The location of sense

Abstract

The Location of Sense: A Vital Architecture Without Origin Where is sense located? Communication theories have sought it in the emitter, the message, the receiver, the sign, the interaction, or the relation among them. Michael Reddy showed in 1979 that ordinary language about communication is structured by the conduit metaphor: ideas appear as objects, expressions as containers, and communication as their transportation. This paper begins from that diagnosis but extends it beyond English and beyond linguistic communication. Across historically and typologically distant language families, the lexicon repeatedly privileges the pole of emission. This does not establish an anthropological universal, but it supports the hypothesis that directional bias may be embedded in the very tools through which sense is conceived. In place of an architecture organized around an arrow, the paper proposes two irreducible vital operations: relatar—to organize indicators into tramas that reach closure as belief—and personar—to configure an offer as an operation of will and, through that offer, to offer oneself to the environment. Will is used here in a conative sense: it implies neither conscious deliberation nor an identified addressee, but requires offering to belong to the orientation of the operation. Mere availability is therefore not personation. Relatar may occur without any pertinent personation, and personar may occur without any relatador celebrating a relato while considering the offer. When both operations occur within the same enactuation, they do not share a semantic object. Personation configures indicators-o, tramas-o, conclusions-o, and LAM-o; the relatador produces indicators and tramas within a singular celebration. The suffix -o does not designate a preliminary stage of something that will later be received, interpreted, or reconstructed. It marks a function belonging specifically to the offer. No semantic content, closure, or shared sense is transported between the operations. The offer itself does not persist as an identical entity. A material support—a book, inscription, recording, or digital archive—may remain, but it neither contains nor preserves the offer configured in an earlier personation. When that support reappears in another period, institution, or universe of availabilities, it enters a new configuration of offers and availabilities. Each personation and each celebration occurs once and only once. The architecture also recognizes that interactions may acquire functional and dynamic autonomy: they may sustain synchronies, impose constraints, and alter the trajectories of their participants. Such autonomy does not by itself make interaction a subject or residence of sense. What is commonly called “shared meaning” may instead be redescribed as audited compatibility among singular closures. Asking, correcting, translating, repeating, recording, or sanctioning produces new personations and new relatos; it does not provide access to an original celebration shared by the participants. The model develops these distinctions through the concepts of enactuation, LAM—Licenses, Agreements, and Mandates—availability, material support, and meta-observation. It opens research directions for epistemology, theoretical biology, content analysis, education, clinical practice, and the study of human systems. It posits no origin for the architecture it describes and declares itself, like every closure, provisional. Note on this revised version This version deepens and corrects several formulations from the earlier publication. It explicitly distinguishes personation from mere availability, systematically introduces the forms indicator-o, trama-o, conclusion-o, and LAM-o, and establishes that neither personation nor the offer persists as an identical entity within a material support. It also clarifies the relation between the dynamic autonomy of interaction and the attribution of sense, distinguishes audited compatibility among closures from supposedly shared meaning, and reformulates information, sign, and anchoring as functional stabilizations that contain no singular celebration. Finally, it recognizes two direct antecedents absent from the previous version. Michael Reddy identified the conduit metaphor embedded in the vocabulary of communication. Ruth Millikan showed that a signaling function may exist without conscious intention and without the success of every individual occurrence. The relatar–personar architecture differs from both approaches by maintaining that offer and celebration are irreducible operations, that they share no semantic object, and that relatar does not require an offer to have previously existed.