If the sign as substitute introduces representation, mentalism secures it.
Once meaning is understood as something a sign stands for, a further question presses itself forward: where does that meaning reside when it is not being expressed? The answer increasingly given is that meaning exists as an internal entity — an idea, concept, or representation housed in the mind.
With this move, representation is no longer merely a relation between sign and world. It becomes a relation between inner content and outer expression. Meaning is interiorised.
Meaning as Inner Possession
In mentalist orientations, meaning is treated as something one has.
Words express pre-existing mental contents. Utterances externalise inner representations. Communication succeeds when one mind successfully transmits its contents to another.
This framing resolves a problem introduced by substitution: how meaning persists when signs are not in use. But it does so by relocating meaning into a hidden domain that must now bear explanatory weight.
Meaning is no longer enacted first and foremost in practice. It is stored, retrieved, and deployed.
The Doubling of Explanation
Interiorisation produces a distinctive explanatory structure: every meaningful act now requires two stories.
First, a psychological story:
how a mental representation is formed,
how it is activated,
how it causes an utterance or action.
Second, a communicative story:
what the utterance is meant to convey,
how it represents a state of affairs,
how it achieves uptake.
Causation enters decisively at the first level. Teleology becomes unavoidable at the second.
This is not an excess. It is the structural consequence of treating meaning as an inner object that must be expressed.
From Representation to Mechanism
Once meanings are internal representations, they must interact with other internal states. They must be processed, combined, and transformed.
Explanation therefore gravitates toward mechanism. Mental content becomes something that does work: triggering actions, guiding choices, producing behaviour.
The language of cause becomes indispensable. Thoughts lead to actions. Representations generate outputs. Meaning becomes a force.
At the same time, actions are now explained in terms of aims: intentions, goals, plans. Teleology is no longer a gloss added afterward; it is built into the architecture.
Privacy and the Problem of Access
Interiorisation also introduces a new difficulty. If meanings are inner entities, they are in principle private.
This raises familiar problems:
How do different individuals share the same meaning?
How can one ever know whether understanding has occurred?
What anchors correctness if meanings are hidden?
The typical solution is further representation: shared conventions, abstract contents, or idealised meanings that transcend individual minds.
Thus the explanatory spiral tightens. Representation begets representation.
What Practice Can No Longer Do
At this stage, practice loses its explanatory sufficiency.
Use may reveal meaning, but it no longer constitutes it. Coordination may display understanding, but it no longer grounds it. The source of meaning lies elsewhere, behind the scenes.
As a result, explanation must always reach inward before it can reach outward.
The price of this move is permanence. Once meaning is interiorised, it cannot easily be returned to relation and practice without appearing incomplete.
Why This Orientation Persists
Mentalism endures because it solves problems created by substitution. It gives meaning a home. It stabilises content across contexts. It makes misrepresentation intelligible.
But it does so by transforming meaning into something that must be caused, processed, and aimed.
Causation and teleology are no longer symptoms at this stage. They are infrastructural.
The Path Ahead
Later developments attempt to soften or escape mentalism by appealing to structure, system, or interaction. But the interiorisation of meaning leaves a deep trace.
Even when representation is questioned, the expectation that meaning must reside somewhere — and must do causal work — often remains.
The next turn in the story is therefore ambivalent: a genuine attempt to displace mental content with relational structure, yet one that stops short of full ontological revision.
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