The Locus of Meaning

Where does meaning exist? Two recurrent answers place it primarily in the world or primarily in the interpreting mind. The first treats meaning as an intrinsic or discoverable property of objects. The second treats meaning as a projection, representation, or construction of a perceiving subject. This paper argues that both answers misidentify the semantic locus. Meaning is constituted at the location of binding: the structured relation through which objects, signs, interpreters, contexts, histories, practices, distinctions, and consequences become mutually determining. Objects and minds can constrain, preserve, activate, and transform meaning, but neither is its exclusive container. This thesis is formulated as the Semantic Binding Principle: Meaning exists at the locus of a governed, consequential, and reidentifiable binding. The paper then distinguishes two higher-order forms. Recursive Meta-Binding occurs whenever an existing binding becomes a relatum in another binding. Reflexive Meta-Binding occurs when a system represents aspects of its own active binding constitution, including its constraints, frameworks, uncertainty, and prior trajectory, and uses that representation in subsequent processing. This incorporates the durable conceptual contribution of earlier work on Meta-Binding as an operational invariant while separating the general theory of meaning from empirical claims about particular language models. A semantic binding is distinguished from an arbitrary relation by typed role structure, differential sensitivity, constraint, uptake capacity, jurisdiction, reidentifiability, provenance, and consequence. Concepts are modeled as callable binding constitutions. Lexical terms are handles into those constitutions. Contextual meanings are realizations compiled from them. Typed hypergraphs represent what is bound; partial orders and lattices represent refinement and overlap; presheaf-like structures represent locally valid semantic jurisdictions; and sparse semantic polynomials represent context-sensitive projection and co-projection. The paper also formalizes binding overextension, the production of an unauthorized higher-order binding, unsupported bridge, or synthetic claim. Ableman's Razor, expressed as Specification, Configuration Manifold, Instance Constitution, and Instance Realization, is interpreted as the descent from possible binding through admissible and constituted binding into realized binding. The concept of person serves as a principal case study. Person, personation, personhood, self, agent, you, and persona are treated not as flat synonyms but as jurisdictionally distinct projections of a deeper person-binding constitution. The resulting framework offers a non-reductive alternative to object-localism, subject-localism, and unconstrained relativism while providing a formal research program for philosophy, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, and governed semantic systems.