Meaning as a Dangerous Technology: 1 Meaning Is Not What We Think It Is

There is a quiet assumption running through much of science, philosophy, and everyday common sense: that meaning is the basis of intelligent behaviour.

We explain action by appealing to what an organism understands. We explain coordination by invoking shared meanings. We explain success by assuming correct representations. Meaning is treated as the substrate on which intelligence, competence, and even life itself are built.

This assumption is wrong.

Not slightly wrong. Structurally wrong.

Most of what living systems do — including the most complex, adaptive, and resilient forms of behaviour — does not depend on meaning at all.

Life works without meaning

Bacteria coordinate without beliefs. Plants track light, moisture, and nutrients without concepts. Insects build nests, allocate labour, and adapt to environmental change without representations of what they are doing. Animals hunt, flee, court, and cooperate with extraordinary sensitivity to context, yet without any evidence that symbolic meaning is doing the work.

Even in humans, much of what we call intelligence operates below, beside, or prior to meaning: posture, timing, tone, attunement, skilled movement, social navigation. These capacities are not guided by explicit interpretation. They are ready rather than reflective.

Competence, in other words, is not meaning-driven. It is situationally organised, dynamically adjusted, and ecologically constrained. It arises from systems that are exquisitely tuned to act without having to explain themselves.

Meaning is not required for this.

Meaning is a special case, not the general rule

This does not make meaning an illusion. It makes it a specialised phenomenon.

Meaning appears late. It is fragile. It depends on semiotic infrastructure — symbols, conventions, shared constraints — that must already be in place. And when it appears, it does not replace existing coordination systems; it overlays them.

Crucially, meaning does not improve all forms of behaviour. In many cases, it degrades them. Skilled action becomes hesitant. Moral action becomes paralysed. Social coordination becomes brittle. The more explicitly we try to make sense of what we are doing, the more we risk interfering with capacities that were already working.

This should give us pause.

If meaning were the foundation of intelligence, its introduction should reliably enhance performance. Instead, it often introduces friction.

Why the confusion persists

The confusion is understandable. Meaning is visible. It leaves artefacts: texts, rules, explanations, theories. Readiness and coordination do not. They vanish into action.

Because meaning can be pointed to, recorded, and debated, we mistake it for the source of what it merely accompanies. We reverse the dependency: behaviour is explained by meaning, rather than meaning being explained by behaviour.

But this reverses the actual order.

Meaning piggybacks on capacities that are already there. It does not generate them.

The real question

Once this is acknowledged, a more interesting — and more uncomfortable — question emerges:

If life, intelligence, and coordination work so well without meaning, why did meaning evolve at all?

The answer cannot be that it was necessary. Life managed for billions of years without it.

Nor can the answer be that it is harmless. Its introduction reliably brings new kinds of failure along with new kinds of power.

To understand meaning properly, we need to stop treating it as a foundation or a faculty.

We need to treat it as what it actually is:

not the ground of intelligence,

not the essence of cognition,

but a high‑leverage intervention into already‑functioning systems.

In short, a technology.

And like all powerful technologies, meaning changes what is possible — and what can go wrong.

That is where we must look next.