The Horizon of Construal: 5. What Makes a World Possible?

We have been looking at what construal makes visible.

Now we can ask a more difficult question:

What makes construal possible?

The question is easily misunderstood.

We are not asking what existed before a construal, as though there were first a world and then, afterwards, someone began to describe it.

We are asking what must be available within a relation for something to become intelligible at all.

There must be differences that can matter.

There must be some continuity across which differences can appear.

There must be relations within which something can persist, change, interact, or be distinguished.

There must be constraints: not every distinction can work equally well.

And there must be some way in which what is encountered can participate in these distinctions.

None of these conditions is itself simply another thing in the world.

They are conditions under which things, events and relations can become intelligible as such.

This gives us a subtle reversal.

We normally imagine:

world → things → relations → intelligibility

But perhaps the order is closer to:

relations and distinctions → intelligibility → things and events as we can construe them

This does not mean that relations and distinctions exist independently of a world.

It means that a world is not merely a collection of things.

A world is also the structured field in which things can become distinguishable, persistent, related and consequential.

And perhaps this is what makes a world possible.

Not that everything is already there.

But that there are ways for something to become something.

The question, then, is no longer simply what the world contains.

It is:

What must be possible for there to be a world of things at all?