Meaning Under Constraint: 2 Value Systems Do Not Mean (And Why They Still Matter)

The previous post argued that interpersonal meaning feels different because it occurs under constraint.

To understand that constraint, we must now be precise about what produces it.

This requires a firm distinction:

Value systems do not mean.

And yet, without them, interpersonal meaning would not be possible.

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What value systems are

Biological and social systems are organised around viability and coordination.

They regulate:

• what actions persist,

• what behaviours are reinforced or suppressed,

• what patterns stabilise across time.

Their concern is not interpretation, but continuation.

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What value systems are not

Value systems do not:

• construe phenomena,

• interpret symbols,

• generate meaning.

They have no perspective.

They operate without understanding.

This is not a limitation. It is their defining feature.

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Why this distinction matters

If value systems were meaningful, they would need to interpret.

If they interpreted, they would require meaning.

The distinction would collapse.

Maintaining the separation between value and meaning is what allows us to explain how constraint operates without reintroducing representation.

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Value as pressure, not content

Value systems act by exerting pressure:

• narrowing viable options,

• shaping expectations,

• stabilising norms and roles.

They do not supply meanings.

They shape the conditions under which meanings are enacted.

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Biological value

At the biological level, value appears as viability.

Certain patterns of attention and action are sustained because they support continued existence.

Others disappear.

No meaning is involved — only differential persistence.

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Social value

At the social level, value appears as coordination.

Norms, roles, and institutions stabilise expectations and regulate interaction.

Again, no interpretation occurs.

Social systems do not understand what they enforce.

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Why value still matters

Although value systems do not mean, they are indispensable.

They create the structured environments in which meaning can occur at all.

Without biological viability, there is no sustained attention.

Without social coordination, there is no stable interpersonal field.

Value does not generate meaning.

It makes meaning consequential.

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Looking ahead

With value systems clarified as non-semiotic but effective, we can now examine the central mechanism of this series.

Post 3: How Value Acts on Meaning will show how pressure, recruitment, and narrowing operate — and why meaning becomes constrained without being reduced.

Meaning Under Constraint: 1 Why Interpersonal Meaning Feels Different

Meaning does not change its nature when it becomes interpersonal.

But it does change its conditions.

This post begins the series by explaining why meaning enacted with others present feels heavier, riskier, and more consequential — without reclassifying it as a different kind of thing.

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The familiar intuition

Interpersonal meaning feels different from solitary meaning.

Speaking to oneself, reading privately, or silently interpreting a phenomenon lacks a certain pressure.

Speaking to another introduces:

• anticipation of response,

• concern about uptake,

• risk of misunderstanding,

• possibility of sanction or approval.

This difference is real — but it is not ontological.

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Meaning does not change kind

Meaning remains:

• symbolic and semiotic,

• constituted in construal,

• evental and relational.

Nothing new is added to meaning itself when another person is present.

No interpersonal essence appears.

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What changes: constraint

What does change is the field in which construal occurs.

When others are present — actually or implicitly — meaning is enacted under constraint.

These constraints include:

• expectations about appropriateness,

• norms governing intelligibility,

• sensitivity to roles and relations,

• anticipation of consequences.

Constraint does not generate meaning.

It shapes the space in which meaning can occur.

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The presence of others

Crucially, the presence of others need not be physical.

Social fields persist:

• imagined audiences,

• institutional roles,

• internalised expectations.

Interpersonal meaning occurs whenever construal is oriented toward possible uptake.

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Pressure without representation

The pressure felt in interpersonal meaning does not arise from internalised rules or representations.

It arises from repeated exposure to value-laden coordination systems:

• social norms,

• biological viability pressures,

• histories of sanction and reward.

These systems do not interpret.

They condition interpretation.

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Why this distinction matters

If interpersonal meaning is treated as a different kind of meaning, confusion follows.

If value systems are treated as meaningful, ontology collapses.

What is required is a careful account of how constraint operates on meaning without becoming it.

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Looking ahead

The next post will clarify the nature of value systems themselves.

Post 2: Value Systems Do Not Mean (And Why They Still Matter) will show why value is indispensable to social life — precisely because it is not meaning.

Meaning, Value, and the Interpersonal

The Meaning After Representation series deliberately focused on meaning as construal: relational, evental, and irreducible to stored content. That focus was necessary.

But it left something largely implicit.

Meaning, as it is lived, is very often interpersonal — and interpersonal meaning feels different. It carries weight. Pressure. Risk. Obligation.

This post marks the transition into that terrain, with care.

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What did not change

Before moving forward, it is crucial to be clear about what does not change.

Meaning remains:

• semiotic and symbolic,

• constituted in construal,

• irreducible to biological or social systems.

Biological and social systems remain:

• non-semiotic,

• oriented toward coordination, viability, and regulation,

• concerned with value, not meaning.

No reduction will be attempted. No conflation will be allowed.

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Why the interpersonal feels different

Interpersonal meaning is not a different kind of meaning.

It is meaning enacted under conditions of constraint.

When others are present — actually or implicitly — construal occurs within fields shaped by:

• expectation,

• normativity,

• potential sanction,

• uptake or rejection,

• affiliation and exclusion.

These forces do not generate meaning.

They shape the conditions under which meaning can occur.

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Value acts on meaning

Social and biological systems cannot interpret.

They cannot construe.

But they can act on meaning by stabilising, narrowing, or pressuring the space of possible construals.

Value systems recruit meaning as their operational surface.

Through language, gesture, ritual, and interaction, value systems shape what is sayable, intelligible, and viable — without becoming meaningful themselves.

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Interpersonal meaning as interface

Interpersonal meaning is best understood as an interface:

• Meaning remains symbolic and relational.

• Value remains non-symbolic and regulatory.

• The interpersonal is where they meet.

This interface explains why meaning in social life often feels normative, consequential, and risky — without collapsing meaning into value or value into meaning.

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Why this matters now

If meaning is treated only experientially, its social force becomes mysterious.

If value is treated as meaning, ontology collapses.

What is needed is a careful account of how value systems act upon meaning practices — shaping, constraining, and sometimes distorting them.

That is the work of the next series.

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Looking ahead

The posts that follow will explore:

• how obligation and normativity emerge without representation,

• how social coordination pressures meaning without producing it,

• how biological viability shapes attention and uptake,

• and why interpersonal meaning feels both fragile and forceful.

Meaning will not be reduced.

Value will not be romanticised.

The task is to understand how they relate — precisely because they are not the same.

Meaning After Representation: Reflection: After the Series

This series did not begin with a definition of meaning.

That was deliberate.

To define meaning too early is already to misunderstand what kind of work it does.

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What shifted

Across the posts, meaning was progressively released from familiar frames:

• from representation,

• from stored content,

• from objects,

• from explanation,

• and from value.

What emerged instead was not a new theory about meaning, but an orientation toward it.

Meaning appeared as relational activity, not as a thing to be possessed.

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What survived

Once representation stopped doing the work, meaning did not disappear.

It persisted — sturdily, quietly — as construal, alignment, misalignment, and practice.

This persistence matters.

It shows that meaning is not a fragile philosophical luxury, but a basic condition of intelligibility and coordination.

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What this makes possible

Reframing meaning as practice opens new possibilities:

• education becomes cultivation rather than transmission,

• communication becomes coordination rather than exchange,

• disagreement becomes productive rather than pathological,

• and thinking itself becomes something that evolves through use.

Meaning is no longer something we have.

It is something we do, together, repeatedly.

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A closing orientation

This series ends without a final claim.

Instead, it offers a way of attending:

To notice construal as it happens.

To recognise misalignment without panic.

To sustain conditions where meaning can continue to emerge.

If representation once promised certainty, meaning as practice offers something else instead:

participation without closure.

Meaning After Representation: 8 What Kind of Practice Meaning Is

The series now arrives at its culmination.

Having traced meaning through construal, object emergence, misalignment, and evolutionary shaping of thought, we ask:

What kind of practice is meaning?

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Meaning is relational practice

Meaning is not a thing, content, or representation.

It is relational: it arises in interaction, engagement, and situated activity.

Every act of attention, recognition, or interpretation is a moment of practice.

Meaning is co-constituted, not possessed.

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Practice before content

The focus is not on storing or transmitting information.

The focus is on cultivating the conditions for construal to occur reliably:

• stabilising fields of attention,

• facilitating repeated engagement,

• sustaining intelligibility without ossifying it.

Practice shapes the emergence of meaning before content is even considered.

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Situated, iterative, and ongoing

Meaning is iterative: each construal informs the next.

It is situated: context, participants, and prior construals shape what emerges.

It is ongoing: meaning never rests in finality, nor does it arrive as a completed object.

This ongoing nature is its strength — flexibility, responsiveness, and generativity.

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Integrating prior posts

Meaning as practice integrates the insights of previous posts:

• It occurs before objects emerge.

• It is not value, though value systems interact with it.

• It is relational and evental, not stored.

• Misalignment and ambiguity are natural and productive.

• It reshapes what can be thought, expanding possibilities in action and understanding.

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Responsibility and cultivation

Meaning as practice carries responsibility.

Because it structures what can be thought and how phenomena are intelligible, attending to meaning is not passive.

It is a cultivation: supporting conditions that allow relational construal to continue without closure, coercion, or collapse.

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A series closing

The series does not end by defining meaning once and for all.

It ends by recognising its work:

Meaning persists as relational, situated, and emergent.

It is inseparable from practice, and survives even after representation no longer does the work we once asked of it.

To attend to meaning is to participate, to sustain, and to open possibility — not to possess or control.

Meaning After Representation: 7 Meaning Changes What Can Be Thought

Having established meaning as construal and recognised misalignment as structural, we now turn to its evolutionary dimension:

Meaning does not merely mirror thought; it reshapes what can be thought.

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Expanding the space of possibility

Each act of construal selectively stabilises distinctions and highlights certain patterns while downplaying others.

Over time, these relational activities accumulate.

They subtly expand or contract the field of what is thinkable.

Meaning is, in this sense, productive: it structures the horizon of cognition and imagination.

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Shaping categories and distinctions

The categories we inhabit, the distinctions we notice, and the questions we consider salient are all outcomes of meaning-in-relation.

What can be articulated, discussed, or reasoned about is contingent upon the constellations of construal already stabilised.

Novel thought emerges from recombining these structures, not from applying some external measure of correctness.

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Practices of evolution

Meaning evolves through repeated activity, interaction, and negotiation.

Conventions, norms, and symbolic systems do not store meaning, but they scaffold repeated construals.

Through these practices, what can be thought and how it can be thought slowly changes.

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Limits and horizons

Expansion of thinkable space is never total.

Some phenomena remain unnoticeable.

Some distinctions are unavailable.

Some possibilities are suppressed or invisible until relational shifts occur.

The horizon of thought is always contingent and partial.

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The generative role of misalignment

As shown in the previous post, misalignment is not a problem; it is a source of change.

Disagreement, ambiguity, and negotiation generate opportunities for new distinctions.

Through this process, meaning systematically shapes what can emerge in thought.

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Looking ahead

With the evolutionary dimension of meaning made visible, the series can now close by showing what kind of practice meaning is.

Post 8: What Kind of Practice Meaning Is will gather the arc, framing meaning as ongoing, situated, and irreducible — a relational work that persists once representation no longer does the work we once asked of it.

Meaning After Representation: 6 Meaning and Misalignment

Having shown that meaning is relational and cannot be stored, we now turn to its structural counterpart:

Misalignment is not exception; it is part of meaning itself.

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Misunderstanding as structural

When participants construe differently, misunderstandings occur.

Ambiguity emerges.

Events are interpreted variably.

These are not flaws to be corrected, but natural consequences of meaning being an emergent, relational event.

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Alignment is always partial

No construal perfectly overlaps with another.

No object is universally stabilised.

Some degree of misalignment is inevitable whenever meaning is enacted.

This partial alignment is not a problem — it is the engine of flexibility and innovation.

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Productive misalignment

Misalignment can generate novelty:

• conflicting construals reveal hidden assumptions,

• divergent interpretations produce new distinctions,

• uncertainty opens spaces for reconfiguration.

Meaning depends on this play between coherence and divergence.

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Misalignment in practice

In discourse, learning, and collaboration, misalignment signals opportunities for attention:

• it invites participants to negotiate distinctions,

• to refine understanding,

• and to recalibrate shared fields of intelligibility.

Without misalignment, meaning would ossify.

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Not a call for relativism

Recognising misalignment as structural is not a license for arbitrariness.

Some construals are better attuned to the relational context than others.

Good meaning practices are sensitive to the situation, capable of sustaining intelligibility while accommodating variation.

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Looking ahead

With misalignment and ambiguity acknowledged as features rather than bugs, the next post explores how meaning changes what can be thought.

Post 7: Meaning Changes What Can Be Thought traces the evolutionary dimension of meaning, showing how relational activity reshapes the field of conceivable distinctions and possibilities.

Meaning After Representation: 5 Why Meaning Cannot Be Stored

If meaning is construal, and if objects themselves emerge through relational activity, a familiar assumption must be challenged:

Meaning cannot be stored.

This post explains why.

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The metaphor of storage

We often speak as if meaning is something that can be stored:

• in texts,

• in symbols,

• in minds.

From this perspective, understanding is retrieving what is already there.

But this is a metaphor — and one that misleads.

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Meaning as event

Meaning is not a substance or container.

It occurs in events of construal.

Every instance of engagement with phenomena, every act of interpretation, is a moment in which meaning is actualised.

Symbols, texts, and minds afford these events, but do not contain them.

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Texts and symbols as affordances

A word on texts, signs, and symbols:

They are powerful because they can prompt repeated construals across time and participants.

But they do not carry meaning themselves.

They provide a field in which meaning can occur, not a reservoir from which it can be extracted.

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Minds do not store meaning

Similarly, the mind does not possess meaning as content to be transferred.

Understanding is not a matter of decoding.

It is a matter of participating in relational events that instantiate construals.

Meaning emerges in interaction, not in isolation.

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Implications for learning and communication

If meaning cannot be stored, education, dialogue, and transmission must be understood differently:

• the goal is not to deposit information,

• but to cultivate conditions in which construals can reliably occur,

• to stabilise fields of intelligibility without freezing them,

• to foster practices that sustain the emergence of meaning.

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Emergence and temporality

Meaning is inherently temporal.

It depends on what is currently being construed, in relation to what has been construed before, and in anticipation of future construals.

This temporality explains why meaning is never identical across participants or across moments.

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Looking ahead

With storage dispelled as a metaphor, the series can now explore how meaning functions amidst misalignment, ambiguity, and breakdown.

Post 6: Meaning and Misalignment will show that these are not exceptions or errors, but structural features of meaning-in-relation.

Meaning After Representation: 4 Meaning Before Objects

Having established that meaning is construal, we can now ask a deeper question:

What does it mean for meaning to operate before objects exist?

This post explores how objects themselves emerge through repeated relational activity.

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Objects as emergent

Objects are not pre-given entities waiting to be represented.

They become distinguishable through repeated patterns of construal.

Through attention, differentiation, and relational practice, phenomena acquire stability and recognisability — they emerge as objects.

Meaning, therefore, is not about attaching to objects.

It is what allows objects to appear at all.

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Stabilising phenomena

Repeated construal stabilises certain features while others recede.

Some differences are amplified; some similarities are grouped.

These patterns are not arbitrary.

They emerge from the interplay of attention, context, and practice.

The “object” is the outcome of this stabilisation process.

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Objects are perspectival

Because objects emerge from relational activity, they are perspectival.

Different participants may stabilise different objects from the same phenomena.

No object exists independent of the construals that sustain it.

This explains why disputes over what an object is are never merely factual: they reflect different relational structuring of possibility.

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Implications for communication

If objects are emergent, then meaning cannot be thought of as transferring pre-existing content.

Communication is not about passing symbols that correspond to independent objects.

It is about coordinating construals, negotiating shared intelligibility, and maintaining the stability of phenomena across participants and time.

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Emergence of possibility

Before objects exist, meaning already structures a field of what can happen, what can be recognised, and what can be imagined.

This field is the space of possibility.

Objects, in this sense, are stabilised possibilities, made recognisable through construal.

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Looking ahead

Understanding meaning before objects sets the stage for the next post:

Post 5: Why Meaning Cannot Be Stored — which challenges the assumption that meaning resides in symbols, texts, or minds, and shows how meaning is always emergent and evental.

Meaning After Representation: 3 Meaning as Construal

Having cleared meaning of representational duties and separated it from value, we can now ask: what is meaning actually doing?

The answer is deceptively simple:

Meaning is construal.

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Construal is relational

Construal is the act of bringing phenomena into relation, of making something intelligible as something.

It is not a property of objects, nor a content in minds.

It occurs in relation, within a field of distinctions, attentions, and practices.

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Construal before judgement

Meaning does not depend on correctness, truth, or utility.

Before any judgement can be made, some construal must already be in place:

• we recognise what counts as a situation,

• we identify features that are salient,

• we detect patterns and possibilities.

Judgement and evaluation are secondary; construal is primary.

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Construal before objects

Objects are outcomes of construal, not its prerequisites.

What is taken to be a discrete thing emerges through repeated patterns of attention and differentiation.

Meaning, therefore, is not attached to objects — it makes them visible as objects at all.

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Multiple, overlapping construals

Construals are never singular.

Different participants in a situation may construe differently, each producing a coherent field of intelligibility from their perspective.

Misalignment, ambiguity, and disagreement are natural consequences of this relational activity.

Meaning is robust precisely because it can exist amid such variation.

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Construal is practiced

Construal is not static.

It occurs in action, discourse, observation, interaction.

Texts, symbols, and systems afford construal but do not contain it.

Practice is central: the same phenomena may be construed differently in different contexts, across time, and by different participants.

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Why construal matters

Seeing meaning as construal dissolves several confusions:

• meaning is no longer trapped by representation,

• meaning is not reducible to value or preference,

• meaning does not require objects to attach to,

• and meaning is active, not static.

Construal is what allows phenomena to become intelligible, actionable, and relevant.

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Next steps

Having established construal as the heart of meaning, the next post goes further: it shows how meaning operates before objects, how objects themselves are emergent from repeated relational activity, and how the field of possibilities is structured through meaning.

Meaning After Representation: 2 Meaning Is Not Value (and Value Is Not Meaning)

Once meaning is released from representational duty, a familiar temptation appears.

If meaning is not about representing the world, perhaps it is about what matters.

Meaning, on this view, becomes value.

This move is understandable — and mistaken.

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Why the confusion arises

Meaning and value are deeply entangled in lived experience.

What matters draws attention.

What is meaningful often feels important.

Practices that organise meaning also coordinate action.

From here, it is easy to slide from meaning to value without noticing the shift.

But entanglement is not identity.

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What value does

Value systems organise behaviour.

They stabilise preferences, priorities, norms, and sanctions.

Biological values coordinate survival.

Social values coordinate cooperation.

Institutional values coordinate compliance and distribution.

These systems work whether or not anything is construed symbolically.

They regulate action directly.

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What meaning does

Meaning does something different.

Meaning makes phenomena intelligible as something.

It does not tell us what to do.

It allows us to recognise what is happening, what kind of situation this is, and what distinctions are in play.

Meaning does not coordinate behaviour.

It differentiates experience.

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The danger of collapse

When meaning is reduced to value, two distortions follow.

First, meaning is moralised.

Disagreement becomes deviance.

Misunderstanding becomes failure of commitment.

Second, value systems acquire false semantic authority.

They begin to present themselves as matters of sense rather than coordination.

Neither distortion is benign.

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Independence without isolation

To say that meaning is not value is not to separate them completely.

Meaning and value interact constantly.

Value systems depend on meaning to articulate norms.

Meaning practices are shaped by what is at stake.

But they are not interchangeable.

They operate at different levels and do different work.

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Why the distinction matters

If meaning is collapsed into value, critique becomes impossible.

Every challenge to sense appears as a threat to order.

Every reconfiguration of meaning feels like moral decay.

Keeping the distinction clear allows both meaning and value to function without overreach.

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Preparing the positive account

With representation set aside in the previous post, and value now distinguished from meaning, the space is finally clear to articulate what meaning is.

The next post introduces this directly, framing meaning as construal — the relational activity through which phenomena become intelligible at all.

Meaning After Representation: 1 What Meaning Is Not Doing

The question of meaning is usually approached as if its task were obvious.

Meaning, we are told, is what connects words to things, thoughts to reality, symbols to the world.

This series begins by setting that expectation aside.

If representation is no longer doing the work we once assigned to it, then meaning is not failing at its job.

It is being misunderstood.

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Meaning is not representing

The most persistent assumption about meaning is that it represents something else.

Words represent objects.

Sentences represent states of affairs.

Thoughts represent the world as it is.

Within this frame, meaning is judged by accuracy, correspondence, or fidelity.

But this frame quietly imports a picture of the world already carved into objects, awaiting correct depiction.

Once that picture loosens, the representational task collapses with it.

Meaning does not stand between symbols and things, attempting to match them up.

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Meaning is not inner content

When representation falters, meaning is often relocated inward.

Meaning becomes something private: an idea, an intention, a mental image.

Communication then appears as the transfer of inner content from one mind to another.

But this merely reproduces representation at a different scale.

The problem is not where meaning is located.

It is the assumption that meaning is a thing at all.

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Meaning is not correspondence

Another familiar move treats meaning as a relation of fit.

A symbol is meaningful if it corresponds correctly to a feature of reality.

Misunderstanding becomes misalignment.

Nonsense becomes failure to refer.

Yet this model cannot account for how meaning functions in situations where no stable referent exists, where novelty arises, or where sense is made without reference to anything prior.

Correspondence presupposes the very distinctions meaning must help establish.

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What remains when representation recedes

If meaning is not representation, not inner content, and not correspondence, what remains?

Not emptiness.

What remains is activity.

Meaning is something that happens.

It is enacted in use, in relation, in situated engagement with others and with the world.

This does not make meaning subjective, arbitrary, or ineffable.

It makes it relational.

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Clearing the ground

This post has not yet said what meaning is.

That work must wait.

For now, it is enough to notice how much conceptual clutter is produced by asking meaning to do representational labour it was never designed to perform.

Once that labour is set aside, meaning can begin to appear — not as a mirror of reality, but as a practice that makes reality intelligible in the first place.

The next post draws a crucial boundary, showing why meaning must not be confused with value, usefulness, or regulation — even though it is inseparable from them in practice.

Myth After Representation: Coda: Contemporary Practices of Orientation

If myth names the work of orientation, then it should not surprise us that this work continues under other names.

In a scientific world, orientation rarely appears as myth as such.

It appears as art, ritual, and education — practices that do not primarily explain, but still shape what can be perceived, felt, and lived.

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Art: re-weighting attention

Art does not explain the world.

It reorganises attention.

By slowing perception, amplifying contrast, or unsettling familiarity, art alters what stands out and what recedes.

In doing so, it re-weights possibility.

What can be noticed changes.

What can be endured changes.

What can be imagined changes.

This is orientational work, whether or not it is acknowledged as such.

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Ritual: holding orientation in time

Ritual is often dismissed as empty repetition.

But repetition is precisely how orientation is stabilised.

Rituals mark thresholds, synchronise bodies, and maintain shared tempos of significance.

They do not transmit information.

They preserve a field in which actions remain intelligible.

In a world of constant novelty, ritual performs the quiet labour of continuity.

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Education: shaping what can be thought

Education is not primarily the transfer of knowledge.

It is the cultivation of sensibility.

What counts as a good question, what feels puzzling, what demands precision, what can be left vague — these are orientational outcomes.

Education shapes not only what students know, but what they find thinkable.

This makes it one of the most powerful orientational practices of all.

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Orientation without totality

Art, ritual, and education do not aspire to total orientation.

They operate locally, provisionally, and often in tension with one another.

This partiality is not a weakness.

It is what allows orientation to remain flexible rather than brittle.

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The ongoing work

In a scientific world, myth does not disappear.

It disperses.

Orientation is carried by practices that do not claim authority over the whole, yet quietly shape how life can be lived.

Recognising this does not restore myth to a privileged position.

It simply makes visible the work that has never stopped being done.

Myth After Representation: 7 Myth in a Scientific World

The question that now presses is unavoidable:

What place does myth have in a world shaped by scientific explanation?

This question is often asked as if science and myth compete for the same role.

They do not.

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The scientific transformation of explanation

Science has been extraordinarily successful at reorganising explanation.

It has displaced local narratives with generalisable models, replaced situated causes with systemic relations, and rendered many phenomena manipulable rather than merely intelligible.

But this success concerns explanation, not orientation.

Science changes what can be explained.

It does not, by itself, determine what matters.

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When explanation colonises orientation

Trouble arises when explanatory success is mistaken for orientational sufficiency.

When science is tacitly asked to do the work of myth — to tell us who we are, what counts as a life, what futures are worth pursuing — it cannot help but fail.

The failure is then misattributed to myth itself.

This produces the familiar story: myth is obsolete, science has replaced it.

What has actually happened is a category error.

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Scientific myths

A scientific world does not eliminate myth.

It produces new ones.

Stories of progress, inevitability, optimisation, neutrality, or total explanation function mythically even when they borrow scientific language.

They orient attention, stabilise expectations, and delimit possibility.

Their power lies not in their accuracy, but in their orientational force.

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Myth alongside science

To recognise myth in a scientific world is not to subordinate science to myth, or myth to science.

It is to recognise that they do different kinds of work.

Science reorganises how phenomena can be intervened upon.

Myth orients how such interventions are situated within a life and a world.

Neither can replace the other.

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Responsibility without illusion

A scientific world intensifies the stakes of myth.

Because science expands what can be done, orientation increasingly shapes what will be done.

Mythic responsibility does not lie in providing answers, but in holding possibility in ways that do not collapse into domination, inevitability, or despair.

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Orientation after representation

In a world saturated with representations, models, and explanations, myth does not retreat.

It shifts.

It becomes less about describing origins and more about sustaining orientation amid unprecedented capability.

This is not a return to the past.

It is a task of the present.

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What remains

Myth in a scientific world is neither relic nor rival.

It is the ongoing work of making a world inhabitable when explanation alone cannot tell us how to live within it.

This series has not argued for a revival of myth, nor for its critique, but for its recognition as an irreducible practice of orientation — one that persists precisely because representation is no longer doing the work we once asked of it.

Myth After Representation: 6 How Mythic Orientations Change

If myth orients by holding possibility steady, and if that orientation can harden into constraint, then change becomes both necessary and dangerous.

The central problem is this:

How can an orientation change without collapsing into disorientation?

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Why myths cannot simply be replaced

Mythic orientations are not optional overlays.

They are the background conditions under which sense is made at all.

For this reason, a myth cannot simply be rejected or swapped out like a theory.

Attempts to do so tend to produce confusion, anxiety, or compensatory rigidity.

Orientation does not vanish gracefully.

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Change as reconfiguration, not negation

Mythic change does not proceed by refutation.

It proceeds by reconfiguration.

Elements are displaced, figures are reweighted, relations are altered.

Some possibilities lose prominence; others slowly emerge.

At no point is the field empty.

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The role of strain and breakdown

Change is typically initiated not by argument, but by strain.

When actions repeatedly fail, when suffering accumulates without explanation, when inherited responses misfire — orientation begins to loosen.

This loosening is experienced as unease rather than insight.

It creates space, but does not yet provide direction.

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Hybrid moments

Mythic change often passes through hybrid forms.

Old figures coexist with new emphases.

Contradictions are tolerated rather than resolved.

From a representational standpoint, such moments appear incoherent.

From an orientational standpoint, they are transitional necessities.

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The importance of practice

Orientations change through practice before they change through articulation.

New ways of acting, gathering, marking time, or responding to danger can slowly reshape what feels possible.

Narrative follows practice, not the reverse.

Stories catch up with lived reorientation.

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No outside position

There is no neutral vantage point from which mythic change can be engineered.

Every attempt at transformation proceeds from within some orientation.

This is not a defect.

It is what makes gradual, partial, and situated change possible.

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Change without mastery

To understand how myths change is not to gain control over the process.

It is to recognise its fragility.

Change involves loss as well as gain.

Possibilities are opened by closing others.

The next and final post draws the arc together, asking what role myth continues to play in a world saturated with scientific explanation — and what orientation is required now.

Myth After Representation: 5 When Orientation Becomes Constraint

If myths hold possibility steady, they do not merely enable action.

They also limit it.

This is not a failure of myth, but an inevitable consequence of orientation itself.

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Orientation always excludes

To be oriented is to inhabit a world where some things matter and others do not.

This means that orientation is necessarily selective.

Every stabilised field of possibility renders other possibilities unintelligible, marginal, or unthinkable.

This is not oppression by default.

It is the cost of having a world at all.

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Constraint without coercion

Mythic constraint does not usually operate through prohibition.

More often, it works by making alternatives fail to appear as possibilities in the first place.

Certain questions do not arise.

Certain responses feel absurd, dangerous, or invisible.

Constraint, here, is structural rather than enforced.

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When stability hardens

Orientation becomes problematic when stability hardens into immobility.

This occurs when the conditions that once required a particular mythic configuration no longer obtain, but the orientation persists unchanged.

Actions that once made sense begin to misfire.

Suffering increases without intelligible cause.

The myth still orients — but badly.

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Misrecognising failure

When orientation fails, the failure is often misdiagnosed.

It may be attributed to moral decline, loss of belief, or external corruption.

Rarely is it recognised as a structural mismatch between inherited possibility and present conditions.

This misrecognition tends to intensify constraint rather than loosen it.

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The danger of total orientation

Some myths aspire to totality.

They attempt to orient every domain of life with a single, unified configuration.

Such myths are powerful, but brittle.

When they fail, they fail catastrophically, leaving little room for partial revision or local adaptation.

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Constraint and violence

When orientation becomes constraint, violence often follows.

Not necessarily physical violence, but the violence of forced intelligibility: compelling people to make sense of their experience within a frame that no longer fits.

This violence is rarely experienced as violence.

It is experienced as necessity.

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Opening the question of change

Recognising constraint does not immediately tell us how to change orientation.

Myths cannot simply be discarded without disorientation.

The next post addresses this difficulty directly, asking how mythic orientations transform — and what replaces explanation when transformation is at stake.

Myth After Representation: 4 Stories That Hold Possibility Steady

If myth is a practice of orientation, the question now becomes more precise:

What exactly is being stabilised?

The answer is not belief, doctrine, or explanation.

It is possibility.

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Possibility before choice

Possibility is often misunderstood as a set of options awaiting selection.

But before choice, before deliberation, there is already a structured sense of:

• what could happen,

• what would make sense if it did,

• and what would be unrecognisable or impossible.

This structure is rarely explicit.

It is felt as the shape of a situation.

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Stories as stabilising devices

Stories are not merely representations of events.

They are devices for holding patterns of relevance and consequence steady across time.

A myth does not just recount what happened.

It preserves a configuration: agents, forces, thresholds, dangers, and affordances arranged in a recognisable relation.

To enter the story is to enter that configuration.

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Holding, not fixing

To say that myth holds possibility steady is not to say it freezes it.

Stability here is not rigidity.

A myth can be retold, adapted, localised, even contradicted in detail — and still perform its orienting work.

What persists is not content but structure.

The space of what counts as a meaningful action remains intelligible.

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The work of figures

Mythic figures are not characters in the modern sense.

They are anchors of possibility.

A trickster does not explain deception; it stabilises a way deception can appear, function, and matter.

A creator does not explain origin; it stabilises a sense of emergence, dependence, and limit.

Through figures, possibility acquires contours.

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Time held open

Mythic time is often described as cyclical or eternal.

What matters is not the chronology, but the fact that myth suspends linear finality.

The story can always be re-entered.

This re-enterability keeps possibility from collapsing into mere history.

The past remains active as orientation.

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When myths fail

Myths fail not when they are disproven, but when they no longer hold possibility together.

When actions lose their sense, when responses feel arbitrary, when futures cannot be imagined — orientation collapses.

At that point, new stories are required.

Not to explain more accurately, but to re-stabilise the field.

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Toward transformation

If myths hold possibility steady, they also delimit it.

The next post confronts this directly, asking how myths both enable and constrain — and what it takes for a mythic orientation to change without disintegrating entirely.

Myth After Representation: 3 Myth as Orientation

The previous posts set aside two persistent misframings: that myth is bad explanation, and that explanation is the right lens through which to approach it.

This post introduces the positive account.

Myth is a practice of orientation.

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What orientation is

Orientation is not belief, knowledge, or explanation.

To be oriented is to have a sense of:

• where one is,

• what kind of situation this is,

• what matters here,

• what calls for action or restraint,

• and what kinds of futures are conceivable.

Orientation precedes judgement. It operates before truth and falsity become relevant.

One can be well oriented or poorly oriented, but not correct in the way a proposition is correct.

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Orientation before objects

Orientation does not begin with objects.

Before there are discrete things to be explained, there is already a field of salience: some aspects of experience stand out, others recede; some relations matter, others do not.

Myth works at this level.

It does not describe a world of objects.

It stabilises a world as lived.

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Stories that locate

Myths locate their participants.

They answer questions such as:

• Who are we in this situation?

• What kind of forces are at play?

• What is at stake?

• What responses are fitting?

These answers are not delivered as propositions. They are enacted through narrative patterns, figures, repetitions, and contrasts.

A myth tells you where you stand by showing you how to move.

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Orientation without explanation

Because myth orients rather than explains, its effectiveness does not depend on causal adequacy.

A myth can orient successfully even when its imagery is fantastical, contradictory, or opaque.

What matters is not whether the story corresponds to an independent reality, but whether it holds a field of action and meaning together.

This is why myths persist even when their literal content is no longer taken seriously.

The orientation can remain intact long after belief has faded.

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Myth and repetition

Orientation must be stable to be usable.

Myths therefore rely on repetition: retelling, ritual, familiar figures, recurring scenes.

This repetition is often mistaken for rigidity or dogma.

In fact, it is how orientation is maintained across time and individuals.

A myth does not merely happen once. It must be re-enterable.

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Orientation and responsibility

To provide orientation is to shape attention and action.

Myths therefore carry responsibility, whether acknowledged or not.

They do not dictate behaviour, but they weight possibilities: some responses appear natural, others unthinkable.

Understanding myth as orientation makes this visible without reducing myth to manipulation or ideology.

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Toward structured possibility

If myth orients, it does so by stabilising a space of possibility: what can happen meaningfully, what counts as a response, what futures can be imagined.

The next post makes this explicit, showing how myths function as stories that hold structured possibility steady — not by explaining the world, but by delimiting how it can unfold.

Myth After Representation: 2 Why Explanation Is the Wrong Frame

The previous post cleared away a set of persistent misunderstandings about myth. It showed that myth is not bad science, not a set of beliefs, and not a failed attempt to represent reality.

This post addresses the deeper problem that sustains those misunderstandings: the assumption that explanation is the primary function of meaningful stories.

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What explanation presupposes

Explanation is not a neutral activity.

To explain something is to assume that:

• there are stable objects to be explained,

• that these objects stand in determinate relations,

• that causes and effects can be identified,

• and that an explanation improves orientation by accurately describing those relations.

These assumptions are not universal. They belong to particular practices — most notably scientific ones.

Explanation works when those conditions are already in place.

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Explanation comes late

Explanation is never the first thing a culture does.

Before explanation is possible, there must already be:

• a sense of what counts as a thing,

• a sense of what matters,

• a background of relevance and salience,

• and a shared orientation that renders some questions intelligible and others nonsensical.

Explanation presupposes this orientation.

It does not create it.

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The mistake of retrofitting

Modern readers often approach myth as if it were an early attempt to answer questions that we now answer better.

But this retrofits myth into a conceptual space it did not inhabit.

The questions myth responds to are not “what caused this?” or “how does this work?”

They are questions like:

• Where are we?

• What kind of situation is this?

• What matters here?

• What calls for action, restraint, fear, or care?

These are not explanatory questions.

They are orientational ones.

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Why explanation distorts myth

When myth is read as explanation, it is forced into a frame that distorts its function.

Elements that are crucial to myth — symbolic repetition, narrative compression, archetypal figures, ritual resonance — appear redundant or irrational when judged by explanatory standards.

What looks like excess from an explanatory perspective is often precisely what stabilises orientation.

Explanation strips myth of its operative force by treating it as an answer rather than as a field within which answers and actions become possible.

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Explanation and control

There is another reason explanation dominates modern thought.

Explanation is closely tied to prediction and control. To explain something is often to render it manageable.

This has enormous practical value.

But it also encourages the idea that all meaningful practices must justify themselves by their explanatory power.

Myth resists this demand — not because it is irrational, but because control is not its task.

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A category error

To ask what a myth explains is therefore a category error.

It is like asking what a compass explains, or what a map believes.

Myth does not explain the world.

It orients us within it.

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Opening the way forward

Once explanation is set aside as the governing frame, myth can begin to appear on its own terms.

The next post develops this positive account directly, introducing myth as a practice of orientation — one that operates prior to belief, explanation, or representation.

Only then can the work myth actually does come into view.

Myth After Representation: 1 What Myth Is Not

Myth is one of the most persistently misunderstood practices in human culture.

It is routinely dismissed as false explanation, pre-scientific theory, or imaginative error — a childish attempt to answer questions later resolved by reason, evidence, or science.

This series begins by clearing that rubble.

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Myth is not bad science

A common mistake is to treat myth as an early or inferior form of science.

On this view, myths are primitive explanations: stories invented to account for lightning, seasons, illness, death, or fate before causal reasoning was properly developed.

This framing is seductive — and entirely wrong.

Myths do not fail because they explain badly.

They fail only if we assume that explanation was ever their task.

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Myth is not a set of beliefs

Myths are also often understood as things people once believed.

This, too, is misleading.

Myths do not primarily function as propositions to which assent is given or withdrawn. They are not held in the same way one holds a belief about the weather, a fact of history, or a scientific claim.

People inhabit myths. They act within them. They recognise themselves and others through them.

Belief may accompany this inhabitation — but it is not what makes myth work.

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Myth is not false representation

The deepest misunderstanding treats myth as a failed representation of reality.

Here myth is judged by the standards of reference and accuracy: does the story correspond to how the world actually is?

But this judgement presupposes a representational frame that myth does not occupy.

Myth does not aim to mirror the world.

It does not attempt to describe what exists independently of human orientation.

To accuse myth of misrepresentation is therefore a category error.

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The representational hangover

Why, then, does myth seem so obviously deficient?

Because modern thought is saturated with representational assumptions.

We are trained to ask of any story:

• Is it true?

• What does it explain?

• What does it refer to?

These are legitimate questions within certain practices.

They are disastrous when applied indiscriminately.

When myth is forced into a representational frame, it can only appear as error.

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What disappears when myth is misread

When myth is treated as failed explanation, several things vanish from view:

• its role in stabilising meaning,

• its capacity to orient action and attention,

• its power to organise significance,

• and its ability to hold a world steady enough to live in.

These functions are not secondary embellishments.

They are the work myth actually does.

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Clearing the ground

This post has been entirely negative by design.

Before myth can be understood, it must be freed from expectations it was never meant to satisfy.

The next post takes the next step, showing why explanation itself is the wrong frame for approaching myth — and how that frame came to dominate our thinking in the first place.

Only then can myth be approached on its own terms.

Science After Representation: Reflection: Relational Science and James Burke

As the series closes, it is worth noting a historical and cultural resonance: the work of James Burke, particularly his television series The Day the Universe Changed, shares a deep, intuitive kinship with the perspective advanced here.

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Burke’s insight

Burke’s series did not merely recount discoveries or inventions. It showed how knowledge, technology, and culture mutually reconfigure each other. A single scientific insight could ripple outward, changing the questions people asked, the tools they used, and the ways they understood the world.

He illuminated science as relational, transformative, and contingent — a web of effects rather than a linear march toward truth.

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Echoes in relational ontology

Science After Representation formalises these intuitions in a relational ontology:

• Objects are perspectival actualisations, not primitives.

• Experiments are cuts that stabilise regions of possibility.

• Systems cannot close, so possibility continually evolves.

• Science produces operational myths that orient communities without relying on representational fidelity.

Burke anticipated the shape of this argument. Where his narrative dazzled, the series systematises.

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From intuition to formalisation

Burke’s work helps us recognise that the phenomena of science are inseparable from the patterns they produce in human thought, society, and perception. Science After Representation takes that observation and renders it philosophically precise:

• what Burke presents as narrative transformation, the series frames as relational instantiation,

• what Burke illustrates as changing contexts, the series describes as evolving possibility,

• what Burke dramatises as the unexpected consequences of knowledge, the series formalises as ontology-in-practice.

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The final Burke demonstration

Interestingly, Burke concluded his series by showing explicitly that science itself is a cut: contrasting it with Buddhism as another cut, and with the very different possibilities that enabled witch trials. This aligns perfectly with the relational ontology: each framework stabilises its own structured space of possibility, producing phenomena and orientation specific to its cut.

This insight anticipates many of the points developed systematically in this series.

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The value of resonance

Acknowledging Burke is not about reducing the series to his work. It is about recognising that some intuitions about science’s relational power pre-existed formal articulation.

The series stands on its own theoretical legs, but Burke’s vision reminds us that intuition, storytelling, and philosophical formalisation are not opposed — they can co-inspire, one making visible what the other renders precise.

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A final thought

In this light, Science After Representation can be read both as a philosophical intervention and as part of a broader cultural project: understanding science not as a mirror, but as a practice that transforms the space of what can be thought, acted upon, and experienced. Burke showed the power of this perspective narratively; the series formalises it, systematically, for readers willing to follow the cuts, the systems, and the evolution of possibility itself.

Science After Representation: 8 What Kind of Practice Science Actually Is

This series has traced a path from familiar assumptions about representation to a relational understanding of science as a practice that shapes possibility. The previous post argued that science produces orientation and operational myths. This final post asks: what kind of practice is science, once representation is no longer doing the work?

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Not representation, not accumulation

Science is often described as:

• representing reality,

• building a stock of knowledge,

• or progressively approximating truth.

From the perspective developed here, all of these are secondary effects. The primary work of science is not about mirroring, describing, or collecting.

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Science as stabilisation of possibility

Science is a practice that stabilises regions of possibility through disciplined systems, coordinated experiments, and shared semiotic resources.

Its operations include:

• defining what counts as a phenomenon,

• structuring distinctions that matter,

• constraining what can recur reliably,

• producing cuts that generate phenomena,

• and coordinating these across time, space, and communities.

In short: science holds possibility steady enough for actualisation and coordination.

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The generativity of science

By stabilising structured possibility, science is generative rather than representational. It does not merely describe what exists; it enables what can exist within a system of constraints.

Its generativity manifests in multiple ways:

• new phenomena can appear,

• new concepts become intelligible,

• new experiments and methods can be devised,

• and new forms of explanation emerge.

This generativity is disciplined: not all possibilities are realised, but only those permitted by the systems and practices of science.

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Coordination and objectivity

Science is deeply social, not in a trivial sense, but because coordination is the mechanism by which possibility is stabilised.

Protocols, instruments, shared conventions, and communicative practices allow multiple researchers to enact the same cuts and observe the same phenomena.

Objectivity arises relationally: it is a property of coordination within a system, not a property of statements mirroring independent reality.

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Science as operational myth-making

Science produces myths in the relational sense described previously. It stabilises frameworks of orientation that guide what can be thought, observed, and manipulated.

These operational myths are disciplined, repeatable, and testable. They enable communities to navigate possibility reliably, while leaving the space of potentialities open for transformation.

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Why science persists

Science persists because it does not exhaust the space of possibility. Systems cannot close, and each cut opens new regions of potential actualisation.

The ongoing evolution of possibility, sustained by experimentation and conceptual innovation, ensures that science is never merely reactive or archival. It is performative, transformative, and generative.

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The series conclusion

Viewed through a relational lens, science is:

• not a mirror,

• not a repository of facts,

• not a march toward completeness.

It is a practice that actively shapes the structure of what can be actualised, thought, and coordinated.

Its work is the stabilisation of structured possibility, the production of orientation, and the ongoing creation of operational myths that sustain the evolution of knowledge itself.

Science, in this sense, is both rigorous and generative: a practice that evolves possibility while holding it steady enough to be intelligible, actionable, and communal.

The series closes here, leaving open the ongoing inquiry: how will the evolution of possibility continue to unfold, and how will scientific practice participate in that unfolding?

Science After Representation: 7 Myth, Orientation, and the Work Science Actually Does

The previous post argued that science participates in the evolution of possibility: it reconfigures what can be thought, instantiated, and explained. This post examines the unacknowledged consequence of that work: the production of orientation, and the formation of myths.

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Science and myth are often contrasted

Science is typically described as the enemy of myth.

Myths are said to be false, explanatory fictions. Science is said to correct them with evidence and logic.

But this opposition rests on a representational picture: that science mirrors reality while myth misrepresents it.

Once representation is no longer doing the work, this opposition dissolves.

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What science stabilises

Science stabilises configurations of possibility. In doing so, it produces patterns of orientation:

• what can be distinguished,

• what counts as significant,

• what sequences, relations, and correlations are intelligible,

• and what kinds of intervention are possible.

These patterns function like myths. They provide a framework in which action, thought, and expectation can operate reliably. But unlike traditional myth, they are disciplined, coordinated, and empirically constrained.

Myth, in this sense, is not false story; it is stabilised orientation within possibility.

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Examples in practice

Consider fundamental scientific concepts:

• Objectivity, information, force, evolution.

Each is not merely a description of reality. Each stabilises a certain way of interacting with the world:

• deciding what counts as evidence,

• what experiments are legitimate,

• which distinctions matter,

• and which manipulations are intelligible.

They are operational myths: frameworks that hold possibility steady enough for coordinated action and expectation.

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Orientation without belief

This has profound implications.

Orientation is not belief. One may operate effectively within a scientific system without committing to metaphysical realism, without “believing” in laws as things in themselves.

What matters is the stability of the system, and one’s ability to navigate it reliably.

Science produces orientation in the same sense that myth does, but in a disciplined, replicable, and constrained manner.

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Why myths matter

Myths, understood relationally, are not errors to be eliminated. They are functional:

• they guide attention,

• they shape action,

• they stabilise coordination,

• and they make experience intelligible.

Science, when successful, produces myths that are generative: they allow phenomena, experiments, and new conceptual structures to emerge that would otherwise be impossible.

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Science as myth-producer

Viewed this way, science and myth are continuous:

• science produces myths of orientation,

• myths stabilise possibility,

• possibility enables phenomena,

• and phenomena sustain further science.

The difference between scientific and pre-scientific myth is not truthfulness, but discipline, repeatability, and scope of coordination.

Science is the most sophisticated myth-making practice humanity has devised, not because it is superior in truth, but because it reliably stabilises structured possibility across time and observers.

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Toward the series conclusion

This series has moved from questions about representation to the recognition that:

• objects are perspectival actualisations,

• experiments are ontological cuts,

• systems cannot close,

• science changes what can be thought,

• possibility evolves,

• and science produces orientation through operational myths.

The final post will synthesise these threads, making explicit what it means to understand science after representation, without collapsing into prescriptive or metaphysical claims.