17 Reweaving the Real: Collective Alignment After Collapse

Series: Construal and the Collective – Part 17

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Introduction: The Aftermath of Reflexive Failure

When symbolic systems collapse, what remains is not a clean slate, but a fractured field of semiotic residue: broken alignments, wounded myths, flickering rituals. The question is not how to return to coherence, but how a collective might begin again—how meaning can re-emerge when the symbolic order has turned in on itself.

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1. Ruins as Relational Traces

Post-collapse, the symbolic field is marked by:

• Fractured semiotic residues—myths, icons, or narratives that no longer phase

• Incoherent genres—fragments of past construals surviving without a systemic logic

• Intensified individuation—individuals carrying more of the burden of sense-making

These ruins are not empty. They retain traces of former alignment—echoes of potential.

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2. Re-alignment as Emergence, Not Restoration

A post-collapse realignment cannot be engineered from above. It emerges when:

• Local construals resonate across scales

• Affiliations form around shared phasing, not shared content

• Symbolic innovations condense the relational potential of the field

The collective re-phases when meaning begins to scale again—not as repetition, but as novel coherence.

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3. Mythogenesis After Collapse

The seeds of new symbolic life are often mythic—but in a different key:

• Not the hero’s journey, but the weaver’s return: a dispersed process of stitching fragments into new fabrics

• Not salvation myths, but reciprocal recognition: narratives that allow selves to see themselves in relation

• Not foundational truths, but relational becomings: stories that unfold through phasing, not fixed meaning

These myths do not replace the broken ones. They grow through the fractures.

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4. Meta-symbolic Genres as Carriers of Renewal

Certain genres hold the potential to initiate re-alignment:

• Dialogic rituals—not performance, but situated acts of shared construal

• Grief-work—not closure, but bearing witness to the failure of meaning

• Speculative imaginaries—not utopias, but phase-possibility spaces

These genres don’t offer answers. They provide fields of symbolic incubation.

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5. Re-alignment as Ethical Practice

Realignment is not merely aesthetic or epistemic. It is an ethical act:

• To align is to commit to mutual construal

• To phase is to risk being reshaped by relation

• To symbolise is to hold the world as reflexive—even when it has forgotten itself

The new symbolic order, if it comes, will not emerge from above. It will be woven in the ruins, by those still willing to mean.

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Conclusion: Phasing Forward

We do not return from collapse. We rephase—slowly, contingently, relationally.

In the next post, we will explore how symbolic infrastructures can be cultivated to support this re-alignment: not as totalising systems, but as open architectures for collective construal.

16 Phase Collapse: When the Collective Cannot Align

Series: Construal and the Collective – Part 16

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Introduction: The System Breaks Its Own Construal

Not all symbolic evolution proceeds by graceful expansion. Some transitions are marked by collapse—not merely institutional breakdown or loss of social cohesion, but a systemic failure of symbolic alignment. This is not just crisis in the empirical sense, but crisis as a relational phase-space phenomenon: the collective can no longer construe itself.

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1. Collapse as Phase Misalignment

In relational ontology, collapse occurs when:

• Symbolic forms no longer align with the phase-space of the collective

• The collective can no longer phase itself meaningfully across scales

• Patterns of individuation and affiliation fail to produce coherence

This is not the failure of individuals or institutions per se, but of the relational field—its capacity to hold construals across difference.

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2. Fracture Across Scales

Collapse is scalar:

• Local phases become disjoint from collective ones

• Symbolic forms are recycled or weaponised without systemic integration

• Meta-symbolic genres may proliferate in destabilising ways: critique without reformation, irony without vision

The result is not a lack of symbols but a saturation without synthesis—a semiotic noise floor drowning out possible alignments.

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3. Crisis of Construal, Not of Content

In a symbolic collapse:

• There may be no shortage of narratives, but no shared field of construal

• Meanings cannot phase across scales—they fail to cohere as collective reality

• Social formations may revert to pre-symbolic forms of identity: blood, territory, charismatic force

The failure is not epistemic, but ontological: the world loses its reflexivity.

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4. Collapse as Reflexive Incoherence

Reflexivity becomes recursive malfunction:

• Every attempt to restore meaning triggers further instability

• Critique undoes itself; alignment generates backlash; vision is preemptively ironised

• The symbolic turn folds in on itself—the system cannot bear its own awareness

The collective enters a feedback loop of self-alienation.

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5. What Holds Through Collapse?

Even in collapse, some symbolic resources persist:

• Residual myths offer continuity, even if maladaptive

• Rituals may provide momentary coherence

• Art may hold space for incommensurable grief or longing

• Meta-symbolic genres, if grounded, may seed new alignments

But nothing guarantees recovery. Collapse is the loss of symbolic plasticity—the capacity to remap the real.

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Conclusion: Beyond the Fracture

Collapse reveals the limits of current symbolic architectures. It is not merely destruction, but exposure: of what no longer holds, of what never did, and of what might still be possible.

In the next post, we turn to the horizon of that possibility: how does symbolic life begin again after collapse? What seeds remain for reflexive re-alignment?

15 Phase-Brokers: The Role of Meta-Symbolic Genres

Series: Construal and the Collective – Part 15

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Introduction: The Breakdown and the Bridge

When scalar alignments fracture—when institutions ossify, myths lose grip, or individuals feel uncoupled from collective patterns—meta-symbolic genres emerge. These are symbolic formations whose function is not to reinforce a particular scale of construal, but to mediate between them.

Philosophy, art, science, critical theory, and speculative narrative are not merely “high” forms of culture. They are phase-brokers, active at the liminal edges where collective meaning must be renegotiated.

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1. What is a Meta-Symbolic Genre?

A meta-symbolic genre is one whose referent is the symbolic system itself. That is:

• It construes how construal is happening

• It interrogates which symbolic architectures are in play

• It may expose, disrupt, or recompose the alignments across social scales

Such genres are often:

• Reflexive (aware of their own symbolic positioning)

• Transversal (cutting across genres and strata)

• Disorienting (to shake entrenched patterns loose)

• Generative (of new alignments, genres, imaginaries)

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2. Philosophy as Phase-Broker

Philosophy, at its most vital, does not simply argue propositions—it questions the symbolic scaffolding through which propositions appear meaningful at all.

• It may render visible a misalignment between cultural myths and institutional logic

• It may reconfigure ontological assumptions that underpin a civilisation’s phase space

• It may forge new metaphysical cuts that become generative for future symbolic life

Philosophy brokers between the symbolic and the phase-possibility of the real.

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3. Art as Phase-Sensory Distortion

Art operates as a sensorium for misalignment:

• It makes felt what cannot yet be said

• It renders incommensurability perceivable

• It disorients habitual phasing so new alignments can become possible

An artwork can make one feel the unbridgeable, and in doing so, hold it open. In times of cultural instability, art often anticipates new symbolic orders before they crystallise.

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4. Science as Reflexive Structuration

Science, too, may act as a phase-broker—not merely by representing nature, but by:

• Abstracting regularities across collective constraints

• Providing symbolic tools that transform phase relations (e.g. computing, systems theory)

• Producing ontologies that destabilise old alignments (e.g. quantum, evolutionary, ecological paradigms)

Science does not remain “objective” here; it participates in restructuring meaning’s affordances.

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5. Criticality and Collective Self-Construal

Meta-symbolic genres play a vital role in collective self-construal:

• They offer symbolic means for society to see itself differently

• They introduce cuts that cannot be made from within operational genres

• They support the reflexive modulation of phase-space: what society can become

They are not outside the system—they are cuts within it that reveal the space of possible re-alignment.

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Conclusion: Mediating the Symbolic Turn

Phase-brokers become vital when meaning falters across scales. They:

• Hold open new possibilities of collective construal

• Create symbolic resources for phase transitions

• Help social formations renegotiate themselves

In the next post, we will turn to the problem of crisis and collapse: what happens when symbolic systems cannot accommodate emergent scales of alignment, and the collective enters a zone of phase breakdown.

14 Nested Alignments: Scaling Construal Across Collective Levels

Series: Construal and the Collective – Part 14

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Introduction: The Problem of Scale

Construal does not operate at a single scale. Every act of meaning belongs not only to an individual or a moment, but to nested strata of collective alignment:

• Interpersonal encounters

• Group narratives and practices

• Institutional structures

• Cultural imaginaries

• Civilisational phase-architectures

This post explores how scaling construal across these levels generates tension, alignment, and reflexive complexity.

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1. Multi-Scalar Meaning-Making

In a relational ontology, each instance of construal is already positioned within broader alignments:

Scale	Example	Nature of Construal
Individual	Personal values, semantic preferences	idiosyncratic, fluid
Interpersonal	Conversation, shared routines	negotiated, rhythmic
Group	Ritual, team coordination	patterned, cohesive
Institutional	Law, policy, education	standardised, recursive
Cultural	Myth, genre, ideology	sedimented, generative
Civilisational	Cosmology, epochal narrative	phase-setting, horizon-defining

Each scale is not simply larger, but differently structured in its phase-relations and construal potentials.

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2. Scalar Disalignment

Scaling construal introduces tensional drift:

• What feels meaningful at one level may misalign at another

• A community's reflexive awareness may exceed that of its institutions

• Institutions may demand stabilities that constrain group-level improvisation

• Cultural scripts may lag behind interpersonal realities

Meaning becomes frictional when scalar alignments are out of phase.

This is not a flaw—it is the terrain of reflexive life.

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3. Entrainment and Tuning

To navigate scalar tension, collectives engage in entrainment:

• Temporal tuning across levels

• Alignment through recursive genre

• Rhythmic re-construal to maintain coherence across nested contexts

Mechanisms of entrainment include:

• Canonical narratives

• Educational systems

• Shared symbolic repertoires

• Ritual synchronisation

However, over-entrainment ossifies potential. Phase-aware societies must balance coherence with openness.

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4. Reflexive Scale-Awareness

When collectives become reflexively aware of scale, new potentials emerge:

• Social formations can phase-shift deliberately across levels

• Institutions can support multi-scalar modulation rather than enforcing uniformity

• Individuals can cultivate scalar literacy: the capacity to hold multiple symbolic horizons in tension without collapse

This awareness is not abstract—it is embodied in genre, ritual, and institutional design.

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5. Symbolic Interphasing

The critical task is not to collapse scales into a single logic, but to mediate their interfacing:

• What meanings can translate across scales without distortion?

• Which meanings must remain incommensurable to preserve their phase-specific function?

• How can symbolic forms hold this tension open?

Genre systems, again, are key. A genre like satire or speculative fiction may speak across scales without demanding alignment.

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Conclusion: Holding Meaning Across Scales

Construal is never scalar-neutral. It stretches, reverberates, and disaligns across nested collectivities. A phase-aware society must:

• Foster entrainment without erasure

• Cultivate institutions that allow re-cutting across levels

• Embody scale-awareness as a lived symbolic capacity

In the next post, we will explore how meta-symbolic genres—such as philosophy, art, and science—function as phase-brokers, enabling societies to renegotiate their scalar alignments in symbolic terms.

13 Phase-Aware Societies: Structuring for Symbolic Modulation

Series: Construal and the Collective – Part 13

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Introduction: Designing for Phase-Shift

A society capable of reflexive plasticity must not merely withstand symbolic turbulence—it must be structured to modulate its own phase conditions. In this post, we explore what it means for a social formation to be phase-aware: not merely reacting to symbolic reconfiguration, but anticipating and enabling symbolic re-cutting as an intrinsic dynamic.

This is not an idealistic vision of perfect harmony. It is a structural commitment to symbolic agility.

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1. What Is a Phase-Aware Society?

A phase-aware society is one in which:

• Symbolic transitions are not pathologised

• Re-construal is built into institutional cycles

• Structural lag is minimised by design

• Semantic turbulence is treated as generative, not deviant

Such a society is attuned to the cut, the shift, the re-scaling of meaning—and structures itself around that awareness.

Phase-aware societies do not avoid disalignment. They navigate it deliberately.

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2. Architecture of Symbolic Modulation

What structural features support phase-awareness?

a. Multiphasic Institutions

Institutions must accommodate multiple symbolic temporalities:

• long cycles of shared construal

• shorter pulses of narrative revision

• rapid bursts of reframing under novel conditions

b. Reflexive Infrastructure

• Legal, educational, and communicative systems must support reflexive construal

• This includes genre systems that allow both continuity and recursive revision

• Media and ritual practices scaffold meta-semiotic participation: not just transmission of meaning, but modulation of its architecture

c. Semantic Reservoirs

• Collective memory must preserve past construals without ossifying them

• A semantic archive is required—accessible, interpretively rich, open to re-cutting

• Folklore, myth, historiography, and speculative fiction all play a role

d. Tensional Governance

• Governance does not eliminate conflict, but curates symbolic tension

• Deliberative mechanisms institutionalise phase tension as productive contradiction

• The aim is not consensus but construal coordination across divergence

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3. The Role of Ritual and Performance

Phase-awareness is not only conceptual—it must be embodied:

• Rituals mark symbolic transition, allowing collectives to track phase shifts

• Performative genres (theatre, satire, protest, liturgy) provide symbolic rehearsals of alternative construals

• These practices actualise potential meanings before they are stabilised

Performance is where a society previews the symbolic phase-space of its own becoming.

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4. From Crisis to Construal

In phase-unaware societies, meaning collapses into crisis:

• Normative frameworks become brittle

• Disalignment is interpreted as failure

• Authority is confused with stability

In contrast, phase-aware societies construe crisis as transition:

• Instability becomes signal, not noise

• Leadership involves narrative transduction, not control

• Collective agency emerges through re-articulation of symbolic horizons

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Conclusion: Societies as Construal Systems

To become phase-aware is to live within meaning as an evolving system, not a fixed map. This requires:

• Semiotic humility

• Structural openness

• Temporal and perspectival depth

• A willingness to hold construal itself as the site of reality’s becoming

In the next post, we will explore how such phase-awareness affects the scale of social coordination, asking: How does construal stretch across multiple nested collectivities, and what tensions emerge in the process?

12 Cultivating Reflexive Plasticity: Conditions for Symbolic Phase-Shift

Series: Construal and the Collective – Part 12

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Introduction: Beyond Stability, Toward Reflexive Readiness

To transduce symbolic turbulence into new alignment, a collective must be capable of reflexive plasticity: the capacity not just to adapt, but to reconstrue the basis of adaptation itself. This is not simply resilience. It is a meta-capacity for symbolic realignment — the collective equivalent of shifting how the system construes its own construals.

What conditions enable this?

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1. Reflexive Plasticity Defined

Reflexive plasticity is the capacity to:

• Consciously re-align construal relations

• Hold multiple symbolic gradients in tension

• Inhabit disalignment without collapse

• Facilitate transduction as a generative act

It is not the ability to stabilise symbols, but to re-symbolise stability itself under shifting conditions.

Reflexive plasticity is what allows a collective not just to interpret, but to remake the conditions under which interpretation holds.

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2. Conditions That Foster Reflexive Plasticity

Several enabling conditions support this collective capacity:

a. Semiotic Redundancy

• Multiple construal pathways co-exist

• Meaning is not over-fitted to a single trajectory

• Enables cross-scaling alignment in response to perturbation

b. Layered Reflexivity

• Distinctions between first-order meaning and second-order construal are cultivated

• The system can distinguish between symbolic action and symbolic architecture

c. Distributed Construal

• Meaning-making is not centralised

• Multiple loci of alignment emerge, allowing polycentric phase-shifts

d. Narrative Incompleteness

• Genre systems tolerate ambiguity and interpretive gaps

• Avoids over-specification of what meaning must become

• Keeps symbolic potential open

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3. Fragility and Strength

Reflexive plasticity should not be confused with robustness. A highly robust system may:

• Withstand shocks without transformation

• Maintain alignment by suppressing disalignment

• Resist novelty to preserve stability

By contrast, a reflexively plastic system:

• May appear fragile

• Invites symbolic turbulence

• Harnesses disalignment as a source of repatterning

Plasticity is the courage to re-align meaning itself, not the power to enforce its stability.

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4. Practices of Collective Cultivation

What can nurture reflexive plasticity?

• Dialogic practices that foreground perspectival tension

• Metasemiosis: construals about construals

• Genre innovation that re-cuts social roles and symbolic expectations

• Temporally recursive rituals: symbolic acts that iterate their own redefinition

• Pedagogies of ambiguity, irony, and symbolic play

Such practices do not produce fixed meanings. They train the capacity to move within meaning itself.

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Conclusion: Toward Phase-Aware Societies

Reflexive plasticity is not a property of individuals alone. It is a collective potential, embedded in the architectures of construal that shape symbolic life.

The next post asks: what happens when such plasticity becomes a structural feature of a social formation? Can a society become not only reflexive, but phase-aware?

11 Transduction and the Repatterning of Collective Meaning

Series: Construal and the Collective – Part 11

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Introduction: From Turbulence to Repatterning

Turbulence strains the symbolic field — but it also opens it. In the aftermath of disalignment, a collective must find new pathways of construal. This is not a simple return to stability. It is a transduction: the reorganisation of symbolic structure through a shift in phase.

Transduction is not the resolution of conflict, but the conversion of symbolic energy from one pattern of alignment to another.

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1. What Is Transduction?

In relational terms, transduction is the propagation of a pattern of construal through a symbolic field. It involves:

• Re-scaling of distinctions

• Re-phasing of construal relations

• Re-alignment of symbolic potentials across strata

Transduction operates through local shifts that become systemic reorganisations. It does not impose form from above. It spreads from within.

Transduction is how symbolic systems move between modes — not by replacement, but by realigning construal across scale.

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2. The Relational Logic of Repatterning

When a symbolic system repatterns through transduction:

• Residual alignments are re-cut into new configurations

• Disalignment is not erased, but re-absorbed into new structuring potential

• New attractors emerge, often from peripheral or previously incompatible forms

This is how symbolic novelty arises: not ex nihilo, but as a realignment of the field’s own contradictions.

Transduction is thus both reflexive and generative.

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3. Catalysts of Transduction

What enables a system to transduce?

• Semiotic leverage: minor construals with disproportionate ripple effects

• Marginal symbolic resources: latent distinctions that become newly central

• Distributed readiness: a collective capacity to re-align construal relations in concert

Transduction is not a top-down change. It is emergent coherence from within symbolic turbulence.

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4. Transduction vs Translation

Unlike translation, which maps across pre-given systems, transduction:

• Alters the structure of construal itself

• Reshapes the possibility space of meaning

• Does not preserve symbolic invariance, but enables symbolic innovation

It is the invention of new symbolic gradients, not the substitution of signs.

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5. Collective Effects of Transduction

A successful transduction may result in:

• A new symbolic architecture, with stabilised phasing relations

• Re-coordination across scales, with novel pathways of alignment

• Reconfigured genre systems, social roles, or interactional norms

• A transformed ethos or mode of reflexivity

But even partial transductions can reorganise local meaning-making, altering how the collective construes itself.

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Conclusion: Repatterning as a Phase-Shift

Transduction is the moment a symbolic system remakes its own gradients — not by replacing content, but by altering the field of construal.

The next post asks how this capacity for symbolic phase-shift can be cultivated. What conditions allow collectives not only to withstand turbulence, but to transduce it into deeper reflexivity?

10 Turbulence in the Semiotic Field: Bifurcation, Breakdown, and the Reboot of Meaning

Series: Construal and the Collective – Part 10

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Introduction: Not All Alignments Align

When symbolic gradients multiply and contradict each other — when alignment is pulled in incompatible directions — a system may enter turbulence. This is not merely a breakdown of communication. It is a phase of heightened construal, in which the very structure of symbolic possibility becomes unstable.

Turbulence is a semiotic phenomenon that signals structural conditions for transformation — or collapse.

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1. The Conditions of Symbolic Turbulence

Turbulence arises when:

• Multiple gradients intersect without converging

• Overloaded phasing leads to systemic incoherence

• Contradictions accumulate across scale (e.g. micro/macro symbolic conflict)

• Reflexive delay prevents re-alignment from keeping pace with change

The system cannot sustain a coherent alignment of construals. Instead, it oscillates between incompatible attractors — a kind of symbolic vertigo.

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2. Signs of a Turbulent System

Turbulence is not chaos. It has patterns. Among them:

• Hyper-production of signs (everything is being named, reframed, over-construed)

• Semantic drift (key terms change meaning without consensus)

• Rapid oscillation between modes (e.g. ironic sincerity, performative authenticity)

• Breakdown of genre boundaries (or their inflation into self-parody)

Turbulence is construal under strain — stretched between competing futures.

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3. Bifurcation and the Forking of Construal

In turbulence, a symbolic system may bifurcate:

• Two or more distinct construal paths emerge

• Each becomes a new attractor of alignment

• The prior symbolic centre may dissolve or fragment

This is not simply fragmentation. It is the re-differentiation of symbolic space: a system splits, re-branches, or recomposes its constraints.

Sometimes this leads to innovation. Sometimes to symbolic fatigue.

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4. Breakdown and Reboot

If a symbolic system cannot stabilise:

• It may collapse into aphasia (the inability to align meaning at all)

• Collective sense-making may become improvisational or ritualistic

• Legacy constraints persist, but without directional force

• Reboot is only possible through radical re-construal — a new symbolic cut

The reboot of meaning is not a return to order. It is the emergence of new gradients, new symbolic distinctions, new ways to phase the collective.

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5. The Role of Collective Reflexivity

Turbulence invites reflexivity — but it also tests its limits.

A collective capable of:

• Holding disalignment without collapse

• Tracking competing gradients without paralysis

• Constraining new symbolic possibility from within turbulence

...is a collective that can metabolise turbulence into transformation.

Reflexive capacity is not about avoiding turbulence, but learning how to phase within it.

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Conclusion: From Turbulence to Transduction

Turbulence marks a critical threshold in symbolic ecology. It is where phasing becomes difficult, alignment unstable, and construal intensely plastic.

In the next post, we ask how symbolic systems transduce turbulence into structure — not by eliminating conflict, but by reorganising potential. How does the symbolic field re-cut itself after turbulence?

9 Symbolic Gradients: Vectors of Alignment and Resistance

Series: Construal and the Collective – Part 9

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Introduction: Meaning Moves

Meaning is never static. Even within a relatively stable symbolic system, tendencies of movement persist — flows of construal, tensions of alignment, and directions of potential transformation. We call these symbolic gradients.

Symbolic gradients are not gradients of meaning (as if meaning were a substance), but gradients in the construal of possibility — directional tendencies that shape how symbolic systems align, resist, and reconfigure.

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1. What Are Symbolic Gradients?

Symbolic gradients are systemic tendencies for:

• Alignment (phasing toward shared construals)

• Divergence (rephasing or breaking with a dominant construal)

• Resistance (blocking or redirecting the flow of symbolic possibility)

• Acceleration or deceleration of re-alignment

They operate within and across symbolic systems, and may:

• Scale vertically (e.g. from individual genre to institutional discourse)

• Spread horizontally (e.g. across peer collectives or networks)

• Traverse temporally (e.g. echoing past construals or anticipating future ones)

A symbolic gradient is a relational vector within the ecology of construal.

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2. Gradients and Social Formation

Gradients are not merely abstract. They are socially structured, and often correspond to:

• Power differentials (who can align whom, or resist re-alignment)

• Institutional inertia (resistance to systemic reframing)

• Emergent collectivity (alignment around new construals)

• Symbolic capital (the capacity to shape what counts as meaningful)

Just as physical gradients move heat, symbolic gradients move construal — toward centres of legitimacy, or outward into destabilising difference.

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3. Mapping Gradients in Semiotic Space

Within a semiotic ecology, we can observe gradients by tracing:

• Frequency and regularity of construals (what patterns are stabilising?)

• Deviance or innovation (what construals resist dominant alignment?)

• Phasing events (moments of systemic shift or bifurcation)

A symbolic gradient is never visible in a single act. It is a relational phenomenon that emerges from patterns of construal across time, scale, and perspective.

To read a symbolic gradient is to trace the direction of meaning's becoming.

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4. Resistance as Gradient Inversion

Not all symbolic gradients serve alignment. Some express resistance:

• Subversion (reframing dominant construals from within)

• Negation (explicit reversal or critique)

• Displacement (redirecting symbolic energy into a different frame)

• Withdrawal (refusal to align)

These are not outside the ecology. They are intra-systemic inversions — vectors that pull against the dominant flow, often opening new symbolic possibility.

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5. Reflexivity and Gradient Modulation

Because symbolic systems are reflexive, gradients can themselves be:

• Consciously construed (e.g. strategic alignment or resistance)

• Refracted by symbolic commentary (e.g. meta-critique or irony)

• Modulated through alignment practices (e.g. ritual, pedagogy, storytelling)

Gradients are not deterministic. They are potentials modulated by collective reflexivity.

This makes symbolic gradients uniquely sensitive: they can evolve through their own construal — a kind of self-steering reflexive flow.

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Conclusion: Following the Vectors

To think in terms of symbolic gradients is to attend to how meaning moves — how it is attracted, resisted, realigned. It is to treat construal as directional, not simply locational.

In the next post, we follow these gradients into symbolic turbulence — moments when the ecology is unsettled, and the vectors of meaning collide, bifurcate, or dissolve.