The Horizon of Construal: 3. The Difference That Appears

We have become accustomed to thinking of differences as things we notice.

This is red and that is blue.

This is a tree and that is a stone.

This happened before that.

The difference seems to be sitting there, waiting to be observed.

But not every difference matters.

There are countless variations in the world that make no difference to anything we do, predict, or understand. A difference becomes significant only when it enters into some relation in which it can have consequences.

A difference, then, is not merely a gap between two things.

It is a distinction that does something.

The distinction between a living organism and its surroundings matters because the organism maintains itself in relation to them.

The distinction between one event and another matters because their relations allow us to order, connect, or explain what happens.

The distinction between one object and another matters because something can persist, interact, or move differently.

Difference becomes visible through consequence.

And this changes our question.

We need not ask only:

What differences are there?

We can ask:

Which differences become differences that matter?

This does not mean that we create the difference.

Something must constrain what distinctions can successfully be made.

But neither does the distinction arrive fully formed, waiting for a name.

It emerges within a pattern of relations in which one possibility begins to count differently from another.

Perhaps, then, construal begins not with naming things but with making differences consequential.

And if that is so, the world does not first present us with things which we subsequently distinguish.

Things and differences may emerge together.

A thing becomes a thing because some difference holds.

And a difference becomes significant because something can become a thing.

The map is beginning to draw itself.