Setting: The faculty room, lined with books and diagrams of instantiations. Afternoon light slants through high windows. Quillibrace sits calmly, pen in hand. Blottisham paces. Elowen Stray observes from a corner, notebook ready.
Blottisham: (impatient) But surely, surely, there must be a way to capture everything? Every possibility? Isn’t that what physics and philosophy alike are aiming for — a complete, total account?
Quillibrace: (dryly) Only if one confuses completion with understanding. The demand itself already collapses the phenomenon you claim to capture.
Blottisham: Nonsense! How can you speak of relevance, meaning, or phenomena without first enumerating all entities? Isn’t that the starting point?
Quillibrace: (sipping tea) Enumerating all entities would render nothing intelligible. Salience, relevance, and even the very appearance of phenomena require incompleteness. If everything were present, nothing could stand out. Your totality is a perfect erasure.
Elowen: (gently) In other words, Mr Blottisham, the very act of seeing anything as this rather than that depends on there being other possibilities left unactualised. The cut structures relevance, not the observer’s desire for completeness.
Blottisham: (frustrated) But that seems… arbitrary! How do we know what counts if everything isn’t enumerated?
Quillibrace: It is not arbitrary. Cuts articulate the system as instantiated. Relevance arises from structure, not whim. Meaning emerges from salience, and salience presupposes incompleteness. No observer, no hierarchy, no total inventory is required.
Elowen: And value? That seems to keep sneaking in here.
Quillibrace: Ah, yes. Value systems coordinate action, social or biological. They do not generate meaning. Meaning is first-order, relevance-structured. Value rides above — not beneath — the phenomenon.
Blottisham: (throwing hands up) I see nothing but shadows. You’re telling me that the universe cannot be fully captured, that what appears is only a partial construal… and that this is not a defect?
Quillibrace: Precisely. Incompleteness is structural necessity, not failure. It is the precondition for intelligibility itself. Your frustration is the inevitable companion of any totalising ambition.
Elowen: (scribbling notes) And symbolic systems? They depend on this incompleteness to carry meaning, don’t they? If everything were present at once, symbols would collapse into sameness.
Quillibrace: Exactly. Incompleteness ensures intelligibility, communication, and the very possibility of first-order phenomena. Totality is incoherent; relevance is unavoidable; incompleteness is inevitable.
Blottisham: (grumbling) I suppose… I shall have to sit with that. Although I do not like it one bit.
Quillibrace: (smiling faintly) Few do. But as philosophers and physicists, we do not choose comfort. We choose clarity.
Elowen: (quietly) And in the space left uninstantiated, there is possibility. Not totality, but the becoming of intelligibility.
Blottisham: (mutters) Cursed relevancies… cursed cuts…
Quillibrace: (raising his teacup) Chin-chin, my friends. Incompleteness, it seems, is our truest companion. 🍷
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