Having cleared meaning of representational duties and separated it from value, we can now ask: what is meaning actually doing?
The answer is deceptively simple:
Meaning is construal.
Construal is relational
Construal is the act of bringing phenomena into relation, of making something intelligible as something.
It is not a property of objects, nor a content in minds.
It occurs in relation, within a field of distinctions, attentions, and practices.
Construal before judgement
Meaning does not depend on correctness, truth, or utility.
Before any judgement can be made, some construal must already be in place:
we recognise what counts as a situation,
we identify features that are salient,
we detect patterns and possibilities.
Judgement and evaluation are secondary; construal is primary.
Construal before objects
Objects are outcomes of construal, not its prerequisites.
What is taken to be a discrete thing emerges through repeated patterns of attention and differentiation.
Meaning, therefore, is not attached to objects — it makes them visible as objects at all.
Multiple, overlapping construals
Construals are never singular.
Different participants in a situation may construe differently, each producing a coherent field of intelligibility from their perspective.
Misalignment, ambiguity, and disagreement are natural consequences of this relational activity.
Meaning is robust precisely because it can exist amid such variation.
Construal is practiced
Construal is not static.
It occurs in action, discourse, observation, interaction.
Texts, symbols, and systems afford construal but do not contain it.
Practice is central: the same phenomena may be construed differently in different contexts, across time, and by different participants.
Why construal matters
Seeing meaning as construal dissolves several confusions:
meaning is no longer trapped by representation,
meaning is not reducible to value or preference,
meaning does not require objects to attach to,
and meaning is active, not static.
Construal is what allows phenomena to become intelligible, actionable, and relevant.
Next steps
Having established construal as the heart of meaning, the next post goes further: it shows how meaning operates before objects, how objects themselves are emergent from repeated relational activity, and how the field of possibilities is structured through meaning.
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