19 Metaphenomena: Meaning About Meaning and the Emergence of Reflexivity

(Post 19 in “Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning”)

If phenomena are first-order meanings — the immediate, construed events of lived experience — then metaphenomena are meanings that arise about those meanings. They are second-order inflections: meanings of meaning, reflexively aware and recursively structured.

What Is a Metaphenomenon?

A metaphenomenon is not just a commentary or interpretation. It is a distinct kind of event, one that takes meaning itself as its domain of operation. Where a phenomenon presents a world, a metaphenomenon re-presents — or better, re-cuts — the meaning that made that world appear.

To recognise “a tree” as an ecological sign, or “a law” as a social construct, or “a measurement” as a product of a theoretical frame — these are metaphenomenal acts. They do not occur at a separate level of reality, but as reflexive inflections within the same semantic fabric.

The Emergence of Reflexivity

Reflexivity is not an added feature of consciousness; it is an evolutionary achievement of meaning systems capable of inflecting their own inflections. That is: capable of construing their own construals.

This recursive potential — the power to construe the way one construes — is what gives rise to culture, science, ethics, and philosophy. It also introduces a new dynamic into the system: a capacity for re-organisation, critique, and self-transformation.

Reflexivity is not unique to humans, but its emergence in language marks a turning point in the evolution of possibility. It opens up not only new ways of knowing, but new ways of being — because in a relational ontology, to change the construal is to change the world.

Metaphenomena as Events of Repatterning

Every metaphenomenon is a potential inflection point in the history of meaning. It takes the patterns that make up our world and throws them back into the system for reappraisal, contestation, or reconstrual.

Science, for example, produces metaphenomena — not just data, but theories: ways of construing phenomena that themselves become objects of inquiry. So does art. So do cultural rituals, philosophical traditions, and political debates.

In this sense, metaphenomena are not marginal. They are the generative edge of meaning’s evolution — the recursive pulse by which a meaning system becomes historical, capable of renewal, and ultimately reflexive in its own becoming.