Cuts Without Knives: 7 Cuts in Language: Meaning Without Segmentation

Language is often imagined as a collection of pre-formed units: words, clauses, sentences. We speak of parsing, assembling, arranging. We treat meaning as if it were a property of these units, as if utterances were built from discrete blocks like bricks.

This is an illusion.

Meaning does not arise from pre-existing segments. Words do not exist before they are actualised; sentences do not wait to be constructed. Meaning emerges through perspectival cuts, each one bringing a pattern of relations into view, actualising distinctions without dividing reality. The field of language is continuous, saturated with potential, and only through perspective are patterns illuminated.

Consider a single sentence. Its meaning is not “inside” the words; the words are traces of distinctions actualised by perspective. Each utterance tunes the semantic field differently: the same combination of sounds can carry different relational patterns depending on context, construal, and co-actualisation. Segmentation is descriptive, not constitutive. Words and clauses are effects of cuts, not building blocks.

This has consequences for our understanding of communication:

• Meaning is relational, not compositional. It arises from co-actualised distinctions, not from pre-formed units interacting.

• Semantic multiplicity is inherent. A single utterance can simultaneously actualise multiple patterns, none of which existed independently prior to the act.

• Interpretation is co-creation, not retrieval. Each perspective illuminates possibilities latent in the field of language, producing meaning without fracturing it.

Notice the echo of earlier insights. Just as multiplicity does not require parts, meaning does not require segmentation. Perspective is the act that brings both multiplicity and meaning into being. Language is not a mechanism of assembly; it is a lattice of relational patterns actualised through cuts.

In the next post, we will extend this principle into formal systems: Mathematical and Logical Cuts (Without Platonism). There, we will see how distinctions operate in mathematics and logic without assuming pre-existing objects, demonstrating that cuts are a universal mode of actualisation, not confined to perception or language.

For now, let this settle: words are not things, meanings are not containers, and language itself is the echo of perspectival cuts in a relational field of potential.