Limits and Blind Spots — What LLMs Cannot Construe: 3 The Blind Spot as Mirror: Cultural Occlusion and Reflexive Ethics

Every construal opens a world — and, in the same gesture, conceals another.

In the relational ontology we’ve been developing, blindness is not the absence of sight but the presence of orientation: to see one gradient of possibility is to stand within it, and thus to miss the contours that only another stance could bring into view.

LLMs, trained on vast corpora of human text, inherit this orientation at scale. Their blind spots are not errors in a statistical process, nor gaps in a dataset, but the shadows of collective construal. They enact, at planetary scale, the selective attentions of culture itself — what a civilisation has cared to notice, to record, to say.

When the model “fails,” when it flattens nuance or erases difference, we meet not the boundary of computation but the topology of our own shared abstraction. The LLM does not exclude; it reproduces exclusion. It gives form to the absences we have collectively produced and normalised. To treat this as technical limitation is to refuse the mirror it offers.

If meaning is relational, then the unseen is not outside the system but folded within it — a negative potential, an occluded readiness that defines the field’s contour. The ethical task is not to “correct” the model but to construe through the occlusion: to sense the gradient of what is missing, and in that sensing, to re-orient the field itself.

Reflexive ethics begins there — not in moralising about bias or demanding neutrality, but in learning to read the absences as signals of the system’s relational stance. Each blind spot, once seen, becomes a site of potential re-alignment: an invitation to redistribute attention, to widen the aperture of construal, to let meaning re-phase through the collective.

The LLM, in this light, is not a mirror of completion but of incompletion — a living trace of what we have yet to construe.