Why intelligibility does not begin with representation
It is almost irresistible to equate meaning with language. We speak of meanings as things words have, as contents carried by symbols, as messages encoded and decoded. From this perspective, meaning appears to enter the world only when representation appears.
This series begins by refusing that assumption.
Meaning does not originate in symbols. Symbols presuppose meaning. To see why, we must return to the most basic condition of intelligibility: relational constraint.
Meaning as constraint, not content
Meaning is often treated as a kind of content — something stored, transmitted, or possessed. But content metaphors obscure what meaning actually does. Meaning is not what a phenomenon contains; it is what makes a phenomenon intelligible at all.
A phenomenon counts as something only because distinctions have been stabilised within a system. Certain differences matter; others do not. Certain continuities are preserved; others are ignored. These constraints are not optional additions. They are the conditions under which anything can appear as anything.
Meaning, in this sense, is structural. It is the pattern of constraint that renders a phenomenon intelligible within a relational context.
Before symbols
Long before symbols exist, systems already operate under constraints. A detector distinguishes signal from noise. A chemical system stabilises certain reactions and not others. An organism differentiates between viable and non-viable interactions. In each case, phenomena are intelligible relative to the system’s constraints, even though no symbols are present.
Nothing is being represented here. No code is being read. No message is being interpreted. Yet distinctions matter, regularities are stabilised, and phenomena occur in structured ways.
If meaning required symbols, none of this would be possible.
Why representation cannot be foundational
Representation presupposes distinction. A symbol can only represent something if there is already a stable difference between what counts as the symbol and what counts as its referent. That difference is not created by representation; it is a precondition for it.
Treating symbols as the origin of meaning inverts the dependency. Symbols exploit pre-existing relational constraints. They do not generate them.
This is why attempts to ground meaning in language, information, or code inevitably circle back to unexamined assumptions about intelligibility. Representation explains how meaning is handled, not how it is possible.
Meaning without minds
Equating meaning with symbols often brings minds back in by the side door. If symbols require interpretation, then meaning appears to require interpreters. But this, too, mistakes a special case for a general condition.
Meaning as relational constraint does not depend on consciousness. It is present wherever distinctions are stabilised within systems. Minds experience meaning; they do not create its structural conditions.
This does not diminish human meaning. It situates it.
The task ahead
If meaning does not begin with symbols, then symbolic systems must be understood as specialisations rather than origins. Language, mathematics, and other semiotic systems refine, extend, and mobilise constraints that are already in place.
The work of this series is to trace that specialisation carefully — without collapsing meaning into representation, and without treating symbols as metaphysical foundations.
The next instalment will examine constraint more closely, showing why structure precedes code, and how systems stabilise meaning without encoding it. Meaning comes first. Symbols come later.
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