We speak easily of the world, as though its meaning were obvious. The world is what exists. The world is what we inhabit. The world is what science studies. The apparent clarity of the term is precisely what should make us suspicious.
This series begins by undoing that familiarity.
The claim guiding what follows is simple but destabilising: a world is not what is, but what can be held as real by a system. Worlds are not containers, backdrops, or totalities. They are outcomes of constraint.
The world as container
The most common picture treats the world as a kind of box: a vast domain in which objects, events, and facts reside. On this view, different disciplines merely inspect different regions of the same underlying world. Physics looks deep, biology looks local, culture looks messy — but all are assumed to be talking about the same thing.
This picture quietly does a great deal of work. It allows us to speak as if disagreement were merely partial ignorance, as if a single final description could, in principle, gather everything together. It also makes it seem natural to ask whether a given theory corresponds to the world.
What it does not do is explain how the world becomes intelligible at all.
From existence to intelligibility
Before we can talk about what exists, something must count as a phenomenon. Before there can be objects, events, or facts, there must be distinctions that matter — differences that make a difference within a system.
A world, in the sense that matters here, is the closure of such distinctions. It is the structured space of what can appear, be taken up, and be treated as real, given a particular configuration of constraints.
This immediately breaks the spell of the container metaphor. Worlds are not places things are in. They are the conditions under which things can show up at all.
Systems and worlds
A system is not defined here by its material boundaries, but by its constraints. What a system can discriminate, stabilise, and respond to determines what can count as a phenomenon for it. The world of a system is therefore inseparable from the system itself.
This does not mean that systems invent worlds arbitrarily. Constraints are not optional. They are enforced by viability, coherence, and coupling. But it does mean that there is no system-independent world waiting to be accessed.
Different systems enact different worlds, even when they occupy the same physical space.
Actualisation, not discovery
Worlds are not discovered pre-formed. They are actualised through cuts that distinguish some possibilities from others. A cut is not a temporal process but a perspectival one: a way of taking the potential of a system as determinate in a particular manner.
Once a cut is in place, a world snaps into focus. Certain phenomena become possible; others become unintelligible. This is why worlds can feel stable and inevitable from within, even though they are contingent on the constraints that sustain them.
No appeal to “the world itself”
From this point on, the phrase the world itself will no longer do explanatory work. It cannot be invoked to settle disputes, ground meanings, or guarantee objectivity. To do so would be to smuggle in a perspective-free vantage point that no system can occupy.
This is not scepticism. It is a refusal to grant metaphysical privilege where none is warranted.
What follows
If worlds are actualised rather than given, then several familiar assumptions must be revisited. Objectivity, disagreement, realism, and even truth will need to be rethought in terms of constraint and coupling rather than correspondence.
The next instalment turns to one of the most persistent illusions in this space: the idea that perspective is a defect to be overcome, rather than the very condition of having a world at all.
Worlds do not come first.
Systems do.
And worlds follow from how systems cut possibility.
No comments:
Post a Comment