The purpose of this opening move is not to recover a pristine origin for meaning, nor to claim that representation was once absent and later introduced as a mistake. The point is more modest and more precise: to show that intelligible accounts of meaning and form existed in which standing-for was not yet doing explanatory work.
In these orientations, meaning is not treated as an object, content, or inner state that must be conveyed. It is treated as a mode of participation in patterned activity. Explanation therefore proceeds by describing forms of action, relations among practices, and the conditions under which distinctions are enacted.
Nothing here requires denial of reference. What is absent is the assumption that reference is ontologically basic.
Form as Patterned Activity
In pre-representational orientations, form is not a container for meaning but the shape of activity itself. A form is recognisable because it recurs as a pattern of doing, not because it encodes a content that can be extracted.
Grammatical forms, rhetorical figures, and poetic structures are understood as ways of acting in language. They constrain what can be done next, what responses are appropriate, and what distinctions are salient. Their intelligibility lies in their operation, not in their capacity to point elsewhere.
Explanation, accordingly, does not ask what a form represents. It asks what it makes possible, what it differentiates, and how it participates in a broader pattern.
Meaning as Use and Participation
Where meaning is approached through use or practice, it is not something possessed or transmitted. It is something enacted.
To mean is to take up a position within an ongoing activity: to respond appropriately, to recognise what counts, to orient oneself within a form of life. Meaning is therefore public without being representational, shared without being identical, and stable without being fixed.
Importantly, such accounts do not require a mental intermediary. There is no need to posit inner representations that language merely expresses. The intelligibility of meaning resides in the coordination of action itself.
Relation Without Aboutness
These orientations are relational, but not referential. Relations are established among actions, roles, and distinctions, not between a sign and an external object it stands for.
A word relates to other words through patterns of contrast and co-occurrence. An utterance relates to a situation through appropriateness and uptake. A form relates to a practice through the possibilities it opens and closes.
None of these relations requires aboutness. They are internal to the activity in which they function.
What Explanation Looks Like Here
Without representation, explanation does not reach outward. It remains immanent to the phenomenon.
To explain a meaning is to show:
how a distinction is enacted,
how a form constrains possible continuations,
how a practice stabilises expectations,
how participation coordinates action.
There is no pressure to ask what produced the meaning or what it was for. Those questions arise only once meaning is treated as something that must be caused or aimed.
Paths Not Yet Taken
Nothing in these orientations prevents the later emergence of representational accounts. But neither do they require it.
At this stage, meaning does not yet owe an account of its origin or its target. Coherence is achieved without appeal to causes or ends, and intelligibility does not depend on reference.
The significance of this point is not historical nostalgia. It is diagnostic. It shows that the explanatory grip of representation is contingent. Other ways of making sense were available, and were once sufficient.
The next step, then, is not a correction but a shift: the moment when meaning begins to be treated as a substitute for something else, and explanation is redirected accordingly.
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