If experience is usually treated as of things, and action as done by agents, meaning is usually treated as a matter of representation.
Words, on this view, stand for things. Sentences encode propositions. Understanding consists in decoding what is already there and matching it against the world.
This picture is so deeply entrenched that even its critics often leave it intact. Meaning may be said to be socially constructed, context-dependent, or embodied — but it is still assumed to be something that represents how things are.
This post asks what happens if we suspend that assumption.
Not to deny meaning, and not to drift into obscurity, but to ask a prior question: what if meaning does not function representationally at all?
Why Representation Feels Inevitable
Representation promises clarity.
It allows us to explain communication as transfer: I have a meaning in mind, I encode it in words, you decode it, and if all goes well, the same meaning appears in your head. Misunderstanding, on this picture, is a failure of transmission.
Representation also promises objectivity. If meanings stand for things or states of affairs, then correctness seems straightforward: the representation either matches reality or it does not.
These promises are powerful — but like many powerful ideas, they come with hidden costs.
Everyday Meaning, Reconsidered
Consider a simple exchange.
Someone says, “I’m fine.”
The words are clear. The grammar is unambiguous. Yet what the utterance means depends almost entirely on situation: tone of voice, prior interaction, shared history, current stakes. In one context it closes a topic; in another it opens one. In a third, it signals distress while denying it.
Nothing here is best explained as decoding a representation. The same string of words makes different things available in different situations.
Or consider misunderstanding. Often it is not that one party has the “wrong meaning,” but that the interaction has gone off‑track — expectations misaligned, relevance misjudged, commitments mismatched.
Meaning fails not because representations misfire, but because coordination does.
Meaning as Immanent Activity
The ontology developed on this blog treats meaning as immanent in activity, not as a layer added on afterward.
This aligns with a foundational insight of systemic functional linguistics: meaning is not something language carries; it is something language does. A clause enacts a configuration of relations — between participants, processes, and circumstances — and in doing so, it makes a world available in a particular way.
On this view, meaning is not a bridge between language and reality. It is a mode of organising reality as experienced and acted upon.
Representation, where it occurs, is a special case: a stabilised practice within broader meaning-making activity, not its foundation.
Context Is Not a Container
A common move is to rescue representation by adding “context.” Words represent, we are told, but context adjusts their meaning.
This still gets the order wrong.
Context is not a container in which representations float. It is part of the meaning itself. Field, tenor, and mode — what is going on, who is involved, and how language is functioning — are not external parameters but constitutive dimensions of what an utterance is doing.
Once this is recognised, the idea of meaning as a detachable content begins to lose its grip.
What Becomes Visible
When representation is no longer treated as primary, several features of meaning come into focus:
Meaning is situational, not abstract.
Understanding is practical, not mental matching.
Misunderstanding is structural, not merely semantic error.
Learning is re‑construal, not accumulation of meanings.
Most importantly, the familiar problem of how language “hooks onto” the world dissolves. There was never a hook to be explained.
Meaning is one of the ways the world is articulated in practice.
Precision Without Pictures
A frequent anxiety is that abandoning representation sacrifices precision.
In fact, the opposite is true. Representational accounts trade precision for simplicity: they compress rich, multi‑dimensional activity into tidy stand‑ins. A non‑representational account allows finer distinctions — between kinds of situations, roles, commitments, and consequences.
What is lost is the comfort of picturing meaning as a thing.
What is gained is the ability to track how meaning actually works.
Meaning Without Mystery
To say that meaning is not representational is not to say that “anything goes.” Meaning is constrained — by shared practices, by material conditions, by histories of use, by what actions make sense next.
These constraints are not external checks on free‑floating symbols. They are internal to meaning as activity.
In the next post, we will turn to the self, and ask what becomes of identity once experience, action, and meaning are all understood relationally rather than substantively.
For now, it is enough to see this:
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