Intelligibility, Revisability, and Responsibility: 1 From Potential to Readiness to Revisability

In recent posts, the concept of revisability has moved steadily toward the foreground. This is not because the ontology has changed, but because its operational consequences have become harder to ignore at scale.

What follows is not an update to the ontology, nor a new theoretical layer. It is a clarification of how several familiar ideas—potential, readiness, intelligibility, and revisability—hang together once coordination is treated as the primary ethical problem.

Potential Is Not Readiness

In earlier work, potential was framed as structured possibility: the space of what could be actualised given a particular configuration of relations.

But potential alone does nothing.

A system may contain enormous potential while remaining inert, stalled, or brittle. This is because potential only becomes active under conditions of readiness.

Readiness is not a moral property, nor a motivational one. It is a conjunctive condition:

• Inclination — a directional pull toward certain actualisations rather than others

• Ability — the capacity to carry those actualisations through

Both are necessary. Neither is sufficient.

A system with inclination but no ability produces frustration and symbolic excess.

A system with ability but no inclination produces procedural drift or mechanical repetition.

Readiness is thus the local condition under which potential can be actualised.

Readiness Is Not Enough Either

Yet readiness alone does not guarantee that actualisation will succeed, persist, or propagate.

Why?

Because readiness is always situated. It operates within a field of coordination that must be able to register, interpret, and respond to what is being attempted.

This is where intelligibility enters.

Intelligibility is not shared belief, agreement, or understanding in any strong sense. It is the minimum condition under which actions, signals, and constraints can be taken up by a system at all.

A system may contain ready agents whose actions nevertheless fail—not because they are wrong, but because the field cannot make sense of what they are doing.

In such cases, failure is misdiagnosed as incompetence, deviance, or moral defect. In reality, it is often a failure of intelligibility: the field lacks the categories, rhythms, or interfaces required to coordinate with what is emerging.

Revisability as the Temporal Condition of Intelligibility

This brings us to revisability.

Intelligibility is not static. Fields of coordination do not simply “have” it; they maintain it over time under changing conditions.

Revisability names the system’s capacity to re-articulate its own constraints—its norms, procedures, categories, and interfaces—when existing forms of intelligibility no longer align with readiness.

Where revisability is high, mismatches between readiness and uptake generate learning.

Where revisability is low, the same mismatches generate blame, suppression, or collapse.

Crucially, revisability is not freedom, pluralism, or resilience (those distinctions have been explored elsewhere). It is the temporal openness of coordination itself—the ability of a system to remain negotiable with its own future.

The Alignment Problem

Seen together, a pattern becomes clear:

• Potential defines what could happen.

• Readiness defines what can happen here and now.

• Intelligibility defines what can be coordinated.

• Revisability defines whether coordination can adapt when these come apart.

Ethical and political failure, at scale, is rarely caused by bad intentions or moral deficit. It is far more often caused by misalignment across these layers.

We see:

• potential without readiness,

• readiness without intelligibility,

• intelligibility without revisability.

Each produces a different pathology. None are solved by exhortation or moralisation.

Why This Clarification Matters Now

As analysis moves from individual agents to institutions and planetary systems, the temptation is to reach immediately for ethical abstractions: responsibility, justice, obligation.

But these abstractions presuppose a functioning alignment between potential, readiness, intelligibility, and revisability.

Where that alignment fails, moral language tends to accelerate unrevisability rather than repair it—a problem explored in subsequent posts.

The task, then, is not to invent new ethical principles, but to diagnose where coordination is breaking down and why.

This clarification is offered in that spirit: not to close the ontology, but to sharpen how it is used.

The work ahead is not to perfect the system, but to keep it capable of learning.