If cognition is participation in a field of potential, and if attention is structured collectively rather than privately, then symbols cannot be what they are usually taken to be.
They cannot be:
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representations stored in minds,
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codes that stand for things,
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or vehicles that carry meaning from one head to another.
This post makes a stronger, quieter claim:
Symbolic systems are not representational devices.They are stabilisations of participation.
Once this is seen, the last major refuge of representational cognition dissolves.
1. The representational myth of symbols
The orthodox story runs like this:
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Symbols represent objects, states of affairs, or ideas.
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Cognition involves encoding and decoding these representations.
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Communication transfers representations between minds.
This story feels natural because symbolic systems are stable, repeatable, and transmissible. But stability is mistaken for representation.
What symbols actually do is something far more structural.
They hold a field open.
2. Symbols do not carry meaning
From the ontology of meaning already established:
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Meaning is not in symbols.
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Meaning is not behind symbols.
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Meaning is not transmitted by symbols.
Meaning is a first-order phenomenon of construal — an event of actualisation within a system of potential.
So what are symbols doing?
They are constraints on participation:
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they narrow possible construals,
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stabilise distinctions,
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and make certain trajectories of engagement repeatable.
3. Stabilisation across time, scale, and absence
The real problem symbols solve is not representation, but continuity.
Symbolic systems:
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preserve constraints beyond the immediate situation,
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allow coordination across time and distance,
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and enable participation without co-presence.
They stabilise a field so that meaning can be re-actualised later, by different participants, under different conditions.
4. Why symbols feel representational
Symbols feel like representations because:
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they reliably orient participation,
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they support prediction and coordination,
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and they appear object-like and detachable.
But this is an effect of successful stabilisation, not representational accuracy.
Its “aboutness” is a retrospective interpretation of successful coordination.
5. Symbolic systems are collective memory
Symbolic systems function as collective memory, but not in the sense of stored content.
They are:
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sedimented constraints,
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preserved distinctions,
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habitualised pathways of participation.
What is remembered is not information, but ways of going on.
This is why symbolic breakdown is so destructive:
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when symbols lose their stabilising force,
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participation fragments,
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and meaning proliferates uncontrollably or collapses entirely.
6. No symbols without participation
A crucial inversion follows:
A mark, sound, or gesture becomes symbolic only when:
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it participates in a stabilised field,
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it reliably constrains construal,
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and it can be re-actualised by others.
Outside participation, there are no symbols — only material traces.
This is why purely formal accounts of symbolic systems always fail: they try to explain symbols without participation, which is exactly what symbols presuppose.
7. Cognition, revisited
At this point, cognition can be redescribed more precisely:
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Cognition is participation in a field.
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Attention is collective orientation within that field.
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Symbols are stabilisations that make such participation durable.
Nothing here requires:
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internal representations,
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mental content,
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or symbol manipulation inside individual minds.
What we call “thinking with symbols” is participating in a field structured by stabilised constraints.
8. The quiet collapse of representation
With this post, representation loses its last plausible role:
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Meaning is not representational.
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Cognition is not representational.
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Symbols are not representational.
Representation turns out to have been a story we told after coordination worked — a metaphenomenon, not a mechanism.
9. What follows
One major question now presses:
If cognition is participation, and symbols stabilise participation, how does learning occur?
The next post addresses this directly:
Post 4 — Learning as Perspectival Shift, Not Information Transfer
There we will show that learning is not the accumulation of content, but a reconfiguration of participation — a change in what cuts are available, what distinctions stabilise, and what trajectories become possible.
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