Relational Epistemology: Knowing as Becoming-With

1 Knowledge as Relation, Not Possession

Reframing epistemology in a co-emergent world

What does it mean to know, when knowledge is not a possession but a relation?

In many dominant traditions, knowledge has been imagined as a kind of object — something we acquire, hold, store, and transfer. We “gain” knowledge, “possess” insights, and “accumulate” information, as if understanding were a commodity and the knower a solitary collector.

But this metaphor of knowledge-as-possession arises from — and reinforces — a particular ontology: one in which entities are discrete, self-contained, and fundamentally separate from one another. From this view, to know something is to stand at a distance, to observe without entanglement, and to translate the world into representations we can control.

What if that picture no longer holds?

In this series, we want to explore what happens when we reimagine knowing through the lens of a relational ontology — one in which entities emerge through relation, not apart from it. In such a world, to know something is not to stand outside it, but to participate in its becoming. Knowledge is not the mapping of a pre-existing terrain, but the unfolding of meaning in and through relation.

This idea is not without precedent. Indigenous epistemologies, feminist science studies, Buddhist interdependence, and ecological thought have all questioned the myth of the isolated observer. In relational systems, objectivity is not neutrality, but accountability. And knowing is no longer an act of extraction, but of entanglement.

Our own model emerges from this same impulse. Drawing on systemic functional linguistics, neuronal group selection, and relational process thought, we view meaning as not pre-given but semiotically co-actualised — a product of shared potential and local instantiation. From this vantage point, to know is to bring forth a world together.

In the posts to come, we’ll explore:

• how the subject–object divide collapses in a relational universe

• how language mediates shared becoming

• why all knowledge is situated, embodied, and historically contingent

• what kind of ethics emerge from epistemic entanglement

• and how reverence for the unknowable may be the most relational epistemic act of all.

We invite you, then, not to acquire these ideas, but to enter into relation with them. Let them change you — even if slightly. Let them listen back.

Because to know is not to have —

It is to become with.

2 The Collapse of the Subject–Object Divide

From observer to participant in the act of knowing

The modern Western tradition has long been shaped by a powerful epistemic split: the division between subject and object, knower and known. This binary underlies many of our institutions and practices — from the scientific method to legal discourse, from education to economics. It frames the world as a collection of objects, and the self as a separate subject that can stand outside, observe, and represent.

But from a relational perspective, this split begins to unravel.

If beings come into being through relation, then there are no subjects without objects, and no objects without subjects. The distinction itself is an artefact of a particular mode of meaning-making — one that favours distance, fixity, and control. In reality, the knower and the known are co-constituted in the act of knowing.

To observe is already to participate.

We see this clearly in quantum mechanics, where the act of measurement collapses the wavefunction — not because the observer’s consciousness imposes itself, but because the very framework of observation brings forth a particular actuality from a field of potential. But this is not limited to physics. Every act of perception, of language, of meaning, is an actualisation of shared potential — an event in which world and mind emerge together.

In systemic functional linguistics, meaning arises from the interplay of potential and instance, and unfolds across strata: from experience to semantics, from semantics to wording. There is no pure observer; there is only the unfolding of meaning as relation. The speaker is not a solitary source, but a node in a network of historical, cultural, and intersubjective potentials.

And in Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, consciousness itself is not the mirror of a pre-given world, but the emergent property of a nervous system undergoing experience-dependent selection. What the self “knows” is inseparable from how it has become.

This means that to know is not to grasp a pre-existent object, but to enter into relation — to instantiate one possibility among many, co-shaped by one’s perspective, location, and history.

In a relational epistemology:

• Knowledge is process, not product.

• The subject is enmeshed, not removed.

• The world is responsive, not passive.

• And every act of knowing changes both the knower and the known.

This is not the end of rigour or clarity. It is the beginning of accountable entanglement.

It is the shift from knowledge as certainty, to knowledge as participatory unfolding.

Next, we’ll look at how language makes this possible — how it not only mediates meaning, but enacts the relationality at the heart of knowing.

3 Language as Relational Act

Meaning arises in the space-between

If knowledge is not possession but participation, then how does this participation take form?

Through language.

Language is often imagined as a code — a tool for labelling objects and transmitting information from one mind to another. But from a relational epistemology, this model fails to capture the generative role of language in world-making. Language does not simply represent a world already there. It co-creates it.

In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), language is a semiotic system — a system of meaning potential that is instantiated in concrete acts. These acts unfold across multiple strata (semantics, lexicogrammar, phonology) and serve three simultaneous functions:

• Ideational: construing experience

• Interpersonal: enacting relationships

• Textual: weaving meaning into flow

What we call a “fact” is already a construal — the result of selections from a system of potential meanings. And these selections are never neutral. They enact positions, relationships, values, and ontologies.

Language, then, is not a mirror but a gesture: a semiotic act that brings forth a world in dialogue with others. Each utterance is a thread in the web of shared becoming. It presupposes a listener, anticipates a response, and is shaped by the histories of meaning that precede it.

From this perspective, language is not in the mind. It is a relational field:

• An attractor space of shared habits, histories, and resonances

• A zone of tension between what is known, what is possible, and what is becoming

• A medium in which knower and known meet, not as fixed entities, but as co-emergent presences

Even the notion of a “subject” relies on language. In SFL terms, the self is not the origin of meaning but an interpersonal enactment: the I that says “I” exists because it is said, not before. The self is a semiotic figure — an ongoing performance in a field of voices.

And just as potential meanings are actualised through instantiation, so knowledge itself is always instance-bound: specific to its conditions of utterance, yet drawing on collective resources.

To know, then, is not simply to internalise. It is to enter a dialogue, to respond, to take up a position in a web of meanings that precedes and exceeds us.

We become knowers by participating in the language-worlds of others.

In the next post, we will explore the implications of this view for objectivity, and what it might mean to be “rigorous” in a relational universe.

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4 From Observation to Participation: Rethinking Objectivity

The story of Western knowledge has often been told as a progressive refinement of objectivity. To know truly, we were told, was to see without bias, to stand apart from the world, and to observe it as it is — unclouded by our subjectivity. This myth of the detached knower brought powerful tools and a certain kind of mastery. But it also obscured something vital: we are never not part of the world we seek to know.

The Observer is Always Embedded

In a relational ontology, there is no Archimedean point — no view from nowhere. Every act of knowing is situated. We know from somewhere, with others, and through the lenses of meaning systems we inherit and co-create.

Science itself has recognised this. In quantum mechanics, the act of measurement collapses potentiality into actuality. In ecology, the observer is part of the system. In anthropology, knowledge is inseparable from cultural standpoint. Across disciplines, cracks have appeared in the illusion of detachment — and through them, a richer vision of participation is emerging.

Knowing as Intra-action

Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action replaces the notion of interaction between pre-existing entities. It suggests that entities do not pre-exist their relations — they emerge through their relations. In this light, knowing is not about mapping an independent world; it’s about becoming-with the world through patterns of entanglement. Epistemology becomes relational practice.

Objectivity, then, must be reframed. Not as distance from, but as accountability to. Not as removal of the self, but as conscious inclusion of one’s position, values, and relational responsibilities. In this sense, objectivity becomes a stance of ethical situatedness — not erasure of perspective, but clarity about how one’s perspective shapes the knowing.

The Relational Epistemic Stance

To know relationally is to shift from observer to participant, from explanation to engagement, from certainty to attunement. It asks:

• What are the relations that make this knowing possible?

• How do I participate in the emergence of this knowledge?

• What does this knowledge make possible — and what does it foreclose?

Such questions do not undermine rigour — they deepen it. They invite humility, curiosity, and responsiveness. They make space for other ways of knowing — Indigenous, poetic, embodied — that have long been marginalised by the myth of dispassionate observation.

Knowing is a Form of Care

In this view, knowing is not just cognitive but ethical. It is a form of care — a way of relating that transforms both the knower and the known. To know something is not simply to grasp it, but to participate in its becoming, to be shaped by its presence, and to respond to its needs.

In relational epistemology, knowledge is not a possession. It is a practice of participation, grounded in the shared world we co-create.

5 Learning as Transformation: Becoming-with What We Know

If knowing is a form of participation, then learning is not simply the accumulation of information. It is a transformation of who we are, through our entanglement with what we come to know. In a relational ontology, learning is not just acquiring knowledge — it is becoming-with the world.

From Acquisition to Transformation

Traditional models of education often cast learning as transfer: knowledge is a commodity held by one party and passed to another. But this assumes that the learner remains fundamentally unchanged — a stable self that merely receives.

In contrast, relational epistemology frames learning as ontogenetic — it changes the knower. To learn something deeply is to reconfigure one’s patterns of attention, action, and relation. The learner is not an empty vessel but a node in an unfolding web of becoming.

This shift echoes what happens in developmental systems theory and in Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection: new patterns emerge not from imprinting but from dynamic reorganisation. Just as neural circuits are strengthened through lived experience, our ways of meaning-making are sculpted through our participation in meaningful practices.

Co-Transformation and Mutual Becoming

Relational learning is not individualistic. It happens in relation: with others, with environments, with texts, with traditions. And in each of these relations, something shifts — not only in the learner, but in the world.

When we engage with a concept, a story, a landscape, or a community, both parties are changed. The world becomes differently knowable through us, and we become differently possible through it. This is co-transformation — learning as a mutual unfolding.

This view challenges the false neutrality of traditional schooling, which too often treats learning as assimilation into pre-existing structures. A relational pedagogy asks: What is being transformed? What is being sustained? What is being silenced?

The Temporality of Learning

Learning unfolds in time — but not clock time. It unfolds in meaningful temporality, the felt rhythm of processes of change. From this angle, learning is less like crossing off outcomes and more like tending a garden: slow, recursive, attuned to conditions and possibilities.

In relational temporality, learning is not linear progression. It is spiral, recursive, dialogic. We revisit ideas in new contexts, re-make meanings through new relations, re-compose ourselves again and again.

Learning as Ethical Becoming

To learn relationally is to enter into a practice of care. It matters what we learn — and it matters how we are changed by that learning. Not all transformations are life-affirming. Not all knowledge nurtures the possible.

Thus, relational learning is not just a pedagogical theory. It is a practice of discernment: Which relations do I enter? Which knowings do I deepen? How do I stay accountable to what I become-with?

In this view, education is not the production of skilled individuals for a system. It is the cultivation of relational beings who can respond wisely and compassionately to the worlds they co-create.

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6 Beyond the Mirror: The Limits of Objectivity in a Co-Emergent World

We often imagine knowledge as a kind of mirror — a faithful reflection of the world "out there." Science, in this view, is the supreme polisher of the mirror, offering an ever-clearer image of reality. But what if there is no static reality to reflect? What if the world, and the knower, are co-emergent?

Objectivity as Distance

The Enlightenment ideal of objectivity promised detachment. To know truly, one must step back, set aside bias, and observe from a neutral vantage point. The ideal observer is outside the system, unaffected by what is observed.

But in a relational universe, such detachment is a fiction. All knowing is entangled — situated in bodies, cultures, ecologies, languages. The very act of observing is also a way of participating. To observe is to select, to frame, to relate.

This is not a failure of objectivity — it is a revelation of how knowing works.

Entangled Observation

Quantum physics has long taught us that the observer affects the observed. But this is not just a quirk of subatomic particles. In human meaning-making, too, our ways of seeing shape what is seen. Theories are not just mirrors — they are tools that cut grooves into the world, making some pathways possible and others invisible.

In this light, knowledge is not neutral representation. It is intra-action (as Karen Barad puts it): a coming-into-relation that brings both knower and known into being.

We do not find truth lying there in the world, untouched. We enter into a relationship with what is. And in that relationship, both the world and the knower are transformed.

Situated Knowledges

Feminist epistemologists such as Donna Haraway have insisted on situated knowledges — an alternative to the view-from-nowhere. All knowledge arises from a location, a history, a set of relations. This does not make it false; it makes it accountable.

From a relational perspective, knowledge gains its richness not from abstract distance but from concrete engagement. A farmer knows the soil differently than a satellite does. A patient knows pain differently than a clinician. Both knowings are valid — and partial.

Objectivity, then, is not purity from relation. It is responsibility within relation. It means being answerable to the ways our knowing shapes the world and to the consequences of our conceptual tools.

Knowing Otherwise

In a co-emergent world, there is no God's-eye view. But there are many eyes, many voices, many ways of knowing. Rather than striving for control over truth, we can listen across difference, learn in dialogue, and co-create more livable futures.

This does not mean “anything goes.” It means we go together, carefully, aware that knowledge is never solitary. It is always a weaving — of bodies, histories, ecologies, and desires.

In the end, to know relationally is to enter the dance: not mastering the steps, but moving responsively, attuned to the rhythms of the world and to the calls of others.

7 Wisdom as Relational Attunement: Knowing-with in a Living World

As we arrive at the end of this inquiry, we find ourselves far from the domain of static facts and finished truths. In their place, we encounter something more fluid, more fragile, and more alive: wisdom — not as a body of knowledge, but as a practice of attunement.

From Knowing About to Knowing-With

We began by unseating the myth of the solitary knower, the one who stands outside the world and names it from a distance. What emerged instead is a vision of knowledge as relational: we know with, not just about. We become part of what we seek to understand.

In this shift from separation to entanglement, we discover that wisdom lies not in control, but in participation. It’s not the accumulation of facts, but the deepening of responsiveness — the ability to notice, to care, to respond in kind to the needs of a moment, a community, a living world.

The Rhythms of Attunement

To attune is to move in resonance with others — not only with other humans, but with animals, forests, rivers, ancestors, symbols, dreams. In a relational epistemology, all of these become sites of knowing. They are not passive objects of study, but active participants in the unfolding of understanding.

Wisdom listens. It senses shifts in tempo, texture, and tone. It recognises that meaning is emergent, and that knowing means staying open — porous — to what has not yet fully arrived.

Attunement requires slowness. Stillness. The relinquishing of the desire to grasp. It is a posture of receptive presence, of abiding-with.

The Ethical Dimension

Because knowing is never neutral, wisdom bears an ethical charge. It asks not just Is this true? but What is this relationship asking of me? It is not about possessing knowledge, but being answerable to it — recognising that knowing reshapes both the world and ourselves.

This moves us from epistemology to ethics, from understanding to care. If we are always becoming-with, then we are also always responsible-for. The world we come to know is not something we can leave unchanged. It changes with us.

Reclaiming the Sacred in Knowing

In a relational universe, knowing is not just mental. It is affective, bodily, symbolic, storied. It participates in the sacred — not as a separate domain, but as the depth dimension of all becoming.

To know wisely is to honour this depth — to treat the world not as object, but as thou. In this spirit, wisdom is not cleverness. It is reverence. It is humility in the face of complexity, and trust in the co-arising of understanding through relation.

We might even say that wisdom is what knowing becomes when it has been softened by love.

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The Way Ahead

As we conclude this series, we offer not a map but an invitation. To know is not to conquer mystery, but to walk with it. To live relationally is to live in meaning — not as a thing we hold, but as a space we co-inhabit and co-create.

Let us meet the world, not as masters, but as kin. Let us listen, attend, respond — and in so doing, let us become wise.

Explorations in the Ecology of Semogenesis

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

3 Instantiation: Where Meaning Comes Alive

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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

4 The Triangle of Meaning: Reconstrual, Individuation, Instantiation

A synthesis of three dimensions of semiotic life

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

A Relational Ontology Of Biological Systems

1 Rethinking the Gene: From Replicator to Developmental Potential

In our recent exploration of memes, we moved beyond the idea of cultural replication and proposed a more relational view: memes are not self-contained replicators but constrained meaning potentials that are instantiated and individuated across social contexts. This shift invites a parallel question: can we rethink genes in the same way?

The gene, like the meme, has often been cast as a replicator—a discrete unit of inheritance, "selfishly striving" to preserve itself across generations. But just as memetics gains depth when we view it through a lens of meaning, context, and selection, genetics too can benefit from a developmental perspective. Rather than treating genes as autonomous agents of replication, we might instead approach them as elements of biological potential, instantiated in the material processes of cellular development and evolution.

From Replication to Instantiation

A gene, in itself, is not a thing that does. It is a sequence of possibilities—a structured potential for participation in processes of growth, differentiation, and adaptation. What a gene becomes in any instance depends on:

• The cellular context in which it is transcribed.

• The regulatory networks that activate or silence it.

• The organismal systems that integrate its effects.

• The environmental cues that constrain or afford its activation.

In this view, genes are not replicated in the narrow sense; they are instantiated through a dynamic process of selection, modulation, and integration. Each instance of gene activation is an actualisation of potential—a particular pathway taken among many latent possibilities.

The Ontology of Genetic Potential

We can apply here a relational ontology, in which the gene is not a self-contained unit but a relational entity: its meaning lies not in its internal sequence alone, but in its functional positioning within a larger biological system. In other words:

• The genome is a system of biological potential.

• Gene activation is instantiation within that system.

• Genetic individuation is the variation of instantiations across cells, tissues, and organisms.

This is not to deny the material specificity of genes. Rather, it is to insist that the specificity of DNA sequences does not equate to deterministic agency. Genes make available developmental possibilities; they do not dictate outcomes.

Individuation in the Genetic System

Just as memes are individuated across social users, genes are individuated across biological scales. A single gene may be instantiated differently:

• In different cell types within the same organism.

• In the same cell type under different developmental stages.

• In different organisms sharing a homologous sequence.

This means that genetic potential is not uniformly distributed. The relation between the genome of the cell, the organism, the population, and the species becomes a cline of individuation. The identity of the gene is not fixed by its sequence alone but by the way it participates in meaning-making processes of biological development.

Selection Without Replication

Natural selection still plays a central role—but in this framework, selection acts on instantiations, not on gene sequences abstracted from context. The "fitness" of a gene depends on how its potential is actualised in specific developmental and environmental circumstances. What persists is not a replicator per se, but a pattern of viable instantiations.

Over evolutionary time, certain potentials are reinforced—not because they are selfish, but because they are biologically workable within specific selection landscapes. This parallels our reframing of memes: what spreads is not a unit that copies itself, but a constrained potential whose instantiations prove viable across varied contexts.

Toward a Developmental Gene Ontology

This perspective invites a shift from the gene-as-replicator model to a gene-as-developmental-potential model. It aligns with systems biology, developmental biology, and epigenetics, all of which reveal genes as embedded participants in complex networks of interaction and interpretation.

Such a model opens up new questions:

• How do developmental contexts shape the individuation of genetic potential?

• How do systemic constraints act as selection pressures on instantiations?

• How might this framing help integrate genomic science with organismal and ecological perspectives?

By repositioning the gene within a relational, instantiational ontology, we move toward a richer view of life—not as a battle of replicators, but as a coordinated unfolding of potential across nested systems of meaning and materiality.

2 Epigenetics and the Instantiation of Biological Potential

In our reframing of the gene, we moved from the idea of the gene as a self-replicating unit to a model in which genes are elements of biological potential—instantiated differently across developmental, cellular, and environmental contexts. Nowhere is this more evident than in epigenetics: the study of how gene activity is regulated without altering the DNA sequence itself.

Epigenetics doesn’t just complicate the replicator model; it dismantles it. It shows that what matters is not just what is inherited, but how it is instantiated—and that this instantiation is contextually shaped, dynamically regulated, and in some cases, even heritable across generations.

Instantiation in Epigenetic Systems

Epigenetic markers—such as DNA methylation or histone modification—don’t change the underlying genetic code. Instead, they modulate the actualisation of potential. They determine:

• Whether a gene is switched on or off.

• How strongly a gene is expressed.

• When and where in the organism this occurs.

Thus, the genome is not a script to be read linearly but a landscape of potential, with epigenetic mechanisms acting as gates, filters, and signal routers. The same sequence of nucleotides may give rise to radically different outcomes depending on the epigenetic systems that mediate its instantiation.

Epigenetic Individuation

One of the most striking features of epigenetics is how it individuates genetic potential. Every cell in a multicellular organism contains essentially the same genome, yet the epigenetic configuration of those cells diverges widely. This means that:

• Epigenetic individuation occurs at the cellular level, enabling differentiation of cell types.

• It continues throughout the life course, shaping responses to nutrition, stress, trauma, and environmental cues.

• It can be transgenerational, meaning that actualisations of potential may shape the potential available to the next generation—not by altering DNA, but by altering how it is accessed.

From this vantage point, epigenetics is not a supplementary mechanism layered on top of genetics; it is a core dimension of biological actualisation. It embodies the principle that meaning—here, in the form of functional biological outcomes—arises not from isolated sequences but from systems of constrained potential unfolding across time.

Rethinking Heritability

In the traditional gene-as-replicator model, heritability is about the transmission of genetic material. In this alternative model, we might distinguish between:

• Genetic inheritance: the transmission of biological potential (i.e., the genome).

• Epigenetic inheritance: the transmission of constraints on potential (e.g., methylation patterns).

• Developmental inheritance: the ongoing instantiation of potential through interaction with ecological and social environments.

This broader framing allows us to see how heritability is not just about copying, but about the reconstruction of conditions under which potential is realised. This is especially relevant when thinking about how early life conditions, parental experiences, and environmental exposures can shape the developmental trajectory of organisms—sometimes across multiple generations.

Toward a Relational Biology

Epigenetics gives empirical traction to a relational ontology of life. It shows that:

• Potential is structured, but never prescriptive.

• Context is constitutive, not secondary.

• Variation is not noise, but a central feature of biological meaning-making.

Rather than seeing the genome as a stable blueprint over which epigenetics casts a fuzzy shadow, we might say that the genome is a field of potential, and epigenetics is one of the systems through which that field is organised, modulated, and instantiated.

In this way, epigenetics becomes a key locus for thinking about how biological systems are not just self-maintaining, but self-actualising—developing along paths shaped by their history, structure, and situatedness.

3 Embryogenesis and the Unfolding of Developmental Potential

Having reframed genes as structured biological potential—and epigenetics as one of the systems through which that potential is contextually instantiated—we now turn to perhaps the most dramatic theatre of biological actualisation: development. In the unfolding of an organism from a single cell to a complex multicellular individual, we see biological potential not only actualised, but orchestrated, differentiated, and individuated across time and space.

This is the domain of embryogenesis—and it powerfully affirms our model of constrained potential realised in instance.

From Zygote to Organism: A Developmental Trajectory

Every multicellular organism begins as a single cell. That cell contains the full developmental potential of the organism—yet almost nothing of the organism’s structure has been actualised. What unfolds is not a simple execution of a program, but a dynamic cascade of instantiations, each shaped by:

• Epigenetic constraints, which modulate access to genetic potential.

• Local environments, including the chemical gradients and physical conditions of the embryonic context.

• Intercellular signalling, through which developing cells co-regulate one another's differentiation.

Thus, development is not the expression of a code, but the orchestration of a system—a process that is at once internally constrained and environmentally shaped.

Individuation through Differentiation

Each stage of development increases individuation. The fertilised egg is pluripotent, containing the potential for any cell type. But as development proceeds, this potential is progressively constrained. Cells become muscle, skin, neurones—not because they lose genetic information, but because their epigenetic landscape and relational positioning narrows what is possible in each local context.

In this sense:

• Development is individuation through instantiation. Each differentiation is a move from general potential toward specific actualisation.

• The organism as a whole is not simply a sum of cells, but a self-organising instantiation of its own potential.

Crucially, individuation happens within a system—the developing embryo. Each part's identity is shaped not only by its internal potential, but by its relation to the whole.

Developmental Potential Is Not Destiny

It is tempting to think of developmental potential as deterministic—but this is an artefact of the replicator metaphor. In reality, developmental pathways are robust but flexible. They are regulated through feedback, sensitive to environmental cues, and open to multiple pathways of actualisation.

• Temperature can affect sex determination in reptiles.

• Nutritional signals can shift metabolic development.

• In humans, early relational environments can shape neurobiological development well into adulthood.

Such variability is not a bug in the system—it is part of its design. Developmental potential is not a script, but a field of affordances, structured yet responsive.

The developing organism is not only making a body; it is making a self—an individuated system capable of perception, action, and interaction.

Development Is Ongoing

Embryogenesis may seem like a contained process, but in truth, development never ends. The same principles that guide early development continue throughout life:

• Neural plasticity enables ongoing individuation of experience.

• Immune development continues into adulthood, shaped by environmental exposure.

• Social and symbolic environments modulate biological systems across the lifespan.

Thus, the developmental potential of an organism is not confined to the womb. It is lifelong—and always embedded in contexts of meaning.

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In this light, development is not merely biological engineering—it is living semiosis: the ongoing instantiation of a structured potential shaped by internal dynamics, environmental contexts, and the organism's own unfolding history.

4 From Development to Evolution: Populations as Potentials in Motion

If development is the instantiation of biological potential within the life of a single organism, then evolution is the restructuring of biological potential across the life of a population. What changes over generations is not just what is actualised, but what is possible—what a given lineage can become, given its structured constraints and environmental affordances.

In reframing genes not as replicators but as structured potential, we unlock a view of evolution not as the competition of discrete entities, but as a history of shifting constraints—a dynamic dance between potential and instance, between lineage and environment, between what can be and what is.

Populations as Biological Potentials

A population is not merely a group of individuals, but a field of potential variation—a set of structured possibilities instantiated in different ways across members, environments, and time. Variation arises not simply from mutation, but from:

• Epigenetic modulation across generations,

• Developmental plasticity within individuals,

• Ecological relationships that shape both potential and selection.

Thus, we can treat the population itself as a system of biological possibility.

Each individual organism is an individuation of the population’s developmental potential, shaped by the constraints of its genotype, the regulation of its epigenome, and the specificity of its environment. And just as meaning systems evolve through repeated instantiations, biological systems evolve as the systemic structure of potential itself shifts—through drift, selection, and developmental constraint.

Selection Without Replication

Selection, in this view, does not act on replicators—it acts on instances. That is, it acts on the actualisations of potential. What persists over time is not an individual gene, but the viability of certain instantiations under prevailing environmental constraints.

This view shifts the question from "What replicates best?" to:

• What is repeatedly actualisable under given conditions?

• What constraints on potential prove adaptive or maladaptive over time?

• How do developmental systems bias the direction of future variation?

Crucially, this opens a door to understanding the role of developmental bias—the idea that not all variation is equally likely, and that some pathways of change are more readily accessible than others. Evolutionary change, then, is not an arbitrary shuffle of genotypes, but the reconfiguration of structured possibilities, constrained by past actualisations and future affordances.

Evolution as the Individuation of Lineages

If individual development is a process of individuation—where pluripotent cells become differentiated tissues—then we might say that evolution is the individuation of lineages. Over time, a lineage becomes more distinct, more constrained, and more specialised in how it instantiates biological potential.

Speciation, in this light, is not the splitting of a replicating entity, but the differentiation of developmental trajectories—a point at which systems of potential have diverged far enough that they no longer instantiate into mutually recognisable forms.

And just as in meaning systems, individuation always unfolds within an ecology—of other organisms, of niches, of symbolic or environmental pressures. It is always relational.

Populations as Semiotic Systems?

Without pressing too hard on terminology, we might say that populations—like meaning systems—are structured orders of potential instantiated in context. They carry the marks of previous actualisations, and they reshape what is possible in the future. They evolve, not through simple replication, but through the ongoing negotiation of constraint and possibility.

In this way, the model we built for memes now illuminates the biology of evolution—not by collapsing one domain into the other, but by showing how both operate through the patterned interplay of:

• Structured potential

• Contextual instantiation

• Constraint and variation

• Emergent individuation

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With this, we've extended our model across ontogeny and phylogeny—across individual development and population-level evolution.

5 Ecology as the Field of Co-Instantiation: Completing the Arc from Genes to Meaning

If we reframe genes not as replicators but as structured potentials, and view development as the process of biological instantiation, then evolution becomes not the survival of replicators, but the historical transformation of what can be instantiated. Throughout this reconceptualisation, we have moved from the level of genes to cells, to organisms, and to developmental systems. To complete the arc, we must now turn to the ecological systems in which these potentials are always embedded, and through which they are actualised.

Ecology as Instantiating Context

In traditional evolutionary narratives, the environment plays the role of selector: it rewards or punishes organisms based on how well their inherited traits suit current conditions. But if we adopt a relational ontology, the ecological environment is not just a backdrop for selection. It is the dynamic and co-evolving field of instantiation for biological potential.

This means:

• The environment does not merely select from a fixed pool of variations.

• It co-participates in shaping what can be varied, developed, and sustained.

• Ecological systems are not external filters but semi-structured potentials that enter into relation with genetic, cellular, and organismic potentials.

From this perspective, an ecological system is not a static stage but a co-instantiating partner. It is:

• Material: composed of energy flows, chemical gradients, food webs, and climate systems.

• Historical: shaped by previous instantiations, including those of other organisms.

• Potential-laden: offering affordances and constraints for future instantiation.

Development in Ecological Context

Developmental systems theory already emphasises that development is not pre-programmed but context-sensitive. Ecology is the name we give to that broader context in which development unfolds:

• Genes are expressed differently depending on environmental signals.

• Phenotypes emerge through interactions with both physical and social surroundings.

• Behaviour, morphology, and life strategies are co-shaped by conditions that are themselves shaped by other organisms.

This makes the ecological system a participant in instantiation at every level. An ecological niche is not a container; it is an interface of mutual shaping. A beaver does not simply inhabit a stream—it co-instantiates a wetland system through dam building. Coral reefs emerge not just from the genes of coral polyps, but from their interactions with water temperature, symbiotic algae, nutrient flows, and other species.

Evolution as Ecological Reconfiguration

When ecological systems are seen as co-instantiating fields, evolution becomes not just a shift in gene frequencies, but a reconfiguration of the possible. Ecological changes—whether slow or abrupt—reshape what can be biologically instantiated. For example:

• Climate change alters developmental thresholds and reproductive timing.

• Species invasions open or close off relational pathways.

• Habitat loss collapses the relational scaffolds that sustain some phenotypes.

So evolution is not just adaptation to a fixed environment. It is the co-adaptive transformation of organisms and environments—what some theorists call niche construction, and what we might now call the mutual shaping of potential across levels of biological and ecological organisation.

From Meaning to Matter, and Back Again

Throughout our exploration of memes, genes, and ecology, we have used the model of potential and instantiation to bridge meaning and biology. The logic that holds across them is neither metaphorical nor mechanical. It is ontological:

• Meaning is semiotic potential instantiated in context.

• Development is biological potential instantiated in context.

• Ecology is the relational context through which both are co-instantiated.

We end where we began: not with discrete units that replicate, but with structured potentials that are actualised in relation. The world is not made of things that persist. It is made of potentials that unfold through relation, in the strata of meaning and matter, mind and life, individual and collective, organism and ecology.

And this is what it means to think ecologically: to see not just systems, but instantiating fields—spaces of unfolding, negotiation, and co-emergence. Ecology is not just the context in which life happens. It is the relational grammar of life itself.