On Relation Without Representation: 3 Why Meaning Is Not About Anything

If relation is ontologically prior to reference, then a further consequence follows — one that is often resisted even by those sympathetic to relational approaches:

meaning is not fundamentally about anything.

This claim is easily misunderstood, so it is worth proceeding carefully. To say that meaning is not about anything is not to deny that language, diagrams, gestures, or thoughts can be used to refer. Nor is it to deny that we experience meaning as about objects, events, or states of affairs. The claim is deeper and more precise: aboutness is not an ontological primitive. It is an achievement that arises under specific relational conditions.

The representational tradition treats aboutness as basic. Meaning, on this view, consists in standing-for, pointing-to, or mirroring something beyond itself. The task of theory is then to explain how this pointing succeeds. But as we have already seen, reference presupposes intelligibility rather than generating it. The same is true, more sharply still, of aboutness.

Before anything can be about something, a field of intelligibility must already exist in which distinctions can appear, persist, and matter. Aboutness assumes:

• differentiated phenomena,

• stable identities,

• backgrounded alternatives,

• and a perspective from which something can count as something.

None of these are supplied by aboutness itself. They are the outcome of relational articulation within structured potential.

Meaning, at its most basic, is not directional. It does not point outward toward an object. It emerges inwardly, as intelligibility under a cut. A phenomenon appears as meaningful not because it refers to something else, but because it is articulated against a background of excluded possibilities within a relational field. Meaning is the effect of this articulation — not a relation of correspondence.

This is why meaning can be present even when nothing is being referred to. A melody is meaningful without being about anything. A colour contrast is meaningful without representing an object. A syntactic structure can be meaningful even when it is semantically empty or nonsensical. In each case, intelligibility precedes reference. Aboutness may later be layered on, but meaning does not depend on it.

The persistence of aboutness as a conceptual default stems from a conflation: the conflation of phenomenal orientation with ontological structure. We experience meaning as directed, intentional, and outward-facing. But this phenomenological orientation is itself a relational effect. It arises when stable patterns have sedimented sufficiently for certain articulations to function reliably as if they were about independent objects.

From within such a system, aboutness feels primitive. From outside it — or rather, from beneath it — it is clearly derivative.

Once this is seen, several long-standing philosophical puzzles dissolve rather than being solved. The problem of how meaning “reaches” the world evaporates, because meaning was never a reaching relation in the first place. The anxiety about misrepresentation loses its grip, because correspondence was never foundational. Error, fiction, abstraction, and imagination all become intelligible variations within relational systems, not deviations from an assumed representational norm.

This does not impoverish meaning. It enriches it.

Meaning is no longer constrained to succeed or fail at mirroring reality. It is understood as the articulation of intelligibility — the way phenomena appear as differentiated, salient, and coherent within structured potential. Aboutness becomes one mode among others, a powerful and useful one, but not the ground of meaning itself.

This shift also clarifies why representational explanations so often feel satisfying while remaining ontologically shallow. Aboutness works because systems are capable of sustaining stable relational patterns over time. When those patterns are treated as independent objects, meaning appears to point outward. But this outwardness is an effect of sedimentation, not a foundation.

Meaning is not about anything because it does not need to be.

It does its work earlier.

In the next post, we will show how this account recovers what representational theories thought they alone could secure: the apparent stability of objects. We will see that objects are not the ground of meaning, but neither are they illusions. They are stabilised relational effects, sustained through constraint, repetition, and successful coordination.

Meaning does not point to objects.

Objects emerge where meaning holds.

That is where we turn next.