The Avoidance of Construal — 1 The One Thing No Theory Explains

Across a wide range of contemporary approaches to meaning, there is a striking pattern.

Theories differ on almost everything:

• whether meaning is internal or external,
• individual or social,
• structural or dynamic,
• grounded or enacted.

And yet, despite these differences, they converge on a single tendency:

they explain everything except construal.

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1. The Ubiquity of Explanation

Modern theories of meaning are not lacking in explanatory ambition.

They account for:

• how behaviour is organised,
• how systems are structured,
• how agents interact,
• how practices are sustained,
• how norms are enforced.

They provide detailed descriptions of:

• pattern,
• use,
• coordination,
• value,
• and function.

In many cases, these accounts are:

• sophisticated,
• internally coherent,
• and empirically informed.

Nothing appears to be missing.

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2. The Missing Relation

And yet, something is consistently absent.

Not because it is denied explicitly,

but because it is never addressed directly.

That absence is:

the relation in which something is taken as something.

This relation is not:

• a pattern,
• a behaviour,
• a norm,
• or a coordination.

It is:

construal.

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3. Not an Omission, but a Pattern

This absence is not accidental.

It is not the result of:

• oversight,
• incompleteness,
• or lack of detail.

It is:

systematic.

Across different frameworks, the same move recurs:

• identify a domain of organisation,
• describe it in increasing detail,
• and allow it to stand in for meaning.

Construal is not rejected.

It is:

displaced.

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4. The Forms of Displacement

The displacement takes different forms.

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Structure

Meaning becomes:

• pattern,
• statistical regularity,
• or formal organisation.

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Use

Meaning becomes:

• behaviour in context,
• or appropriate deployment.

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Normativity

Meaning becomes:

• correctness,
• rule-following,
• or inferential role.

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Practice

Meaning becomes:

• participation,
• coordination,
• or shared activity.

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Life and Value

Meaning becomes:

• biological organisation,
• or value-sensitive interaction.

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In each case:

something real is identified—

and then asked to do the work of construal.

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5. Why Construal Is Avoided

This displacement is not arbitrary.

Construal resists the usual strategies of explanation.

It is not:

• reducible to mechanism,
• derivable from structure,
• emergent from complexity,
• or grounded in value.

It does not:

• sit inside systems,
• distribute across interactions,
• or appear as a component of activity.

So theories face a choice:

• confront construal directly,
  or
• replace it with something more tractable.

Almost all choose the latter.

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6. The Cost of Substitution

When construal is replaced, the result is:

• a complete account of organisation,
• without an account of meaning.

What is explained is:

• how systems behave,
• how practices persist,
• how norms function.

What is not explained is:

how anything comes to be about anything.

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7. The Diagnostic Turn

This series does not begin by proposing a new theory of meaning.

It begins by identifying a recurring failure:

the avoidance of construal.

Each subsequent post will examine:

• a different framework,
• a different substitution,

and show:

how construal is displaced,

and what takes its place.

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Closing Formulation

Contemporary theories of meaning explain everything they can describe:

structure, behaviour, normativity, practice, value.

But they do not explain the one relation that makes any of this meaningful:

the taking of something as something.

This is not because it is unimportant.

It is because it cannot be reduced,

and so is systematically avoided.