nucleation

THEORY-1278: Communication can be treated as transduction, the continuity of an action through processes that it transforms, rather than as exchange between parties; meaning is then the contribution an action makes, in retrospect, to a joint individuation, coexisting meanings mark concurrent individuations, and the problem of scaling agency from individual to collective is claimed to dissolve

3 min read

Properties5
StatusProposed
Tagssocial-ontology, individuation, philosophy-of-language
SourceLIT-1902 — Agency Without Agents: Affective Forces, Communicative Events, and Organizational Becomings
Bears onQUESTION-029 — What constitutes the identity of a relationally organized communicative act, how can it be recognized apart from any one representation, and under which transformations does it persist?
Cited as “grounds” byCLAIM-525 — Information in the sense the Simondonian readings give it, a disparity whose resolution reorders the system that takes it up, is in the line's terms a change in the interpreter or in the questions receivers can decide, not evidence about a fixed situation, so Blackwell's order leaves it out by construction and the two accounts are not rivals, CLAIM-526 — Describing persons and organizations as coexisting levels of one process removes the question of how already-constituted agents add up to a collective, but not the question of levels: whether a collective variable has dynamics of its own, closed against the activity that realizes it, can be decided on a process description that presupposes no agents, is sometimes decided no, and a closed collective variable can be an aggregate that coexists with its realization while keeping none of its members' distinctions

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Source

Bencherki, Brummans and Vézy (2024), LIT-1902, pp. 1355–1358 and 1363–1365; read in NOTE-1484.

What was actually shown

The paper argues four things.

  • Communication is transduction. It is “the continuity of action through beings who are in a perpetual state of becoming”, and “any communication also implies a transformation” (pp. 1356, 1364). Its examples include a synapse converting electrical to chemical signals, a hunger pang becoming a postponed meeting, and a piston that “communicates movement”.
  • Meaning is retrospective. “action contributes to informing a system that, retrospectively, gives that action its meaning” (p. 1357).
  • Organizations are not consensus. They are not formed by reducing equivocality: “Coexisting meanings of the same action indicate that several individuations are ongoing” (p. 1358), against Weick.
  • Scaling up dissolves. The problem of scaling from individual to collective agency “vanishes the moment communication is viewed eventfully” (p. 1364). Individuation is said to take place “concurrently at different ‘levels’”.

The last is asserted, with the MSF meeting as illustration. The illustration shows the description can be given. It does not show that a scaling-up account of the same meeting goes wrong.

What this does not say

  • That information-theoretic communication is wrong. It sets aside the transmission view of communication; it does not engage it.
  • How to bound the notion. With pistons communicating movement, “communication” covers every causal continuity. Something must separate organizationally relevant transduction from causation in general, and the paper does not supply it.

Connections

  • TERM-097. The record holds coherence as agreement among the members of a family. “Coexisting meanings” is the paper’s case of incoherence that is not failure.
  • CLAIM-430. Taking part can come before the reinterpretation it later seems to express. That is the record’s sharpest neighbour to retrospective meaning, with a mechanism the paper lacks.

Connections to the record’s own argument

Added 2026-10-31 by a pass connecting the readings of Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy 2024 and the works it leans on to the record’s lines. Analogies are marked as such.

Pragmatic transport

  • CLAIM-002. Transduction is continuity of transmission without similarity of function. CLAIM-002 says that gives descent, not fidelity.
  • CLAIM-171. Retrospective meaning is a systemic form of CLAIM-171’s position, and it gives CLAIM-160’s intended meaning no slot.
  • CLAIM-496. Coexisting meanings are incoherence that is not failure; the task-relative criterion is the record’s own.

Distributed agency and individuation

  • CLAIM-526 meets this theory’s own refutation condition for the question of levels, though not for the aggregation of agents.

Nucleating argument and formal apparatus

  • TERM-097. “Coexisting meanings” is not yet incoherence. Coherence is agreement under a stated correspondence structure, and the paper states none under which the meanings must agree (CLAIM-265). The dispute with Weick is about that structure.
  • CLAIM-310. Judgements of one action that are functions of its features jointly refine, so their coexistence does not by itself show that “several individuations are ongoing” (p. 1358).

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