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Imagine a sign sitting in the middle of a town square with nothing on it but three scribbled loops. Every day for years, people walk by this sign and give no reaction to it. People might attempt to interpret the sign in different ways, but without an established practice wherein all rule-followers exhibit the same behavior towards the sign, there is no rule for the sign. But imagine one day that a person sees the sign, and then walks in the same sort of loops which are depicted on it. Once he finishes his three loops, he goes on his way, as if it had all been perfectly natural. Imagine that a large group of people saw him do this, and in turn initiate a practice of walking three loops every time they passed the sign. Perhaps we leave this village and come back fifty years later. Everyone now walks in loops when they pass the sign. When we ask them why they do this they might say something like “because that’s what the sign says, you idiot!”

The sign had no meaning until people agreed on a meaning. Before this agreement was reached, there might have been numerous interpretations and speculations about the sign’s meaning, as if an interpretation itself could assign meaning. But this would be like trying to put an object inside an empty box by speculating about what’s inside it. To be perfectly clear, what I am saying is that meaning is not a matter of interpretation or opinion. To merely think that the sign means something is not enough to assign it meaning. And if you argue that it was the original Looper’s interpretation that assigned meaning to the sign, then you should consider what sort of meaning this would be in the case where no one had adopted the practice of looping.

It wouldn’t be any sort of meaning, because even the original Looper’s interpretation has no bearing on the meaning of the sign. We might imagine that the Looper didn’t even see the sign when he first passed by, but instead was being chased by a wasp, and that he only walked in his loops to avoid being stung. In this case, meaning originated without any possibility of originating in an interpretation. The onlookers just simply understood his looping to be in accord with the meaning of the sign. There was a practice that was picked up, and when the practice finally cemented itself, so did the meaning of the sign.