CONCEPT
Semantic Autonomy
Ricoeur's thesis that a text, once written, acquires meaning independent of its author's intention—a
surplus of meaning available for interpretation—and the framework explaining why AI-collaborative authorship is philosophically coherent even when the boundary blurs.
Semantic autonomy is the property by which a text, once produced, means more than its author intended. The text enters the public world of readers and is interpreted in ways the author could not have anticipated—and these interpretations are not distortions but realizations of the text's
surplus of meaning. Developed in
Interpretation Theory (1976) and
From Text to Action (1986), the concept challenges the Romantic assumption that the author controls the text's meaning. In Ricoeur's framework, authorship is not the determination of meaning but the initiation of a hermeneutical process whose outcome exceeds authorial intention. Applied to AI collaboration, semantic autonomy explains why distributed authorship is philosophically coherent: the text Claude produces has meaning that neither the machine's pattern-matching nor Segal's intention fully determines. The meaning emerges from the configuration, and the configuration is genuinely collaborative—neither party owns it completely.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept was Ricoeur's answer to E.D. Hirsch's Validity in Interpretation (1967), which argued