A predictable misunderstanding follows any rejection of pre‑linguistic thought: the charge that experience itself has been denied. This is a mistake—but a revealing one. It shows how deeply “experience” and “thought” have been quietly fused in common sense accounts of language.
The argument is not that people lack experience prior to language. The argument is that experience does not arrive already differentiated into meanings. Treating experience as if it contained pre‑packaged thoughts is precisely how the conduit metaphor re‑enters through the back door.
Experience as Potential, Not Content
Experience is not a storehouse of meanings waiting to be expressed. It is a field of potential—rich, structured, and consequential, but not yet semiotically articulated. What experience affords is not propositions but possibilities for distinction.
This matters because once experience is treated as content, explanation collapses inward. Something must already “have” the meanings before language appears, and we are back with inner representations doing unexplained work.
By contrast, treating experience as potential allows us to explain differentiation without interior machinery. Distinctions do not pre‑exist their construal; they are actualised in semiotic choice.
Why Thought Causes Trouble
“Thought,” in most discussions of language, quietly means already‑made meaning. It names something supposedly stable, portable, and privately owned, which language then transmits. But once this assumption is in place, three problems immediately arise:
No account is given of how thoughts acquire their form.
No explanation is offered for why different semiotic choices matter.
No analytic leverage is gained; explanation simply relocates inside the head.
The appeal to thought explains nothing that cannot be explained more precisely by system networks, register, and histories of use. It functions as a placeholder where explanation should be.
Construal Without Interiors
Construal offers a way out precisely because it does not require inner contents. Construal is not a mental act performed on experience; it is the relational alignment of semiotic resources with situations of use.
On this view, experience is not interpreted into meaning. Meaning is actualised through patterned choice in language. What gets differentiated, stabilised, and coordinated are not thoughts, but relations.
This is why construal avoids both mirroring and creation. Language neither copies experience nor invents it wholesale. It organises potential into functional distinctions.
The Persistent Confusion
The resistance to this move is understandable. If experience is vivid, immediate, and compelling, it is tempting to assume it must already be meaningful. But vividness is not meaning, and immediacy is not differentiation.
The mistake is architectural, not phenomenological. It lies in confusing the having of experience with the making of distinctions.
A Simple Test
A useful diagnostic question is this: what explanatory work is “thought” doing that construal, system, and context do not already do better?
If the answer is “none,” then thought has been functioning not as explanation, but as comfort.
Experience remains fully intact on this account—indeed, it becomes more intelligible. What disappears is the unnecessary fiction that meanings are already there, waiting to be carried across.
Language does not transmit thought. It actualises distinctions.
That difference matters.
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