Setting:
The senior common room. Late afternoon. A tray with a teapot, three cups. The blackboard still bears half-erased diagrams of systems and instances. Light filters in, dust motes visible.
Professor Quillibrace sits, reading glasses low on his nose.
Mr Blottisham stands, jacket off, coffee in hand.
Miss Elowen Stray leans against the window, notebook closed but present.
The Grain of Instantiation
Blottisham:
Surely—surely—if we can model the probabilities finely enough, we’ve captured what’s really going on. I mean, the grain, the tendencies, the regularities—what more is there?
Quillibrace:
(Without looking up)
An act.
Blottisham:
An act?
Quillibrace:
Yes. One. Occurring. Irreducible.
Blottisham:
But that’s just mystification. The act comes from the system. The probabilities are updated with every instance—Halliday himself says so.
Quillibrace:
Halliday says the description is updated. Not the ontology.
Blottisham:
That’s a distinction without a difference.
Stray:
(Quietly)
Is it? Or is it the difference between what remains and what happens?
(Blottisham pauses, frowns.)
First- and Second-Order
Blottisham:
Look—corpora show us what language is. The patterns are there. Massive scale. Surely that’s meaning made visible.
Quillibrace:
Meaning made absent, Mr Blottisham. What you see are residues.
Blottisham:
Residues of what?
Quillibrace:
Of acts that are no longer there.
Stray:
And the acts themselves—once they’re gone—they can’t be recovered from the pattern, can they?
Quillibrace:
No. Only inferred. And inference is not instantiation.
Blottisham:
But the pattern constrains what can be said next.
Quillibrace:
It conditions. It does not determine.
Stray:
That word keeps doing important work.
Context and Conditioning
Blottisham:
All right, context then. Field, tenor, mode. Surely once you specify those, the meaning more or less follows.
Quillibrace:
If that were true, responsibility would evaporate.
Blottisham:
Oh come on—context explains meaning.
Quillibrace:
It explains why certain meanings are recognisable. Not why this one occurred.
Stray:
So context narrows the space… but doesn’t select the point?
Quillibrace:
Exactly.
Blottisham:
But Halliday says language construes context!
Quillibrace:
And so it does.
(Quillibrace finally looks up.)
Quillibrace:
Context as experienced is construed. Context as organisation is encountered.
Blottisham:
That sounds convenient.
Stray:
Or careful.
Agency and Acts
Blottisham:
You’re smuggling in agency. That’s the real issue. You don’t want to give it up.
Quillibrace:
I’m not smuggling it in. I’m refusing to remove it.
Blottisham:
Systems act. Institutions act. Models act.
Quillibrace:
No. They enable, constrain, stabilise. They do not answer.
Stray:
And answering is what makes something an act?
Quillibrace:
Yes. Answerability is not optional. It is constitutive.
Blottisham:
So a language model can never mean?
Quillibrace:
It can only be meant with.
(A brief silence.)
The Grain Revisited
Stray:
May I try something?
Quillibrace:
Please.
Stray:
It seems the grain of instantiation is where everything gets confused. The finer the grain we observe, the more we’re tempted to think we’re seeing the act itself.
Quillibrace:
Well put.
Stray:
But what we’re really seeing is the trace density of past acts.
Blottisham:
And that isn’t enough?
Stray:
Not if what you’re trying to explain is meaning.
(Blottisham exhales, half-laughs.)
What Disappears
Blottisham:
So what, then, disappears when we reduce everything to probability?
Stray:
(After a pause)
The moment where something could have been otherwise—and wasn’t.
Quillibrace:
And with it, responsibility.
(Quillibrace closes his book.)
Quillibrace:
Probability explains fluency.
Context explains recognisability.
Institutions explain durability.
(He stands.)
Quillibrace:
None of them explains meaning.
Curtain.
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