If construal is an ontological event, and meaning is the coherence that results from constrained possibility, then a long-standing assumption must now be examined directly: that meaning is about objects.
This assumption feels almost unavoidable. We speak as if words name things, as if thoughts refer to entities, as if meaning points outward toward a world already carved into objects. But once the ontology developed in the previous posts is taken seriously, this picture can no longer be sustained.
What “first-order meaning” names
First-order meaning is not a theory, a description, or an interpretation. It is the phenomenon itself: the local coherence that emerges when a construal actualises constraint within a field of potential.
Crucially, first-order meaning is:
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not symbolic,
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not representational,
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not referential.
It is the organisation of difference that makes some continuities hold and others fall away. It is what makes a situation intelligible at all, prior to any naming, categorisation, or objectification.
How objects appear
Objects enter the picture only after coherence has stabilised sufficiently to be tracked across multiple construals.
When a particular pattern:
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persists across cuts,
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remains functionally coherent,
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can be re-identified under varying perspectives,
we begin to speak of it as the same thing.
This is where objects come from.
We mistake objects for primitives because they are stable, nameable, and useful. But their apparent independence is derivative. They exist because meaning has already occurred, not as the targets that meaning aims at.
The illusion clarified
Calling objects an illusion does not mean they are unreal or imaginary. The illusion lies elsewhere: in treating objects as ontologically prior to the meaning through which they are constituted.
The illusion has three layers:
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Stability is mistaken for independencePersistence under constraint is misread as self-containment.
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Re-identification is mistaken for identityThe ability to track a pattern across cuts is mistaken for the existence of a bounded entity.
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Description is mistaken for foundationNaming an object is mistaken for explaining how it came to matter.
At no point does this require denying the phenomena we call objects. It only requires denying that they ground meaning.
Why reference feels unavoidable
Once objects have been stabilised and named, reference feels natural, even necessary. Words appear to latch onto things. Thoughts appear to point outward. Meaning seems to live in the relation between sign and object.
But this appearance is downstream.
Reference presupposes:
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a stabilised pattern,
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already distinguished from its background,
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already coherent under a construal.
This is why reference works so well—and why it explains so little.
Meaning without targets
At first order, meaning has no targets. It is not directed at anything. It does not aim. It does not succeed or fail in matching the world.
Meaning simply organises possibility into coherence.
Objects are what that coherence looks like once it has been:
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stabilised,
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re-entered into further construals,
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and narrated as independent.
To insist that meaning must be about objects is to reverse the order of explanation yet again.
Holding the distinction
At this point, the architecture of the series should be clear:
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Meaning is not representational.
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Construal is an ontological event.
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Objects are effects of stabilised meaning, not its ground.
This distinction allows us to speak of the world, of things, and of persistence without reintroducing representational metaphysics by stealth.
In the next post, we will turn to symbols themselves and ask a deceptively simple question: if objects are not the carriers of meaning, and meaning is not about them, then where—if anywhere—is meaning located?
For now, it is enough to hold this inversion steady:
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