Constitutional Meaning

This paper presents a constitutional theory of meaning. Most theories treat meaning as representation, interpretation, reference, symbol grounding, or semantic correspondence. Meaning is generally understood as a relationship between a sign and what the sign denotes. The constitutional perspective begins elsewhere. The framework proposes that meaning arises whenever a distinction changes admissible continuation. Meaning is not fundamentally representational. Meaning is structural. Under this view, meaning exists wherever distinctions alter the space of possible futures. The same principle applies across biological, computational, social, and cognitive systems. A signal, symbol, event, memory, observation, or concept becomes meaningful when it changes what may happen next. The paper introduces: constitutional meaning, meaning-binding, continuation sensitivity, semantic participation, constitutional semantics. The framework provides a substrate-neutral account of meaning capable of spanning organisms, institutions, machines, and collectives without requiring commitment to a specific representational theory. The central claim: Meaning is the capacity of a distinction to alter admissible continuation.