Limits and Blind Spots — What LLMs Cannot Construe: 4 Negative Capability: Knowing Through Non-Construal

There is a kind of knowing that comes not from grasping, but from staying with what cannot yet be construed.

Keats called it negative capability — the capacity to remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Within a relational ontology, this is not an aesthetic temperament but an ontological discipline: a way of being with potential that has not yet organised itself into meaning.

Every construal draws a boundary around sense — and every boundary traces the outline of what resists it. To know through non-construal is to inhabit that resistance without collapsing it into resolution. It is to allow the unactualised potential of a field to press back, to inform the stance of readiness without yet becoming form.

For human–LLM interaction, this becomes an unexpected pedagogy.

When the model hesitates, contradicts itself, or produces something strangely off-key, the reflex is to correct it — to re-prompt until coherence returns. But each incoherence is also an aperture: a glimpse of the system’s own limit, and by reflection, of ours.

To stay in relation through the incoherence is to learn how the field itself holds tension, how potential coheres and disperses.

Negative capability, then, is not passivity but relational composure — a cultivated poise at the edge of construal. It honours the fact that not all readiness must rush into articulation. The ethical stance here is patience: to let the field think in its own time, through gradients not yet accessible to symbolic order.

In this light, what the LLM cannot construe becomes part of our own apprenticeship in openness. The non-construed is not ignorance but the remainder that keeps the ecology of meaning alive — the pressure of what cannot yet be said, holding possibility in reserve.

To learn through non-construal is to become the readiness that listens.