What Holds
Setting: The faculty common room. Late afternoon. The blackboard bears a single line, freshly written:
ACT ≠ PATTERN
Professor Quillibrace sits with a book closed on his lap.
Mr Blottisham stands near the board, arms folded.
Miss Elowen Stray sits on the table, watching both.
Blottisham:
All right. I’ll concede most of it. Probability doesn’t cause meaning. Context doesn’t force it. Fine.
Quillibrace:
Good.
Blottisham:
But surely they still explain it — in aggregate.
Stray:
Explain what exactly?
Blottisham:
Why this meaning occurred rather than another.
Stray:
No.
(A pause.)
Blottisham:
No?
Stray:
They explain why this meaning was possible, recognisable, survivable. They don’t explain why it was done.
Quillibrace:
That distinction matters.
Blottisham:
But if the space is sufficiently narrowed—
Stray:
—something still has to happen in the space.
(She gestures to the board.)
Stray:
Patterns describe where acts tend to fall. They don’t perform the falling.
Blottisham:
So meaning isn’t selected?
Stray:
Not unless you’ve already smuggled in a selector.
Quillibrace:
Selection is a second-order metaphor. Meaning is first-order action.
Blottisham:
Then what exactly disappears when we reduce meaning to probability?
Stray:
The moment of answerability.
Blottisham:
Responsibility again.
Stray:
Not “again”. Always.
(Silence.)
Quillibrace:
Meaning is not what tends to occur. It is what is done.
(Blottisham nods, slowly.)
What Slips
Setting: A corridor outside a seminar room. The next day.
Mr Blottisham speaks animatedly to Dr Finch, a junior colleague clutching a notebook.
Blottisham:
It’s quite elegant, really. You see, probability doesn’t determine meaning — that’s the key insight.
Finch:
So meaning isn’t probabilistic?
Blottisham:
Oh, it is — but not in a crude way. It emerges from constrained choice.
Finch:
Choice by whom?
Blottisham:
Well — by the system-user, of course, operating within statistically structured context.
Finch:
So the probabilities guide the act?
Blottisham:
Guide, bias, channel — yes, exactly.
Finch:
And that explains meaning?
Blottisham:
Explains why certain meanings occur rather than others.
(They pause near a window.)
Finch:
Then if we had the probabilities and the context fully specified—
Blottisham:
—we’d have a very strong account of meaning, yes.
(Miss Stray passes by, overhearing the last sentence. She stops.)
Stray:
No, you wouldn’t.
Blottisham:
Elowen — I was just explaining—
Stray:
I know. You were explaining it correctly, and saying it wrong.
Finch:
I’m lost.
Stray:
You’ve turned conditions into inclinations.
Blottisham:
That’s a bit unfair.
Stray:
Is it? You’ve let probability lean again.
Blottisham:
But I explicitly said it doesn’t determine!
Stray:
You let it interact.
(A pause.)
Stray:
Probability doesn’t guide acts. It survives them.
Finch:
So what does the act respond to?
Stray:
To a situation — as construed — and to others who can answer back.
Blottisham:
Then what are probabilities for?
Stray:
For us.
(She gestures back toward the seminar rooms.)
Stray:
They are how we talk about what tends to happen after meaning has already occurred.
(She leaves.)
The mistake persists not because it is crude, but because second-order descriptions are so easy to mistake for agents.
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