After Representation: 2 The Sign as Substitute

The shift to representation does not announce itself as a rupture. It enters quietly, under the guise of clarification.

Where earlier orientations treated meaning as enacted within patterned activity, representation introduces a new explanatory convenience: the idea that a sign can stand in for something else. Meaning is no longer only what is done; it is what is carried, conveyed, or substituted.

This move is neither arbitrary nor foolish. It answers real pressures. But it also installs a new kind of explanatory debt.

Substitution as an Explanatory Shortcut

To treat a sign as a substitute is to say that it can take the place of something absent. A word can stand for an object, an idea, a state of affairs. An utterance can represent a situation without reproducing it.

This is powerful. It allows meaning to travel across space and time. It allows coordination without co‑presence. It allows language to be abstracted from immediate activity.

But substitution also changes what must be explained.

Once a sign stands for something else, explanation can no longer remain immanent to use alone. It must now account for:

• how the sign comes to be linked to what it substitutes,

• how that link is maintained across contexts,

• how correct substitution is distinguished from incorrect substitution.

These questions do not arise when meaning is treated as participation in activity. They arise only once standing‑for is taken as basic.

The Installation of Directionality

Substitution quietly introduces direction.

A sign now points beyond itself. Meaning flows outward, from sign to referent. Understanding consists in recovering what the sign is about.

This directional structure reorients explanation:

• backward, toward the origin of the sign–referent link,

• outward, toward what the sign is meant to capture,

• forward, toward successful uptake by an interpreter.

None of this requires teleology or causation to be named explicitly. They are already implied by the structure of substitution itself.

From Use to Correctness

When meaning is enacted, appropriateness is primary. An action fits or does not fit a situation.

When meaning is representational, correctness takes centre stage. A sign must match what it stands for. Error becomes misrepresentation rather than miscoordination.

This distinction matters. Correctness demands standards that are independent of the particular act of use. Something must anchor the sign’s meaning beyond the interaction in which it appears.

With this, meaning acquires an external measure.

Why Substitution Invites Causation

If a sign represents something, then the relation between sign and referent must be established somehow.

Explanatory pressure therefore turns to questions of origin:

• How did this sign come to mean that?

• What caused this association to be formed?

Causation enters not as a metaphysical claim, but as an explanatory necessity. The sign–referent relation demands a story of production.

Similarly, explanation begins to ask what the sign is for: what outcome it is meant to secure, what understanding it aims to produce. Teleology follows just as quietly.

What Is Lost — and What Is Gained

The representational move does not simply replace one account with another. It reweights what counts as intelligible.

What is gained is abstraction, portability, and generality. Meaning can be detached from immediate practice and treated as an object of analysis.

What is lost is explanatory sufficiency at the level of relation and use. Meaning can no longer explain itself without appeal to something else.

The sign now depends on what it is not.

A Shift, Not a Fall

It is important not to moralise this transition. Representation is not a mistake to be undone. It is a structural reorientation with real affordances.

But it is also a point of no return. Once signs substitute, explanation must account for substitution. Directionality, correctness, causation, and teleology are no longer optional. They are the price of standing‑for.

The significance of this shift is not that it happens, but that it often goes unnoticed. Representation installs itself as common sense.

The next development intensifies this orientation further: meaning is no longer merely substituted in signs, but relocated inside minds, where representation becomes internal, private, and causal.