Meaning as Interbeing: A Treatment of the WE-turn and Meta-Science
Open Philosophy January 1, 2025 Andrej Zwitter
Meaning arises not from individual minds or material objects alone but as an emergent property at the intersection of proto-meaning and epistemic frames. Drawing on Deguchi's relational ontology of the WE-turn and a meta-ontological perspective called Meta-Science, the argument critiques subjectivist and materialist accounts of meaning for their limitations. It introduces the concept of proto-meaning: non-epistemic relational structures underlying experience that bridge the non-epistemic and epistemic realms through interbeing. Meaning proper emerges from irreducible interdependencies between objects and their semblance to non-epistemic archetypal patterns engraved in all relationships. Meaning is thus layered, relational, and conditioned by ontological premises.