The Ontology of Meaning and its articulated foundations—epistemological, ontological, methodological, and axiomatic—may invite a further question:
On what are these foundations themselves grounded?
This question is understandable. It is also the point at which many theoretical projects quietly lose their discipline, mistaking intellectual responsibility for infinite regress. This post is not an attempt to ground the foundations more deeply. It is an attempt to make explicit why no such grounding is available, or required.
What follows is not a deeper theory, but a clarification of stance.
No external Archimedean point
The first commitment is a refusal: there is no external vantage point from which meaning, relation, or reality can be finally justified.
This is not an empirical claim about the limits of knowledge. It is a rejection of a particular explanatory fantasy: that justification must ultimately appeal to something outside the system it explains.
This work proceeds without that fantasy.
Explanation must terminate in practice
All explanation ends somewhere. The only honest question is where.
In this project, explanation terminates not in metaphysical necessity, but in disciplined practice: in how we proceed once certain explanatory moves have been shown to fail.
The ontology of meaning does not claim to be necessary in an absolute sense. It claims to be:
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internally coherent,
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explanatorily non-redundant,
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and free of illicit primitives.
That is the standard it holds itself to. Nothing stronger is required, and nothing stronger can be supplied without contradiction.
Relation is taken as primitive by choice, not proof
Relation is not presented as an ultimate constituent of reality, nor as a hidden metaphysical substance.
It is taken as primitive by choice, after the failure of alternatives.
Relation remains not because it is proven, but because it is the least dishonest starting point left.
This is not a weakness. It is methodological integrity.
Meaning is treated as first-order because the alternatives collapse
Meaning is treated as first-order not because it is metaphysically fundamental in some final sense, but because every alternative treatment fails on contact:
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Treat meaning as second-order, and it explains nothing.
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Treat it as representational, and fictions return immediately.
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Treat it as subjective, and constraint disappears.
First-order treatment is not a metaphysical dogma; it is the only position that allows coherence, constraint, and stability to be explained without smuggling.
Again: not necessity—discipline.
Why the regress stops here
At this point, justification cannot proceed without contradiction.
To demand a deeper ground would be to:
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reintroduce a transcendent standpoint,
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posit unexplained primitives,
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or mistake theoretical comfort for explanatory rigor.
This work stops here not because it has reached bedrock, but because going further would mean pretending.
Closing
This post does not add another layer beneath the foundations. It removes the illusion that such a layer must exist.
What follows from this refusal is not relativism, but responsibility: the responsibility to explain without cheating, to stop where explanation stops, and to proceed carefully from there.
That is not a metaphysical claim.
It is a commitment.
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