The Subject-Centered Model: Meaning as a Complex of Qualia—A Critique of Hermeneutics and Philosophy of Language

This article develops subject-centered theory (SCT), according to which meaning is identical to a complex of qualia—the immediate phenomenal content of a living subject’s experience. In this model, language neither creates meaning nor constitutes an autonomous ontological medium; it serves as an instrument for articulating, structuring, and intersubjectively synchronizing qualitative experience. On this basis, the article proposes a cyclical model of understanding in which a text functions as a system of sign-based instructions that reactivates and recombines the reader’s qualia. SCT is compared with the enactivism of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch and applied to a critical analysis of Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Wittgenstein. Examples involving color blindness, prelinguistic experience, and the privacy of qualia demonstrate the difference between command of a linguistic rule and possession of the corresponding phenomenal content. Fusion of horizons, interpretation, and rule-following are explained as forms of correlation between signs and subjective experience, rather than as the autonomous generation of meaning by language or text. The proposed model preserves the social function of language while locating the source of meaning in the biologically organized experiencing subject.