Meaning Without Interiors

Once the myths of inner images, inner emotions, inner beliefs, inner selves, inner agency, inner memory, and inner consciousness have been set aside, a final intuition tends to flare up in resistance.

Surely meaning must be inside somewhere.

If nothing is going on “in the head,” if there is no inner space in which experience is presented, then where could meaning possibly be?

This intuition is powerful — and misleading. Meaning does not disappear when interiors collapse. It simply becomes visible for what it always was.

The Interior Model of Meaning

Most contemporary theories of mind, language, and cognition quietly presuppose an interior model of meaning:

• meanings are representations in the mind

• words express inner contents

• understanding is matching internal states

• communication transfers meanings between heads

Even when the language is softened — “activation patterns,” “semantic networks,” “encodings” — the picture remains intact. Meaning is something possessed, stored, retrieved, or processed internally.

From a relational ontology perspective, this entire architecture is unnecessary.

And worse: it actively obscures how meaning actually works.

Meaning Is Not a Mental Object

Meaning is not a thing that words carry, thoughts contain, or brains store.

Nothing breaks if we remove this assumption. On the contrary, several long-standing puzzles evaporate:

• How do private meanings become shared?

• How do meanings change without anyone noticing?

• How can meaning be vague, contested, or emergent?

These are only problems if meaning is treated as an inner object that must somehow travel between individuals.

Once we drop that model, meaning no longer needs to move. It needs to stabilise.

Meaning as Relational Stabilisation

Meaning is a property of coordinated distinction-making.

A distinction becomes meaningful when it:

• makes a difference to action

• is sustained across interaction

• can be taken up by others

• constrains what follows

No interior space is required. Meaning arises in the relations that hold these distinctions in place.

Words do not express meanings. They participate in practices that stabilise distinctions.

Understanding is not matching inner contents. It is successful coordination.

Why Language Was Misread

Language has been the primary accomplice in the myth of interiors.

Because we can talk about thoughts, feelings, intentions, and meanings, we assume these must exist somewhere private before being expressed. But linguistic reference does not imply ontological location.

Saying “I believe X” does not report the contents of an inner container. It performs a positioning within a normative and discursive space.

Language does not reveal interiors. It creates the illusion of them.

Meaning Without Minds

This reframing also dissolves the anxiety that meaning requires a conscious subject to “have” it.

Traffic lights are meaningful. Legal documents are meaningful. Rituals, tools, maps, diagrams, equations, and melodies are meaningful.

Not because they contain meaning internally, but because they participate in systems of coordination that stabilise distinctions over time.

Human minds are extraordinarily good participants in meaning — not privileged containers of it.

Misunderstanding as the Default Case

If meaning were internal, shared understanding would be miraculous.

From a relational perspective, misunderstanding is the default condition — and communication works anyway, because meaning does not require perfect alignment. It requires enough coordination to proceed.

This is why meaning can drift, fracture, mutate, and recombine without ever needing to be “updated” inside anyone’s head.

Meaning is robust precisely because it is not located anywhere.

The Brain’s Proper Role

The brain supports participation in meaning-making practices. It does not host meaning itself.

Neural plasticity enables us to be trained into distinctions, sensitivities, expectations, and habits — all of which are necessary for meaning to stabilise. But the meanings are not in the neural tissue.

Again: correlation without containment.

Meaning as Event, Not Substance

Meaning happens.

It is actualised in moments of coordination, uptake, resistance, repair, and reinterpretation. It persists only insofar as practices persist.

There is no storehouse. No archive. No semantic warehouse hidden behind the eyes.

Just ongoing relational work.

The Shift in Question

Once meaning is freed from interiors, the central question changes.

Not: Where is meaning located?

But: What kinds of relations allow meaning to stabilise, propagate, and transform?

This shift has consequences — for epistemology, ethics, politics, education, and art. Meaning is no longer something to be extracted from minds, but something to be cultivated in relations.

That is a very different responsibility.

The Cut Ahead

If meaning does not live inside individuals, then neither truth nor value nor normativity can be treated as private possessions.

They, too, will require re-cutting.

The next step is unavoidable.