By now, we have a clearer sense of what understanding involves.
Understanding shows up in orientation: in knowing what matters, what counts as a reason, and what would miss the point. It is visible in anticipation rather than feeling.
But this raises a deeper question—one we have been skirting until now:
Where does meaning come from in the first place?
Because until we can answer that, we cannot say what it would mean to understand another person’s meaning rather than merely reacting to their words or emotions.
Meaning is not stored inside people
We often talk as though meaning lives inside individuals: in their minds, intentions, or inner states. On this picture, understanding someone would involve somehow accessing what is already there—decoding it, mirroring it, or empathically “getting inside.”
But this way of speaking misleads us.
Meaning is not a thing that sits intact inside a person waiting to be retrieved. It is something that takes shape through how experience is organised, what distinctions are drawn, and what relations are treated as relevant.
In other words, meaning is not hidden. It is structured.
The background that does the work
Consider how easily meaning shifts when background shifts.
Nothing “inside” the sentence itself explains these differences. What explains them is the background against which the sentence is taken: expectations, histories, roles, stakes, and prior moves in the interaction.
Meaning happens where these relations come together.
This is why misunderstandings persist even when people use the same words and feel the same emotions. They are organising the situation differently. They are operating against different backgrounds of relevance.
Experience is always from somewhere
Another way to say this is that experience is always from a perspective.
This does not mean experience is subjective in a loose or relativistic sense. It means that experience is always organised from a position that determines what stands out, what recedes, and what counts as significant.
Perspective is not an optional add-on to experience. It is what gives experience its shape.
And meaning follows that shape.
Why this matters for empathy
If meaning is made through perspective, then understanding another person’s meaning requires recognising that their experience is organised from somewhere that is not where you are.
This sounds obvious when stated abstractly, but it has demanding consequences.
It means you cannot understand another person simply by imagining how you would feel in their situation. Your imagination brings your own background with it—your distinctions, your priorities, your sense of what matters.
That imaginative exercise may generate feeling. It may even generate care. But it does not, by itself, relocate you into the space where the other person’s meaning is being made.
Empathy requires something more exacting.
The temptation to collapse perspectives
Because perspective is so fundamental, there is a constant temptation to collapse it.
We do this when we assume that what would matter to us must matter to others in the same way. We do it when we hear words through our own stakes rather than theirs. We do it when we substitute emotional resonance for orientational precision.
This collapse often feels empathic. It feels like closeness, alignment, shared humanity.
But it comes at a cost.
When perspectives are collapsed, difference disappears—not because it has been understood, but because it has been overwritten.
Meaning requires location
At this point, we can state a crucial principle without heavy terminology:
Meaning is always made somewhere.
To understand meaning, you must know where it is being made from.
This “where” is not a physical place. It is a position in a web of relevance: a way of carving up what matters, what is at stake, and what counts as a reason to act or speak.
Understanding another person means being able to orient yourself within that web without replacing it with your own.
This is a skill. It is also a discipline.
What this opens up
Once we take perspective seriously, empathy starts to look different.
It is no longer about emotional proximity. It is about maintaining a difference in position while still coordinating understanding across it.
This is harder than feeling with someone. It requires restraint, attentiveness, and the willingness to hold a perspective as real without occupying it.
In the next post, we will finally give this operation a name.
We will look at the specific cut that makes empathy possible—the act that allows another to appear not as an object in your field, nor as an extension of yourself, but as a genuine centre of meaning in their own right.
That is where empathy’s real structure comes into view.
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