The Limits of Perspective: 2 Confusion vs Ambiguity; Why Not All Indeterminacy Is Generative

Indeterminacy is often treated as a virtue.

Ambiguity is celebrated as openness.

Uncertainty is framed as possibility.

Multiplicity is taken to be inherently generative.

But not all indeterminacy expands a system’s capacity to mean.

Some indeterminacy collapses it.

This post draws a necessary distinction between ambiguity, which sustains differentiation, and confusion, which erodes it.

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Ambiguity Preserves the Cut

Ambiguity occurs within a stable perspectival cut.

A role remains intact.

A context holds.

The field of relevance is bounded.

Within that space:

• multiple interpretations coexist

• alternatives can be explored

• commitment can be deferred

• meaning remains negotiable

Ambiguity is productive because the system knows where it is ambiguous.

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Confusion Dissolves the Cut

Confusion occurs when the perspectival cut itself fails.

There is no stable field in which indeterminacy can be explored.

No clear boundary separating:

• role from role

• obligation from obligation

• context from context

Everything presses at once.

Confusion is not too many meanings.

It is too many bindings in the same space.

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The Error of Treating Confusion as Openness

Modern discourse often misrecognises confusion as a lack of clarity that can be remedied by:

• explanation

• reframing

• reflection

• better communication

But explanation presupposes a perspective from which explanation can operate.

In confusion, no such vantage point exists.

Adding more information increases load.

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Ambiguity Has Edges; Confusion Does Not

Ambiguity is bounded.

One can say:

• this is unclear

• that remains undecided

• here interpretation is suspended

Confusion lacks edges.

There is no place to locate uncertainty because everything is uncertain at once.

This is why confused systems feel urgent, noisy, and immobilised simultaneously.

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Why Confusion Is Experienced as Failure

Because our dominant metaphors are cognitive and moral, confusion is often framed as:

• misunderstanding

• incompetence

• indecision

• avoidance

But structurally, confusion is a signal that:

• differentiation has exceeded its load-bearing capacity

• obligations have collided

• roles have saturated

The system has asked for more separation than it can sustain.

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Confusion as a Limit Case of Meaning

Confusion is not the absence of meaning.

It is meaning without separation.

Everything signifies, but nothing can be acted upon cleanly.

In this state:

• commitment becomes incoherent

• responsibility intensifies without direction

• choice feels both mandatory and impossible

This is not a psychological state.

It is a semiotic configuration.

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Why This Matters

Without this distinction:

• exhaustion is mistaken for indecision

• overload is treated as openness

• collapse is moralised as weakness

Recognising confusion as structural allows us to see breakdown before pathology, and without blame.

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Next

The next post will examine a specific mechanism of collapse:

Role Saturation

When one position must carry incompatible bindings.

Because perspectival failure is rarely abstract.

It happens somewhere.