If normativity first appears in breakdown, and if breakdown is not a failure of representation, then a difficult question follows:
In what sense can anything be correct at all?
For many readers, correctness and representation are inseparable. To say that something is correct is assumed to mean that it matches a rule, a model, or an external state of affairs. On this view, normativity derives from comparison: the action is correct because it corresponds to what it is meant to represent.
This post makes a different claim.
Why representation cannot ground correctness
Let us begin by noting a structural problem with representational accounts.
To say that an action is correct because it matches a representation presupposes that:
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the representation is already fixed,
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the criteria for matching are already known,
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the act of comparison is itself correct.
But none of these can be explained by representation alone. The comparison itself must already be normatively constrained. Otherwise, there would be no way to say whether the representation had been applied correctly.
Representation, therefore, cannot be the source of normativity. At best, it is one of its later products.
Correctness as sustained coherence
Consider again the domains we have already touched:
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A sentence is correct if it can be continued intelligibly.
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A bodily movement is correct if it maintains balance and coordination.
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A conversational move is correct if it preserves mutual engagement.
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A line of reasoning is correct if it supports further inferential work.
In none of these cases is correctness established by matching a representation. It is established by what the act makes possible next.
Correctness is retrospective and functional. We say something was correct because it worked — not in the pragmatic sense of “achieved a goal”, but in the structural sense of sustaining the field of potential from which it emerged.
Correctness without ideals
It is important to be precise here.
Many continuations can be correct at once. Others may be marginal but still viable. Correctness is not a single target but a region of stability within a constrained space.
This is why correctness tolerates variation, improvisation, and local difference. Systems do not demand exact matches; they demand sufficient alignment for continuation to remain possible.
Repair and the emergence of correctness
We can now return to repair, foreshadowed in the previous post.
When breakdown occurs, repair does not aim at restoring a prior representation. It aims at re-establishing continuability. The repaired action is correct if it succeeds in doing so — regardless of whether it resembles the original trajectory.
Correctness, then, emerges through repair. It is not present in advance as a rule to be followed. It is recognised after the fact as the stabilisation that holds.
This is why normativity feels both constraining and flexible: it constrains the space of viable action, but it does not specify in advance exactly how that space must be traversed.
Why this matters for meaning
Within the ontology of meaning developed earlier, this account of correctness is decisive.
This is what allows meaning to be:
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context-sensitive without being arbitrary,
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disciplined without being rule-bound,
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stable without being fixed.
Correctness is the name we give to this disciplined flexibility.
Clearing a final confusion
One might object that this account reduces correctness to mere success. It does not.
Success is goal-relative. Correctness is system-relative. An action can succeed in achieving a goal while still destabilising the system that supports it. Conversely, an action can fail to achieve a goal while remaining structurally correct.
Correctness concerns the integrity of the system, not the satisfaction of an intention.
Looking ahead
If correctness can be understood without representation, a further consequence follows:
Normativity does not require rules.
Rules, where they appear, must themselves be explained as stabilised responses to recurring breakdowns and repairs. They are not the source of correctness; they are one of its crystallisations.
In the next post, we will take this step explicitly by examining rules, norms, and values as secondary formations — derivative, powerful, but not foundational.
That is where normativity begins to look recognisably ethical, without ever losing its ontological footing.
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