If relevance is constitutive, and if cuts generate salience, then a final question presses with some force:
Why does a phenomenon appear as this rather than that?
This question is often treated as psychological (“because of attention”), epistemic (“because of knowledge”), or pragmatic (“because of interests”). But those answers already presuppose what they claim to explain.
The ontology developed here requires a different response.
1. Appearance is not added to being
It is tempting to imagine a world that is fully there first, to which appearance is later added — by minds, languages, or practices.
But once totality is refused, this picture becomes untenable.
There is no pre-appearing world waiting to be rendered visible. There is only appearance itself, structured by relevance.
Appearance is not a surface phenomenon. It is the mode of existence available to ontology.
To ask why something appears as this is not to ask why it is perceived in a certain way. It is to ask how existence becomes determinate at all.
2. Phenomenon as first-order meaning
A phenomenon is not a thing behind experience. Nor is it an impression in front of it.
A phenomenon is first-order meaning: the immediate articulation of a system of possibilities as relevant.
This is why phenomena are neither subjective nor objective in the traditional sense. They are not private experiences, but neither are they observer-independent inventories.
They are construals — and construal is constitutive.
There is no phenomenon without construal, and no construal without relevance.
3. Why “as this” matters
The phrase as this does important work.
It marks the fact that appearance is always determinate, always structured, always selective. Nothing appears as everything.
To appear as this is not to exclude other possibilities arbitrarily. It is to actualise a particular articulation of possibility.
The alternatives do not vanish. They become irrelevant — not unreal, but uninstantiated.
This is why relevance and incompleteness are inseparable.
4. No appeal to frames or observers
It might be objected that this simply reintroduces frames, perspectives, or observers under another name.
But the cut that generates phenomenon does not belong to a subject.
Subjects are themselves phenomena — already structured by relevance. They do not impose appearance; they emerge within it.
Nor does this account privilege frames. A cut is not a viewpoint surveying a field. It is the articulation of a field as a phenomenon.
There is no frame outside appearance from which appearance could be selected.
5. From relevance to meaning
Once phenomena are understood as relevance-structured construals, meaning ceases to be mysterious.
Meaning is not added to phenomena. Phenomena are already meaningful — not symbolically, but ontologically.
Symbolic systems come later, as second-order articulations of first-order meaning. They depend on relevance; they do not generate it.
This is why meaning can be shared, contested, and reconfigured without requiring total agreement or total representation.
6. Why this is not value
It is crucial to distinguish relevance from value.
To say that a phenomenon appears as this is not to say that it is good, important, or desirable. Value systems coordinate action; relevance structures appearance.
Conflating the two collapses ontology into normativity.
The cut generates salience, not worth.
7. What follows
We can now say, with some precision:
Phenomena appear as this because instantiation articulates relevance
Relevance structures meaning prior to symbolism
Incompleteness is not a limitation but a condition of appearance
What remains is to show how symbolic systems operate on top of this first-order field — how meaning becomes organised, stabilised, and propagated without claiming completion.
That will require distinguishing meaning from value more carefully still.
In the next post, we will turn directly to that distinction, and to the consequences it has been quietly shaping all along.
No comments:
Post a Comment