One of the most persistent misunderstandings surrounding construal is the assumption that it names a mental act: an individual interpreting experience, imposing meaning on what is given. Once this substitution is made, all the familiar furniture of interiority quietly returns. Construal becomes a refined synonym for interpretation, and the architectural shift it was meant to effect is lost.
This is not a small terminological slip. It is a categorical error.
Why Interpretation Pulls Meaning Back Inside
Interpretation presupposes three things:
a subject who interprets
a content to be interpreted
a meaning that results from that interpretive act
Even when dressed up in sophisticated language, interpretation retains the basic structure of an interior operation performed on experience. Meaning is something added, projected, or inferred.
Once construal is understood this way, the homunculus is back — not always explicitly, but structurally. Someone, somewhere, must already know how to interpret correctly.
What Construal Actually Names
Construal does not name a mental act at all. It names a relation.
More precisely, it names the patterned alignment between semiotic resources and situations of use. Construal is how experience is differentiated through choice within a system, not how a subject imposes meaning on raw input.
There is no prior content waiting to be interpreted, and no inner agent required to perform the work. Meaning emerges as distinctions are actualised semiotically.
This is why construal belongs with system networks, register, and context — not with cognition understood as inner processing.
Why the Confusion Is So Persistent
The confusion persists because interpretation feels intuitive. Experience feels meaningful, vivid, already organised. From that phenomenological immediacy it is tempting to infer that meaning must already be there.
But immediacy is not differentiation. Vividness is not meaning. What feels “already meaningful” is precisely what semiotic systems have made available as potential through long histories of use.
Construal operates at this systemic level. It explains how certain distinctions are available, stabilised, and functional — not how individuals privately interpret the world.
The Analytic Payoff
Treating construal as interpretation drains it of analytic power. Once meaning is relocated inside the subject, analysis loses traction. Explanations dissolve into appeals to intention, understanding, or perspective.
By contrast, treating construal as relational keeps explanation where it belongs:
in the organisation of systems
in the probabilities of choice
in the relation between register and situation
in histories of semiotic differentiation
This is where predictions improve, descriptions sharpen, and analyses scale beyond individual cases.
A Simple Check
A useful test is this: if construal is doing its work properly, no appeal to an inner interpreter should be required.
If explanation still depends on what someone meant, intended, or had in mind prior to language, then construal has already been replaced by interpretation.
Why the Distinction Matters
Construal is not interpretation because meaning is not an interior achievement. It is a relational accomplishment.
Keeping this distinction clear is not pedantry. It is what prevents the entire explanatory architecture from collapsing back into the head.
Construal keeps meaning where it does its work: in systems, in situations, and in histories of use.
That is why it matters.
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