The Cut That Makes Meaning: Introduction

In On Meaning as Possibility, we explored the idea that meaning is not a substance, a reference, or a static object, but a structured field of potential. Meaning is possibility: a latent capacity for phenomena to appear under construal. That series cleared away familiar metaphysical assumptions, showing that meaning cannot exist outside of the relational structures in which it is articulated.

Yet possibility alone is insufficient. To account for the determinate phenomena we encounter in experience, we must ask: how does possibility become actualised? How does a particular configuration of meaning appear while others remain unrealised? How can something be intelligible without reducing the richness of what remains unarticulated?

This series, The Cut That Makes Meaning, answers these questions. Across six posts, it examines the foundational condition that makes meaning intelligible: the cut.

• A cut is not an object, an event, or an act. It is a perspectival distinction within structured potential.

• Instantiation is not a process in time, but the system viewed under a cut.

• Foregrounding one articulation necessarily backgrounds others—but this exclusion is not loss.

• What appears under a cut is a phenomenon, not an object; meaning is first-order, not derived from hidden entities.

• The cut is unavoidable. Without it, meaning cannot appear; intelligibility itself is impossible.

Together, the six posts trace the logic of the cut from its necessity to its implications, establishing it as the ontological condition under which phenomena appear. The series is a continuation of the work begun in On Meaning as Possibility, taking possibility from a general claim about potential to a precise account of how meaning emerges, persists, and structures experience.

This is not a series about what exists behind appearances, nor about representation, mechanism, or process. It is a series about how the world appears intelligibly at all, and why that intelligibility is inseparable from the distinctions we call cuts.