The Meaning After Representation series deliberately focused on meaning as construal: relational, evental, and irreducible to stored content. That focus was necessary.
But it left something largely implicit.
Meaning, as it is lived, is very often interpersonal — and interpersonal meaning feels different. It carries weight. Pressure. Risk. Obligation.
This post marks the transition into that terrain, with care.
What did not change
Before moving forward, it is crucial to be clear about what does not change.
Meaning remains:
semiotic and symbolic,
constituted in construal,
irreducible to biological or social systems.
Biological and social systems remain:
non-semiotic,
oriented toward coordination, viability, and regulation,
concerned with value, not meaning.
No reduction will be attempted. No conflation will be allowed.
Why the interpersonal feels different
Interpersonal meaning is not a different kind of meaning.
It is meaning enacted under conditions of constraint.
When others are present — actually or implicitly — construal occurs within fields shaped by:
expectation,
normativity,
potential sanction,
uptake or rejection,
affiliation and exclusion.
These forces do not generate meaning.
They shape the conditions under which meaning can occur.
Value acts on meaning
Social and biological systems cannot interpret.
They cannot construe.
But they can act on meaning by stabilising, narrowing, or pressuring the space of possible construals.
Value systems recruit meaning as their operational surface.
Through language, gesture, ritual, and interaction, value systems shape what is sayable, intelligible, and viable — without becoming meaningful themselves.
Interpersonal meaning as interface
Interpersonal meaning is best understood as an interface:
Meaning remains symbolic and relational.
Value remains non-symbolic and regulatory.
The interpersonal is where they meet.
This interface explains why meaning in social life often feels normative, consequential, and risky — without collapsing meaning into value or value into meaning.
Why this matters now
If meaning is treated only experientially, its social force becomes mysterious.
If value is treated as meaning, ontology collapses.
What is needed is a careful account of how value systems act upon meaning practices — shaping, constraining, and sometimes distorting them.
That is the work of the next series.
Looking ahead
The posts that follow will explore:
how obligation and normativity emerge without representation,
how social coordination pressures meaning without producing it,
how biological viability shapes attention and uptake,
and why interpersonal meaning feels both fragile and forceful.
Meaning will not be reduced.
Value will not be romanticised.
The task is to understand how they relate — precisely because they are not the same.
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