We tend to begin with a world that is already complete.
There are things.
There are events.
There are places and times, causes and effects, objects that persist and processes that change.
Then there is us, encountering this ready-made world and trying to describe it.
It seems so obvious that it is difficult to see it as an assumption.
But consider what we actually encounter.
Before we can say this is a thing, something must have become distinguishable as this rather than that.
Before something can be an event, there must be some way in which its occurrence can be distinguished from what continues around it.
Before something can persist, there must be some basis on which what is encountered at one moment can count as the same as what is encountered later.
The distinctions seem to belong to the world.
But perhaps that is because, once they are working, we no longer notice the work they are doing.
This does not mean that we invent the world.
It means that the world does not necessarily arrive already divided according to the distinctions through which we can understand it.
A thing is not simply a piece of reality with the label thing attached.
It becomes available as a thing within a particular pattern of distinctions and relations.
And the same may be true of events, objects, boundaries, causes and possibilities.
Perhaps, then, the question is not merely:
What is the world like?
Perhaps we should also ask:
What has to happen for something to become intelligible as the kind of thing we say it is?
That is the first step toward understanding construal.
The world we already have may not be the world before construal.
It may be a world already made intelligible through it.
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