The Knowing World: IV. The World Becomes Articulate

A distinction can persist without yet becoming meaningful.

Something can be different, and that difference can matter. It can even be distinguished again.

But meaning requires something further.

The distinction must become available within an organisation of other distinctions.

This is what allows a difference to become articulate.

To articulate something is not simply to name it. It is to place a distinction into relations through which it can have further significance.

A distinction between inside and outside can organise further distinctions. A distinction between food and poison can become part of an organism's continuing organisation. A distinction between one social role and another can organise what participants can do.

At each point, what matters becomes connected to what else matters.

The world has not been divided up by an observer.

Rather, distinctions have become capable of participating in further distinctions.

This may be what meaning-making systems add to the longer history of mattering.

They do not create differences. They organise differences as possibilities for further organisation.

And once this becomes possible, the world can begin to appear as a world of things, processes, relations and circumstances—not because these were simply waiting there to be named, but because distinctions have acquired the capacity to organise experience into an intelligible pattern.

The world becomes articulate.

But articulation is never final.

Every system of distinctions makes some differences available while leaving others in the background. What can be articulated depends upon the relations the system makes possible.

And so the world that becomes articulate is not the whole world.

It is the world that can be made meaningful within a particular potential for meaning.

This is not a limitation imposed upon the world from outside.

It is a condition of there being a world for a meaning-making system at all.

And now we are ready for a more precise question.

What kind of system can provide a theory of experience?