Many contemporary approaches announce a departure from representation.
Meaning is said to arise from use rather than reference, from interaction rather than encoding, from embodiment rather than mental content. Language is treated as action, coordination, or practice. At first glance, this appears to return to the orientations sketched at the beginning of this series.
Yet representation proves difficult to leave behind.
The Promise of Use and Interaction
Approaches that foreground use, interaction, and practice reject several core assumptions of representationalism.
Meaning is no longer treated as something transmitted from speaker to hearer. Communication is not the successful copying of inner content. Understanding is displayed in action rather than inferred from internal states.
These shifts matter. They reduce the explanatory burden placed on mental causation and weaken the appeal of teleology as an organising principle.
However, the promise of these approaches often outpaces their ontological commitments.
Practice as a Vehicle Rather Than a Site
In many post-representational accounts, practice is treated as the means by which meaning is expressed, negotiated, or conveyed.
Meaning is said to emerge through interaction, but it is still treated as something that emerges from it — something that can, in principle, be abstracted, stabilised, and theorised independently.
Practice thus becomes a vehicle rather than a site. It carries meaning without fully constituting it.
The representational frame survives in attenuated form.
The Persistence of Aboutness
Even when reference is officially downplayed, aboutness often remains tacit.
Utterances are analysed in terms of what they are about. Practices are said to convey information. Interactions are evaluated for accuracy or adequacy relative to a situation.
These moves reintroduce correctness as a central concern. Meaning is still measured against something beyond the act itself.
Representation returns, not as doctrine, but as habit.
Embodiment Without Ontology
Embodiment is frequently invoked as an antidote to mentalism.
Meaning is grounded in bodily activity, sensorimotor engagement, or environmental coupling. Cognition is distributed rather than internal.
Yet embodiment often functions as a supplement rather than a replacement. Bodily activity explains how representations are formed or constrained, not whether representation is basic.
The body becomes another mechanism for producing meaning-as-content.
Why the Slide Back Occurs
These approaches falter not because they are incoherent, but because they stop short of ontological revision.
Representation is criticised at the level of mechanism or method, but retained at the level of what meaning is taken to be. Meaning remains something that must be shared, matched, or recovered.
Without rethinking meaning itself, explanation defaults to familiar questions:
How do participants arrive at the same meaning?
What ensures understanding?
How is miscommunication explained?
Teleology and causation quietly re-enter to answer these questions.
The Limits of Correction
Attempts to correct representational excesses often take the form of constraints: social norms, interactional rules, embodied affordances.
These constraints shape how meaning is expressed, but they do not displace the assumption that meaning pre-exists its enactment.
Correction presupposes a target. Constraint presupposes something constrained.
Representation remains intact.
What Would Actually Be Required
To move beyond representation, meaning must no longer be treated as a thing that practices carry.
It must be understood as something that occurs only in and as particular enactments. Stability must be reconceived as persistence across cuts, not agreement on content. Understanding must be visible in coordination, not inferred from shared representations.
Without this shift, linguistics after representation risks becoming linguistics around representation.
Toward an Ontological Break
The persistence of representational habits in post-representational approaches is itself diagnostic.
It shows how deeply the expectation of aboutness, correctness, and shared content has been installed. Leaving representation behind requires more than new terminology or expanded mechanisms. It requires a change in what explanation is allowed to appeal to.
The final move of this series therefore turns away from theories of language or meaning altogether, and toward the ontological conditions under which meaning can be said to occur.
No comments:
Post a Comment