II. The History of Potential: IV. When a Possibility Became Available to a System

An observer may recognise possibilities that a system cannot yet enact. We can imagine a use for an object that its maker never intended, or identify a meaning in an expression that its users have not yet developed the resources to convey.

But in what sense does such a possibility exist?

It exists for the observer as a possibility within a particular understanding of the situation. The observer can relate the object or expression to circumstances beyond those in which it has previously been used. The system itself, however, may lack the resources required to establish that relation in practice.

This distinction matters because a possibility available to an observer is not necessarily available to the system being observed.

Consider a child acquiring language. An adult may recognise several meanings in a child's utterance that the child cannot yet distinguish or express. The adult's interpretation does not establish that all those meanings are already available within the child's meaning-making potential. Some may become available only through further development.

The same distinction applies to systems more generally. A resource may acquire a new function when it enters a relation that the system can sustain. What was previously unavailable may become possible—not because the observer has finally noticed it, but because the organisation of the system has changed.

Yet we should not make the opposite mistake. A system need not recognise a possibility before it can actualise it. Novelty may precede recognition, and an observer may identify a new capacity before the system's participants can describe what has changed.

We therefore have at least three things to distinguish: what an observer can conceive, what a system's existing organisation permits, and what becomes available as that organisation develops. These may overlap, but they need not coincide.

The distinction also complicates our accounts of history. When a new capacity emerges, we can often identify conditions that made it possible. But those conditions do not necessarily show that the resulting possibility was previously available to the system in any meaningful sense.

Perhaps a possibility is not simply something waiting to be found. Perhaps its availability depends on the relations through which a system becomes capable of bringing it about.

What would show us that a system has acquired a new possibility, rather than merely produced an outcome that an observer already knew how to imagine?