When meaning falters, we reach almost instinctively for repair. A conversation breaks down, a collaboration stalls, a policy fails to land, a model misfires. The diagnosis comes quickly and with reassuring familiarity: disagreement, error, misunderstanding, lack of information, misaligned incentives. Each diagnosis carries with it an implied remedy. Argue more carefully. Correct the mistake. Explain more clearly. Provide better data. Align interests.
This reflex is not accidental. It presupposes that alignment is the default condition of meaning, and that when alignment fails, something has gone wrong that can in principle be put right. This series begins from the refusal of that presupposition. Misalignment is not a defect that befalls meaning from the outside. It is a structural possibility internal to meaning as such.
This first post does only negative work. It does not yet say what misalignment is. It clears away several powerful but misleading interpretations that prevent misalignment from being seen at all.
Misalignment Is Not Disagreement
Disagreement is a familiar and tractable phenomenon. It presupposes a shared question-space, common criteria of relevance, and a sense—however fragile—that resolution is in principle available. One may disagree about facts, interpretations, priorities, or values, but disagreement already assumes a background of alignment within which such differences can be articulated.
Misalignment does not require disagreement. It can persist in its absence, and it can dissolve while disagreement remains. Two parties may agree on every proposition they exchange and still fail to coordinate meaningfully. Conversely, sharp disagreement can occur within a largely aligned construal regime, where the terms of the dispute, the stakes, and the procedures for resolution are jointly understood.
Treating misalignment as disagreement mistakes a failure of composition for a conflict of views. It assumes that the problem lies in what is believed or asserted, rather than in how meanings are structured and related.
Misalignment Is Not Error
Error presupposes a correct alternative. To say that something is wrong is to imply that it could be set right by reference to an appropriate standard. In everyday practice, this presupposition is often harmless and even necessary. But at the level of ontology, it becomes distorting.
There is no unconstrued standpoint from which meaning could be adjudicated in general. Construal is not a veil placed over an independent reality; it is constitutive of what counts as a phenomenon at all. To label misalignment as error is therefore to smuggle in an external measure that the ontology itself disallows.
One cannot be wrong in general—only wrong relative to a construal one is not inhabiting. Misalignment does not consist in one side failing to match reality while another succeeds. It consists in the absence of a shared construal within which such matching could be assessed.
Misalignment Is Not Misunderstanding
Misunderstanding is a psychological notion. It invokes intentions, mental states, empathy, and failures of uptake. The implied remedy is mutual comprehension: if only the parties could fully grasp what the other means, alignment would follow.
This hope is misplaced. Understanding is itself a situated achievement, accomplished within a particular construal regime. Mutual understanding does not guarantee composability. Two agents may understand each other perfectly—accurately grasping intentions, definitions, and commitments—and still find that their meanings do not cohere when brought together.
Misalignment persists not because something has been misunderstood, but because what has been understood cannot be jointly sustained.
Misalignment Is Not Moral Failure
When other explanations falter, moralisation often enters by default. Someone must be acting in bad faith, refusing to listen, privileging the wrong values, or failing to take responsibility. Misalignment is thus redescribed as a failure of will or character.
This move adds heat without adding clarity. Moral judgement presupposes agency that could have done otherwise under the same conditions. Yet misalignment frequently persists despite maximal goodwill, sincerity, and effort. Blame may arise within misalignment, but it does not explain it.
To refuse moralisation here is not to deny ethical stakes or lived consequences. It is to insist that normativity does not provide the ontology of meaning. Misalignment is not a vice, and alignment is not a virtue.
Why These Distinctions Matter
As long as misalignment is treated as disagreement, we argue. As long as it is treated as error, we correct. As long as it is treated as misunderstanding, we explain. As long as it is treated as moral failure, we accuse. None of these responses are neutral. Each presupposes that alignment is the natural resting state of meaning, and that failure to achieve it signals defect.
Once these assumptions are suspended, a different picture begins to emerge. Misalignment no longer appears as an anomaly in need of repair, but as a structural condition with which meaning must reckon. The question shifts from how to eliminate misalignment to how construals relate—and fail to relate—to one another in the first place.
In the next post, we will begin to approach that question directly, by examining what it means for construals to compose, and why there is no general reason to expect that they should.
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