What semiotically links knowledge, competence, and feeling? How can we break down this vital and typical understanding of signs and meaning? We’ll cross-reference a few semiotic, linguistic, and anthropological suggestions to approach the “feeling-knowledge-competence” trio in the general terms of semiotic perception. Drawing on Eduardo Kohn’s eco-semiotic theory, we consider that: (1) the emergence of self and other is structured according to the different ways in which assigning power, practical activity, and reference unfold upon each other; (2) the differential processing of reference is responsible for the regularity/variation and ritualization/institutionalization of patterns of interaction and meaning that punctuate the value of forms within a given collective. In this framework, form has a trans-individual, trans-specific, and trans-temporal character: it refers to a concrete pattern production and propagation process whose logic permeates the living. Finally, comparing at least two conceptions of engagement, namely Lambros Malafouris’s theory of material engagement and Arnold Berleant’s aesthetic engagement, will further detail the link between engagement, experience, and semiosis.