The previous post established a cut: value and meaning do not lie on a shared continuum. They belong to different systems, organised by different principles, irreducible to one another.
This raises an immediate question.
If these systems are distinct, how are we to understand their relation?
The default answer is familiar: they must, at some level, share a common ground. Even if they appear different, there must be an underlying substrate—biological, physical, informational—within which they can be unified.
This answer is not argued for. It is assumed.
And it is precisely what must now be refused.
1. The Demand for a Common Ground
The demand takes many forms.
It may appear as:
a search for the biological basis of meaning
an appeal to physical processes as the ultimate substrate
a theory of information that spans from molecules to language
In each case, the structure is the same.
Different systems are treated as levels of description of a single underlying reality. Their differences are taken to be differences in perspective, scale, or complexity—not differences in kind.
This allows for translation between domains. What cannot be explained at one level is referred to another. What appears distinct is ultimately unified.
The appeal of this move is obvious. It promises coherence.
But the coherence comes at a cost.
2. Levels, or Substitutions?
To treat systems as levels is to assume that they can, in principle, be substituted for one another.
If biological, social, and semiotic systems are levels of the same structure, then:
a semiotic description can be translated into a biological one
a biological account can be redescribed in informational terms
differences between them are matters of convenience, not necessity
But this substitutability fails under scrutiny.
A biological account of neural activation does not translate into a semantic account of meaning. A description of social coordination does not yield a description of construal. An informational measure does not capture significance.
What appears at one level is not recoverable at another.
The systems do not align as levels. They diverge.
3. Systems as Theories of Instance
To see why, we need to shift the terms of description.
A system is not a layer of reality. It is a theory of the instance.
It defines:
what counts as an instance
what distinctions are relevant
what relations can be drawn
A biological system, in this sense, is a theory of viable states. It distinguishes between what sustains and what disrupts the organisation of an organism.
A social system is a theory of coordinated states. It distinguishes alignments, roles, relations of power and cooperation.
A semiotic system is a theory of meaningful construals. It distinguishes meanings, not as responses, but as phenomena within a system of interpretation.
These are not different descriptions of the same instances.
They are different conditions under which something can count as an instance at all.
4. No Shared Metric
Because each system defines its own conditions of instantiation, there is no shared metric by which they can be aligned.
One cannot measure meaning in terms of viability. One cannot reduce coordination to significance. One cannot translate construal into biochemical regulation.
This is not a practical limitation. It is structural.
The systems do not fail to align because of insufficient knowledge. They do not align because they are not commensurable.
To insist on a common ground is to assume that such commensurability must exist.
The framework developed here denies that assumption.
5. The Persistence of Reduction
Even when the language of levels is avoided, the demand for a common ground reappears in the form of reduction.
Reduction promises to explain one system in terms of another:
meaning in terms of neural processes
social interaction in terms of individual behaviour
coordination in terms of physical dynamics
These moves differ in direction, but they share a structure. One system is treated as more fundamental; the others are derived from it.
Reduction fails for the same reason that levels fail.
It assumes that what is described in one system can be fully accounted for in the terms of another.
But if systems define distinct conditions of instantiation, then no such derivation is possible. What counts as an instance in one system does not exist, as such, in another.
Reduction eliminates its target.
6. Against Unification
The refusal of a common ground is not a claim that systems are unrelated, nor that they exist in isolation.
It is a refusal of a particular kind of relation: unification through subsumption.
Unification requires that differences be absorbed into a higher-order framework. It seeks a perspective from which all systems can be seen as aspects of a single structure.
This perspective is precisely what is being rejected.
There is no vantage point from which biological, social, and semiotic systems can be simultaneously described without loss.
Any such attempt privileges one system’s terms and imposes them on the others.
7. Relation Without Ground
If there is no common ground, what kind of relation remains?
Not derivation, not reduction, not translation.
What remains is a more constrained notion: relation without common measure.
Systems can be coupled:
events can be simultaneously instantiated under different systems
constraints in one system can affect what is possible in another
patterns of alignment can stabilise across systems
But these relations do not collapse the systems into one.
They do not produce a unified description.
They maintain difference.
8. The Risk of Reintroduction
At this point, the pressure to reintroduce a common ground becomes acute.
Without it, the landscape appears fragmented. The desire for coherence reasserts itself, often through familiar substitutes:
“interaction” used as a catch-all explanation
“information” as a supposedly neutral bridge
“embodiment” as a unifying condition
Each of these can be useful within a system. Each becomes misleading when used to span systems without acknowledging the break.
They function as placeholders for the very ground that has been refused.
9. A Different Coherence
If coherence is not to be found in unification, where is it to be found?
Not in a single framework that contains all systems, but in the consistency of distinctions across analyses.
A description is coherent if:
it maintains the cut between value and meaning
it does not treat systems as interchangeable levels
it does not reduce one system to another
it accounts for relations without erasing differences
This is a stricter requirement than unification. It does not allow for explanatory shortcuts.
But it avoids a more serious error: the construction of a coherence that depends on ignoring structural differences.
10. The Consequence
To work without a common ground is to accept a certain limitation.
There will be no single story in which life, society, and meaning are stages of one process. No final account in which all domains are reconciled.
What there will be instead is a set of analyses, each precise within its own system, and careful in how it relates to others.
This is not a loss of explanatory power.
It is a refusal of a particular kind of explanation—one that achieves unity by dissolving the very distinctions it claims to respect.
The idea of a common ground promises resolution: a place where differences disappear into a deeper sameness.
What has been argued here is that this promise cannot be kept.
The systems in question do not converge beneath their differences. They do not share a substrate that would allow them to be unified without remainder.
They stand, instead, in relation without common ground.
And it is from within that constraint—not beyond it—that any adequate account must proceed.
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