The previous series, On Meaning as Possibility, advanced a deliberately restrained claim: that meaning is not a substance, not a reference, and not a content, but a form of structured potential. Meaning, on this account, does not reside in things, nor hover behind them as an interpretation. It consists in what could be made of experience under particular construals. To speak of meaning is to speak of possibility.
This move was necessary. It cleared away a long inheritance of metaphysical debris: the idea that meanings are objects, that they are carried intact from speaker to hearer, or that they exist fully formed prior to their actualisation in experience. Recasting meaning as possibility allows us to treat it as ontologically primary without reifying it, and to account for its flexibility without dissolving it into vagueness.
But necessity is not sufficiency.
If meaning is possibility, then we must still explain how anything ever becomes determinate at all. We must explain how experience takes on the particular shape it does, rather than remaining indefinitely open. We must explain why this phenomenon appears, rather than all others that were equally possible. Without such an account, possibility risks becoming a polite synonym for indeterminacy—a way of gesturing at openness while leaving intelligibility unexplained.
Possibility alone does not yield phenomena.
This is not because possibility is too weak, but because it is too generous. Possibility, by definition, includes more than can ever be actualised at once. If nothing constrains it—if nothing distinguishes one potential articulation from another—then nothing in particular can appear. A world of pure possibility would not be rich; it would be empty. Nothing could stand out, because nothing would be excluded.
Meaning, however, is never experienced as a boundless field. It appears as this sense, this significance, this phenomenon. Even the vaguest feeling is determinate in ways it could have failed to be. To account for meaning as it is lived and encountered, we must therefore account not only for possibility, but for distinction.
This is where the notion of a cut becomes unavoidable.
By a cut, we do not mean a physical boundary, a causal intervention, or an act performed by an agent. We do not mean a decision, a choice, or a temporal event. We mean something more austere and more consequential: the perspectival distinction by which a field of potential is articulated into a phenomenon. A cut is not imposed on possibility from outside. It is the condition under which possibility becomes intelligible at all.
Without a cut, possibility remains unarticulated. With a cut, a phenomenon appears.
This does not mean that possibility is destroyed or reduced. On the contrary, the unrealised possibilities remain precisely what give the phenomenon its character. What is present is intelligible only against what is absent. What is said is meaningful only against what could have been said instead. Determinacy is not the negation of possibility; it is its articulation.
The temptation, at this point, is to treat the cut as an optional addition: a useful metaphor, perhaps, or a heuristic for thinking about interpretation. That temptation must be resisted. The cut is not an explanatory convenience layered onto an otherwise complete account. It is the missing condition without which meaning-as-possibility cannot do the work it has been asked to do.
To speak of meaning at all—to speak of phenomena, experience, sense, or significance—is already to presuppose distinction. There is no experience without articulation, no phenomenon without exclusion, no intelligibility without form. The fantasy of meaning without cuts is the fantasy of a meaning that never appears.
This series begins, then, from a simple but demanding claim: possibility is real, but it is not enough. If meaning is to be more than an ontological promise—if it is to account for the actual texture of experience—we must understand how possibility is cut, how distinction arises without being imposed, and how determination occurs without collapsing into mechanism.
The task ahead is not to abandon possibility, but to complete it.
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