Meaning as Interbeing: A Treatment of the WE-turn and Meta-Science

Abstract This article develops a conception of meaning in the sense of “meaning as interbeing,” i.e., meaning as an emerging property in the intersection between proto-meaning and epistemic frames. The foundational basis of this argument is built on two streams of thought, Deguchi’s relational ontology of the WE-turn and the meta-ontological perspective of what is discussed in this article as Meta-Science. The article first discusses the problem of the emergence of meaning based on the limitations of subjectivist and materialist conceptions of meaning. It then builds upon the WE-turn’s incapability theses to define ontologies and their limitations, specifically their propositional incompleteness. Finally, it develops the concept of proto-meaning, i.e., the non-epistemic relational structures that underlie experiences and explain how the non-epistemic and the epistemic are bridged through interbeing to form meaning proper. The argument presented here, thereby, reframes meaning as emergent from irreducible interdependencies between objects (both epistemic and non-epistemic) and the recognition of their semblance to non-epistemic archetypal structures that are engraved in all relationships as proto-meaning. Meaning is, thus, conceived as interbeing: a layered, relational emergence grounded in archetypal patterns and conditioned and filtered by ontological premises.