Centre Gilles Gaston Granger · Working note for discussion

— SENSE — Toward a Renewed Theory of Sense

A working note on sense as a local, emergent, and sometimes evanescent stabilization produced through an effort of thought, and through other forms of sense-making, working on signs, forms, situations, interactions, and dynamic configurations.

Status of this page

This document presents a strong common hypothesis, not a finalized architecture. It is meant to make the central line of the project explicit enough to be discussed with external interlocutors before the consortium meets in full. The exact inflection of each pole, and the final balance among them, will be clarified collectively in the next phase.

Principal investigators

Frédéric Jaëck Shankar Raman Bob Coecke Aikaterini Fotopoulou proposed PI

Part I — Orientation

What Sense Is the Name Of

We are constantly confronted with signs, words, gestures, proofs, images, situations, interactions, and dynamic configurations that do not immediately yield sense. Something is there, given or objectified in one way or another, yet what it means, how it holds together, what can be followed in it, and how it may become intelligible are not given in advance. Sense requires a process through which it is formed.

The project begins from this experience. Sense is not approached here as a ready-made content simply deposited in expressions. It is approached as the result of an effort of thought working on what is given: on signs, contexts, sequences, situations, constraints, and forms of interaction. This effort may clarify, connect, deepen, test, redirect, and stabilize. But it would be too simple to attribute sense only to a narrow model of reflective thought. The project must also examine how sense is locally constituted in human situations marked by vulnerability, altered capacities, or unstable forms of expression. Where such efforts succeed, at least locally, something becomes followable, discussable, inhabitable, or transmissible. Where they falter, sense may remain precarious, diverge, fail to become shared, or be lost again.

Sense is neither simply given nor purely indeterminate: it takes shape as a local stabilization within a dynamic process. Such a view requires an account of depth as that through which sense is locally constituted, stabilized, thickened, displaced, weakened, lost, and reworked.

The aim of SENSE is therefore not to presuppose a unified theory of sense, but to investigate how local stabilizations of sense are produced, under what pressures they hold, how they branch, how they may be repaired, and what kinds of robustness they can achieve in very different regimes of thought and expression.

The central wager of the project is that sense must be studied where it is actively formed: not only in completed meanings, but in the movement through which thought seeks, tests, deepens, and locally stabilizes intelligibility.

Part II — Directions of inquiry

Two movements in the formation of sense

To make sense of something is not only to follow a sequence, a relation, a development, or a rule. It is also to enter into a dynamics of depth in which expressions, situations, and forms gather density, resist immediate closure, and demand a more stable grasp. Sense is not simply given by structural position; it emerges from a process of thought working on what is given, bringing certain features into relief, organizing them, and stabilizing them enough for intelligibility to hold locally. The project proceeds from this double requirement. Sense takes shape where something can both be followed in its unfolding and deepened in its determination.

First movement

Horizontal articulation

Sense is often formed through the possibility of following an ordered unfolding. Relations, transitions, sequences, reprises, transformations, and dependencies allow one element to answer another, modify it, interrupt it, clarify it, displace it, or open a new step. This horizontal movement concerns the ways in which elements hold together, developments acquire structure, and intelligibility takes shape through an organized progression.

Such articulation may be governed by grammar, logic, usage, practice, or narrative form. It appears in syntax, in proofs, in episodes, in gestures, in clinical exchanges, in interpretive sequences, and in conversational turns. In each case, sense depends in part on the possibility of following a local organization through what unfolds.

Second movement

Vertical deepening

Sense is also a question of depth. Words, signs, forms, and situations are not always exhausted by their first articulation. Some acquire density, gather pressure, and enter into a dynamics through which sense becomes available. This movement involves operations of exploration, selection, and abstraction: thought works through what is given, brings certain features into relief, and lets others recede, so that a more stable grasp can begin to take shape. The vertical movement concerns this dynamic of depth through which sense thickens and moves toward local stabilization.

Such stabilization is never complete. It is achieved only enough for sense to hold locally, within an interaction, an interpretation, a proof, or an exchange. Other aspects remain in reserve, return differently, or call for renewed work. To make sense of something is often to grasp it under a certain determination rather than another: one may understand a door through its movement on its hinges without mobilizing its atomic composition. Some configurations are quickly exhausted. Others require repeated engagement and a more careful determination of what is at stake. Vertical deepening names this unfinished movement through which sense is shaped and locally stabilized.

Where the two movements meet

These two movements must be thought together. Horizontal articulation makes it possible to follow a development, to identify relations, and to grasp how something holds together through an ordered sequence. Vertical deepening makes it possible to determine more precisely what is at stake, to bring certain features into relief, and to stabilize a more exact grasp. Without articulation, depth would remain diffuse and difficult to follow. Without deepening, articulation would remain mere sequence, formal order, or narrative progression without sufficient determination.

Sense emerges through the joint work of these two movements. It is not simply given by structural position, but takes shape through a process in which an unfolding is followed, certain features are selected and brought into relief, and a local stabilization is achieved. Something becomes intelligible where what unfolds can also be worked through in depth. This also explains why branching belongs to the life of sense. The work of articulation and determination does not always converge toward a unique stabilization. Different lines may be followed, different features may be privileged, and different local stabilizations may be achieved. Sense may therefore branch, remain partial, fail to become shared, or be lost again. The project treats these possibilities not as marginal failures, but as constitutive features of sense-making itself.

Part III — Four poles

Four anticipated poles of inquiry

The project brings together four domains in which the formation of sense becomes visible under sharply different pressures. At this stage, these poles should be understood as strong projected lines of contribution rather than as already fixed doctrinal positions.

What is already identifiable is the common hypothesis. What remains open, and is meant to be worked out collectively, is the exact role, balance, and articulation of the four poles in the final scientific architecture of the project. The decisive point is therefore synergy itself: the project does not rest on the addition of four preconstituted domains, but on the joint elaboration of a structure in which each pole constrains, informs, and transforms the others. The aim is to arrive at a renewed theory of sense, deeply informed by the four domains and tested through them, whose scientific force will also lie in its operability: its capacity to generate concrete applications and to prove itself in practice.

Mathematics

Sense under rigor, objectification, and the return of the thinking subject

Frédéric Jaëck

Why this domain matters

Mathematics offers a privileged site for the project because it confronts sense with the strongest demands of rigor, validity, stabilization, and transmissibility. Yet mathematical intelligibility cannot be reduced to finished formal expression alone. Definitions, proofs, diagrams, inferential moves, and conceptual transformations all belong to a work of thought through which mathematical objects become graspable. One of the underlying convictions here is that much of the philosophy of mathematics has too often set aside the thinking and sensing subject, and that this has weakened its account of mathematical intelligibility.

Scientific focus and main stakes

This pole presses the project to account for the local constitution of sense under highly exacting conditions. It raises questions about how thought reaches its objects from signs that may appear flat at first sight, how objectification proceeds, how new forms of intelligibility become available, how proofs develop trajectories of expectation, reversal, and narrative tension, and how stabilization can remain inventive without losing rigor. It also places at the center the subject of mathematical thought, whether human or artificial, insofar as sense is inseparable from an active power of thinking. Its precise inflection will be refined collectively, but it is already expected to provide one of the strongest entry points into the general hypothesis.

Prospective close collaborators

Karine Chemla
Gabriella Crocco
Paola Cantù
Elaine Landry
Fernando Zalamea

Literature and poetry

Sense where literature tests its own boundaries and methods

Shankar Raman

Why this domain matters

Literature and poetry are central because they make visible forms of sense that cannot be reduced to transparent transmission. Rhythm, phrasing, voice, ambiguity, reprise, and commentary do not simply decorate a prior content. They participate in the movement through which sense is sought, deepened, suspended, and sometimes reconfigured. Literature has also long explored the crossing of boundaries: madness, artificial beings, altered forms of subjectivity, and heterogeneous modes of thought and sense-making, while often reflecting on its own procedures at the same time.

Scientific focus and main stakes

This pole presses the project to take seriously the fact that sense may require sustained return, interpretation, and divergent stabilization. It gives privileged access to vertical deepening, to narrative development, to branching lines of intelligibility, and to the active role of form in what thought can make of an expression or a work. It also presses the project to recognize that literature does not merely present sense, but investigates the means by which sense is made, undone, and remade. Its precise literary and historical focus will be refined collectively, but it is expected to sharpen the project's account of depth, bifurcation, and the non-immediate relation between expression and intelligibility.

Prospective close collaborators

Florian Klaeger
Bruno Perreau

Clinical interaction and care

Sense where selfhood and relation are co-constituted locally

Aikaterini Fotopoulou proposed PI

Why this domain matters

Clinical situations are crucial because they reveal with unusual force that sense is neither guaranteed nor uniformly available. Speech, bodily awareness, affective life, self-relation, and relation to others may no longer support intelligibility in their ordinary ways, yet local formations of sense may still emerge within an encounter. What is especially decisive here is the thesis that selfhood is inseparable from a relation to others, and that both take shape locally, in embodied and situated interaction.

Scientific focus and main stakes

This pole presses the project to account for emergence, interruption, repair, and non-sharing. It asks what can still count as a stabilization of sense when available forms are weakened, partial, or unstable, and how proximal co-constitution, embodiment, and intersubjective support become constitutive of local intelligibility rather than secondary additions to an already formed self. Its exact empirical and conceptual focus will depend on collective discussion, but it is expected to illuminate sense from the side of vulnerability, embodiment, and reconstruction rather than from already secure forms of understanding. It is also one of the places where the project's attention to subjectivity, interaction, and sensibility becomes indispensable.

Prospective close collaborators

Conversational machines

Sense in artificial systems as a full domain of inquiry

Bob Coecke

Why this domain matters

Conversational systems place before us interactions in which the appearance of understanding is constant, yet the status of sense remains radically open. They therefore reopen the question of what it would mean to model not only output generation, but processes in which local stabilization, revision, and interpretability are themselves at stake. This domain is not included merely to cross-test hypotheses imported from elsewhere; it is one of the places where sense itself acquires a new determination through discussion with the other poles.

Scientific focus and main stakes

This pole presses the project to formulate its hypotheses in ways that can be made explicit, analyzable, and testable. It forces the common theory to state more precisely what counts as articulation, stabilization, correction, branching, and shareability in interactive systems. At the same time, it asks whether artificial forms of thinking or sense-making can be understood only as simulations, or whether they open a genuinely new regime within the comparative theory of sense. Its final role is not yet fixed, but it is expected to stand as a full domain alongside the others, where hypotheses from mathematics, literature, and clinical interaction are not only formalized or compared, but reworked by the specific pressures of artificial interaction itself. This domain remains distinct from the two possible societal products envisaged at the end of the project.

Prospective close collaborators

Part IV — Common program

An argumentative spine for the project

The four poles do not stand side by side as examples. They are meant to test and transform one common hypothesis by exposing it to very different constraints.

There is something to work on

Sense begins from objectified situations: signs, forms, proofs, utterances, contexts, interactions, and dynamic configurations.

Sense must be actively made

Sense is sought through an effort of thought, and through other forms of sense-making, that follow relations, deepen beneath surfaces, test possibilities, and organize what is given.

Stabilization is local and open

What emerges is not absolute closure, but local stabilization: sometimes robust, sometimes partial, sometimes divergent, sometimes evanescent, sometimes lost again.

The poles pressure one another

Each pole constrains the others differently: rigor, form, fragility, and formalization become mutually corrective pressures within one program.

The synergy of the project lies precisely there. Mathematics compels the theory to account for sense under maximal rigor, while bringing back the thinking subject and the process of objectification. Literature and poetry compel it to account for narrative development, thickness, return, and branching, while also reflecting on the means by which sense is explored. Clinical interaction compels it to account for emergence, interruption, embodiment, and reconstruction in situations where selfhood and relation are locally co-constituted. Conversational machines compel it to account for explicitness, formalization, and interactive revision, but also to ask whether artificial systems introduce a genuinely new regime of sense-making. What circulates across the poles is therefore not a general vocabulary alone, but a set of transversal questions: what counts as a stabilization of sense, how it is supported, how it branches, how objectification proceeds, how it is repaired, and what kinds of robustness it can achieve.

Part V — Scope and directions

Two concrete research directions and sites of operability

The project is fundamentally theoretical, but it also opens two concrete directions in which a stronger account of sense can be worked through and tested beyond the conceptual level.

Human sciences and interpretation

One direction concerns conversational tools for the human sciences: systems that engage explicitly with argument, presupposition, interpretation, and sources, rather than producing only plausible continuations. The aim is not automation in a simplistic sense, but conversational support for situations in which sense must be clarified, traced, and critically stabilized.

Clinical interaction and care

A second direction concerns carefully constrained conversational tools for contexts of fragility, where sense may still be locally formed even when it is difficult to sustain. The issue is not substitution for caregivers or patients, but the possibility of support in interactions where intelligibility, expression, and shared orientation are delicate and must be co-constituted with caution.

These two directions are not external applications, nor do they define the machine pole itself. They are sites in which the theory is put under pressure and made operative. In both cases, the wager is the same: if sense is approached not as a fixed semantic deposit but as a process of local stabilization, then it becomes possible to design conversational architectures that differ in kind from systems oriented only toward plausible output production.

Part VI — Collective construction

Current construction phase

The project is built around a strong common hypothesis, but its final scientific architecture is meant to emerge through sustained collective work.

The forthcoming phase is therefore constitutive, not merely confirmatory. The aim is to sharpen the central line of the project, clarify the precise role of each pole, identify the strongest shared research objects, and progressively stabilize a common narrative that remains faithful to the specificity of each domain.

Schematic timeline

Indicative milestones for the present construction and submission phase.

Spring 2026

Initial constitution of the consortium.

Late spring / early summer 2026

Three-day intensive meeting. Each PI presents their line of work, their possible entry into the project, a short list of close collaborators, and a first set of particularly relevant references. The aim is to identify the strongest axes of synergy and the most promising shared objects.

Summer 2026

Drafting phase. Consolidation of the main narrative in close back-and-forth with the PIs, while the scientific architecture and internal articulations are progressively clarified.

End of summer 2026

Mature scientific version.

Autumn 2026

Final adjustments and submission.

2027–2028

Possible start of the project.

Autumn 2027

Possible resubmission if the first evaluation indicates a project close to threshold.

Part VII — Documentation

Some key references — provisional orientation

The references below do not define a fixed canon. They indicate some of the main lines of thought with which the project may enter into dialogue as the collaboration develops.

Transversal references

Gottlob Frege, “Über Sinn und Bedeutung”.
Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations and Formal and Transcendental Logic.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.
Charles S. Peirce, especially the writings on signs, interpretation, and semiosis.
Paul Ricoeur, La Métaphore vive and Temps et récit.

Mathematics

David Corfield, Towards a Philosophy of Real Mathematics.
José Ferreirós, Mathematical Knowledge and the Interplay of Practices.
Roi Wagner, Making and Breaking Mathematical Sense.
Silvia de Toffoli.
Yuri Manin, Mathematics as Metaphor.
Fernando Zalamea, Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics.
Elaine Landry, “Mathematics: Method Without Metaphysics,” Philosophia Mathematica, 31(1), 2023.
Frédéric Jaëck, What does it mean to “think” in mathematics?

Literature and poetry

William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity.
Gérard Genette, Figures III.
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, A Philosophy of Language: The Mediations of Deixis, 2023.
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, De la force du langage, 2020.
Shankar Raman, Before the Two Cultures: Literature and Mathematics in Early Modern Europe (forthcoming).

Clinical interaction and care

Aikaterini Fotopoulou and Manos Tsakiris, “Mentalizing homeostasis: The social origins of interoceptive inference,” Neuropsychoanalysis, 19(1), 2017.
Thomas Fuchs, Ecology of the Brain.
Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant.
Giovanni Stanghellini, Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Conversational machines

Bob Coecke, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, and Stephen Clark, “Mathematical Foundations for a Compositional Distributional Model of Meaning,” Linguistic Analysis, 36, 2010.
Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn, “Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis,” Cognition, 28(1–2), 1988.
Robin Lorenz, Anna Pearson, Konstantinos Meichanetzidis, Dimitri Kartsaklis, and Bob Coecke, “QNLP in Practice: Running Compositional Models of Meaning on a Quantum Computer,” Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 76, 2023.

Open constellations and nearby references

Mikhail Bakhtin, especially on dialogism and polyphony.
Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers.
Hermann Broch, Logique d'un monde en ruine.
Stanley Cavell.
Gilles Châtelet, Les enjeux du mobile.
Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens.
François Jullien, L'Incommensurable.
Maria Zambrano, Les rêves et le temps.