The Avoidance of Construal — 3 Use in Place of Construal: Why Behaviour Is Asked to Mean

If structure is too static to carry meaning on its own, a natural corrective appears:

shift from pattern to use.

Meaning is no longer located in abstract organisation, but in:

• what agents do,
• how expressions are deployed,
• how activity unfolds in context.

This move appears to restore dynamism to meaning.

But it repeats the same substitution.

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1. The Turn to Use

In many contemporary accounts, meaning is identified with:

• use in context,
• functional deployment,
• behavioural role,
• or situated activity.

The intuition is simple:

meaning is not in the pattern—it is in what we do with it.

This appears to correct the excess abstraction of structural accounts.

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2. Behaviour as Anchor

Use is attractive because it seems to anchor meaning in something:

• observable,
• embodied,
• and context-sensitive.

Instead of asking:

• what does this represent?

we ask:

• how is it used?

Meaning becomes:

a feature of activity rather than abstraction.

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3. The Substitution

But the shift is not neutral.

What changes is not the problem, but the vocabulary:

• structure → use
• pattern → behaviour
• organisation → deployment

Yet the explanatory role remains identical:

to account for meaning without invoking construal.

Use is asked to do what structure could not.

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4. What Use Actually Provides

Use can account for:

• regularities in behaviour,
• context-sensitive responses,
• functional appropriateness,
• and learned coordination.

It can describe:

• how agents act,
• when they act,
• and under what conditions they act differently.

This is substantial.

But it remains:

description of activity.

Not:

construal of activity.

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5. The Persistence of the “As”

Behaviour can be:

• appropriate or inappropriate,
• successful or unsuccessful,
• adapted or maladapted.

But these evaluations operate at the level of:

performance.

They do not, by themselves, introduce:

the relation in which something is taken as something.

An action can be perfectly appropriate:

• without anything being construed.

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6. Use Without Interpretation

A crucial distinction appears here:

• use can be rule-governed,
• behaviour can be context-sensitive,
• activity can be highly structured.

But none of this requires:

interpretation in the strong sense.

That is:

• nothing in “use” guarantees semiosis.

Use can be:

• functional,
• adaptive,
• coordinated,

without becoming:

aboutness.

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7. The Temptation of Function

The substitution often relies on a further move:

if something functions as if it has meaning, it has meaning.

But functional equivalence is not:

• semiotic identity.

A system can:

• behave as though it tracks meaning,
• without anything being taken as anything.

Functionality describes:

• what behaviour achieves,

not:

• what it is about.

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8. The Re-description of Meaning as Behaviour

Once again, a re-description occurs:

• meaningful activity becomes “use,”
• understanding becomes “correct performance,”
• interpretation becomes “appropriate response.”

But nothing has been added that would yield:

construal.

What has been added is:

• behavioural richness,
  not semantic relation.

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9. Why Use Is So Persuasive

Use is difficult to resist because it:

• eliminates hidden entities,
• grounds meaning in activity,
• and aligns with empirical observation.

It feels like:

we have finally reached what meaning really is.

But this feeling arises because:

activity is easier to observe than construal.

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10. What Remains Unaddressed

Even in the richest accounts of use:

• coordination increases,
• responsiveness increases,
• contextual sensitivity increases.

But the same gap remains:

nothing explains how anything becomes about anything.

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Closing Formulation

Use describes what agents do.

It captures behaviour in context,

its regularities, its flexibility, and its coordination.

But no amount of use produces construal.

Behaviour can be fully accounted for

without anything being taken as anything.

To identify meaning with use

is to substitute activity for aboutness.

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The second substitution is now exposed:

• structure → use
• pattern → behaviour

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Next, we move closer to the social layer itself.

Where the temptation becomes even stronger.