5 Symbolic Processes: Meaning and Construal

In our journey through The Construal Experiments, we have explored solitary processes, the emergence of time and space, and recursive processes that generate reflexivity and higher-order horizons. Now we turn to symbolic processes — language, dialogue, and other forms of symbolic activity — to see how meaning itself emerges in relational fields.

Symbolic Processes as Recursive Alignments

A symbolic process is a process that refers not only to itself or other processes, but to patterns, norms, and distinctions within a relational field. Language, for instance, is a recursive process:

• Utterances are aligned with previous utterances.

• Words, grammar, and symbols emerge as coordinated relational structures.

• Meaning arises not from words themselves but from the relations they instantiate across participants and contexts.

Construal as Constitutive of Meaning

In relational ontology, meaning is never pre-given: it emerges in the act of construal. A sentence does not carry meaning independently; it becomes meaningful when processes (speakers, listeners, context) are aligned and phased relationally.

This insight has profound implications:

• AI and computation: AI outputs are not meaningful in isolation; they gain significance only in relational fields with human or other interpretive processes.

• Social systems: Norms, symbols, and culture arise through recursive construals of many interacting processes.

• Personal identity: Selfhood is enacted as a recursive alignment of one’s own processes with social and symbolic fields.

Horizons of Symbolic Construal

Symbolic processes extend the horizons we have explored:

• Time and space arise first from the alignment of processes.

• Recursive processes create reflexive horizons and higher-order construals.

• Symbolic processes expand these horizons further, creating structured fields of meaning, identity, and coordination.

In other words, the architecture of symbolic reality emerges from relational cuts applied recursively across processes, producing the familiar worlds of language, culture, and social interaction.

Concluding the Series

Through these five posts, we have traced a path from the simplicity of a solitary process to the complexity of symbolic fields:

1. The Solitary Process — process exists without time or space.

2. The Dual Process — time emerges as coherence between processes.

3. The Relational Field — space emerges from multiple processes in alignment.

4. Recursive Processes — reflexivity and metaconstrual create higher-order horizons.

5. Symbolic Processes — meaning and social reality emerge in recursive relational fields.

At every stage, we see that horizons of construal — time, space, reflexivity, and symbolic meaning — are not independent structures but emerge from the relations we enact among processes.

This series offers a framework for understanding reality not as a collection of objects or pre-given dimensions, but as a field of relational possibility, continuously actualised in the interplay of processes.