Category Cuts: 7 Returning to Meaning: Cuts, Constraints, and Semiotic Practice

The previous post left us at a reflexive edge: categories of categories, meta-constraints, and the evolution of the space of possible cuts itself. At that altitude, it is tempting either to keep climbing—or to accuse the entire project of losing touch with meaning as it is actually lived.

Both temptations misunderstand the role of abstraction here.

The purpose of Category Cuts has never been to replace meaning with mathematics, nor to redescribe semiotic life in alien formalism. It has been to discipline our talk about meaning: to make explicit the constraints that silently govern what can count as meaningful at all.

This post turns those constraints back toward semiotic practice.

Meaning Is Not an Object

We begin with a refusal.

Meaning is not a thing that appears once the right configuration is reached. It is not an emergent substance, a value-laden property, or a hidden content waiting to be decoded.

Meaning is a relational achievement, stabilised under constraint.

From the perspective developed in this series:

• a semiotic system is a category of possible construals,

• instances of meaning are actualisations within that system,

• and coherence depends on the admissibility of cuts under shared constraints.

Meaning is not in symbols.

It is enacted through constrained perspectival alignment.

Semiotic Systems as Theories of Possible Meanings

A language, a discourse, or a symbolic practice is not best understood as a collection of signs. It is better understood as a theory of what can count as a meaningful instance.

This aligns directly with our earlier claim:

categories are theories of possible instances.

In semiotic terms:

• grammatical systems specify what distinctions are available,

• semantic systems constrain how those distinctions may cohere,

• contextual systems regulate what counts as an appropriate cut in a situation.

None of these are reducible to one another. Their relation is adjoint, not hierarchical.

Instantiation Without Reification

When meaning is actualised in use, nothing “new” is added to the world. There is no ontological surplus. What occurs is a perspectival cut that stabilises a phenomenon as meaningful within a system of constraints.

This matters because it blocks two familiar confusions:

• that meaning must be grounded in intention or psychology,

• that meaning must be grounded in social value or coordination.

Both may condition meaning, but neither is meaning.

Meaning lives in the space of constrained alternatives—in what could have been said, but wasn’t, under shared systems of possibility.

Limits and Colimits in Practice

We can now return to limits and colimits with fresh eyes.

In semiotic practice:

• limits correspond to points of tight stabilisation, where multiple constraints converge (technical definitions, ritual formulae, canonical genres),

• colimits correspond to structured plurality, where multiple construals coexist without collapse (metaphor, irony, polysemy, dialogic tension).

Neither is superior.

Each answers to a different configuration of constraint.

Attempts to force one into the role of the other—demanding univocity where plurality is required, or celebrating ambiguity where coherence is needed—are failures of cut, not failures of meaning.

Against Expressivism and Instrumentalism

This framework also blocks two persistent reductions.

It blocks expressivism, which treats meaning as the outward projection of inner states. Inner states do not define the space of possible cuts.

It blocks instrumentalism, which treats meaning as a tool for coordination or control. Coordination operates in value systems; meaning operates in semiotic systems.

The two interact, but they are not identical.

To conflate them is to mistake constraint for function.

Meaning as Situated Rigour

One of the quiet consequences of this view is that meaning is neither arbitrary nor absolute.

It is rigorous—but the rigour is local.

A cut can be:

• appropriate or inappropriate,

• coherent or incoherent,

• generative or destructive,

only relative to a system of constraints that is itself historically and relationally situated.

This is not relativism.

It is situated discipline.

Why Category Theory Was Necessary

At this point, the motivation for the entire detour should be clear.

Without a language for:

• perspectival translation (functors),

• mutual constraint (adjunctions),

• condensation and plurality (limits and colimits),

• reflexive evolution (higher-order categories),

we are left speaking about meaning in metaphors that either mystify it or trivialise it.

Category theory did not explain meaning.

It cleared conceptual space for speaking about meaning without contradiction.

The Cut That Matters

The final lesson of Category Cuts is not technical.

It is this:

every act of meaning is a cut that matters.

It matters because it excludes alternatives.

It matters because it binds perspectives.

It matters because it stabilises possibility—briefly, locally, and never finally.

Meaning does not float free of constraint.

Nor is it crushed by it.

It is what happens when a cut holds.

The next step, if there is one, is not further abstraction. It is selective return: tracing specific semiotic phenomena—genres, metaphors, discourses—as configurations of cuts under constraint.

Not to explain them away.

But to see, more clearly, how they become possible at all.

The horizon is still open.

But now, the cuts are sharp enough to work with.