Reality is given to man through his actions. Uncertainty is the degree of adaptation (or, what is actually the same thing, inadaptation) of human needs and actions to reality. It is the discrepancy between reality and human needs. Complete adaptation would mean that the satisfaction of needs does not require human actions, in which case there would be no uncertainty at all. In practice, however, there are hardly any situations of complete certainty, so that man must act. Frank Knight argued that human wants are those needs that cause goal-directed action.
“We ‘need’ iodides and vitamins, and an infinite number of things of whose existence the race at large has been blissfully ignorant; but we do not ‘want’ them, because they give rise to no conflicts and hence no ‘conduct.’ The common basis of conflict, and we may say of the existence of wants at all, is the limitation in the means of gratifying some impulse or need” (Knight 1964, p. 60).
In school economics, uncertainty comes down to limited resources, to a lack of resources compared to human needs. But resource scarcity is just a special case of uncertainty. Another case is, for example, asymmetric knowledge, when one person knows something that another person does not know and uses this to deceive. Both are just special cases of uncertainty, that is, randomness, surprise, unpredictability.
Meaning as determinateness aims to adapt people and reality to each other, to overcome uncertainty. This gives meanings a great deal of inertia: people prefer to adapt and interpret meanings rather than abandon them. Talcott Parsons wrote that interpretation is the reason why sudden changes in the environment do not lead to the abandonment of the “symbolic formulae” and “elements of cultural tradition” on which social systems are based. Parsons (1964, p. 296) called this mechanism “adaptation by interpretation.” This mechanism has a long history that probably goes beyond humans: practices are derived from traditions and values of animals, simple causal models are older than intelligence itself:
“… Morality derives from values, rather than reason. Jonathan Haidt has found evidence for just this dominance. People try to justify their values by citing reasons for them, but if our reasons are demolished we conjure up others, rather than revise our values. Our reasons are revealed as a self-deceiving charade, a sham called ‘motivated reasoning.’ Reasons are anchored on values, not values on reasons” (Collier 2018, p. 35).