What defines a cosmos is not its content but its horizon: the boundary of what can be seen, said, known, and made meaningful. This horizon is not fixed. It is semiotic. It moves as construal moves.
A semiotic horizon is not a perceptual limit but a symbolic one. It marks the edge of a world not in space or time, but in meaning.
Each symbolic formation projects such a horizon. It construes the possible—what can be imagined, reasoned, questioned, answered. And as collective construal shifts, so too does the horizon of the cosmos.
The semiotic horizon is shaped by patterned cuts in symbolic space. These cuts do not just differentiate elements; they phase entire regions of possibility into alignment. They tell us what kinds of questions are thinkable, what counts as evidence, what frames an explanation.
Thus, the semiotic horizon is where construal becomes cosmological.
This is why symbolic systems do not merely express a cosmos—they constitute it. Their internal architecture becomes the architecture of the real.
Think, for example, of how a cosmology rooted in divine command differs from one rooted in mechanistic causality. These are not rival descriptions of the same world. They phase different kinds of worlds, with different horizons of inquiry, action, and sense.
What matters is not which is “true” in the modern epistemological sense, but how each symbolic system enables collective life to scale, align, and coordinate under a shared horizon.
When symbolic systems phase such horizons reflexively—when they include their own conditions of possibility within the cosmos they construe—a new kind of symbolic architecture emerges. This is no longer merely a mythology or a science. It is a reflexive cosmogenesis: the world-making of worlds that know they are made.
This is where we stand now. Between symbolic systems that no longer hold, and a reflexive cosmos yet to be fully formed.
The semiotic horizon is both our limit and our opening. It marks where the cosmos becomes conscious of its own construal.
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