Masashi Watanabe

How can the structuralist insight that meaning arises from differential relations be preserved without collapsing into unlimited relativism? This paper proposes that the answer lies not in a new static theory of meaning but in a taxonomy of dynamics: the ways in which differential networks fission, fuse, select, elevate, and crystallise under the constraint of physical grounding. We introduce a formal model L = (R, T, G, δ), where R is the horizontal rhizomatic network of differential relations (following Saussure 1916, and Deleuze and Guattari 1980), T the vertical hierarchy that emerges through universality-class convergence, G the set of physical grounding points anchoring nodes to mind-independent reality, and δ the residual degrees of freedom—the space of cultural arbitrariness. The model argues that (1) conceptual fission is driven by the collision of incompatible grounding chains within a single node; (2) universality-class fusion generates vertical T-structure from within R itself, dissolving the rhizome–tree opposition (Deleuze and Guattari 1980) as an artefact of the observational axis; and (3) post-structuralism correctly mapped regions of high δ but conflated this with the unwarranted generalisation that G is everywhere empty. The framework draws on statistical mechanics—Ising universality, renormalization group flow, ergodicity, and spontaneous symmetry breaking—not as metaphors but as structural analogies. Its principal contribution is a taxonomy of conceptual dynamics that recurs recognisably across language, science, culture, and artificial language systems.