Actual and Potential Meaning

When we talk about meaning, we often conflate two things:

What is actually meaningful for us, and what has rich potential to be meaningful for someone else.

Actual and Potential Meaning.

For example, to a devout Christian, Christianity is deeply meaningful. That Christianity is also deeply meaningful for many empirically demonstrates that, in practice, that it is a pattern of engagement which has rich potential to be meaningful for many others.

Even without the empirical demonstration of something being meaningful to many others, we may predict that a pattern of engagement has rich potential to be meaningful for others; for example, if we love a song, then we might reasonably wonder if others might also.

We may also predict that a pattern of engagement has rich potential to be meaningful for ourselves, because we are familiar with our tendencies: we might receive a gift and wonder: "might this because deeply meaningful to me in time?"

That which is actually meaningful has both interiority and exteriority: there is a felt-sense of care, and something that we care about.

What is potentially meaningful is something that we see as being a good scaffolding for individual care, either because it is demonstrably so for many, because it is so for ourselves, or because that is simply our judgement based on experience of predicting how potential meaning becomes actual meaning.

Often times, it is not important to sort out actual and potential meaning or to sort out our reasons for seeing something as potentially meaningful.

Sometimes, though, it is.