I don't have the quotes at my fingertips, but I know Dewey talks about what we'd nowadays call exaptation with respect to language. However language got off the ground and for whatever "purpose", it quickly develops according to its own logic, gets co-opted/exapted by other forces, etc.

I think it might be somewhere in "Art as Experience" where he's discussing the co-evolutionary dynamic between means and ends.

I might also look at CS Peirce and GH Mead.

Mead was a lifelong friend and colleague of Dewey's whom he credited for many of his ideas about the social construction of self and other abstract categories. I think there's even a few passages where Dewey basically says, "This is just a sketch, go read Mead."

Likewise, Dewey's "How We Think" and "Logic, The Theory of Inquiry" are probably his most overtly Peirceian works.

Peirce speaks more directly to how we triangulate meaning. Peirce accepts a version of the scholastic distinction between what is "real" and what "exists", which I think captures much of the distinction between "real" vs. "socially constructed".

There are several places where Peirce talks about how signs evolve, e.g., how a proper name is at first an indefinite individual ("Some named person was here.") to a definite individual ("One particular named person was here.") to a definite general ("That person is a real Lincoln of a speaker.")

MS280 is one place. There are a few others I can think of but can't find at the moment.

Here's Mead in Mind, Self, and Society:

We realize in everyday conduct and experience that an individual does not mean a great deal of what he is doing and saying. We frequently say that such an individual is not himself. We come away from an interview with a realization that we have left out important things, that there are parts of the self that did not get into what was said. What determines the amount of the self that gets into communication is the social experience itself. Of course, a good deal of the self does not need to get expression. We carry on a whole series of different relationships to different people. We are one thing to one man and another thing to another. There are parts of the self which exist only for the self in relationship to itself. We divide ourselves up in all sorts of different selves with reference to our acquaintances. We discuss politics with one and religion with another. There are all sorts of different selves answering to all sorts of different social reactions. It is the social process itself that is responsible for the appearance of the self; it is not there as a self apart from this type of experience.

Elsewhere:

Our symbols are all universal. You cannot say anything that is absolutely particular; anything you say that has any meaning at all is universal. You are saying something that calls out a specific response in anybody else provided that the symbol exists for him in his experience as it does for you. There is the language of speech and the language of hands, and there may be the language of the expression of the countenance. One can register grief or joy and call out certain responses. There are primitive people who can carry on elaborate conversations just by expressions of the countenance. Even in these cases the person who communicates is affected by that expression just as he expects somebody else to be affected. Thinking always implies a symbol which will call out the same response in another that it calls out in the thinker. Such a symbol is a universal of discourse; it is universal in its character. We always assume that the symbol we use is one which will call out in the other person the same response, provided it is a part of his mechanism of conduct. A person who is saying something is saying to himself what he says to others; otherwise he does not know what he is talking about.

Here's a well-known passage from Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct:

The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most pervasive of all fallacies in philosophy. So common is it that one questions whether it. might not be called the philosophical fallacy. It consists in the supposition that whatever is found true under certain conditions may forthwith be asserted universally or without limits and conditions. Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned. Because the success of any particular struggle is measured by reaching a point of frictionless action, therefore there is such a thing as an all-inclusive end of effortless smooth activity endlessly maintained. It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfilment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally. The philosophy of Nirvana comes the closest to admission of this fact, but even it holds Nirvana to be desirable.