The Horizon of Construal: 15. The Horizon Is Productive

We usually think of a horizon as a limit.

Here is where we can go no further.

Here is where the description stops.

Here is where our way of making the world intelligible breaks down.

But a limit can do something other than stop us.

It can show us what the old construal could not contain.

And in doing so, it can make something else possible.

This is the productive character of the horizon.

When a distinction fails, we do not necessarily lose the world. We may discover that the distinction was too narrow.

When a background disappears, we may begin to notice that we had treated a condition of intelligibility as though it were simply part of reality.

When a theory reaches its limit, we may discover not that nature has become meaningless, but that our way of asking the question has become inadequate.

The horizon therefore does not merely conceal.

It discloses.

It reveals the shape of the construal by showing where that shape can no longer carry us.

And once the shape becomes visible, it can be changed.

This is why conceptual change is not simply the accumulation of better descriptions.

Sometimes the possibility of a new description emerges from the failure of an old one.

The failed distinction becomes a clue.

The unexplained remainder becomes significant.

The anomaly becomes an opening.

Something that previously could not be construed begins to matter precisely because the old construal could not accommodate it.

But the new possibility is not arbitrary.

The world still pushes back.

A new construal has to find something that can sustain it. It must establish distinctions that matter, relations that hold, patterns that persist. It must make a world intelligible without simply ignoring what resisted the previous one.

The horizon is productive because failure creates pressure for reorganisation.

Not because the world commands us to choose one particular conceptual scheme.

And not because anything whatsoever becomes possible once the old scheme fails.

Rather, the space of possible construals begins to change.

The horizon is therefore neither a wall nor a void.

It is a region of transition.

The old world of intelligibility has reached its edge.

But at that edge, new differences may become visible.

And perhaps this is why the most interesting questions so often arise at the limits of what we already know how to say.

The horizon does not merely mark the end of a world.

It is where another world of intelligibility may begin.