Introduction: When Meaning Is Treated as a Thing
If traits and dispositions feel explanatory because they promise stability, stored meanings and internal representations feel explanatory because they promise content. Beliefs, memories, intentions, and knowledge appear to live inside individuals as ready-made items that can be retrieved to explain action.
This post shows how such appeals create the impression of explanation while quietly bypassing the relational dynamics that actually constitute meaning.
1. The Intuitive Appeal of Stored Meaning
When asked why someone acted as they did, it feels natural to answer:
because they believed something,
because they remembered something,
because they intended something.
These explanations feel deep because they invoke meaningful content rather than mere behaviour. They seem to respect agency and understanding.
But notice the move: meaning is treated as a thing possessed rather than as a relation enacted.
2. Representation as a Closure Site
Internal representations function as powerful closure devices because they appear to complete the explanatory circuit:
The action occurred because the representation was present.
Once the representation is named, inquiry stops. We are no longer asked:
how the belief was formed in relation,
how it is sustained or contested,
how it functions differently across contexts,
how it is made intelligible in practice.
The explanation ends where meaning should begin.
3. Memory Without Situation
Memory is often invoked as a stored record that explains present behaviour. Yet memory only becomes meaningful in situation:
what is recalled depends on context,
what matters depends on interaction,
what counts as relevant depends on current relations.
Treating memory as an internal archive mistakes availability for explanation. The relational work that makes memory operative disappears from view.
4. Beliefs as Answers Instead of Orientations
Beliefs are frequently used as explanatory endpoints:
She acted that way because she believes X.
But beliefs do not explain action by themselves. They require:
normative environments,
shared practices of justification,
situational uptake and recognition.
When belief is treated as a self-sufficient inner cause, explanation collapses into naming.
5. Why Internal Meaning Feels So Convincing
Stored meanings feel explanatory because they:
preserve a sense of agency,
align with introspective experience,
fit comfortably with individualist ontology,
promise access to reasons without examining relations.
Their power is rhetorical: they sound like reasons while functioning as closures.
6. Preparing the Next Unpicking
By now a pattern is visible. Whether traits, dispositions, or stored meanings, inner causes operate by:
relocating explanation inside the individual,
compressing relational processes into internal labels,
terminating inquiry prematurely.
In the next post, we will make this pattern explicit by examining The Rhetoric of Interiorisation — how explanation is persuaded, not demonstrated.
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