Few ideas about language are as deeply entrenched — or as quietly destructive — as the claim that language is a medium. It sounds harmless, even commonsensical. Language, we say, is the medium through which thoughts, meanings, or messages pass.
But this metaphor does more damage than it appears. Treating language as a medium smuggles the conduit model back in at the very moment it seems to have been abandoned.
What a Medium Presupposes
A medium is defined by what passes through it. Water carries fish. Air carries sound. Wires carry signals. To call language a medium is therefore already to assume:
something exists prior to language
that something is transported
language itself is secondary, inert, and transparent
Once these assumptions are in place, meaning must originate elsewhere — typically in minds — and language becomes a delivery system rather than an organising force.
The homunculus is never far behind.
Why Language Resists the Medium Metaphor
Language does not behave like a medium. Nothing passes through it unchanged. Meanings are not preserved, transmitted, or delivered intact.
Instead:
distinctions are made, not carried
relations are organised, not conveyed
possibilities are opened and closed, not transported
If language were a medium, then meaning would be stable across contexts, registers, and histories. Empirically, the opposite is true.
What Language Actually Does
Language functions as a technology of coordination. It makes certain distinctions available, probable, and consequential in particular situations.
Through system networks, language organises potential into choice. Through register, it aligns those choices with situation types. Through history, it stabilises some distinctions and marginalises others.
None of this resembles transmission. It resembles configuration.
Why the Medium Metaphor Persists
The metaphor persists because it flatters intuition. Experience feels immediate; meaning feels already there. Treating language as a medium preserves this feeling while offering a simple explanatory story.
But explanatory comfort is not explanatory power.
The medium metaphor obscures exactly what analysts need to see: how meaning varies systematically, how new meanings emerge, and how coordination succeeds or fails.
The Cost of the Metaphor
Once language is treated as a medium, analysis slides toward interiors. Meaning becomes something speakers have rather than something they do. Explanation gravitates toward intention, understanding, or mental content.
The result is a theory rich in intuitions and poor in analytic traction.
A Better Framing
Language is not a medium for meaning. It is the means by which meaning is actualised.
Meaning does not pass through language. It comes into being through patterned semiotic choice in context.
When this shift is made, familiar problems dissolve:
the need for inner meanings
the mystery of coordination
the recurrence of the homunculus
Language stops being a channel and becomes what it has always been: a relational technology for making distinctions matter.
Once that is seen, the medium metaphor can be set aside — not because it is false in some trivial sense, but because it has been doing the wrong work all along.
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