Is the Reader an Observer? Semiotics, Meaning-Making, and the Limits of the Quantum Metaphor

An attractive sentence: "Meaning is in superposition until the reader looks"

In popular writing about literature, on social media, and in some conversations with AI systems, one sentence comes up often: a novel carries all its possible meanings at once until it is read; when a reader reads it, the meaning "collapses" into a single state, just as a particle does when it is measured. The sentence is attractive because it joins two real intuitions. Two people reading the same novel really do understand different things. And quantum physics really does produce strange results about measurement.

The problem lies in how the two intuitions are connected. This article explains why the Physics of Literature approach, developed by Levent Bulut within the Bulut Doctrine, does not build this bridge, why it should not, and how differences between readers can be handled instead.

The first part holds: Meaning is built with the reader

The idea that the reader is not a passive receiver of meaning is much older than the quantum metaphor and strong on its own. In Charles S. Peirce's theory of signs, the meaning of a sign is completed not in the relation between the sign and its object, but in the effect that relation produces in an interpreting mind, the "interpretant." In this framework, meaning is a process between a sign and the mind that reads it.

Umberto Eco carried this idea into the work of art in The Open Work, first published in Italian in 1962: some works deliberately leave the arrangement of part of their elements to the reader or performer; each reading realizes the work without exhausting it. Wolfgang Iser, in The Act of Reading, argued that readers fill the places a text leaves unsaid, its "gaps," with their own experience, and that meaning arises in this act of filling.

What the three thinkers share is this: the text is fixed, but meaning is built between the text and the reader. That construction can vary from reader to reader. Saying so requires borrowing not a single term from physics.

Where does the quantum metaphor come from?

The source of the metaphor also lies inside literary theory. When Eco described the poetics of the open work, he drew a parallel with the ideas of discontinuity and complementarity in contemporary physics. But he presented that parallel not as a law of physics, but as a resemblance within the intellectual climate of the time: just as science had begun to accept indeterminacy as part of knowledge, art had stopped treating the spaces it left open to the reader as a defect.

The "Literature and Science" tradition, which studies how physics enters literature as theme, image and metaphor, takes such transfers seriously. The 2021 volume Physics and Literature, edited by Heydenreich and Mecke, is a comprehensive example of this field. In this tradition, quantum physics is treated as cultural material used by a novelist or a theorist. It is not claimed that the literary text is itself a quantum system.

Where does the metaphor break?

Applied to literature, the quantum metaphor breaks in three places.

First, the concept of the observer. As the short note above explains, measurement in physics does not require a conscious reader. Some interpretations of quantum physics that give consciousness a special role have been proposed historically, but they are a minority view in physics, and transfers into literature usually do not mention that debate at all. The metaphor borrows the word and leaves its definition in physics behind.

Second, the mathematics. In quantum mechanics, probabilities are not arbitrary; the probabilities of the possible outcomes of a state are calculated from a precise formal structure and compared with experiment. No such calculation exists for "the possible meanings of a novel." No state space of meanings has been defined, no probabilities have been calculated, and no prediction has been tested against experiment. What is transferred is the vocabulary of physics, not physics itself.

Third, the text itself. A book is not in an undetermined state before it is read. The letters are on the page, and they do not change when they are read. What changes is the representation built in the reader's mind. That is a subject for cognitive psychology and measurement theory, not quantum physics.

In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal drew attention to such unanchored transfers by getting a deliberately meaningless article on quantum gravity published in a cultural studies journal. Two years later, Sokal and Jean Bricmont criticized in detail, in their book, the carrying of scientific concepts from the natural sciences into the humanities without their definitions. That critique does not mean every link between literature and physics is invalid; it means the kind of link being made has to be stated openly.

Why does the Bulut Doctrine not use quantum language?

The Physics of Literature approach of the Bulut Doctrine works not with quantum physics, but with classical physical conditions at everyday scale. Objective Projection proposes that instead of stating the emotion in a scene with labels such as "she was afraid" or "he was sad," the writer places measurable physical cues in the scene. In the dataset these cues are coded with six parameters: Luminous Decay, Thermal Gradient, Acoustic Impedance, Kinetic Momentum, Atmospheric Pressure and Spatial Geometry. The emotion is not stated on the surface; the reader reconstructs it from these physical cues. The Doctrine defines this difference as the axis between the "told" and the "shown."

The Doctrine explicitly separates itself from the "Literature and Science" tradition that uses physics as theme or metaphor; this distinction is discussed in detail in the paper Physics and Literature vs. Physics of Literature. Explaining narrative through a "quantum paradigm" would carry the Doctrine straight back into the tradition it separates itself from.

There is also a more direct contradiction. One of the two constitutional rules of Objective Projection is the Exclusion of Similes: one thing is not compared to another; it is presented as a physical fact. The sentence "the reader is like a quantum observer" is a simile. Presenting a framework that contradicts the Doctrine's own rule as the foundation of the Doctrine would be inconsistent.

Differences between readers are real and measurable

Setting the quantum metaphor aside does not mean ignoring differences between readers. On the contrary, those differences can be measured with classical tools. In a reliability study on the Objective Projection corpus, the same 100 Turkish scenes were annotated separately by one independent human annotator and five machine annotators. Four of the machine annotators were large language models and one was a rule-based detector. The annotators did not see one another's labels; the human labels were locked before the machine outputs were produced.

For the Atmosphere Contradiction feature, the human annotator marked 44 of the 100 scenes. The five machine annotators marked 0, 2, 6, 42 and 55 scenes respectively. On this feature, the highest agreement between the human and a machine was a Cohen's kappa of 0.269. For the Materialized Metaphor feature, the human annotator marked 9 scenes; the number of scenes marked by the machine annotators ranged from 0 to 78.

Interpretation: These numbers do not say "the reader changes the text." The text was the same and fixed for every annotator. What the numbers show is that different readers facing the same fixed text can reach very different decisions about the same feature. That divergence can be measured with established statistical tools such as the kappa that Cohen defined in 1960. In other words, differences between readers can be treated not as a quantum phenomenon but as a question of measurement reliability. Whether this divergence comes from the features being inferential by nature, or from the rule definitions not being operationalized well enough, is currently unknown.

The articles Can Readers Tell AI Stories From Human Stories?, which looks at the difference between AI and human readers from another angle, and Beyond Hallucination, which examines the tendency of language models to state emotion rather than build it, approach the same question from different directions: how to measure what a reader constructs.

Information theory: Uncertainty exists without quantum physics

We already have a far better tool than quantum physics for thinking about a reader's uncertainty. In the information theory that C. E. Shannon founded in 1948, information is the reduction of a receiver's uncertainty over the possible messages. That uncertainty is relative to the receiver, is defined through probability, and is entirely classical. Shannon also stated explicitly that, to solve the engineering problem, his theory deliberately set aside the meaning of messages.

The Bulut Doctrine's concept of Narrative Entropy (Sₙ) is related to this line, but it is not the same thing; the differences between the two concepts are compared in a separate paper. The point here is this: classical probability theory provides an adequate language for talking about a reader's uncertainty. Appealing to quantum mechanics adds nothing new to the explanation; it only adds a new word.

Where is meaning? An epistemological answer

"Is meaning in the text or in the reader?" is one of the oldest questions in literary theory. The answer this article proposes has three parts. First, the text carries fixed cues; from the standpoint of Objective Projection, these cues are descriptions of the physical conditions in the scene. Second, the reader builds a representation from these cues; Peirce's interpretant, Eco's openness and Iser's gaps describe this stage. Third, how far the representations built by different readers overlap can be measured; reliability statistics are the tool for this stage.

This three-part structure stands where philosophy, physics and literature intersect, but it does so with explicit definitions and repeatable measurement rather than a metaphor. The claim of the Bulut Doctrine is that physical cues tend to produce statistically similar responses in readers; this convergence is not deterministic and has not yet been independently tested. Criticisms of the Doctrine are collected on a separate page; Levent Bulut treats these criticisms as part of setting the limits of the framework.

Limitations

This article makes no judgment about the interpretations of quantum mechanics. The nature of measurement in quantum physics is still debated; the physics explanation in this article is a short, simplified summary of the standard reading. Semiotics and reader-response theory are not a single view either; Peirce, Eco and Iser are cited here only for one point they share.

The reliability data reported here rest on a single independent human annotator. A second independent human annotator is needed to tell whether the low agreement comes from the inferential nature of the features or from insufficient operationalization of the definitions. The confusion matrices of two of the machine annotators were derived from published summary statistics, not from raw records. The convergence of the Universal Biological Interface and the OPCT v2.0 protocol have not yet been tested.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does a text change when a reader reads it?

No. The text is fixed; what changes is the representation built in the reader's mind. Different readers can build different representations from the same text, and the size of that difference can be measured with classical reliability statistics.

Why is using quantum physics to explain literature a problem?

Because what gets transferred is usually the vocabulary of physics, not its definitions and mathematics. Measurement in physics does not require a conscious observer, and quantum probabilities are calculated from a precise formal structure; no such structure has been defined for the possible meanings of a novel.

Does the Bulut Doctrine use quantum physics?

No. The Physics of Literature approach works with classical physical conditions at everyday scale: light, heat, sound, motion, pressure and space. Objective Projection's Exclusion of Similes also rules out comparing the reader to a quantum observer.

Can differences in meaning between readers be measured?

Yes, to a degree. It is possible to have the same text annotated independently by more than one reader or annotator and to calculate their agreement with statistics such as Cohen's kappa. The reliability study on the Objective Projection corpus was carried out with this method.

References

• Bulut, L. (2026). Inter-Rater Reliability of LLM and Rule-Based Annotation for Inferential Narrative Features: Three Studies on a Turkish Corpus. arXiv:2609.13936. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21740239
• Bulut, L. (2026). Physics and Literature vs. Physics of Literature: Why the Difference Matters. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19032422
• Bulut, L. (2026). Narrative Entropy (Sₙ) and Shannon Entropy (H): A Formal Comparison. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19421808
• Bulut, L. (2026). Narrative Entropy (Sₙ): Canonical Definition and Version History. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20459351
• Cohen, J. (1960). A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 20(1), 37–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/001316446002000104
• Eco, U. (1962). Opera aperta. Milan: Bompiani. English translation: The Open Work (trans. A. Cancogni). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
• Heydenreich, A., & Mecke, K. (Eds.). (2021). Physics and Literature: Concepts – Transfer – Aestheticization. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110481112
• Iser, W. (1976). Der Akt des Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung. Munich: Fink. English translation: The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
• Peirce, C. S. (1931–1935). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. 1–6 (Eds. C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Shannon, C. E. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 27(3), 379–423; 27(4), 623–656. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x
• Sokal, A. (1996). Transgressing the boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity. Social Text, 46/47, 217–252.
• Sokal, A., & Bricmont, J. (1998). Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science. New York: Picador. (First published in French as Impostures intellectuelles, Odile Jacob, 1997.)
• Zurek, W. H. (2003). Decoherence, einselection, and the quantum origins of the classical. Reviews of Modern Physics, 75(3), 715. https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.75.715

How to cite this article

You can use the BibTeX record below to cite this article. The author's other registered works are listed on the Levent Bulut corpus page.

@misc{bulut2026readerobserver,
  author       = {Bulut, Levent},
  title        = {Is the Reader an Observer? Semiotics, Meaning-Making, and the Limits of the Quantum Metaphor},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = sep,
  howpublished = {\url{https://leventbulut.com/is-the-reader-an-observer-semiotics-quantum-metaphor/}},
  note         = {Bulut Doctrine, Physics of Literature},
  language     = {english}
}