4 Patterns of Construal: Closing the Symbolic-Relational Arc

The critiques of meaning, identity, and symbolic universality reveal a familiar architecture: across semiotic and social systems, relational potential is routinely misread as absolute. What is modal — degrees of possibility, structured potential, perspectival alignment — is projected as modulation, as if reality or symbols themselves compel outcomes.

Meaning is not intrinsic; it emerges from relational construal. Identity is not given; it is enacted along perspectival clines. Universality is not inherent; it is stabilised across contexts through repeated interpretation. Across these domains, the apparent stability of symbolic and social patterns is not a decree of objects or acts, but the repeated actualisation of relational potential.

Recognising this architecture preserves explanatory power while correcting ontology. Symbols do not compel interpretation; identities do not exist independently; universals do not pre-exist. Rather, all are enacted, interpreted, and stabilised through relational patterns and construals.

The persistent rhythm is clear: modality is misread as modulation. Structured potential is mistaken for necessity. Whether in physics or in symbolic systems, the act of seeing the frame reveals that what appears absolute is in fact relational, contingent, and perspectival.

From here, future explorations can trace these patterns across social formation, mythic architecture, language, and symbolic cosmos — examining how relational potential, construal, and alignment shape reality at every scale. To see the frame is to recognise the universe, social or physical, as alive with structured possibility, interpreted and stabilised through perspective, not imposed by decree.