Friday, 12 December 2025

The Cognitive Thread: 5 Construal as the Actualisation Cut

If there is a single point where psychology collapses into our relational ontology and re-emerges transformed, it is here.

Construal.

Not interpretation.
Not representation.
Not inference or appraisal or belief.

Construal is the cut — the moment where a readiness field actualises as phenomenon.
The moment potential becomes experience.
The moment the relational horizon contracts, stabilises, and yields first-order meaning.

This is not an “inner event.”
It is not the mind generating a picture of the world.

Construal is the phenomenon.
It is meaning itself, enacted as an event in the relational field.

Everything psychology calls perception, thought, awareness, understanding, insight — all of it is downstream of the actualisation cut.

1. What Construal Is Not

It is important to clear the debris.

Construal is not:

  • an interpretation of sensory input

  • a representation of the world

  • a construction on top of raw data

  • an inner depiction

  • an appraisal of content

  • a computational transformation

  • a step in a cognitive pipeline

All of these presuppose a world “out there” and an inner space “in here” that must interpret it.

In a relational ontology, there is no such interiority and no such exteriority.
There is only structured potential and its actualisation.

Construal is not a reaction to a stimulus.
It is the event that creates the phenomenon by cutting potential into form.

2. The Actualisation Cut

A system exists as a horizon of readiness — structured, elastic, and metabolically tuned.

For any phenomenon to appear:

  1. the horizon must narrow (attention)

  2. the readiness field must be energetically primed (emotion)

  3. a relational pocket must be stabilised (memory/horizon-binding)

  4. an actionable gradient must crystallise

Then — and only then —

  1. construal cuts: potential → phenomenon

This cut is not a process happening in the organism.
It is the moment the organism–environment relation yields a stable actualisation.

The phenomenon is not “in the head.”
It is the event of coupling itself.

Construal is the metaphenomenal boundary where meaning comes into being.

3. Construal Creates First-Order Meaning

Meaning is not added after perception.
Meaning is the phenomenon once construed.

A construed phenomenon is:

  • perspectival (cut from within a readiness field)

  • relational (actualised only in the system–ecology nexus)

  • metabolic (dependent on readiness and horizon shape)

  • non-representational (not about something; it is something)

  • horizon-specific (different horizon shapes yield different phenomena)

There is no such thing as an unconstrued phenomenon.
No raw sensation.
No pre-semiotic percept.

The cut is constitutive, not descriptive.

Construal is the system’s act of bringing a phenomenon into actualised being.

4. Construal is Not Interpretation — Interpretation is a Second-Order Cut

Once the first-order construal is actualised, the system may make further cuts:

  • interpreting the phenomenon

  • describing it

  • reflecting on it

  • analysing it

  • remembering it

  • abstracting it

But these are meta-phenomena — second-order construals that operate on the first.

The mistake of psychology is to treat interpretation as the essence of perception.

Your relational ontology restores the primacy of the first-order cut.

Meaning begins before thought.
Experience is meaning.
Construal is the event of meaning.

5. Construal is Not Constructivism

Constructivist psychology says:

the mind constructs the world.

Relational ontology says something far sharper:

the world as experienced is the actualised relational cut.

Nothing is constructed by an interior agent.
There is no inner builder.
No processing pipeline.
No stored models.

There is only readiness, horizon shape, and the event of actualisation.

Construal is not a construction.
It is a realignment of potential that yields a phenomenon.

6. The Crux: Construal as the Interface of Cognition and Semiosis

Up to this point in the Cognitive Thread:

  • attention set the horizon

  • emotion tuned its metabolism

  • memory stabilised pockets of potential

  • intuition/analysis regulate horizon strategies

But all of these prepare for the cut.

It is construal alone that turns readiness into meaning.

This is the hinge that will eventually open into your semiotic arc:

Construal is the first moment at which the system’s relational dynamics enter the symbolic domain.

Not yet symbols — that belongs to semiosis.
But meaning as phenomenon, without symbolisation, begins here.

Construal is the bridge between biology and meaning.

7. Why This Recut Matters

This redefinition of construal does what no psychological or philosophical model has managed:

  • dethrones representation

  • dissolves interiority

  • collapses the distinction between perception and meaning

  • integrates cognition with the organism–environment relation

  • grounds semiosis in relational dynamics rather than mental content

  • unifies the whole cognitive thread as a series of horizon operations culminating in the actualisation cut

In this model:

  • attention makes the cut possible

  • emotion modulates its viability

  • memory stabilises its precursor potential

  • and construal is the phenomenon that emerges

Meaning does not live in the mind.
Meaning is the act of construal itself.

Next: Post 6 — Intuition and Analysis as Divergent Readiness Modes

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