The question of meaning is usually approached as if its task were obvious.
Meaning, we are told, is what connects words to things, thoughts to reality, symbols to the world.
This series begins by setting that expectation aside.
If representation is no longer doing the work we once assigned to it, then meaning is not failing at its job.
It is being misunderstood.
Meaning is not representing
The most persistent assumption about meaning is that it represents something else.
Words represent objects.
Sentences represent states of affairs.
Thoughts represent the world as it is.
Within this frame, meaning is judged by accuracy, correspondence, or fidelity.
But this frame quietly imports a picture of the world already carved into objects, awaiting correct depiction.
Once that picture loosens, the representational task collapses with it.
Meaning does not stand between symbols and things, attempting to match them up.
Meaning is not inner content
When representation falters, meaning is often relocated inward.
Meaning becomes something private: an idea, an intention, a mental image.
Communication then appears as the transfer of inner content from one mind to another.
But this merely reproduces representation at a different scale.
The problem is not where meaning is located.
It is the assumption that meaning is a thing at all.
Meaning is not correspondence
Another familiar move treats meaning as a relation of fit.
A symbol is meaningful if it corresponds correctly to a feature of reality.
Misunderstanding becomes misalignment.
Nonsense becomes failure to refer.
Yet this model cannot account for how meaning functions in situations where no stable referent exists, where novelty arises, or where sense is made without reference to anything prior.
Correspondence presupposes the very distinctions meaning must help establish.
What remains when representation recedes
If meaning is not representation, not inner content, and not correspondence, what remains?
Not emptiness.
What remains is activity.
Meaning is something that happens.
It is enacted in use, in relation, in situated engagement with others and with the world.
This does not make meaning subjective, arbitrary, or ineffable.
It makes it relational.
Clearing the ground
This post has not yet said what meaning is.
That work must wait.
For now, it is enough to notice how much conceptual clutter is produced by asking meaning to do representational labour it was never designed to perform.
Once that labour is set aside, meaning can begin to appear — not as a mirror of reality, but as a practice that makes reality intelligible in the first place.
The next post draws a crucial boundary, showing why meaning must not be confused with value, usefulness, or regulation — even though it is inseparable from them in practice.
No comments:
Post a Comment