If meaning is not about anything, then it cannot be produced by interpretation, reference, or symbol manipulation. The question that immediately follows is therefore unavoidable: what actually brings meaning into being?
The answer is construal—but not as it is usually understood.
Construal is not a mental act, a cognitive process, or a subjective interpretation imposed on an otherwise neutral world. It is an ontological event: a way in which possibility is actualised through constraint.
Releasing construal from the mind
In most theories, construal is quietly psychologised. It is treated as something a subject does: interpreting a sign, framing an experience, assigning a meaning. Even when the subject is distributed or socialised, construal is still placed on the “side” of observers rather than in the structure of reality itself.
This placement is a residue of representational thinking.
If meaning were about things, then construal would indeed have to be interpretive. But once meaning is understood as actualised coherence, construal must be relocated. It is not an overlay on reality; it is one of the ways reality differentiates itself.
Construal is the act by which a cut is made.
The cut as event, not operation
A cut is often misunderstood as a division between pre-existing parts. But there are no parts prior to the cut. The cut does not separate; it conditions. It selects a mode of coherence within a field of potential and excludes others.
Construal names this selection.
As an ontological event, construal:
-
actualises certain relations rather than others,
-
stabilises patterns of difference,
-
makes some continuities intelligible and others inaccessible.
Nothing needs to “interpret” the cut for meaning to occur. Meaning is the coherence that results from the cut itself.
Construal and participation
To call construal an ontological event is not to deny participation. It is to redefine it.
Participation is not a subject acting on an object. It is a perspectival involvement in the actualisation of constraint. Any system—biological, social, linguistic—participates in meaning insofar as it helps maintain, transform, or propagate a particular construal.
This is why meaning is not private, even when it is local. Construal is not owned. It is enacted.
What we usually call “understanding” is the alignment of participation with an already-stabilised construal. But the meaning itself was never in the understanding. It was in the event.
Against interpretation
At this point, it may be tempting to reintroduce interpretation under a different name. That temptation should be resisted.
Interpretation presupposes:
-
something already meaningful,
-
a subject who interprets,
-
a relation between them.
Construal, as used here, presupposes none of these. It is not something done to meaning. It is what meaning is, at the moment it occurs.
Interpretation is always secondary. It belongs to meaning-theory, not to first-order meaning.
Why this matters
Once construal is recognised as ontological, several consequences follow immediately:
-
Meaning is no longer hostage to minds or languages.
-
Meaning can occur without symbols.
-
Meaning does not need to be communicated to exist.
-
Meaning is not subjective, even though it is perspectival.
This does not inflate meaning into a cosmic force. It grounds it precisely where it belongs: in the actualisation of possibility under constraint.
Holding the distinction
We now have three elements clearly distinguished:
-
Potential: the structured field of what could be.
-
Construal: the ontological event that actualises constraint.
-
Meaning: the coherent organisation that results.
None of these require representation. None require interpretation. None require pre-given entities.
In the next post, we will examine first-order meaning itself, and show why the objects we think meaning is “about” are in fact effects of construal, not its targets.
For now, it is enough to hold this firmly:
No comments:
Post a Comment