I. The Key Question
An anthropologist asks how gift exchange differs from commodity exchange. A sociologist asks how individuals interact with society. A medical researcher asks how biological, psychological and social factors combine to influence health. A historian asks how nature came to be distinguished from culture. Each of these is a reasonable research question. Each offers a recognizable object, an established debate, and a body of scholarship large enough to occupy a career. And each carries, folded into its formulation, a division of the world that was settled before the inquiry began.
Consider gift exchange. The question assumes that exchange is already a sufficiently distinct phenomenon to organize inquiry, so that the remaining work concerns its forms, functions, meanings and consequences. Yet there is a prior question, which the formulation makes difficult to ask: why did certain activities become recognizable as exchange at all, separated out from the wider processes through which living beings keep their lives going and transform them? That prior question does more than modify the existing debate. Taken seriously, it may change the object of investigation.
The principle can be put simply. Whenever a distinction seems fundamental, ask whether living coordination actually exhibits that distinction. A distinction may be useful, practically consequential, historically durable and institutionally indispensable, and none of these qualities establishes that it describes the world as it is lived. Much research examines the world through classifications fixed before the investigation started, and critical scholarship often shares more with its adversaries than it acknowledges. It contests how exchange works, how culture operates, or how individuals relate to society, while leaving untouched the question whether these are appropriate first divisions of living reality.
No modern thinker recognized a closely related problem more powerfully than Ludwig Wittgenstein. His image of philosophy as showing the fly the way out of the fly-bottle (Wittgenstein 2009, §309) captures the experience of being trapped by a problem that one's own conceptual arrangements have produced. The fly keeps striking the glass because it keeps flying towards the light; the trap works because of what the fly takes its situation to be. But what happens once the fly escapes? Wittgenstein's investigations are devoted almost entirely to the escape. Living Value Theory (LVT) wants to investigate the world the bottle had been concealing.
This article argues that LVT shares Wittgenstein's suspicion of misleading symbolic distinctions and makes three moves beyond his approach. First, it treats multisymbolization as one of five continuously co-mediating dimensions of living coordination, alongside multisensorial embodiment, multispecies being-with, multiversal dwelling and multimateriality. Second, it places the maintenance and transformation of metabolic mesocosmic states, rather than meaning, at the centre of investigation. Third, it treats living coordinations and their symbolic differentiations as phenomena that emerge and change historically and must be studied through concrete cases. The argument is that Wittgenstein identified a problem of extraordinary importance without developing the research programme needed to follow its consequences, which is a different claim from saying that he was wrong. Between these moves the article identifies a mechanism that the familiar contrast between language and life leaves unexplained: how a symbolic differentiation comes to function as though it were an independently existing feature of the world, so that people meet its consequences as they would meet a stone in their path. That mechanism, it will be argued, accounts for a substantial class of the confusions Wittgenstein diagnosed, and also for why they so often survive their diagnosis.
A further difference emerges along the way and deserves to be stated at the outset, so that the article is not misread. Questioning inherited distinctions is one of LVT's points of entry, and the one at which it comes closest to Wittgenstein, but it is far from the only one. Many LVT investigations begin with coordinations that simply work and in which no symbolic misclassification ever becomes significant, and many begin from ontology itself, from what the world must be like if it is to be liveable at all. Wittgenstein's therapeutic philosophy needs a confusion to get started. LVT can begin where there is none. Its central methodological achievement is therefore twofold: to question, where it matters, the symbolic differentiations that made particular questions seem necessary in the first place, and to have other ways of beginning where it does not.
II. Wittgenstein's Extraordinary Proximity to Living Value Theory
The comparison is worth making only if the similarities are taken seriously first, and they are considerable.
The early Wittgenstein was already preoccupied with the possibility that philosophical trouble arises from misunderstanding language. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus holds that most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from a failure to understand the logic of our language (Wittgenstein 1922, 4.003). It describes philosophy as an activity of clarification rather than a body of doctrine (4.112), distinct from the natural sciences (4.111). Its closing propositions recognize the limits of what can be said, recommending that one say nothing except the propositions of natural science and show anyone who wishes to say something metaphysical that certain of their signs have been given no meaning (6.53). The later Wittgenstein came to regard the Tractatus's picture of a single logical form beneath all language as itself a captivating picture, exactly the kind of thing philosophy should loosen. Yet a continuity runs through the whole career: confusion that presents itself as depth is often confusion about language.
The Philosophical Investigations transforms this concern decisively. Meaning is no longer explained primarily through a correspondence between names and objects. In the opening game of §2, a builder calls out "block", "pillar", "slab" and "beam", and an assistant brings the stone he has learnt to bring at each call. Speaking is embedded in coordinated practical activity, and Wittgenstein calls the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, a language-game (§7). By §23 he insists that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life. A word acquires its significance within practices, and understanding involves participation in them.
This is very close to where LVT begins, and the parallels go further. The discussion of family resemblance (§§65–67) undermines the assumption that every category must name a single common essence: games are related through overlapping and criss-crossing similarities, with no one feature running through all of them. Wittgenstein's attention to ordinary practice resists the temptation to impose abstract theoretical requirements upon it. And his conception of philosophy as therapy shows how apparently profound problems can arise from misleading pictures rather than from unexplained features of reality. Philosophy, he writes, is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language (§109), and the complete clarity it aims at simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear (§133).
These parallels bear directly on what LVT calls a SWIPE, a split of worlds paired with incommensurable epistemologies, of which the separation of nature from culture is the most consequential modern instance. The problem of connecting mind with body, or the individual with society, becomes intractable precisely because the terms of the question have already separated what is continuously coordinated. Wittgenstein would have recognized the form of the difficulty at once: the problem is held in place by a picture.
Further affinities make the comparison more pointed still. Wittgenstein describes what he offers as remarks on the natural history of human beings, observations that no one has doubted but that have escaped notice because they are always before our eyes (§415). He notes that commanding, questioning, recounting and chatting are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking and playing (§25). He observes that the aspects of things most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity (§129). Each of these sentences could stand as an epigraph to an LVT investigation. Agreement in language, he says, is agreement in form of life rather than in opinions (§241), and it extends to agreement in judgements (§242). In On Certainty he describes an inherited background against which we distinguish true from false, a world-picture that functions like the rules of a game and that we did not acquire by satisfying ourselves of its correctness (Wittgenstein 1969, §§94–95).
It would therefore be a weak criticism to claim that Wittgenstein ignored practice, or regarded language as detached from life. Language-games were designed to overcome exactly that detachment, and Wittgensteinian scholars, anthropologists among them, have long emphasized the place of the everyday, of natural reactions and of forms of life in his thought (Das 1998; Boncompagni 2022). The interesting question lies elsewhere. Having situated language within life, having named eating and walking as part of human natural history, and having observed that what matters most is hidden by its familiarity, why did Wittgenstein not make living coordination itself the primary object of investigation?
He gives his own answer. If concept formation could be explained by facts of nature, he asks, should we not be interested in what in nature is the basis of grammar? His reply is that his interest does not fall back on these possible causes: he is not doing natural science, nor yet natural history, since he can just as well invent a fictitious natural history for his purposes (Wittgenstein 2009, Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment, §365). LVT can be understood, in a precise sense, as the decision to undertake the natural history that Wittgenstein declined, without collapsing it into the natural science he rightly refused to confuse with philosophy. The sections that follow show what that decision involves.
III. The Symbolic Differentiation of the Mesocosm Is Not the Mesocosm
Before returning to Wittgenstein, the positive foundation of the method has to be laid out.
Living beings inhabit species-relative worlds of practical coordination, which LVT calls mesocosms. They find food, avoid threats, move through environments, reproduce, maintain relations with others, recover from disturbances and keep their lives going across time. None of this requires the human symbolic categories through which the world is later classified. A badger does not need to distinguish biology from psychology, nature from culture, or organism from environment in order to live. Its coordination runs continuously across the processes that humans parcel out under those headings. Human living coordination is no different in this respect: people do not first separate reality into categories and then reconnect them in order to eat, sleep, or raise a child. Life does not begin with the divisions through which it is later described.
One qualification is needed. The absence of human symbolization is no absence of differentiation. Living beings discern relevant differences continuously and respond to them selectively; a bacterium swimming up a nutrient gradient is already discerning. The claim is that historically specific human symbolic divisions should not be mistaken for the natural architecture of living reality, which is a long way from claiming that reality is an undifferentiated whole.
Human beings develop symbolic distinctions because they are extraordinarily useful. Distinctions permit communication, memory, comparison, coordination across distance, institutional continuity, specialized inquiry and the transmission of knowledge across generations. The difficulty lies in the recursive effects of symbolic stabilization. A distinction may begin as a practical way of organizing certain activities. Over time it becomes habitual, institutionalized, embedded in education, built into the structure of disciplines, and treated as the obvious starting point for further investigation. Eventually people no longer experience it as a decision or an achievement. It simply appears to describe the world. In LVT's terms, an articulation that began at the third level of recursivity, where a felt misalignment is put into words, has been stabilized at the fourth level, where institutions hold it in place. Binaries, in particular, become fourth-level operations of this kind once they are institutionally stabilized. Not every operative symbol is an articulation, however. Many symbols work below the threshold of notice, within coordination that proceeds without becoming salient, and multisymbolization is the one mediation that spans every level of recursivity.
Nature and culture, mind and body, individual and society, gift and commodity, biology, psychology and society: these distinctions differ greatly in their histories and their usefulness, and they should not be dismissed indiscriminately as errors. The methodological question for each is whether, and where, it tracks consequential features of living coordination, and where it misleads.
A great deal of theoretical labour in the human sciences goes into explaining how supposedly separate domains interact. How do individuals relate to society? How does culture shape biology? How does the mind influence the body? How does nature constrain culture? Many of these problems become unavoidable only after a particular symbolic differentiation has been accepted. LVT does not begin with the task of reconnecting such domains, and asks instead whether the initial separation was appropriate. Rather than claiming that all distinctions are equally arbitrary, or that none should be made, it proposes that the continuity of living coordination should be the starting point, while the justification for any particular differentiation remains an open empirical question.
An obvious misunderstanding has to be headed off. LVT cannot dispense with symbolic distinctions, because its own framework is symbolic through and through. The five mediations, the five levels of recursivity, the three types of recursive counterparts and the concept of the mesocosm are analytical constructions, made of the same stuff as the distinctions they are used to examine. What distinguishes LVT is its refusal to grant analytical distinctions the status of independently existing compartments, and it entertains no fantasy of access to an unmediated reality. The test of a distinction is what it allows us to investigate. Before that test can be applied to the distinction between language and everything else, one further step is needed: an account of how a symbolic distinction comes to be encountered as though it were part of the world.
IV. When Symbols Become Reality: Three Modes of Symbolization and the Misrecognition of Recursive Counterparts
The argument so far has moved quickly from symbolic differentiation to the mistake of treating a differentiation as reality. That transition needs an account of its own, because it is where Wittgenstein's problem and LVT's diverge most precisely. What exactly happens when language misleads us?
LVT distinguishes three symbolic modes. In coordination mode, a symbol participates directly in the situation it names. "Pass the salt" coordinates a movement at a table where the salt, the hands and the people are all present; a shout of fire intervenes in an evacuation before it functions as a statement awaiting assessment; the builder's call of "slab" is part of building. Such symbols need not be noticed at all. Once habitual, they work at the first level of recursivity, within coordination that proceeds without becoming separately salient, and nothing in them is waiting to be extracted as a proposition. In reference-to-absence mode, a symbol makes something not presently available matter to current coordination, as in memory, narrative, description and most ordinary discourse: "the university was a different place in 1980" brings an absent institution into a present conversation. In re-presentation mode, a symbol claims to make present again what is absent, lost, imagined or never directly encountered, as in ritual, art and theory. A single symbolic act can operate in more than one mode at once, and a symbol can move between modes as the coordination around it changes. The modes are functions, and nothing requires them to follow one another in a fixed developmental order.
The distinction matters because the second and third modes carry a distinctive risk. A symbol that refers to absence remains available when the conditions for checking it against its referent are absent too. It can be repeated, elaborated, defended and built into further symbols without any corresponding encounter with what it describes. The risk is greatest when the supposed referent is itself a symbolic abstraction. Where exactly is the society to which the word "society" refers? One can investigate people, households, activities, institutions, infrastructures, relationships and histories, but nothing corresponds to the abstract noun in the way a particular stone corresponds to "this stone". Theory, working in re-presentation mode, then makes society present as an object of study, an entity with structures, functions and pressures of its own.
Wittgenstein saw much of this. He observed that what confuses us is the uniform appearance of words, whose application is not presented to us as clearly as their form (2009, §11), and he compared words to the handles in a locomotive cab, which look alike although one is a crank, another a switch, another a brake lever (§12). He described a picture that held us captive because it lay in our language (§115), and he urged that words be brought back from their metaphysical to their everyday use (§116). It would be wrong, then, to say that he failed to notice how grammar disguises differences between kinds of expression. He noticed exactly that. Consider three sentences: "The stone is blocking the entrance", "The university is blocking my research", and "Society is blocking individual freedom". Each presents something as a subject capable of standing in a causal relation. The first may name an immediately present material obstruction. The second compresses a great many changing coordinations among people, regulations, budgets, procedures and decisions. The third compresses still more, while treating the individual and society as two independently constituted entities facing each other. Grammar makes the three sentences look more alike than the processes they describe, and the level at which a distinction operates cannot be read off its grammatical form. Tense, deixis, quotation, modality and genre give clues, but they do not systematically indicate a symbol's mode or the kind of coordination it compresses.
What Wittgenstein's therapy leaves open is what happens after people begin to organize their activities according to such descriptions. A symbol then becomes what LVT calls a ground: later coordination can stand upon it without reconstructing the interaction that produced it. The individual/society distinction begins as a differentiation of continuous living coordination. It is then written into legislation, administrative procedure, professional training, the division of universities into disciplines, and the terms of political argument. Durkheim (1982 [1895]) gave it one of its most consequential stabilizations when he defined social facts by their externality to the individual and their power of constraint, and recommended that they be treated as things. Once the distinction has been incorporated into the arrangements through which people live, they encounter its consequences everywhere, and a person may come to experience society as something externally given, fixed and resistant, standing over against them.
LVT's three types of recursive counterparts sharpen the analysis at this point. A symbolic deposit is nonrecursive: the text of a regulation does not alter when someone objects to it, and a classification does not argue back. Encountered at the desk where an application is refused, the rule presents the resistance of a nonrecursive counterpart, and the person refused cannot negotiate with it as they might with a colleague. Yet sedimentation is never the end of recursion. A rule must be enforced, a category applied, a record kept, a procedure followed, and all of this is done by living beings who respond to one another. The regulation persists and operates only through a continuing interrecursive coordination of administrators, documents, software, legal powers, habits, expectations and institutional histories. Poiesis relocates recursion without ending it, and what appears nonrecursive at one scale of coordination depends on interrecursive maintenance at another. Recursive counterpart types therefore describe relations within a coordination, and the same arrangement can be encountered as one type while being sustained as another.
The process the article has been circling can now be stated precisely. A symbolic differentiation becomes reified when its recursive reproduction within living coordination drops from view, so that people encounter its stabilized consequences as though they were dealing with an independently existing, nonrecursive counterpart. One might call this counterpart misrecognition: approaching an arrangement as having a different kind of recursive responsiveness from the one that actually sustains it. The resistance a person feels from "society" is real, and its source is the continuing coordination through which the distinction is reproduced and enforced rather than a substance called society, which is also why that coordination could, in principle, become otherwise.
Pragmatist sociology formulated half of this long ago. W. I. Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas (1928) observed that situations defined as real are real in their consequences, which never meant that believing a proposition makes it true, only that a definition of a situation, even a mistaken one, generates real effects. Ian Hacking's (1995) account of the looping effects of human kinds showed how classifications of people change how those people understand themselves and how others treat them, altering the phenomena the classifications were meant to describe. John Searle (1995) showed how institutional facts such as money, property and office depend on collectively maintained rules while producing real rights, obligations and powers. The claim that classifications become consequential therefore has a long pedigree, and what LVT adds is an account of the process that can specify which symbolic mode is operating, how a reference or re-presentation becomes a ground for subsequent coordination, which recursive counterparts participate and how they are encountered, at what level of recursivity the arrangement is stabilized, and what metabolic mesocosmic consequences follow across the five mediations. A distinction becomes consequential through the living coordination in which it is repeatedly enacted, transmitted, materially supported, contested and enforced, and belief alone accomplishes none of this.
Two qualifications keep the argument honest. The individual/society distinction is a symbolic classification, but it is neither meaningless nor wholly fictional. Differences between a person and large-scale arrangements are real and consequential, and the error lies in reading a useful analytical distinction as evidence of two independently existing substances. What LVT contests is the interpretation of continuous coordination as interaction between ontologically separate entities. The second qualification turns back on the method itself. LVT began from the principle that symbolic differentiations must not be mistaken for the organization of living reality, yet a differentiation can become part of living reality through the very coordinations it reorganizes. The method therefore cannot rest on a simple contrast between symbolic unreality and mesocosmic reality. It has to distinguish the initial symbolic distinction, its purported independent referent, the actual coordinations through which it is reproduced, and the real consequences of that reproduction. The reality of a classification's consequences does not establish the reality of the division it claims to describe, and symbolic classifications can become real features of living coordination without the divisions they designate becoming fundamental divisions of the world. This is why such classifications are so hard to escape. They are woven into the practical arrangements through which people live, which makes them far more durable than false pictures lodged in people's heads.
V. Language Is One Mediation Among Five
Wittgenstein brought language back into practical activity. LVT makes practical living coordination, rather than language, the primary object of investigation. The difference is easiest to see by taking Wittgenstein's own example and changing the question.
The builders of §2 were an enormous achievement. They showed that the calls "block" and "slab" are intelligible only within an activity, so that the meaning of a word cannot be established by examining a verbal definition in isolation. But it matters why the example is introduced. Wittgenstein is investigating language, and the building appears as the setting that makes the builders' expressions intelligible. He does not go on to investigate the building itself. We are never told whether the wall stands.
Ask instead how the builders sustain their joint activity, and all five mediations come into view. In multisensorial embodiment, the builders rely on strength, posture, grip, fatigue, tactile discrimination, peripheral vision and the bodily anticipation of a load about to shift. In multispecies being-with, their work depends on mutual responsiveness, trust, established expectation and the capacity of each to anticipate the other; the assistant is an interrecursive counterpart whose next response cannot be fixed in advance. In multiversal dwelling, the work happens under some sky, in some temperature, on some terrain, under gravity and within the rhythm of daylight, none of which the builders made. In multimateriality, the stones with their weight and friction, the tools, the scaffold, the surfaces on which the slabs are set down and the built site itself all participate in what is possible; a slab is a nonrecursive counterpart, yet it resists, slips, cracks and settles. In multisymbolization, the calls, gestures, measurements, plans and shared classifications contribute to the work.
Now remove the spoken calls. The builders may still coordinate through pointing, demonstration, habitual sequencing and their familiarity with the materials, as builders across most of human history have done amid noise too loud for speech. Conversely, perfectly clear calls guarantee nothing. A slab may crack, the assistant may be exhausted, rain may make the stones slick, the light may fail. The meaning of the words explains one important dimension of the coordination and leaves the success or failure of the building unexplained.
The builders' symbols are themselves of more than one kind. The calls work in coordination mode, so habitual that nobody needs to notice them. But any real building also involves reference to absence, in the instruction to fetch the beams stacked behind the shed or the recollection of how the last wall failed, and re-presentation, in the plan or drawing that makes present to everyone a building that does not yet exist. The drawing is a nonrecursive deposit, and it becomes a wall only through the interrecursive work of builders who read it, dispute it, adapt it to the stones actually available, and lift. The question then becomes how different modes of symbolization participate, together with the other four mediations, in producing a specific material result, and the meaning of the words answers only part of it.
Rather than an additive model of five influences on an activity, the five mediations are continuously co-mediating dimensions of one living process. A call changes a bodily movement; fatigue changes how calls are made and heard; the weight of a stone changes the division of labour; the layout of the site changes which gestures can be seen; a new tool reorganizes the whole interaction. These changes occur within an ongoing coordination rather than between independently constituted entities, and they cannot be captured by stretching the concept of language until it covers everything the builders do. A theory of language-games extended in that way would end up treating the weight of the slab as a move in the game, which is precisely the mediational imperialism that the five mediations exist to prevent.
The comparison extends beyond the human case. Wolves hunting together, termites building a mound, and a ewe and her lamb finding each other in a crowded flock all coordinate through embodiment, being-with and dwelling, with no human multisymbolization at all. The three zoetic mediations are universal to living beings, while the poietic mediations, multimateriality and multisymbolization, reach their full elaboration only in human mesocosms, where all five are co-present. This comparative observation establishes that human symbolic mediation is a historically particular elaboration of wider living processes, and it opens evolutionary questions that language-games do not systematically address. How did the builders' calls become possible at all, out of forms of coordination that needed no calls?
The criticism of Wittgenstein must be precise. He did not believe that language creates the world, and his remarks on natural history show that he knew language-games rest on facts that are not themselves linguistic. His philosophical attention nevertheless remained directed at linguistic and conceptual problems, even where he recognized their practical grounding. The LVT difference therefore goes beyond adding further context to language: it changes the object of inquiry from language-in-use to living coordination, within which language is one significant mediation.
VI. Beyond Meaning to Metabolic Mesocosmic States
Many of the most influential approaches to human life assume that to understand a phenomenon is to establish what it means. Anthropologists investigate cultural meanings, sociologists socially constructed meanings, historians the meanings of texts and representations, philosophers meaning, intention and understanding. Wittgenstein transformed the account of meaning more radically than anyone. For a large class of cases, he writes, the meaning of a word is its use in the language (2009, §43), so that meaning is neither a mental object nor a fixed reference but something visible in practice. LVT accepts the force of this and questions its destination. Why should meaning be the principal thing we want to explain?
Living beings must continuously sustain viable relations between their embodied capacities and the environments, materials, other beings and symbolic practices through which they live. They become hungry, exhausted, threatened, nourished, secure, distressed, comfortable, disoriented, or well coordinated. LVT calls these metabolic mesocosmic states, and the term needs care. "Metabolic" here does not reduce to physiology; it names the ongoing work of keeping a living organization going across all the mediations through which it lives. Such states are lived conditions that arise within coordination and bear on whether and how it continues, which is more than any interpretation can claim for itself. Symbolic meaning participates in these processes, sometimes decisively. A diagnosis can reorganize a life, a promise can sustain trust for decades, a perceived insult can set the heart racing. But the meaning of these events is not identical with their metabolic mesocosmic effects.
The distinction can be stated as an asymmetry. Meaning is one dimension of living coordination, whereas the maintenance and transformation of living coordination is no dimension of meaning. The primacy claimed here is explanatory rather than temporal. Symbols can precede bodily states and transform them profoundly, as anyone who has received bad news by telephone knows. LVT investigates the significance of symbolic mediation in relation to living coordination and declines to treat meaning as the final explanatory destination. Symbols themselves operate at every level of recursivity: a builder's call or a habitual greeting works in coordination mode, unnoticed, within the first level. What arrives late is meaning as an explicit object, the articulated content that can be asked about and disputed, which belongs to the third level and above. To make meaning the destination of explanation is to treat this late, explicit achievement as the ground of everything symbols do, and so to misdescribe the greater part of symbolization itself.
Sleep offers the simplest demonstration. A person's need for sleep is not produced by the meaning of sleep. Societies classify sleep differently, organize it differently, moralize it differently and build different institutions around it: segmented nights, siestas, shared beds, monastic offices, shift rotas and sleep clinics. These meanings strongly affect sleep practices and sleep quality. An inquiry confined to the meaning of sleep nonetheless misses what is most obviously happening, which is that the person still has to sleep. Sleep makes the limits of meaning-centred explanation accessible without requiring anyone to accept the whole of LVT in advance.
Illness is a stronger case. A person receives a diagnosis. It may bring recognition, reassurance, anxiety, access to treatment, social legitimacy or stigma, and its symbolic significance matters enormously. A Wittgensteinian investigation might illuminate how diagnostic expressions are used, how criteria function, and how philosophical confusions gather around words such as "pain" or "depression". LVT asks further questions. What is happening to the person's embodied capacities? How have relationships changed, and who now carries which burdens? What has become of the person's ability to move through familiar landscapes and seasons? Which material arrangements, from stairs to blister packs, support or undermine everyday activity? How do diagnostic categories alter all of these? A diagnosis may classify a condition correctly and leave the person's living situation no better, while important improvements may occur without any clear diagnostic articulation at all. Meaning and metabolic mesocosmic condition must therefore be distinguished analytically, even though they continuously co-mediate each other.
The obvious objection is that LVT replaces cultural reductionism with biological reductionism. The concept of metabolic mesocosmic states exists precisely to prevent this, by refusing to isolate a biological organism from its world. Hunger involves bodily processes, but also access to food, material infrastructures of provision, relations of care and obligation, seasonal and environmental conditions, and often symbolic rules about who may eat what with whom. Distress may involve bodily sensations, changes in being-with, displacement from familiar places, institutional settings and troubling interpretations. A metabolic condition arises through living coordination and is located in no single organ, and LVT accordingly admits no division between an inner psyche and an outer environment that would modulate it.
The strongest objection comes from Wittgenstein's own work on pain, sensation and private language. He was acutely interested in bodily sensation, in natural expressions of pain, and in the primitive reactions on which language-games are built, and his philosophy cannot fairly be described as denying their reality or reducing them to words. Yet the problems he addressed through these examples concerned sensation language, understanding, privacy and criteria. His interest in pain never extended to how pain reorganizes embodied, relational, material, environmental and institutional coordination across a person's life.
A remarkable document shows exactly where his philosophy stopped and his living did not. In the notebooks he kept as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army between 1914 and 1916, Wittgenstein wrote his philosophical remarks, the material from which the Tractatus grew, on some pages, while on the facing pages he kept personal entries in a simple cipher (Wittgenstein 1961; 1991). The coded entries record illness, fatigue, fear under fire, sensuality, prayer, and above all whether he had been able to work. They are a running record of the labour of keeping a life going through a war, and of how closely the possibility of thinking depended on it. It would be too quick to infer from this that Wittgenstein philosophically separated life from meaning, since the coded pages show how acutely he registered the conditions of his own thinking. What the notebooks do show is the scope of the method he had chosen. The philosophy on the other pages, by its own design, had no place for any of this, and the notebook makes visible, page against facing page, the division between meaning and metabolic coordination that LVT declines to draw. Wittgenstein asked how meaning is possible within life. LVT asks how life continues, and sometimes fails to continue, through processes in which meaning is only one mediation.
VII. Living Coordination Has a History
Wittgenstein's method characteristically works with imagined situations, brief descriptions of ordinary activities and invitations to consider alternative language-games: people who measure with elastic rulers, or who sell timber by the area it covers rather than by its volume (Wittgenstein 1978, I §§5, 149). The purpose is to loosen philosophical assumptions by exhibiting their contingency, and the method works. An imagined case can show that a particular conceptual distinction is unnecessary. It cannot show why a distinction emerged at a particular moment, who sustained it, what practical pressures made it useful, or what followed from its institutionalization. LVT considers these questions essential. Showing that nature and culture need not be sharply separated is one thing; explaining when, why and under what conditions their separation became influential is quite another. Pursued historically, the second inquiry suggests that the separation is much younger than its self-evidence implies. Older oppositions, such as the Greek contrast between physis and nomos, are easily mistaken for it. The division of knowledge into sciences of nature and sciences of spirit or culture, however, received its decisive institutional formulation in German debates of the later nineteenth century, through rival and partly incompatible proposals by Dilthey (1883), Windelband (1894) and Rickert (1899), none of which achieved final closure. Any precise dating of this kind needs detailed intellectual history behind it, and the claim made here is limited to the point that the split has a datable history at all.
The sequence that LVT investigations reconstruct runs roughly as follows. Living coordinations change. Some changes generate felt misalignments, which LVT places at the second level of recursivity. Some misalignments are articulated as questions, classifications and explanations at the third level. Some articulations are stabilized within institutions, disciplines, technologies and everyday practice at the fourth. And the stabilized arrangements then reorganize the coordinations from which they emerged. The result is a recursive historical process rather than a static relation between words and their uses. Not every historical change passes through articulation. Changes in environments, materials, bodily capacities and relationships can transform coordination without ever becoming recognized problems, which is why historical research cannot be confined to the history of ideas.
Askability names the part of this method concerned with the emergence of questions themselves. Rather than a timeless intellectual possibility waiting to be thought, a question becomes askable under particular conditions. Why did this question become pressing here, and at this time? Which changes in living coordination made it relevant? Who was positioned to articulate it, and with what resources? Which forms of stabilization followed, and what did they make harder to ask? Askability treats the history of questions as part of the history of living coordination, and it is the component of LVT that takes up most directly where Wittgenstein's diagnosis of misleading questions leaves off.
Cross-cultural comparison does similar work across space. A distinction that seems indispensable within one tradition may be absent, differently organized or practically irrelevant elsewhere. But comparison must not impose the original categories on another living world. It is not enough to ask how another society distinguishes nature from culture if the question already assumes that the two must exist there. The more fundamental inquiry concerns how people actually coordinate their lives, which distinctions they make, and what those distinctions accomplish. In Bengali households, for instance, digestion, temperament, diet, medicine and moral condition are routinely discussed together, in ways that a division between body and mind, or nature and culture, can only fragment.
Evolutionary history extends the scale further. Living coordination existed for billions of years before any human symbolic differentiation. How did symbolically mediated coordination emerge from earlier forms? What new capacities did it create? How did symbolic stabilization extend the temporal and spatial reach of human life, so that a promise can bind across years and a measurement can coordinate builders who never meet? These questions are indispensable because LVT is a framework for investigating living coordination in general, of which human social practice is one case among many.
The strongest Wittgensteinian objection has to be met here. Wittgenstein was not indifferent to history. In On Certainty he allows that the propositions holding our world-picture in place may harden or become fluid again, and compares them to the bed of a river whose channel can itself shift (1969, §§96–99). His Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough engage directly with anthropological explanation, and anthropologists have increasingly read them as a prescient contribution to their own discipline (Wittgenstein 2018; McGee 2023). These are serious anticipations of the LVT argument. Yet the Remarks are also where the difference appears most sharply. Wittgenstein objects to Frazer's explanations of ritual as mistaken science and proposes in their place a perspicuous arrangement of the material, in which hypothetical connecting links serve only to draw attention to similarities and carry no claim about what developed from what. Faced with the ritual material, he is content to describe and to say that human life is like that. That phrase is where LVT's question begins: is human life really like that, and what made it so? Wittgenstein recognized the mutability of practices and certainties without making their actual emergence and transformation the object of a systematic research programme. His suspicion of explanation, justified as it was against Frazer, made it hard to see that there could be a historical inquiry that was neither Frazerian evolutionism nor philosophical description.
VIII. What Living Value Theory Discovers: Three Investigations
The differences set out so far matter only if they lead to different findings. Each of the following cases moves through the same sequence: the inherited question, its assumed symbolic differentiation, the living coordination that differentiation obscured, and what the coordination turns out to show.
The first case is exchange. Anthropology has made exchange one of its defining objects, distinguishing gifts from commodities, reciprocity from market transaction, and economic from social forms of circulation, with Gregory's Gifts and Commodities (1982) giving the opposition its most systematic form. A Wittgensteinian approach would question whether exchange has a single essence and show that the practices grouped under the word need share no common feature. That would be valuable, and it would leave exchange in place as the object. LVT asks why exchange became noticeable as a separable feature of living coordination at all. Consider the giving of food. An observer may classify it as a gift, an exchange, an obligation or a transfer of resources. But the event occurs within ongoing relations of provisioning, hunger, familiarity, seasonal opportunity, material access and expectation, and the moment of transfer may be a brief episode within a coordination extending over years. An inquiry centred on exchange isolates that moment and treats everything else as context. LVT reverses the priority: the living coordination is the phenomenon, and exchange is an analytical differentiation within it.
What then becomes visible is the assumption LVT calls transactive dualism, the unargued premise that transactions between two parties are the primary unit of social life, of which the gift/commodity binary is one expression. Once the assumption is named, a pattern in the literature becomes legible. Ethnographers repeatedly find cases that fit neither side of the binary, and the discipline has tended to report them as discoveries of hybridity, ambiguity or nuance. LVT reads the same cases as evidence of category error. Herrmann's (1997) study of American garage sales found goods changing hands in ways that were neither straightforwardly gift nor commodity. Seen as living coordination, the garage sale is a household relieving itself of accumulated things, finding them further use, and adjusting its relations with neighbours, a form of mesocosmic remediation in which price is one minor instrument among several. The piano offered free to anyone who will collect it is clearer still. Nothing about the transaction is puzzling once the instrument's weight, the stairs, the cost of removal and the space it occupies are allowed into the account; the gift is a way of disposing of a burden that multimateriality has made heavy in every sense. The Jain practice of dān, in which alms must be given to renouncers without any relationship being formed (Laidlaw 2000), appears less as a paradox of the free gift than as a coordination of ascetic provisioning, in which the renouncers' continued eating, the householders' discipline and the rules of purity sustain one another. Applied to the discipline itself, the same method asks why exchange became so prominent in anthropology's own history. It finds an early and formative instance of the binary in Malinowski's continuum of gift and trade in the Trobriands (1922), which passed into Mauss's (1925) essay and from there into the discipline's founding vocabulary, and whose prominence says as much about what anthropologists had learned to notice as about the people they studied.
The second case is the hospital. Institutional research typically begins with the hospital as an established entity and asks how it functions, how it is organized internally, how it relates to patients and communities, and how its boundaries are maintained. Recent calls to imagine hospitals "otherwise" (Kehr and Chabrol 2026) share this starting point even as they criticize the institution. A Wittgensteinian investigation might examine the uses of the word "hospital" and expose assumptions about what all hospitals must have in common. LVT asks which living coordinations are actually occurring. Patients arrive with embodied conditions, households, dependencies and histories of their own. Clinical work involves professionals, equipment, medicines, rooms, records, diagnostic categories, transport, cleaning, food provision, laundries and supply chains that extend far beyond the building. The symbolic differentiation that identifies the hospital as a distinct institution is consequential, yet it does not encompass the coordination through which care occurs. Once the hospital is designated an institution, it acquires an apparent inside and outside, and research then labours to explain how the institution interacts with its environment, although the underlying processes never conformed to that boundary. For the patient told that a treatment is not available here, or the nurse told that a task falls outside the ward's remit, the boundary is encountered as a fixed counterpart, as resistant as a wall, although it exists only through the continuing work of those who draw, record and enforce it.
LVT's finding is that an institution is a fourth-level symbolic stabilization identifying a configuration of living coordination, an account that broadens rather than replaces the understanding of institutions as recursive compressions of coordination across time. The inquiry shifts from how an institution interacts with its surroundings to how a historically changing coordination came to be bounded and recognized as one. This has a concrete consequence for the call to imagine hospitals otherwise. Treated as configurations, hospitals turn out always to have been otherwise: medieval hospitals that sheltered pilgrims and the destitute as much as the sick, asylums that were also farms and workshops, and contemporary clinics such as those Varma (2020) describes in Kashmir, where psychiatric care is entangled with military occupation and the clinic's walls protect no one from the conflict outside them. The limit of institutional imagination lies less in a shortage of alternatives than in a starting point that makes the entity, rather than the coordination, the thing to be reimagined.
The third case is the biopsychosocial model. Engel's (1977) model is usually presented as a correction to biological reductionism, recognizing that biological, psychological and social processes all bear on health. LVT shares the criticism of reductionism and questions the model's initial differentiation. Why begin with three separate domains that must subsequently be integrated? For a person in persistent distress, embodied state, relationships, landscape and season, material circumstances and symbolic interpretations are dimensions of one continuous coordination, changing over time, rather than causes acting on an individual from several directions. The model may preserve the very divisions that make its integration necessary. A Wittgensteinian analysis could clarify how "biological", "psychological" and "social" function in medical discourse. LVT can also ask how these categories were institutionalized, what they lead practitioners to notice, and which kinds of care they make possible or exclude.
The finding, reached through a rereading of Foucault's account of the birth of social medicine (Foucault 2000), runs against the usual critical script. That script applies Foucault to reveal that biomedicine, and the biopsychosocial model after it, extends medical power into ever new realms of life. Seen historically as living coordination, life had been massively medicalized for centuries, through state medicine, urban hygiene and the medicine of the labouring poor, long before Engel wrote. What his model articulates explicitly is a medicine whose jurisdiction has been restricted, confined to the individual patient by private property, individual rights and the limits of liberal government, so that the social can enter only as a factor acting on that individual and never as a domain on which medicine may act. Why are certain dimensions of living coordination routinely classified as medical, while others, such as housing, wages or the ownership of land, are placed outside medicine's legitimate jurisdiction? That is an empirical, historical, institutional and political problem, and no clarification of the meanings of words could dissolve it.
Across the three cases the same transformation occurs. Exchange, the hospital and the three biopsychosocial domains survive as categories with a changed status, no longer accepted as self-evident units of analysis and now treated as historically situated symbolic differentiations within wider living coordinations. In each case the change of status yields findings the inherited question could not produce: a misread pattern in a literature, a misplaced object of reform, an inverted history of medicalization.
IX. Where There Is No Confusion: Successful Coordination and Ontological Grounding
Everything so far could suggest that LVT always begins with a genealogy of how the world has been symbolically classified, as if each investigation were a more historical and more empirical version of Wittgenstein's therapy. That would be a serious misreading. The diagnosis of misleading differentiation is one entry point, the one at which the comparison with Wittgenstein is most instructive, and a great many LVT investigations never pass through it.
Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy as therapy depends on trouble. A philosophical problem, he writes, has the form "I don't know my way about" (2009, §123). Without a confusion there is nothing for the therapy to treat, and once the confusion has dissolved, philosophy has done its work and leaves everything as it is (§124). His observations about human life range more widely than this conception, as his remarks on natural history show, and the dependence belongs to the method he chose for philosophy rather than to the limits of what he noticed. LVT's method has no such dependence. Many of its investigations concern living coordinations that simply work, in which no symbolic misclassification comes to the fore as significant. How does a household get its members fed and asleep every night for decades? How does a village keep its paths, wells, fields and quarrels in working order across generations? How do two people who have shared a bed for thirty years coordinate their sleep without ever discussing it? In such cases there is no inherited question to unpick, and often no articulated question at all. The task is to describe how the coordination works, across which mediations, at which levels of recursivity, with which counterparts, and what keeps it going.
This kind of inquiry faces a problem of evidence that therapy never encounters, and LVT states it as a principle of archive asymmetry: misfit leaves symbolic traces, while fit leaves none. What works is rarely written down. Disturbances produce complaints, petitions, diagnoses, lawsuits and theories, whereas smooth coordination produces silence. A family that came through centuries of recurrent violence on a river plain by settling about a kilometre off the road the armies used may transmit that strategy with no account of it at all, as nothing more than where the houses happen to stand, while a people that met the same kind of pressure head-on may become highly articulate about its own history. Successful coordination has to be made askable by the inquiry itself, through the wonder of what already works, a recursive opening of a coordination that is in no state of breakdown. Wittgenstein saw the phenomenon clearly when he observed that the most important aspects of things are hidden by their familiarity (§129). He drew from it a lesson about philosophical attention, whereas LVT draws from it a research programme.
The second kind of beginning is ontological. LVT is a process ontology of how living coordination must work rather than one more theory of how it happens to work. The world must be a certain way if it is liveable at all, and some of what follows from this can be known before any particular case is examined. Every living coordination involves multisensorial embodiment, multispecies being-with and multiversal dwelling, and every human coordination involves multimateriality and multisymbolization as well, because the five mediations are irreducible to one another and none can stand in for the others. Ontologically Grounded Theory turns this into a method. It starts from the assumption that any human living coordination co-mediates through all five mediations and uses that assumption as a primary coding architecture for any record of human life. If an analysis, a symbolization or a narrative says nothing about multiversal dwelling, we are still entitled to ask for it, because it had to be there. The silence of the record then becomes a datum about the record rather than evidence of an absence in the world.
The entitlement is simple and powerful. The builders of §2 are described without weather, light, season or ground, yet they could not have built anywhere except under some sky and on some terrain, and whether it was raining bears directly on whether the slabs were safe to carry. A political history of a migration decision may consist entirely of meetings, statements, telephone calls and media reports, yet the people moving on foot across a continent in autumn were coordinating with cold, darkness, distance, terrain and exhaustion, and with one another, whatever the archive of decisions records. A historical source that never mentions sleep nevertheless describes people who slept, and something about the arrangements of their sleeping can be inferred with a necessity that few other historical inferences possess. Ontological grounding reaches even to what did not happen. Prevented events, avoided encounters and suppressed articulations are consequential, and they leave the least trace of all; an ontology that says what must have been present makes it possible to ask what was kept from occurring.
Here the contrast with Wittgenstein takes its most fundamental form. Wittgenstein's therapeutic method deliberately refuses to say how the world must be, since philosophy, for him, may only describe and must leave everything as it is. LVT agrees that symbolic distinctions cannot be read off the world, and insists that living coordination has an ontology that can be stated and tested, because the conditions under which anything can live at all are not optional. Diagnosing misclassification, describing what works, and asking for what must have been there are three ways into the same inquiry, and only the first has anything in common with escaping from a fly-bottle.
X. The Method in Practice, Applied Recursively
An LVT investigation can be described as a series of operations. They are presented here in the order suited to an inherited problem, but an investigation can enter at several points, and the second operation applies only where a question carries a differentiation worth examining.
The first operation is to identify the starting point. Where research begins from an inherited question, it asks what the problem is ordinarily taken to be and which categories, entities or distinctions its formulation takes for granted. Where it begins from a coordination that simply works, it identifies that coordination and the fact of its continuing. Where it begins from a record, a narrative or an existing analysis, it identifies what that record chose to say.
The second operation examines the symbolic differentiation, where there is one. How does the question divide the world? Which boundaries does it set? Does it create a binary, or treat one aspect of living coordination as an independent object?
The third operation returns to living coordination. Without assuming that any classification is correct, it investigates what living beings are doing across all five mediations, and asks explicitly for every mediation that the question or the record leaves out. It attends to the continuities, dependencies and processes that an established question renders peripheral, and treats the silence of a source about a mediation that must have been present as evidence about the source.
The fourth operation establishes the metabolic mesocosmic consequences. What is at stake for the continuation, disturbance or transformation of the coordination? Which differences matter in practice, whether or not anyone has named them?
The fifth operation reconstructs the history. When and why did a symbolic differentiation become useful, prominent or apparently necessary, and which changes in coordination and which institutions sustained it? How has the differentiation been incorporated into subsequent coordination, what kind of reality has it acquired, how is that reality maintained, and what would have to change for the coordination to become otherwise? Where a coordination works without articulation, how has it been sustained, and why has it left so little trace? What do comparison and evolutionary history reveal about the contingency of each?
The sixth operation formulates and investigates the problem that has now become visible. It does not stop at declaring an inherited question misleading or a record incomplete. It identifies what can now be investigated, what evidence would be relevant, and what findings could overturn the proposed reconstruction.
The last operation is the decisive one. A method that merely declared established categories artificial would be weak, and would soon become another variety of the conceptual criticism it set out to exceed. A method that generates empirically investigable problems previously hidden by those categories, or by the silence surrounding what works, is far more consequential.
The method must finally be applied to LVT itself. Why five mediations, and why these? Why five levels of recursivity and three types of recursive counterparts? What intellectual and empirical circumstances made these distinctions possible, and what might they obscure? The ontological claims of the previous section are claims about how living must work, and they need a test the framework cannot evade. A claim that every human coordination involves five mediations could always explain a missing mediation away as an omission in the record, so absence from a description cannot serve as the test. A more stringent test asks two things: whether distinguishing the five mediations reveals consequential relationships that fewer distinctions could not explain, and whether any supposedly irreducible mediation can be shown to depend wholly on another. If the first failed, the distinctions would be idle; if the second succeeded, the ontology would have to be rebuilt. LVT's categories are valuable only insofar as they reveal consequential aspects of living coordination, and they must remain open to criticism, revision and replacement. Without that openness, LVT would commit the very error it identifies, turning a useful symbolic differentiation into an apparently fundamental feature of reality.
XI. Conclusion: Beyond the Fly-Bottle
Wittgenstein's fly is trapped in a bottle it cannot find its way out of. The bottle stands for a philosophical problem whose apparent necessity arises from a misleading picture, and Wittgenstein's achievement was to show that such problems need not imprison us. LVT accepts the diagnosis and gives the subsequent investigation a different direction.
The three symbolic modes allow a more precise reconstruction of what Wittgenstein was struggling with, without any claim about his private intentions. He recognized that grammar tempts us to treat abstract expressions as names of independently existing things, and that the significance of expressions depends on their use within activities. He did not systematically distinguish between the use of symbols to coordinate an activity, their use to refer beyond it, and their return into coordination as grounds that acquire practical consequences and can come to be met as though they were independently existing counterparts. These are three relations between symbolization and living coordination, more than three uses of words, and their intersection may explain why his investigations kept returning to meaning, rules, understanding and captivating pictures. It also explains what his therapy leaves unresolved. A philosopher can show convincingly that society is no entity standing opposite the individual. The person who leaves the seminar still meets the same laws, institutional boundaries, administrative rules and material constraints on the way home. The conceptual confusion may have dissolved, while the living coordination that reproduces the distinction carries on unchanged. In such cases the fly-bottle is more than a misleading picture of the world, because the picture has been built into the organization of the world. Showing someone that the glass is conceptually unnecessary does not remove the glass, which may by now be institutional, material, relational and embodied. Its aim is to investigate the living coordination the misleading distinction had obscured, and that requires more than philosophical clarification. It requires attention to bodies, relationships, landscapes and seasons, materials and symbols, to changing metabolic conditions, historical transformations, cross-cultural differences and evolutionary emergence. It requires empirical research capable of discovering that one's own new analytical distinctions are inadequate too. And it requires the recognition that much of living goes on where there is no bottle at all, in coordinations that work so well they have never been noticed, and in the mediations that records leave out because they were too obviously present to mention.
Wittgenstein showed how philosophical problems arise when language misleads us about the world. Living Value Theory begins from the possibility that much of what we recognize as the world has already been differentiated through historically established symbolic forms, and from the certainty that the world must be a certain way for anything to live in it at all. Its method is to investigate how symbolic differentiations arise within living coordination, how they represent or misrepresent its processes, how they are recursively incorporated into subsequent coordination, and how their stabilized consequences come to be mistaken for evidence that the original differentiation described an independently existing feature of reality, while also attending to what keeps working beneath and beside them and what becomes discoverable when we no longer take them for granted. Such forms acquire a reality that is neither reducible to meaning nor independent of the processes that sustain it. Faced with the rituals Frazer had collected, Wittgenstein said that human life is like that. LVT asks whether the world is really like that, and how we could find out. The point is less to escape the fly-bottle than to discover what the fly-bottle prevented us from seeing.
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