From Readiness to Commitment: How Meaning Becomes Binding: 1 The Problem of Binding Futures

In the previous series, meaning was approached not as a static structure or a repository of representations, but as a field of potential — a landscape of semiotic options poised for actualisation. Central to that account was the notion of meaning readiness: the perspectival availability of semiotic options for action and understanding.

Meaning readiness explains how futures become thinkable.

What it does not yet explain is how some of those futures become binding.

This series begins with that gap.

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Why Readiness Is Not Enough

Meaning readiness captures availability, not attachment.

A speaker may be ready to assert a proposition, to offer a proposal, or to entertain a possibility — but readiness alone does not commit anyone to anything. Readiness opens the space of action; it does not close it. It marks what could be actualised, not what must be.

This distinction is not trivial. It points to a persistent puzzle in the analysis of meaning-making:

• Why do some utterances merely float as possibilities, while others take hold?

• Why do some proposals evaporate, while others bind participants across time?

• How does a future move from being merely available to being owed, expected, or required?

Put simply:

Readiness ≠ commitment

Availability ≠ obligation

If meaning is fundamentally about potential, then commitment is the problem of selective hardening within that potential.

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The Puzzle of Binding Futures

Consider the difference between:

• “We could meet tomorrow.”

• “We will meet tomorrow.”

• “We are expected to meet tomorrow.”

Each involves a future. Each presupposes readiness. Yet only the latter two begin to bind. Something has happened between possibility and obligation — but it is not simply a change of mental state, nor the insertion of a moral force.

What has changed is the semiotic status of the future itself.

Binding is not a property of individuals, intentions, or values. It is a property of configurations of meaning that have become stabilised, shared, and durable. This is why commitments can outlast the people who made them, why institutions remain bound even as agents rotate, and why responsibility can persist without continuous desire.

The question, then, is not why people feel committed, but:

How does meaning come to bind at all?

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Binding as a Second-Order Semiotic Phenomenon

To address this, we need to treat binding not as a primitive, but as a second-order semiotic phenomenon.

First-order meaning:

• projections (propositions and proposals)

• qualified by modality and modulation

• made available through readiness

Second-order meaning:

• expectations about those projections

• alignments around uptake

• stabilised orientations toward future action

Binding emerges not at the moment of projection, but at the moment where projections begin to generate shared expectations about their own persistence.

In other words, commitment is not about what is said or desired; it is about what is expected to continue to hold.

This shift — from possibility to expectation — is where meaning begins to stick.

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What This Series Will Trace

This series does not begin by explaining commitment; it begins by locating the problem.

Across the posts that follow, we will trace how:

• readiness becomes alignment

• alignment becomes expectation

• expectation becomes obligation

• obligation becomes institutionalised

• and how all of this can also unravel

We will examine:

• how proposals acquire uptake

• how modulation stabilises over time

• how responsibility emerges without sovereign subjects

• how institutions function as commitment-preserving devices

• and how binding can decay into hollow form

Throughout, the guiding constraint remains firm:

• value systems are not meaning systems

• obligation is not a moral substance

• commitment is not reducible to intention

Binding will be treated as what it is:

a relational, semiotic achievement, emergent from meaning itself.

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Standing at the Threshold

Meaning readiness opens futures.

Commitment selects among them.

The problem of binding is the problem of how selection occurs without collapse — how futures harden without becoming fixed, how obligation emerges without becoming essence.

That problem is where we now stand.

In the next post, we turn to the first mechanism in that process: uptake — the moment where proposals stop being merely offered and begin to be taken up, aligned with, and expected.

This is where commitment begins.