Note 57

The essence of meaning are the relations between concepts which it picks out. It picks out both context (what is implied, both about the world and about the relation to it) and representation (the specific thing to which it refers).

By picking out specific contexts, it embodies assumptions about underlying structures governing context, within which contextualization is posssible. The way it organizes information is itself information, but which cannot be given in terms of representation. 

By picking out representations, it also embodies assumptions about the structural content of representations, and about possible relations between representation and context.

***

When we say we mean something, what we mean is how the objects relate to other objects within contexts, or represented contexts relating to other contexts.

***

Relationships require limits. Limits are not real. Or rather, they are only as real as they are taken as such from within the network of relationships.

Hence the absolute, or that which is not relatedness, cannot be thought.

Note 56

The greatest cultures are those which articulate and advance the frontiers of the human condition, in their unique ways. They are divorced from the ethnicity from which they originate,  and seed ideas in other cultures in ways which extend their influence beyond the survival of the civilisation itself.

Note 55

Subjectivity is composed of two parts, relativity and representativeness.

By asserting relativity, the argument from representativeness at the meta-level breaks down. This is due to the hierarchies of truth being maintained at that level. Hence there is no argued basis for relativity due to representativeness.

Hence, it either asserts non-representativeness at the meta-level, or denies representativeness as the basis for relativity.

Frame-coherantism is one such alternative. This epistemic notion may be paired with an ontological reality-pluralism which asserts that there are multiple frames of truth, none of which invalidates or overrides the other.

However, the determination of what constitutes a frame is itself a search for a founding principle, a foundational frame. Hence it transcendentally presupposes that which it categorically denies. 

Alternatively, one might be left with a radical undecidability between opposing frames for the sake of meta-consistency, which cannot even be said. This Wittgensteinian anti-theory would deny the validity of the question within which it is framed. Frame just is use.

Note 54

A characteristic of modernity, and Asian modernity in particular, is the determination of social structures and institutions by economic values. 

Hence by altering economic imperatives, the changing operative modality of technologically embedded living will disrupt existing social arrangements. The means of change rests on the question of the flexibility of institutions to adapt.

In particular, the shift to large scale automation will require a lifestyle and social welfare alteration towards pursuit of creative comparative advantages. 

The success in generating potential growth, as well as preventing violent change, rests on the speed of cultural change.

Note 53

Societies function in a general equilibrium within evolutionary stable sets of mutually reciprocating factor conditions. The combination of norms, institutions and ideology, as well as the interaction of the emergent properties and the relationships themselves, constitutes that which Hegel idealizes and calls Geist.

Linkages between components of Geist evolve over time, according to the hierarchy of principles which order the collective decisions of society. Being humans, these principles are embodied in actual historical events and actions, rather than implemented from the top-down.

Use

Use is frame. Meaning is not use. Use is the way in which meaning is used.

So form does not precondition content, but is given in the relation of content to other content.

Expressed through content, it exists in a categorical relation to content.

Use is not the precondition of meaning, but arises out of the condition of meaning  through its content. The necessity of its content is called form. It's necessity is contingent on the kind of content that is evoked.