mechanism

In everyday language, we might say that a gene "produces" a protein, or that DNA "codes for" traits. But these are mechanistic metaphors that often obscure the symbolic nature of biological systems. What if we instead treated these relations as analogous to realisation?

In this frame:

• A gene is not simply a physical molecule but a structured unit of symbolic potential;

• A protein is not simply a material effect, but the realisation of a genetic sequence at a lower level of abstraction;

• The process of transcription and translation is not itself the realisation — it is the material mediation of the realisation relation.

This distinction is subtle but powerful. It allows us to describe biology not just as a set of causes and effects, but as a layered system of symbolic relations: a meaning architecture that can be clarified by tools developed for understanding language.

---

Codons and Amino Acids: A Symbolic Mapping

The most direct example of realisation in biology is the relation between codons (triplets of nucleotide bases) and amino acids. This mapping is not intrinsic — it is historically contingent and mediated by a translation system. It is a convention established by evolutionary processes, maintained by tRNA and ribosomal machinery.

In SFL terms, we might say:

• A codon is a unit of content;

• An amino acid is its realised form at the level of expression;

• The genetic code is a structured system of realisation relations — mapping symbolic potential onto material outcomes.

This analogy helps us see that what matters is not just the substance of the elements, but their patterned relations across levels. It is the structure of realisation that makes biological semiosis possible.

---

Realisation and Functional Integration

Realisation also helps us think about integration across scales:

• Genes are realised as proteins;

• Regulatory networks are realised as cellular behaviours;

• Cellular activities are realised in tissue morphologies;

• Organ functions are realised in organismal capacities.

Each level construes the level above and is construed by the level below — not in a one-to-one fashion, but through complex many-to-many mappings. These mappings are not just material but symbolic: structured, patterned, and functional.

Realisation allows us to see how form and function co-emerge — not as mechanical outputs of a code, but as levels of biological meaning in relation.

---

Realisation Without Teleology

One might worry that talking about realisation introduces a teleological bias — as if genes intend to become proteins. But this is not the case. In SFL, realisation is not about purpose but about structured dependency. One stratum construes another, and the relation between them is both enabling and constraining.

Similarly in biology:

• A gene does not intend to be expressed;

• A codon does not mean an amino acid in the semantic sense;

• But these symbolic correspondences are nonetheless real and consequential.

Recognising this allows us to talk about biological structure and function without reducing either to mere chemistry or to anthropomorphic metaphor.

---

In the next post, we turn to the third pillar of our framework: individuation — the process by which systems of potential are distributed, differentiated, and developed across populations of cells, organisms, and lineages.

---

4 Individuation — Differentiating Biological Meaning Potential

In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), individuation refers to how a shared meaning potential becomes differently available to individuals or subgroups within a community. It addresses how each speaker draws upon and contributes to the collective semiotic system, developing a distinct “voice” or meaning potential of their own.

In this post, we explore how individuation provides insight into biological differentiation — from cell specialisation to developmental pathways and ecological divergence — wherever a shared biological potential becomes particularised in actual living systems.

---

From Genetic Potential to Developmental Differentiation

Every cell in a multicellular organism typically contains the same genome. Yet liver cells, neurons, and muscle cells look and behave differently. Why?

Because what is shared as potential (the genome) becomes individuated through differential activation and interpretation — shaped by context, interaction, and developmental history.

• Stem cells represent undifferentiated potential — pluripotency.

• Differentiated cells are individuated instances of that potential — distinct profiles of gene expression, morphology, and function.

• This individuation is mediated by systems of epigenetic regulation, signalling gradients, and tissue contexts that act like semiotic environments — modulating what gets activated, when, and how.

We might say: a liver cell is not just a cell with a certain identity, but a cell with a particular instantiation of the shared meaning potential — its own way of being a cell, shaped by the system it participates in.

---

Biological Systems as Individuated Meaning Systems

This individuation does not end with cells. Whole organisms, populations, and ecosystems also participate in the differentiation of shared biological potentials.

• Clonal organisms (e.g. genetically identical plants or insects) may exhibit diverse phenotypes based on micro-environmental cues.

• Phenotypic plasticity shows how the same genotype can give rise to different outcomes — depending on what aspects of potential are made actual.

• Niche specialisation in ecosystems reflects long-term processes of individuation — as lineages come to occupy different roles and enact different functions within a shared evolutionary potential.

Just as in language, where each speaker’s repertoire is a patterned subset of the language system, each organism enacts a distinctive subset of the biological system — a particular way of being alive within a field of possibilities.

---

Not Just Variation — Participation

Individuation is not merely variation. It is a relational process: a system–instance dynamic in which:

• The system provides structured potential;

• The instance actualises a distinctive realisation of that potential;

• And both are shaped by participation in a larger ecology of meaning.

This means:

• A cell does not simply “become” a neuron; it participates in a network that makes being-a-neuron meaningful;

• An organism does not simply express traits; it joins an ecosystemic conversation in which those traits matter;

• A species does not merely diverge; it individuates a lineage-level potential into a new role or identity.

Individuation helps us understand not only what is inherited or expressed, but how difference itself is made meaningful in living systems.

---

The Semiotic Architecture of Life

Across the first four posts, we’ve proposed that three key SFL concepts — instantiation, realisation, and individuation — offer a clarifying semiotic lens on biology:

• Instantiation helps us see how potential becomes actual — from gene activation to trait development;

• Realisation reveals the layered symbolic mappings that structure biological systems — from codons to amino acids, regulatory networks to organismal functions;

• Individuation highlights the differentiation of shared potential into particular pathways, forms, and identities.

Together, these concepts offer more than metaphor. They provide a principled way of describing life as a system of meaning — one that unfolds not just through chemical interactions, but through structured relations of potential, actualisation, and differentiation.

In our final post, we’ll reflect on what this perspective contributes to biological understanding — and how it might open up new ways of thinking across the boundaries of language, life, and meaning.

---

5 Biology as a Semiotic System — Rethinking Life Through Meaning

What happens when we look at life not just as a set of chemical and physical processes, but as a meaning system — one that can be better understood using the semiotic architecture of systemic functional linguistics?

Over the last four posts, we’ve explored how three foundational SFL concepts — instantiation, realisation, and individuation — offer deep insight into biological organisation:

• Instantiation as the actualisation of biological potential, from gene activation to trait development.

• Realisation as the symbolic mapping that connects genetic codes with the material forms they specify — codons realised as amino acids, regulatory patterns realised as cell types.

• Individuation as the differentiation of shared potential into distinct developmental paths, functional roles, or ecological identities.

In this concluding post, we step back to consider the broader implications of this perspective — and what it contributes to the study of life.

---

A Shift in Ontology: From Matter to Meaning

At first glance, applying semiotic theory to biology might seem like a stretch. Isn’t meaning something humans do with language, not something cells or genes are involved in?

But meaning, in the SFL tradition, is not confined to words. It is about structured potential — and how that potential is selectively activated, expressed, and differentiated in context.

From this perspective:

• A genome is not just a code, but a system of potential biological meanings.

• A developmental trajectory is not just an outcome, but a patterned actualisation of that potential.

• A differentiated cell type or ecological niche is not just a form, but an individuation of shared possibility.

Biology, in this sense, is not a closed mechanism but an open system of meaning — one that unfolds dynamically through layered semiotic relations.

---

Clarifying Complexity: What This Model Offers

Why use semiotic concepts to talk about life? Because they offer clarifying distinctions that are often blurred in current biological discourse.

For example:

• The distinction between activation (instantiation) and expression (realisation) helps disentangle the logic of gene regulation from the material processes it directs.

• Recognising individuation allows us to describe not just diversity, but the structuring of diversity — how variation becomes meaningful within the system as a whole.

• Framing biological processes in terms of meaning enables us to speak more clearly about function, interpretation, and responsiveness — without reducing everything to chemistry or computation.

This is not about replacing existing biological models. It’s about supplementing them with a relational semiotic perspective — one that foregrounds how life means as well as how it works.

---

An Invitation to Transdisciplinary Thinking

Applying SFL’s semiotic architecture to biology opens up more than a novel interpretation. It invites transdisciplinary thinking across the sciences and humanities.

• In developmental systems theory, we already see recognition that traits are not “in” the genes, but arise from dynamic interactions across levels of organisation.

• In evolutionary biology, concepts like niche construction and ecological inheritance show that meaning-making is part of how organisms shape and are shaped by their environments.

• In philosophy of biology, there is growing interest in how agency, interpretation, and signification figure into life processes.

A semiotic view can bridge these insights, offering a formal vocabulary for understanding life as a system of relations — not just of cause and effect, but of potential and instance, symbol and realisation, difference and identity.

---

Life, Differently Understood

To say that biology is a meaning system is not to anthropomorphise it. It is to recognise that meaning — in the sense of structured, actualisable potential — is not exclusive to language, but intrinsic to life.

Cells interpret signals. Genes map to outcomes. Organisms differentiate shared codes into diverse forms. All this is not merely information processing; it is semiotic activity — patterned, relational, and meaningful.

By bringing the distinctions of instantiation, realisation, and individuation into biological thought, we do not impose a linguistic model onto life. We allow life’s own complexity to become more intelligible — by attending to the kinds of relations that make systems, and systems that make meaning.

This is not the end of a story, but the beginning of a question:

What else becomes visible when we think of life semiotically?

Temporalities of Meaning: Relational Time and Becoming

1 Time as the Unfolding of Process — A Relational Reframing

In the modern scientific worldview, time is often imagined as a uniform container — a linear continuum in which things happen. Physics treats it as a fourth dimension alongside the three of space, something we move through or are moved by. But from a relational and semiotic perspective, time is not a container. It is not an empty backdrop against which processes unfold. Rather, time is the very dimension of unfolding itself — the relational axis of becoming.

This view reframes time as neither objective nor subjective, but as inherently semiotic. That is, it is a meaning dimension, emerging from and with the processes it organises. A process is not located “in” time; it constitutes time — just as a conversation constitutes meaning through the very act of being spoken.

From this perspective, time is not a fixed sequence, but a dynamic arising:

• It unfolds as processes unfold.

• It becomes through instantiations of potential.

• It is felt in and through consciousness, not as a clockwork metronome, but as the lived rhythm of meaning.

Potential and Instance

In a relational ontology, we distinguish between potential and instance. This is not just a distinction between the general and the particular, but between structured affordance and actualised relation. In temporal terms:

• Potential time is the structure of temporal meaning available to be instantiated.

• Instance time is the actual unfolding of a process — a stretch of becoming that occupies a place on the cline between potential and instance.

For example, the structure of narrative offers culturally shaped potentials for past, present, and future. But these do not exist independently; they are instantiated in texts, in utterances, and in experiences. Narrative time isn’t “in” the story — it is the unfolding of the story itself.

Time and Consciousness

If time is the dimension of unfolding, then consciousness is a process of temporal actualisation. In our neural model — grounded in Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection — consciousness is not a substance but a processual selection of patterns. These selections are both temporal and semiotic. They occur over time, but they also constitute time.

Our experiences of flow, delay, anticipation, memory, and repetition are not distortions of objective time — they are the very fabric of meaning-in-becoming. And meaning systems — from language to ritual, from culture to mythology — are the semiotic scaffolds through which such temporal experiences are shaped, shared, and re-actualised.

---

Toward a Semiotic Cosmology

In this reframing, we are not placing time “within” the world. Rather, we are locating the world — the world as construed — within time as semiotic unfolding. Time is not an object; it is the temporal dimension of meaning itself. And just as meaning is always relational, always patterned and always instantiated anew, so too is time.

In the posts to follow, we will explore how different meaning systems shape temporal experience, how grammar enacts time through tense and aspect, how subjectivity emerges through temporal orientation, and how social structures and imaginative acts give rise to collective temporalities of memory, anticipation, and transformation.

2 Grammatical Time and the Semiotics of Tense

If time is the dimension of the unfolding of processes, then language is one of the primary ways we organise, construe, and enact that unfolding. Every time we speak or write, we are not merely describing time — we are doing time. Through grammar, we instantiate temporal relations, selectively activating patterns of meaning from our cultural and linguistic meaning potential.

At the heart of this linguistic temporality is tense — a system that locates a process in relation to a speaking event. But tense is not simply a representation of clock time. It is a semiotic resource for positioning experience in relation to the act of meaning itself.

The Grammar of Temporal Relation

In Systemic Functional Linguistics, tense is not a label attached to verbs — it is a system of interpersonal and experiential meaning. It allows speakers to construe events as having happened, happening, or about to happen, always from a particular vantage point.

Tense structures time in three primary ways:

• It positions processes relative to the “now” of the speech event.

• It orders sequences of events or states — establishing before, after, or simultaneous relations.

• It frames meanings of completion, continuation, or anticipation through aspectual choices.

In other words, grammatical time is a relational map of becoming — not a neutral record of when something occurred, but a semiotic act of patterning experience.

Tense as Instantiation of Temporal Potential

Every tense selection — whether present perfect, future progressive, or past simple — is an instantiation of potential temporal meaning. The system of tense offers structured affordances for construing temporality, and speakers activate these selectively and creatively.

In this way, tense is not a representation of time in the physical world. It is a social-semantic technology: a cultural scaffold for making temporal distinctions that matter to us — to our purposes, our stories, and our interactions.

Becoming Through Language

In a relational ontology, meaning is always emerging — always on the move between potential and instance. Tense participates in this motion. It allows us to construe what has become, what is becoming, and what may yet become. And it does this not by referring to external clock-time, but by articulating position within the unfolding of meaning itself.

Grammatical time is thus a form of temporal individuation. Each utterance not only positions events in relation to others — it positions us. It creates a self who remembers, a self who anticipates, a self embedded in a fabric of unfolding meaning.

---

Beyond Tense: Time as Social Semiotic

Tense is only one resource among many. Languages also use modality, mood, temporal adverbials, and narrative structure to construe time. These are not just linguistic conventions — they are ways of inhabiting time. In the posts to come, we’ll explore how these patterns shape subjective and collective temporalities — and how time, far from being uniform or objective, is always situated, enacted, and shared.

3 Subjective Time — Consciousness and the Rhythm of Meaning

If grammatical time is a semiotic system for construing temporal relations, then subjective time is the lived dimension in which those meanings unfold. It is the inner rhythm of becoming — the pulse of consciousness as it moves, not through a fixed timeline, but through streams of experience.

In a relational ontology, time does not exist independently of processes. It is the dimension of their unfolding. And conscious processes — mental and verbal — are no exception. When we attend, remember, imagine, or speak, we do so in time. But not in a time that simply “passes.” We do so in a time that is enacted.

The Pulse of Mental Processes

From the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, consciousness is not a continuous stream, but a sequence of selections — discrete moments of neuronal integration that form higher-order patterns. Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection shows how neural processes are selected and stabilised through experience. These momentary integrations give rise to what we call attention, memory, and awareness — and each has its own temporal signature.

In this light, subjective time is rhythmic. It pulses with the dynamic recurrence of processes:

• Attention flares and fades.

• Memories surface and retreat.

• Thoughts spiral, stutter, or leap.

Rather than ticking forward like a metronome, time in consciousness is modulated by the patterns of meaning we instantiate.

The Temporalities of Projection

In language, we enact these rhythms through projection — one clause projecting another in mental, verbal, or emotive processes:

• I remember that she left.

• He says it’s raining.

• We believe they’ll return.

Each of these projected structures marks a temporal shift: not from present to past, but from immediate to distanced, from shared to internal, from the outer world to the inner theatre of experience. Here, time is not measured — it is layered.

Becoming Through Conscious Process

What, then, does it mean to become, in the semiotic space of consciousness?

To become is to mean — to actualise potential into instance through attention, reflection, desire, or action. Time, in this view, is not a stage on which we act. It is a trajectory of instantiation — a continual flow from potential experience into actualised meaning.

In this unfolding, the self is not a fixed point. It is a dynamic attractor, stabilised momentarily by recurrent patterns of meaning, memory, and intention. Subjective time is thus the rhythm of this self-organising flow — the way in which becoming is felt, enacted, and known.

4 Collective Time — Cultural Rhythms and Temporal Habitus

If subjective time unfolds in the rhythms of consciousness, then collective time arises in the patterned flows of cultural life. We don’t simply inhabit time — we inherit it. We are inducted into it through practices, rituals, technologies, calendars, and clocks. These are not neutral instruments. They are semiotic artefacts that coordinate shared temporal experience — synchronising bodies, meanings, and social orders.

The Social Construction of Time

Time is not experienced the same way across all cultures or historical periods. It is shaped by collective patterns of meaning:

• Some cultures organise time cyclically, emphasising return and renewal.

• Others emphasise linearity, with beginnings, progress, and ends.

• Still others live by event time, where processes dictate the flow, not the clock.

These orientations are not simply mental. They are encoded in language, myth, ritual, and practice. In this sense, time is a habitus — a relational field of dispositions shaped by the historical and social structures we live within.

Calendars, Rituals, and the Temporalisation of Meaning

A calendar is not merely a tool for marking days — it is a symbolic scaffold for collective becoming. It tells us:

• When to celebrate and mourn.

• When to plant, harvest, or migrate.

• When to pause, reflect, or begin again.

Religious rituals, national holidays, academic semesters, fiscal years — all of these instantiate temporal meanings that organise our lives. They do more than coordinate schedules; they shape our very sense of significance. They synchronise meaning potentials across individuals and groups, creating shared attractor spaces for cultural identity and action.

Time as a Semiotic Field

In this view, time is not a backdrop for culture — it is a product of semiosis. The meanings we give to birth and death, success and failure, youth and old age, all unfold within temporal categories that are learned, enacted, and inherited.

Just as grammar gives us resources to construe temporal relations in language, so cultural systems give us symbolic resources to construe time in life. These systems evolve through the same dynamics of selection and instantiation that shape the brain and the self. In this way, collective time is not imposed from above — it is continually being remade from within.

5 Nonlinear Time — Memory, Recurrence, and the Spiral of Becoming

Not all processes move in straight lines. Many of the most significant rhythms of human life — growth, grief, healing, insight — unfold in nonlinear time. These are not sequences of cause and effect, but recursive patterns of becoming. In a relational ontology, time is not merely duration, but difference unfolding — and that difference does not always follow a clock or a calendar.

Memory as Temporal Recursion

Memory is not a passive recording of what has passed. It is an active semiotic process — a re-instantiation of past meaning within a present context. In remembering, we do not retrieve static events; we re-enter attractor spaces of experience. What returns is not the past itself, but its relevance to the now.

This recursive quality of memory makes time spiral rather than linear. Old meanings are revisited, revised, revoiced. We do not simply move forward — we turn, we double back, we reframe. Personal identity emerges not from continuity alone, but from this dynamic interplay of past potential and present actualisation.

Mythic and Archetypal Time

Cultures also encode nonlinear time through myth. Myth does not recount history in chronological order. It dramatises eternal recurrence — the patterns that shape meaning across generations. These stories are not bound to once-upon-a-time. They are always now — available for re-enactment in ritual, imagination, and dream.

Archetypes, likewise, are not fixed templates but deep attractors in the collective semiotic field. They recur not because they are eternal substances, but because they offer resonant patterns for making sense of experience — especially in times of crisis or transformation.

The Spiral of Becoming

In this view, time is not an arrow, nor a circle, but a spiral: a recursive unfolding in which each turn builds on what came before, without ever returning to the same point. Transformation is possible precisely because meaning does not repeat identically. Even when we revisit old terrain, we do so from a new perspective — a different position in the unfolding relation.

This spiral temporality allows us to see human development, cultural history, even cosmic evolution not as straight progressions but as recursive self-organising systems — where the future emerges through the creative return of the past.

---

6: Thresholds of Time — Crisis, Kairos, and Moments of Transformation

Not all moments are created equal. Some shimmer. Some rupture. Some rearrange the whole structure of our becoming. In this post, we explore thresholds of time — liminal moments that defy linear unfolding and mark the emergence of new meaning potentials.

Kairos: Time as Eventfulness

While chronos measures time in quantity — minutes, hours, years — kairos names a different kind of temporality: qualitative time, the right or ripe moment. In a relational ontology, kairos can be understood as a semiotic condensation — a moment when multiple trajectories intersect and a new attractor crystallises.

These are moments when reality feels charged — when the stakes are high, and the next move matters. They may be born of crisis or creativity, suffering or revelation. What makes them threshold moments is not their objective duration, but their transformative potential.

Crisis and Reconfiguration

Crisis literally means "turning point." It is not just a breakdown, but a bifurcation — a moment in which a system becomes unstable enough to shift into a new pattern. In such moments, the attractor landscape of meaning destabilises. Old semiotic patterns no longer hold; new ones are not yet stabilised.

From a relational perspective, this is not collapse but creative disintegration. It is the opening of new possibility — though that opening may be painful, disorienting, or traumatic. Transformation is not guaranteed. But the potential is there.

Rites of Passage and the Ritualisation of Thresholds

Many cultures have recognised the potency of these thresholds and marked them through ritual. Rites of passage frame transitions — birth, adolescence, marriage, death — as semiotic transformations: not just events in time, but reconfigurations of being. They help hold the uncertainty of the in-between, offering symbolic structure for what cannot be managed by chronology alone.

In modern life, we often lack such ritual containers, and so personal thresholds — illnesses, losses, awakenings — may be lived as private chaos. But even in silence, these moments continue to perform their work: to loosen the grip of old forms and open space for the new.

Time at the Edge

Thresholds are temporal edges. They reveal that time is not merely flow but field — patterned, punctuated, marked by intensities. The event is not a dot on a timeline but a relational convergence — a point where multiple potentialities touch down in experience.

To live relationally is to recognise and honour these edges — not to fear the thresholds, but to walk them with awareness, and with care for the meanings that are trying to emerge.

---

7 Future-Bearing Time — Anticipation, Intuition, and the Pull of Potential

What if the future is not something “out there” waiting to arrive, but something already active within us — a field of potential that calls us forward? In this final post, we explore how meaning systems not only interpret time but participate in the generation of futures.

The Future as Semiotic Gradient

In a relational-semiotic ontology, the future is not an empty space ahead on a clock. It is a gradient of possibility — structured by the meanings we inherit, the patterns we instantiate, and the trajectories we imagine.

Anticipation is not passive waiting. It is attunement to affordance — the capacity to sense what might become, and to orient meaning-making accordingly. Just as physical systems follow gradients of energy, semiotic systems follow gradients of potential meaning.

This is how the future pulls: not as an external force, but as a relational tension within the attractor landscape of consciousness.

Intuition and the Shape of What Is Coming

Intuition may be one way this tension becomes felt. It is not irrational but pre-rational: the resonance of a not-yet-actualised pattern within our current configuration. Intuition gives form to the vague — an inkling, a hunch, a symbolic dream.

We might say that intuition is the semiotic pressure of the future, registering as embodied sense before it becomes articulated in thought or speech.

From a neuronal perspective, this may be the forward reach of dynamic repertoires. From a linguistic perspective, it is the shaping of future speech by the affordances of past and present meaning. Either way, the future is not separate from the present — it is emergent within it.

Imagination as Temporal Agency

Imagination, in this light, is not a detour from reality but a constitutive act. When we imagine a future, we are not simply picturing it; we are participating in its potential actualisation. We reconfigure attractor landscapes. We shift the probabilities of what will come to pass.

This is why storytelling, art, dreaming, and theorising matter. They are practices of future-making — not in the predictive sense, but in the world-forming sense. Every imagined possibility we take seriously begins to alter the field of what seems possible.

Becoming With the Future

To live with future-bearing time is to be aware that the present is not only a product of the past, but a participant in the future. It is to understand becoming as a process not merely of unfolding but of emergent alignment — tuning ourselves to what wants to happen through us.

In this sense, the future is not fate but field — not fixed endpoint but dynamic invitation.

---

And so we conclude this journey into the temporalities of meaning. In the unfolding of relation, time is not a container, but a participant — a rhythm, a threshold, a lure.