Once meaning is released from representational duty, a familiar temptation appears.
If meaning is not about representing the world, perhaps it is about what matters.
Meaning, on this view, becomes value.
This move is understandable — and mistaken.
Why the confusion arises
Meaning and value are deeply entangled in lived experience.
What matters draws attention.
What is meaningful often feels important.
Practices that organise meaning also coordinate action.
From here, it is easy to slide from meaning to value without noticing the shift.
But entanglement is not identity.
What value does
Value systems organise behaviour.
They stabilise preferences, priorities, norms, and sanctions.
Biological values coordinate survival.
Social values coordinate cooperation.
Institutional values coordinate compliance and distribution.
These systems work whether or not anything is construed symbolically.
They regulate action directly.
What meaning does
Meaning does something different.
Meaning makes phenomena intelligible as something.
It does not tell us what to do.
It allows us to recognise what is happening, what kind of situation this is, and what distinctions are in play.
Meaning does not coordinate behaviour.
It differentiates experience.
The danger of collapse
When meaning is reduced to value, two distortions follow.
First, meaning is moralised.
Disagreement becomes deviance.
Misunderstanding becomes failure of commitment.
Second, value systems acquire false semantic authority.
They begin to present themselves as matters of sense rather than coordination.
Neither distortion is benign.
Independence without isolation
To say that meaning is not value is not to separate them completely.
Meaning and value interact constantly.
Value systems depend on meaning to articulate norms.
Meaning practices are shaped by what is at stake.
But they are not interchangeable.
They operate at different levels and do different work.
Why the distinction matters
If meaning is collapsed into value, critique becomes impossible.
Every challenge to sense appears as a threat to order.
Every reconfiguration of meaning feels like moral decay.
Keeping the distinction clear allows both meaning and value to function without overreach.
Preparing the positive account
With representation set aside in the previous post, and value now distinguished from meaning, the space is finally clear to articulate what meaning is.
The next post introduces this directly, framing meaning as construal — the relational activity through which phenomena become intelligible at all.
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