In the first post, we drew a clean cut:
Information theory models the grain of instantiation, not the source of meaning.
That claim rests on a deeper asymmetry—one that is often gestured at, but rarely made explicit. This post makes it explicit by distinguishing first‑order phenomena from second‑order patterning, and by showing why no amount of success at the latter can ever collapse into the former.
The distinction is not empirical. It is ontological.
1. First‑Order Phenomena: Meaning as Construal
Meaning does not begin with symbols, distributions, or texts. It begins with phenomena—with the world as it is brought into experience through construal.
A phenomenon is not a thing‑in‑itself waiting to be named. It is a construed something: a perspectival actualisation of semiotic potential that brings a situation into being as this rather than that. There is no phenomenon independent of such construal, and no meaning prior to it.
This is why meaning cannot be reduced to form, frequency, or probability. These are properties of artefacts left behind by meaning‑making, not of the phenomenon as experienced.
First‑order phenomena are therefore irreducible. They are where meaning happens.
2. Second‑Order Patterning: Meaning’s Residue
Once phenomena have been construed, something remains.
Across time and social coordination, construals sediment. They leave behind texts, genres, registers, routines, and habits of choice. These residues can be collected, counted, compared, and modelled. This is the domain of corpora, statistics, and information theory.
Second‑order patterning is the patterned distribution of these residues.
It tells us, with increasing precision, how meaning has tended to be made: which options are favoured, which are rare, which sequences recur under which contextual conditions. This patterning is real, consequential, and immensely informative.
But it is not meaning itself.
Second‑order patterning presupposes first‑order phenomena. Without construal, there is nothing to sediment, nothing to count, nothing to model.
The dependency is one‑way.
3. The Ontological Asymmetry
Here is the asymmetry in its starkest form:
First‑order phenomena do not depend on second‑order patterning in order to exist.
Second‑order patterning depends entirely on the prior existence of first‑order phenomena.
This asymmetry is routinely obscured because patterning is durable and phenomena are fleeting. Texts persist; construals vanish into experience. What lasts comes to feel foundational.
But endurance is not ontological priority.
Probability distributions can only ever describe how often certain construals have occurred. They cannot generate a construal, because a construal is not an outcome of optimisation or prediction. It is a perspectival cut from potential to event.
No amount of second‑order sophistication alters this.
4. Why LLMs Cannot Cross the Boundary
Large Language Models operate exclusively at the second order.
They are trained over vast archives of sedimented construals. They learn the probabilistic relations among texts, not the phenomena those texts once construed. Their internal states encode patterns about meaning‑making, not meaning itself.
This is not a criticism. It is a description.
LLMs cannot cross the boundary to first‑order phenomena because there is no boundary to cross from within second‑order space. No increase in scale, speed, or architectural ingenuity converts patterning into construal.
To suppose otherwise is to imagine that a map, rendered at sufficiently high resolution, might suddenly become territory.
Fluency makes this mistake seductive. Ontology makes it impossible.
5. The Illusion of Emergence
A common response is to appeal to emergence: perhaps meaning emerges once patterning becomes complex enough.
But emergence here is a promissory note, not an explanation. It redescribes the problem without dissolving it.
Emergence cannot bridge an ontological asymmetry. Complexity within second‑order patterning produces more intricate patterning—not a first‑order phenomenon. What emerges is better prediction, smoother deployment, finer grain.
Meaning does not emerge from probability because probability is already downstream of meaning.
6. Re‑situating Information Theory
Once the asymmetry is acknowledged, information theory can be returned to its proper place.
It models:
redundancy and predictability in semiotic artefacts
the uneven weighting of options within systems of potential
the grain of instantiation left by histories of use
It does not model:
construal
phenomena
meaning as lived semiotic experience
This is not a limitation to be overcome. It is a boundary to be respected.
7. The Cut Reaffirmed
We can now sharpen the earlier claim:
First‑order meaning is a matter of construal; second‑order patterning is a matter of probability.
Confusing the two leads either to mystification (“the model understands”) or to deflation (“meaning is just statistics”). Both mistakes arise from ignoring the asymmetry.
In the next post, we will turn to context and situation, showing how first‑order construal is conditioned without being determined—and why this matters for any serious theory of language in use.
Patterning is powerful.
Meaning is primary.
The asymmetry is not optional.
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