Resolution Theory — Foundations III Architecture of Meaning

Architecture of Meaning applies Resolution Theory to culture, art, and aesthetic value. It argues that meaning is not a supernatural add-on, but a structural consequence of agency under temporal exposure: agents must resolve without certainty, across time, while consequences arrive later. Culture is framed as evaluative infrastructure—the shared public ranking system of better and worse that shapes what feels obvious, noble, shameful, or unthinkable, and therefore shapes what people can resolve into. Art is treated as compressed evaluation that trains attention and feeling; beauty is explained as a coherence-signal that stabilises commitment, while propaganda is analysed as counterfeit coherence that can recruit loyalty by detaching aesthetic authority from reality-tracking. The chapter closes by linking cultural health to long-horizon coordination: stable evaluative infrastructure supports coherent agency; degraded infrastructure increases drift, manipulability, and social fragility.