A difference can stand for another.
That is already remarkable.
But why does it matter?
Why does meaning make a difference?
The answer is not simply that meaning allows us to communicate.
Communication is important.
But something more fundamental is happening.
Meaning changes what a difference can do.
A physical difference can affect a process.
A constraint can alter what is possible.
A living system can come to matter.
A difference can indicate something absent.
A sign can stand for something else.
But once a difference has meaning, it can enter a world of shared possibilities.
Consider a word such as danger.
The sound itself is only a physical event.
Within a language, however, it can make a situation available for a particular kind of construal.
Something can now be dangerous.
Someone can warn us about danger.
We can remember it.
Anticipate it.
Deny it.
Exaggerate it.
Argue about it.
The word has not merely indicated a condition.
It has made that condition available within a system of distinctions and relations.
And because the system is shared, the possibility can travel.
One person can make something available to another.
Something experienced here can become relevant there.
Something that happened yesterday can guide action tomorrow.
Something that has never happened can nevertheless become an object of thought.
Meaning therefore stretches the temporal and spatial reach of possibility.
This is one reason language is so powerful.
A physical constraint operates where it operates.
A sign can travel beyond the event that produced it.
A meaningful sign can travel even further.
It can be detached from the immediate situation and brought into new relations.
A word can be written down.
Copied.
Stored.
Quoted.
Translated.
Recombined.
It can become part of another sentence, another argument, another story.
The original event may disappear.
The meaning can remain available.
Meaning therefore gives differences a kind of historical mobility.
But it also gives them combinatorial power.
A single sign can participate in many relations.
Words can be combined into clauses.
Clauses into arguments.
Arguments into theories.
A small number of linguistic resources can therefore generate an enormous space of possible construals.
The sign has become productive.
It no longer merely points towards something.
It participates in the construction of possibilities that did not previously exist in that form.
This is why meaning cannot be reduced to information.
Information can tell us that something is the case.
Meaning allows us to ask what follows from it.
It allows us to relate it to other things.
To evaluate it.
To question it.
To imagine alternatives.
To formulate possibilities that are not yet actual.
Meaning therefore changes the temporal structure of action.
We can act on what is absent.
We can prepare for what has not happened.
We can organise ourselves around what might happen.
We can preserve what happened long ago.
A meaningful distinction can become part of the conditions for future action.
And here we encounter another feedback loop.
The world makes differences possible.
Living systems become sensitive to some of them.
Signs allow some differences to stand for others.
Meaning allows signs to participate in shared systems of construal.
Those systems organise practices.
Practices alter the world.
The altered world generates new differences.
And those differences become available for further meaning.
Meaning therefore does not sit on top of the world like a commentary.
It becomes part of the world's history.
This is why concepts can eventually change landscapes.
A meaningful distinction can become a rule.
A rule can become an institution.
An institution can alter behaviour.
Behaviour can alter material arrangements.
The material arrangements then become part of the environment in which new meanings arise.
Meaning has entered causality indirectly, through the practices it makes possible.
But we should be careful here.
Meaning does not make everything possible.
The physical world remains stubborn.
Words cannot remove gravity.
A description cannot dissolve a wall.
A concept cannot make every action feasible.
Meaning operates within constraints.
Indeed, perhaps meaning is powerful precisely because it operates through constraints.
A map does not create the terrain.
It makes some possibilities of movement available within the terrain.
A timetable does not create trains.
It organises possibilities for coordinating with them.
A law does not abolish physical reality.
It changes what people can legitimately do within a social order.
Meaning therefore does not replace affordance.
It creates new kinds of affordance.
A written instruction affords a different kind of action from a physical doorway.
A promise affords a different kind of expectation from a weather forecast.
A concept affords a different kind of inquiry from a perceptual distinction.
The meaningful world is therefore not a second world added to the physical one.
It is a new organisation of possibilities within the world.
And perhaps this is why meaning makes such a difference.
It allows differences to become available not merely to individual organisms, but to communities, histories and systems of practice.
It allows possibilities to be inherited without the original experience being inherited.
A child can learn a word for something that happened before the child was born.
A scientist can reason about an entity no human has directly encountered.
A society can organise itself around possibilities that exist only as legal, moral or political constructions.
Meaning allows a world to become cumulatively organised.
Each generation inherits not only a physical environment, but a landscape of distinctions.
Some are useful.
Some are misleading.
Some open possibilities.
Some close them.
Some have become so familiar that they are almost invisible.
The important point is that they have histories.
And once meanings have histories, they can evolve.
They can be extended.
Repurposed.
Combined.
Rejected.
Transformed.
The difference that means something today may mean something different tomorrow.
Meaning therefore does not end our story.
It accelerates it.
It gives becoming another medium.
The world contains differences.
Living systems become sensitive to them.
Signs make some differences stand for others.
Meaning makes those signs available for shared construal.
And shared construal can change what becomes possible next.
Which brings us to a curious reversal.
We began by asking how a difference can make a difference.
Now we can ask something more specific.
How can a way of construing difference change what matters?
That is where concepts enter the story.
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