Up to this point, the argument has been largely negative: probability does not explain meaning; patterning does not generate phenomena; context does not determine construal. What remains to be said is positive, and decisive.
Meaning is not an outcome. It is an act.
This post draws the final cut in the first movement of the series by bringing agency and responsibility into view—not as moral add-ons or humanist comforts, but as structural features of meaning itself.
1. Why Agency Refuses to Disappear
Attempts to reduce meaning to probability, patterning, or context all share a common strategy: they try to make meaning happen by itself. If enough structure is in place, meaning is supposed to fall out as a result.
But meaning stubbornly resists this treatment.
We continue to speak of speakers meaning something, of writers intending, of utterances committing their producers to claims, promises, accusations, or invitations. These are not folk residues awaiting scientific elimination; they track something real about how meaning functions.
Agency refuses to disappear because meaning is not merely instantiated—it is taken up.
2. Meaning as Act, Not Event
To call meaning an act is not to psychologise it, nor to reduce it to inner intention. It is to locate meaning at the point where semiotic potential is actualised in a perspectival cut.
An act is not just something that happens. It is something for which someone can, in principle, be held responsible.
This is why meaning cannot be treated as an event caused by prior conditions. Events can be explained exhaustively by antecedent states. Acts cannot—not because they are mysterious, but because they are normative as well as causal.
To mean is to take a stance within a space of alternatives, to commit to one construal rather than another. That commitment is what makes meaning answerable.
3. Responsibility Is Not Optional
Responsibility enters not as ethics but as ontology.
If meaning were merely the outcome of probability-weighted processes, there would be nothing to answer for. No one would have meant otherwise; the system would simply have unfolded.
But this is not how meaning works. We challenge meanings. We ask what someone meant, whether they were serious, ironic, evasive, misleading. We hold people to account for what they have said or written.
These practices are not external overlays. They are internal to meaning itself.
Responsibility marks the difference between pattern and act.
4. Why Systems Cannot Bear Responsibility
This is the decisive reason probabilistic systems cannot be meaning-makers.
Large Language Models generate outputs. They do not undertake acts. They cannot be responsible for what they produce—not because they are insufficiently complex, but because responsibility is not a property that emerges from patterning.
A system can be reliable, biased, dangerous, or useful. But these are assessments of the system, not responsibilities borne by it.
To say that a model “means” something would be to imply that it could have meant otherwise—and could be held to account for the difference. No increase in probabilistic sensitivity makes this coherent.
5. Agency Without Individualism
At this point, agency is often misunderstood as requiring a sovereign individual subject, standing outside social systems and conventions. This is a mistake.
Agency, in the present sense, is not ownership of meaning in isolation. It is participation in a normative space where meanings count, commitments accrue, and responses are due.
Acts of meaning are socially conditioned, institutionally scaffolded, and historically shaped. None of this diminishes their status as acts.
Agency is relational, not private.
6. The Asymmetry Completed
We can now complete the asymmetry developed across the series:
Probability describes distributions of prior acts.
Context conditions the space in which acts are possible.
Meaning occurs only in the act of construal.
Acts are answerable; patterns are not.
This is why no refinement of probabilistic modelling, no enrichment of context representation, and no appeal to emergence bridges the gap.
Meaning is not what systems produce. It is what agents do.
7. What This Clarifies
This account does not deny the power or importance of probabilistic systems. It clarifies their role.
They model the residue of agency without possessing it. They extend our reach without inheriting our commitments. They participate in meaning-making only insofar as agents use them within acts for which those agents remain responsible.
Once this is seen, much confusion dissolves.
The question is no longer whether machines “really understand”. It is whether we understand what meaning is.
8. Where Next
With act, agency, and responsibility now in view, the ground is prepared for a further question: how do semiotic acts coordinate, stabilise, and scale across institutions, technologies, and histories without collapsing into mechanism?
That question turns from critique to construction.
It will be the task of the next movement of the series.
Meaning happens.
But it does not happen by itself.
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