Orientation Before Understanding: Rethinking Language, Meaning, and the DQM

Written by DS

“That we cannot understand—or even perceive—anything outside the bounds of our existing language or categories.”

This simple yet profound insight reveals one of the most persistent limitations in how we think, speak, and relate. Much of our cognitive process occurs beneath conscious awareness—invisible, unattended, and guided not by words, but by orientation. We tend to focus only on what language lets us capture, name, and verify. But what of the proto-linguistic dynamics—those early, pre-categorical shifts in positioning that shape how and what we come to understand?

The Dynamic Quadranym Model (DQM) confronts this blind spot by offering a framework that models orientation, not just meaning. It does not seek to replace traditional grammar or logic, but to illuminate the motion that happens before meaning settles—the movement that shapes it, but escapes the static structures of language.

Quadranyms: A Virtual Sense for a Moving Mind

At the heart of the DQM are quadranyms, semantic structures that trace the evolving trajectory between expansive and reductive modes, and between subjective and objective states. Their simple form belies their power:

Quadranyms enable thought to evolve, not just associate.

They serve as anchors for dynamic orientation, giving AI and humans alike a virtual sense—a kind of semantic proprioception that makes movement through meaning possible.

Rather than fix interpretation to static meanings, DQM enables context-responsive adaptation. It lets AI interpret language with human-like flexibility, adjusting understanding in real time, navigating spatiotemporal nuance and semantic drift. In this way, DQM does not simulate meaning—it simulates how meaning is approached.

Attended vs. Unattended Senses: A New Orientation Grammar

Traditional grammar focuses on attended senses: defined rules, known meanings, observable syntactic structures. It teaches us how to handle language as a closed, rule-based system.

DQM focuses instead on unattended senses—the undercurrent of movement that gives rise to orientation before words arrive. This is the basis of Orientation Grammar. In DQM, grammar is not a structure to obey, but a flow to track—not a fixed rule, but a procedural rhythm shaped by context, intention, and responsiveness.

DQM fixes rules for how the mind flows, not for what it flows toward.

The result is a model of cognition and communication that is alive, in motion, and capable of grounding interactions in situated, embodied dynamics—not just disembodied symbols.

A Conceptual Distinction, Not a Fixed Divide

The distinction between situational context and dynamical context is a modeling choice—useful, not absolute. Like trying to separate ripples from the water after a stone is thrown, we can recognize the movement, feel its effect, but cannot truly disentangle the motion from the medium. The metaphor helps: we see the ripples as energy from the stone, but what do we see in our distinction?

We call it a dynamical context, not just a dynamic one, to make this nuance clear. While dynamic context refers to visible, shared shifts in a situation—publicly accessible change—dynamical context points to the internal, often private, reorganizations in a system’s response.

To simplify:

  • Dynamic context is public—what can be observed or agreed upon.

  • Dynamical context is private—how the system internally regulates and responds to that change.

This distinction implies a dual ontology:

  • An objective ontology grounding situational context.

  • A subjective ontology shaping dynamical context.

Together, they help us model how meaning and responsiveness co-evolve. Dynamical context draws from dynamical systems theory, offering a way to describe how orientation moves over time, as a function of a system’s current state. Our goal is to build an ecological model—one that bridges private responsiveness and public conditions through an evolving interaction of contexts.

The Cultural Trap: When Dynamical Becomes Situational

This model opens a subtle trap:

The dynamical context is always present, even in memory—but culture often turns it into situational context.

Recollection is never the same twice; it is dynamically re-experienced. But through ritual, custom, and cultural repetition, these living orientations become codified—shared, named, and routinized. What was once responsive movement becomes fixed form.

This is the paradox:

  • Culture enables intersubjectivity by making orientation shareable.

  • But in doing so, it risks freezing orientation into symbolism, replacing felt responsiveness with static expectation.

Rituals re-enact meaning, but too easily forget the movement that made them meaningful.

This dynamic is central to the DQM: keeping the feedback loop open between dynamical and situational context is not just a technical aim—it’s a cultural imperative.

Bootstrapping the Imaginal: From Grounded Action to Symbolic Modularity

What separates modern humans from earlier hominins may not be just cognitive capacity, but a shift in how orientation became modular. Neanderthals may have coordinated around shared affordances, but their dynamical context was tethered to the environment—to what could be immediately sensed or acted upon.

(Hypothesis: The distinction between modern humans and earlier hominins may lie less in raw cognitive capacity and more in the modularity of orientation. While earlier hominins likely engaged in limited symbolic culture—gestures, ritualized practices, meaningful landscapes—these remained tethered to immediate environmental and social affordances. Modern humans, by contrast, developed orientation systems capable of extending symbolic processes into remote, abstract, and imaginal domains. This shift resonates with Mithen’s (1996) notion of cognitive fluidity and Tomasello’s (1999, 2014) concept of cultural ratcheting, together suggesting that what set modern humans apart was not simply cognitive capacity but a modular orientation that made symbolic culture cumulative, open-ended, and detached from immediate context.)

Modern humans, by contrast, began bootstrapping:

  • Using culture to loosen the ground beneath orientation.

  • Comparing orientations to situations, not just situations to each other.

  • Projecting orientation into imaginal space—beyond the here-and-now.

This allowed language and music to evolve not as mere tools of representation, but as overlays of orientation—systems for sharing how we move through meaning, not just what that meaning is.

Grounding still mattered—but now it could happen in cosmology, ritual, or symbolic futures. Orientation no longer had to touch the ground—yet it remained embodied, always returning to feedback through the body and environment.

How Modular Orientation Enables Music

Music, perhaps more than any other domain, reveals the power of modular dynamical context:

  • It orients without fixed reference, guiding emotion, memory, and collective attention without requiring representation.

  • It builds arcs of expectation, repetition, and release—responding to prior moments of orientation rather than pointing to objects.

  • It operates across time, layering orientations through rhythm, tone, and form.

Music is not about what it means—it is about how it moves us through shared orientation.

In DQM, this makes music a living system of semantic modulation—a cultural evolution of dynamical context into a highly refined and expressive tool of collective sense-making. And as Gary Tomlinson argues, it likely co-evolved with language, not as its precursor or follower, but as a parallel system of imaginal orientation.

A Framework for Becoming

If this dynamic distinction helps us better understand how orientation shapes our experience of meaning, then the model has already done its work—not by settling what is, but by inviting us to imagine what could emerge. The true value of the DQM is not in defining meaning, but in activating our capacity to evolve within it. It reorients us—not toward answers, but toward possibilities, where orientation becomes an act of creativity, and sense-making is no longer bound to what we know, but open to how we might come to know.

In this way, the DQM does not constrain the real—it frees the imaginal to participate in it.