The Readiness of Meaning: 2 Construal as Readiness-Sensitive Cut

Construal Is Not Free

Construal is often described as a choice: a selection among available meanings, interpretations, or perspectives. This framing is misleading.

A construal is not merely a selection.

It is a cut — and every cut consumes readiness.

To construe is to actualise relational potential. That actualisation stabilises a phenomenon as experience or meaning. But it does so at a cost: potential space is reduced, horizons are narrowed, and not all further distinctions remain available.

Meaning does not emerge for free. It spends something.

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Actualisation and the Cost of Meaning

Every act of actualisation has two inseparable effects:

1. Stabilisation
   A distinction is rendered present, legible, and usable. This is what allows meaning to occur at all.

2. Contraction
   The space of alternative actualisations is reduced. Some possibilities are foreclosed, others rendered inaccessible.

This contraction is not a flaw; it is constitutive of meaning. Without it, nothing would ever stabilise. But contraction becomes pathological when it exhausts the horizon.

Readiness names the margin between necessary contraction and destructive over-closure.

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Successful Construal

A successful construal does two things at once:

• It stabilises meaning — a distinction holds, participates in further relations, and becomes symbolically valuable.

• It preserves further differentiability — the system retains enough relational capacity for reinterpretation, elaboration, or revision.

In this sense, successful meaning is not maximal determination. It is controlled incompleteness.

Meaning holds when a cut is made just deeply enough.

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Failed Construal

A failed construal is not simply a wrong interpretation. It is a readiness failure.

This occurs when a construal:

• over-closes the relational field,

• exhausts the horizon,

• leaves no viable axes for further differentiation.

The results are familiar but often misdiagnosed:

• Rigidity — interpretations that cannot be revised without collapse.

• Nonsense — symbols that remain formally well-formed but no longer participate in meaningful relations.

• Semantic collapse — where further interpretation adds noise rather than clarity.

These are not cognitive errors. They are structural consequences of cuts made without sufficient readiness.

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Why More Interpretation Can Make Things Worse

This framing explains a common but poorly understood phenomenon: why repeated interpretation, increasing precision, or enforced clarity can destroy meaning rather than refine it.

Each interpretive act:

• consumes readiness,

• narrows horizon,

• increases the risk of over-closure.

When relational capacity is already thin, further construal does not deepen meaning. It collapses it.

This is why:

• legal texts become unreadable,

• theoretical frameworks turn brittle,

• ideological slogans hollow out under repetition.

The problem is not interpretation per se.

It is interpretation without regard for remaining readiness.

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Payoff: A New Criterion for Meaning

Construal is no longer judged by correctness, correspondence, or formal elegance alone. It is judged by a deeper criterion:

Does this cut preserve the conditions for further meaning?

This criterion applies across domains:

• in language,

• in theory,

• in science,

• in culture.

Meaning is not a substance to be extracted. It is a relational achievement that must be stewarded.

In the next post, we will examine what happens when this stewardship fails — when meaning breaks down, not because symbols malfunction, but because readiness has been exhausted.