If meaning is construal, and if objects themselves emerge through relational activity, a familiar assumption must be challenged:
Meaning cannot be stored.
This post explains why.
The metaphor of storage
We often speak as if meaning is something that can be stored:
in texts,
in symbols,
in minds.
From this perspective, understanding is retrieving what is already there.
But this is a metaphor — and one that misleads.
Meaning as event
Meaning is not a substance or container.
It occurs in events of construal.
Every instance of engagement with phenomena, every act of interpretation, is a moment in which meaning is actualised.
Symbols, texts, and minds afford these events, but do not contain them.
Texts and symbols as affordances
A word on texts, signs, and symbols:
They are powerful because they can prompt repeated construals across time and participants.
But they do not carry meaning themselves.
They provide a field in which meaning can occur, not a reservoir from which it can be extracted.
Minds do not store meaning
Similarly, the mind does not possess meaning as content to be transferred.
Understanding is not a matter of decoding.
It is a matter of participating in relational events that instantiate construals.
Meaning emerges in interaction, not in isolation.
Implications for learning and communication
If meaning cannot be stored, education, dialogue, and transmission must be understood differently:
the goal is not to deposit information,
but to cultivate conditions in which construals can reliably occur,
to stabilise fields of intelligibility without freezing them,
to foster practices that sustain the emergence of meaning.
Emergence and temporality
Meaning is inherently temporal.
It depends on what is currently being construed, in relation to what has been construed before, and in anticipation of future construals.
This temporality explains why meaning is never identical across participants or across moments.
Looking ahead
With storage dispelled as a metaphor, the series can now explore how meaning functions amidst misalignment, ambiguity, and breakdown.
Post 6: Meaning and Misalignment will show that these are not exceptions or errors, but structural features of meaning-in-relation.
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