What Understanding Is Once Totality Is Gone: 3 Constraint-Sensitive Explanation

Having established that explanation is not inventory or prediction (Post 1) and that understanding is orientation within possibility (Post 2), we now examine how explanations work: the relational, perspectival, and constraint-sensitive mechanisms that allow them to guide understanding.

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1. Constraints Are Constitutive, Not Limiting

Constraints are often treated as mere limitations: what cannot happen. Post-totality thinking reframes them as constitutive of intelligibility:

• A phenomenon only appears as it does because certain distinctions, relations, and systems are in place.

• Explanations highlight these relational patterns.

• Constraint-sensitive explanations do not attempt to catalogue all possibilities; they make intelligible the subset that matters under the cut.

Key insight: Explanation is effective because it works within constraints, not despite them.

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2. Explanation Requires a Cut

A cut is a perspectival act: it distinguishes, isolates, and selects. Every explanation presupposes a cut:

• The phenomena it addresses exist relative to the distinctions made.

• Constraints define what is relevant, what is intelligible, and what is neglected.

• Explanation is therefore always context-sensitive, relational, and perspectival.

Without acknowledging the cut, any so-called “final explanation” becomes incoherent — it pretends to cover what cannot appear all at once.

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3. Instantiation and Explanation

Explanations are intimately tied to instantiation:

• Phenomena are actualised events within a system of constraints.

• Explanation reveals patterns and relationships among instantiated phenomena.

• Constraint-sensitive explanation ensures that the patterns are intelligible without attempting exhaustive enumeration.

In other words, explanation is not a temporal or sequential process but a structural articulation of what is possible under certain conditions.

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4. Relational Systems Stabilise Meaning

Symbolic and semantic systems extend the reach of explanations:

• They allow distinctions and constraints to be communicated across observers.

• They stabilise patterns of meaning without claiming totality.

• Explanation thus becomes a second-order operation over instantiated phenomena: organising what is salient, highlighting relations, and guiding orientation.

A constraint-sensitive explanation does not replicate the world; it organises it in a way that is intelligible to agents operating within it.

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5. Practical Implication

Constraint-sensitive explanations allow:

• Navigation of complex phenomena without the illusion of finality.

• Understanding that adapts as new cuts and instantiations appear.

• Meaning to propagate without collapsing into value systems, prediction, or total representation.

Orientation, instantiation, and constraint together form the backbone of post-totality understanding.

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Conclusion:

Explanations function because they are sensitive to constraints, relationally structured, and perspectival. They do not catalogue everything; they do not predict everything; they do not mirror totality. They guide, organise, and stabilise understanding within the space of possibilities.

Next, in Post 4 — Understanding Without Representation, we will separate explanation from the seductions of mirroring or predicting reality, showing how understanding operates dynamically without collapsing into naïve representation.