Pragmatism set out to dissolve the problem of meaning by relocating it:
- from inner representations
- to use, practice, and normativity.
In doing so, it rejected:
- mentalism
- referential grounding
- and hidden semantic content.
These rejections hold.
What does not hold is the identification:
meaning = use.
1. What Does Not Survive
The following claims cannot be maintained:
Meaning is use
Use, even when:
- norm-governed,
- socially embedded,
- and inferentially articulated,
does not introduce:
construal.
It organises behaviour.
It does not produce meaning.
Meaning is normative role
Normativity provides:
- correctness,
- evaluation,
- and accountability.
It governs participation.
It does not establish:
what anything is as.
Meaning is participation in practice
Practice secures:
- coordination,
- continuity,
- and shared activity.
It does not generate:
aboutness.
Meaning emerges from integration
No integration of:
- behaviour
- normativity
- practice
produces:
the “as”-relation.
Complexity does not yield construal.
These removals eliminate the core identification on which pragmatism rests.
2. What Survives
Despite this, pragmatism does not collapse entirely.
What remains is substantial.
(a) The rejection of inner content
Pragmatism is right to refuse:
- hidden representations,
- private meanings,
- and internal semantic entities.
Meaning is not:
- stored inside agents.
(b) The primacy of activity
Pragmatism correctly insists that:
- language is enacted,
- meaning appears in activity,
- and use is indispensable.
Without use:
- meaning does not manifest.
(c) The centrality of normativity
Pragmatism identifies something essential:
- meaning is not mere behaviour,
- it is subject to evaluation,
- and bound up with correctness.
Normativity is real.
It is not reducible to causation.
(d) The importance of social organisation
Pragmatism recognises that:
- meaning is not isolated,
- but occurs within organised practices,
- sustained across participants.
This situates meaning:
- within interaction,not:
- within individuals alone.
3. Repositioning What Remains
Under constraint, these surviving insights must be repositioned.
They are not:
- definitions of meaning.
They are:
conditions under which meaning can occur.
- use → the site where meaning is enacted
- normativity → the organisation of value governing activity
- practice → the structured coordination of participants
None of these are:
meaning itself.
4. The Missing Condition (Final)
What pragmatism lacks is not:
- structure,
- activity,
- or organisation.
It lacks:
construal.
Meaning requires:
that something is taken as something.
This relation:
- is not behaviour,
- not normativity,
- not participation,
and not any combination of these.
5. Meaning Re-situated
We can now state, without ambiguity:
meaning arises only in construal,under conditions shaped by use, normativity, and practice.
Pragmatism has correctly described:
- the conditions,
but misidentified them as:
the phenomenon itself.
6. The Cost and the Gain
What is lost:
- the simplicity of “meaning is use”
- the dissolution of the problem by redefinition
What is gained:
- a clear separation between value and meaning
- a non-reductive account of activity
- and a precise location for construal
Final Formulation
Pragmatism is right about everything—except what it takes itself to be explaining.Use, normativity, and practiceorganise the conditions under which meaning occurs.But they do not, by themselves, produce it.
Meaning arises only where something is taken as something.
And that relation is not reducibleto anything that pragmatism calls “use.”
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