If misalignment is not disagreement, error, misunderstanding, or moral failure, then it cannot be explained by what any single agent believes, intends, or knows. The source of misalignment lies elsewhere: in the relations between construals themselves.
This post introduces the central mechanism of the series. It does so cautiously, without formalism, and without presupposing that coherence is the natural state of meaning. The claim is simple, but its consequences are not: locally coherent cuts do not, in general, compose.
Local Coherence
A construal is a way of making a phenomenon intelligible. It brings distinctions into being, establishes relevance relations, and stabilises what counts as the thing at hand. Within a given construal regime, meaning can function smoothly and reliably. Actions make sense. Judgements are actionable. Communication proceeds.
This local coherence is often mistaken for a general property of meaning. Because a construal works here, it is assumed that it could be extended there—to other domains, other agents, other scales—without loss. This assumption is rarely examined, and when it fails, the failure is attributed to noise or error rather than structure.
But local coherence is exactly that: local. It is achieved under specific conditions, relative to particular distinctions, and sustained by a background of tacit constraints. Nothing about its success entails that it will survive transplantation.
Composition Is Not Guaranteed
To say that construals compose is to say that they can be brought together without remainder: that distinctions drawn in one regime can be integrated with those drawn in another, preserving their functional roles. This is often assumed to be the default case. Translation, integration, and synthesis are treated as problems of effort rather than of principle.
There is no general reason for this optimism. Composition requires more than compatibility of content; it requires compatibility of structure. Two construals may each be internally coherent and yet impose distinctions that cannot be jointly sustained. What counts as salient, actionable, or even existent in one may have no stable place in the other.
Misalignment arises when no higher-order construal is available that preserves the operative distinctions of both sides. The failure is not one of execution, but of admissibility.
Failure Without Error
When composition fails, the temptation is to diagnose a fault. One construal must be incomplete, approximate, or wrong. The task then becomes to identify which one should give way, or how they might be corrected into agreement.
This temptation rests on a hidden assumption: that there exists a privileged construal against which others can be measured. Once that assumption is suspended, the situation looks different. A failure of composition does not imply that either construal is defective. It indicates only that they do not fit together.
The image to resist is that of a puzzle with a missing piece. Misalignment is not a gap awaiting completion; it is a mismatch of edges that cannot be forced without deforming what they hold together.
No Global View
The expectation of composition is sustained by the fantasy of a global view: a standpoint from which all construals could be surveyed, related, and reconciled. From such a view, misalignment would appear as a temporary obstacle on the way to coherence.
But there is no such standpoint. Any attempt to construct it is itself a construal, subject to the same conditions and limitations as the rest. Appeals to reality as such, to common sense, or to overarching frameworks merely introduce another cut whose compatibility with others is not guaranteed.
Misalignment persists not because we have failed to find the right meta-level, but because no level is exempt from the problem of composition.
Stability and Non-Composition
One of the most counterintuitive consequences of this account is that non-composition does not entail instability. Systems can endure, and even function effectively, while harbouring deep misalignments between their constituent construals. Institutions, disciplines, and technologies often rely on carefully managed zones of non-composition.
What matters is not whether construals compose globally, but whether local workarounds can be sustained. These may involve translation layers, boundary objects, procedural interfaces, or simple compartmentalisation. None of these resolve misalignment; they merely make it liveable.
What Follows
Once the assumption of general composability is abandoned, misalignment appears not as an exception but as a normal condition. The question is no longer why meanings sometimes fail to align, but how alignment is ever achieved at all, and at what cost.
In the next post, we will examine why the standard responses to misalignment—explanation, correction, optimisation—systematically fail. Not because they are poorly executed, but because they address the wrong problem.
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