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Symbol and Language: The Relation as Condition

Type: Ontological-Structural Criterion

Operational Definition

In the Ontology of Emergent Complexity, the symbol only acquires operative efficacy when inserted into a relational system that grants it functional difference. Such a system is language: a field of material interactions where symbols emerge as differentiated forms of inscription. Outside of this field, there is no symbol, only unreinscribed matter.

Expanded Formulation

Traditionally, philosophy attributed to the symbol an autonomy or a transcendence capable of existing independently of the system in which it is inscribed. However, for the Ontology of Emergent Complexity, the symbol is not a pre-existing datum, but a relational event. A symbol is every functional reorganization of matter that becomes capable of coding an absence, a difference, or an alterity, creating meaning through interactions within a specific symbolic-relational field — language.

Language, in this context, is not reducible to discourse or human communication, but broadly understood as any system of material relations sufficiently organized to produce operative meaning. This includes biological, technological, and hybrid systems, provided they possess a functional regime of differentiation, reinscription, and symbolic modulation. The field of language is, therefore, a necessary condition for something to emerge as a symbol: only there does the symbol gain efficacy, value, and meaning.

This approach radically distances itself from any symbolic essentialisms or linguistic idealisms that seek a transcendent foundation for the symbol. On the contrary, radical immanence is affirmed: the symbol is not sustained on a separate plane, but is born directly from the functional reorganization of matter. There are no symbols outside the relational regime that produces them; without internal interaction within a field of language, any material configuration remains undifferentiated, incapable of establishing symbolic inscription.

Consequently, the value of the symbol is not in its stability or universality, but in its capacity to establish operative differences within concrete material systems. The symbol is, thus, a situated and contingent ontological operator, whose meaning derives from its relative position within the relational field that constitutes it.

State of Matter

Stabilized Core

Relation Notes