Meaning is almost always explained by appeal to aboutness. Words are said to be about things. Thoughts are about states of affairs. Signs are about what they represent. Even when representation is criticised, the structure often survives implicitly: meaning is still treated as a relation between something that means and something meant.
This post begins by refusing that assumption.
To see why, we need to be very clear about what kind of thing meaning is.
The category mistake at the heart of “aboutness”
Aboutness treats meaning as a relation between two already-constituted terms:
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a symbol and an object,
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a sign and a referent,
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a thought and a world.
But relations presuppose relata. And relata presuppose individuation. As we have already seen, individuation is never primitive; it is inferred retrospectively from stabilisation under a cut.
This is not a small error. It is a categorical one.
Meaning as actualised constraint
Meaning occurs when possibility is constrained in a way that makes a difference.
Not a difference between things, but a difference in what can happen next.
A cut actualises certain relations and excludes others. Within that constrained field, some configurations become coherent, trackable, and consequential. That coherence is meaning at first order.
What is required is:
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a field of potential,
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a construal that acts as a cut,
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and the stabilisation of constraint that follows.
Why reference always arrives late
Once coherence has stabilised, it can be redescribed. Patterns can be tracked. Regularities can be named. At that point, we often introduce reference: this symbol refers to that object; this word means that thing.
But reference is not the source of meaning. It is a meta-description of an already meaningful configuration.
This is why reference feels so compelling. It arrives precisely when stability is secure enough to support it. But its apparent explanatory power is borrowed. It explains nothing about how meaning came to be; it only explains how we talk about meaning after the fact.
First-order meaning versus meaning-theory
At this point, a crucial distinction must be held firmly.
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First-order meaning is the phenomenon: the actualised coherence produced by constraint under a cut.
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Meaning-theory is second-order: the attempt to describe, systematise, or explain that phenomenon.
Most debates about meaning confuse the two. They argue at the level of theory while smuggling in assumptions about the phenomenon itself—especially assumptions about representation and aboutness.
This series will not do that.
They describe how we subsequently organise, stabilise, and coordinate meaningful phenomena.
Why this matters
Treating meaning as aboutness has far-reaching consequences:
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It ties meaning to objects, even when objects are not ontologically primary.
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It encourages representational metaphysics, even when representation has already been abandoned.
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It makes meaning appear fragile, subjective, or conventional—because relations can always fail.
Once meaning is understood instead as actualised constraint, these problems dissolve.
Holding the cut
This post makes only one move, but it is decisive:
Everything else—symbols, reference, interpretation, communication—comes later.
In the next post, we will sharpen this claim by examining construal itself: not as a cognitive act, not as interpretation, but as ontological participation in the actualisation of meaning.
For now, it is enough to hold the cut steady:
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