The Horizon of Construal: 10. When Description Stops Working

We often treat a failed description as a temporary inconvenience.

We do not know enough yet.

The measurements are incomplete.

The theory needs refinement.

More information will eventually allow us to say what is happening.

Sometimes that is true.

But sometimes something more interesting occurs.

It is not that we lack a description of what is happening. Our way of describing what is happening has ceased to work.

The distinction matters.

A map can fail because a road has been omitted. That is a problem of information. But a map can also fail because the landscape no longer fits the distinctions by which the map was made.

The difficulty is then not that we have failed to describe one more thing.

It is that the things we know how to describe no longer organise the situation adequately.

This can happen when a relation we had taken for granted stops holding. A category that seemed stable begins to blur. A boundary no longer separates what it once separated. A distinction that once made consequences visible no longer does so.

The world has not disappeared.

Something has happened to the relation between the world and our construal of it.

This is why a failed description can be revealing.

It can show us what the description had depended upon.

When a coordinate system breaks down, we discover that location had depended upon a particular structure of space. When a physical theory reaches a domain in which its equations cease to provide meaningful predictions, we discover that the theory had conditions of applicability. When an everyday distinction becomes impossible to maintain, we may discover that what seemed like an obvious feature of the world was also a feature of the way we had made the world intelligible.

The failure therefore points backwards.

It reveals the conditions that had previously remained invisible because the construal worked so well.

And it points forwards.

For once the old description can no longer carry us, we face a peculiar kind of openness. We are not simply waiting for more facts. We may need a different way of distinguishing what matters.

The horizon of a construal appears precisely here.

Not where reality ends.

But where a way of making reality intelligible reaches the edge of its competence.

The interesting question is therefore no longer simply:

What is beyond our description?

It is:

What has our description required in order to work at all?

The Horizon of Construal: 9. The World That Pushes Back

If the world becomes intelligible through construal, it might be tempting to conclude that we are free to construe it however we please.

We are not.

The world pushes back.

A distinction may seem useful and then fail.

A category may organise our experience and then cease to predict anything.

A map may guide us until the road it depicts is no longer there.

A physical theory may work beautifully within one domain and fail beyond it.

Something constrains the construal.

This is why construal is not construction.

We do not simply make a world and then inhabit it.

We participate in a world whose patterns enable some ways of making distinctions and frustrate others.

A stone resists.

An organism changes.

A measurement disagrees with a prediction.

A relation persists where we expected it to disappear.

The world answers back.

And this matters because it gives us a way to avoid two opposite mistakes.

The first is to imagine that the world arrives already divided into exactly the categories we use to describe it.

The second is to imagine that our categories are entirely our own creation.

Neither is adequate.

A construal is possible because something in the world can sustain it.

It remains useful because the relations it identifies continue to matter.

It reaches its limits when those relations no longer support it.

Perhaps, then, the relation between world and construal is neither passive representation nor arbitrary construction.

It is participation under constraint.

We construe the world.

The world pushes back.

And somewhere between the two, a way of making something intelligible can become possible.

Which raises the question we have been approaching all along:

What happens when the world pushes back hard enough to change the construal itself?

The Horizon of Construal: 8. The Material World

We tend to think of materiality as the most obvious way the world can be.

Things occupy space.

They persist through time.

They have boundaries.

They resist us.

They interact.

And so we speak of a material world as though “material” simply names what is there before anything else happens.

But perhaps materiality deserves a closer look.

To construe something materially is to make certain features consequential.

Persistence matters.

Location matters.

Boundaries matter.

Resistance matters.

The distinction between a thing and its surroundings matters.

A material object is not merely something that exists. It is something that can remain, occupy, resist, interact and be distinguished in particular ways.

This does not mean that we invent material objects.

The world constrains the ways in which it can successfully be construed.

But the material world we encounter is not simply a collection of pieces of matter waiting to be labelled.

It is a world in which particular distinctions have become stable enough to matter.

This gives us a different way of approaching an old question.

Instead of asking:

What is matter?

we might ask:

What makes a material world a possible construal?

The question shifts our attention from substance to possibility.

What must be the case for persistence to matter?

For location to matter?

For a boundary to hold?

For something to count as relatively independent of its surroundings?

These are not merely properties added to matter.

They are part of what makes materiality intelligible.

And perhaps this is why the material world can feel so obvious.

It is a remarkably successful construal.

It gives us a world of things that persist, occupy places, resist change and enter into relations.

But its success should not make us forget that it is a way in which a world becomes intelligible.

The material world is not thereby unreal.

It is something more interesting:

a world in which material distinctions have become possible, stable and consequential.

The Horizon of Construal: 7. The Conditions We Mistake for the World

We have seen that things depend upon relations.

We have seen that distinctions require a background.

We have seen that a construal works because certain conditions hold.

But there is a curious consequence.

Once a construal becomes familiar, we tend to forget its conditions.

The space in which things can be located becomes simply space.

The continuity against which events can be distinguished becomes time.

The relations through which events can be connected become causes.

The stability through which objects can persist becomes a property of the objects themselves.

What made the world intelligible begins to look like the world itself.

This is an easy mistake to make.

A successful construal disappears into what it allows us to see.

We no longer notice the distinctions that make an object an object, or the relations that allow it to persist. We simply encounter the object.

The conditions have become invisible because they work so well.

This does not mean that space, time, causation or objects are unreal.

It means that we should be careful about assuming that the forms in which we successfully construe the world must also be the forms in which the world exists independently of that construal.

The distinction is subtle but important.

A condition of intelligibility is not necessarily an object of which the world is made.

And once we forget that, we can begin asking questions that quietly presuppose the answer.

What is an object in itself?

Where is something located before there is a space in which to locate it?

What happened before time?

What caused the existence of causation itself?

We have encountered versions of these questions before.

Perhaps the problem is not that they are difficult questions.

Perhaps they are questions that have carried the conditions of one construal beyond the point at which those conditions can be assumed.

The map has become so familiar that we have mistaken its coordinates for the territory.

And this gives us a new reason to be interested in the horizon.

For perhaps the quickest way to discover the conditions of a construal is to follow it to the point where those conditions stop working.

The Horizon of Construal: 6. The Relations Behind the Thing

We are used to thinking of a thing as something that exists first and enters into relations afterwards.

A tree stands in a forest.

A planet moves through space.

A person encounters another person.

But look more closely.

What makes the tree the tree it is?

Its roots relate to the soil.

Its leaves relate to light and air.

Its growth relates to seasons.

Its boundary is maintained through exchanges with what surrounds it.

Remove these relations, and the thing does not simply remain the same thing with fewer properties. Its very persistence is affected.

The relations are not additions to the thing.

They are part of what allows it to remain a thing.

The same is true of the planet. Its identity as a planet depends upon relations of motion, mass, orbit and gravitational interaction. Change those relations sufficiently and what counts as the same kind of object may change with them.

This suggests that we have been putting the relation in the wrong place.

We imagine:

thing → relation

But perhaps it is often closer to:

relation → stability → thing

A thing can be a relatively stable pattern within changing relations.

This does not dissolve things into relations. The tree is still a tree. The planet is still a planet.

But their being what they are is not independent of the relations through which they persist.

And this brings us back to construal.

To construe something as a thing is to recognise a pattern of stability within a field of relations.

The thing appears because something holds together.

Perhaps, then, the world is not made intelligible by first finding its things and then discovering their relations.

Perhaps relations are already working behind the things we see.

And once we begin to notice them, the apparent solidity of the world becomes something more interesting:

a stability achieved within becoming.

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?

The Horizon of Construal: 4. The Background We Don't See

Something becomes visible because something else remains in the background.

A figure stands out against a field.

A tree becomes an object against a landscape.

An event becomes an event against something that continues around it.

We rarely notice the background precisely because it is doing its job.

It allows the thing to appear.

This is true of concepts as well.

To recognise something as an object, we normally assume a space in which it can be located.

To recognise something as an event, we assume a temporal continuity against which it can occur.

To recognise something as a cause, we assume a world of processes in which events can be related.

The background is therefore not simply what we have chosen not to describe.

It is part of what makes description possible.

And yet, once a construal is working, its conditions tend to disappear from view. We see the object, not the distinction that made it an object. We notice the event, not the continuity that allowed it to count as an event.

The map shows the roads.

It does not show the assumptions that made the roads mappable.

Perhaps this is why the limits of a construal can be so revealing.

When the background can no longer be taken for granted, what was previously obvious may cease to be intelligible.

The object loses its setting.

The event loses its temporal field.

The relation loses the structure that made the relation possible.

And then we discover something we normally overlook:

A construal does not merely make some things visible. It also makes a background possible against which those things can appear.

The background we don't see may therefore be one of the most important parts of the world we do.

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.

The Horizon of Construal: 2. Before the Thing

We speak easily of things.

A stone is a thing. A tree is a thing. A planet is a thing.

It seems that things simply exist, and that relations come afterwards. The stone exists; then it has a position, encounters another stone, casts a shadow.

But consider what makes the stone the same stone from one moment to the next.

Its material changes. Its position changes. Its surroundings change.

Something nevertheless persists.

What persists is not simply a piece of matter. It is a pattern of distinctions that allows us to treat what changes as belonging to the same thing.

This does not make the stone imaginary.

It means that thinghood is not exhausted by material presence.

A thing has a boundary, but the boundary is meaningful only in relation to what lies beyond it.

It has an identity, but identity depends upon what counts as change and what does not.

It persists, but persistence is intelligible only across difference.

The thing, in other words, is already relational.

We might therefore have begun at the wrong end.

Instead of asking how things enter into relations, we might ask:

What relations make something available as a thing?

The question is larger than it first appears.

For if thinghood depends upon relations, then the world is not first populated by finished things which subsequently acquire properties.

Things may instead be achievements of stability within becoming.

And that gives us a curious thought.

Before there is a thing, there need not be nothing.

There may be something happening that has not yet become available to us as a thing.

Perhaps the world does not begin with things.

Perhaps things are ways in which a world becomes distinguishable.

The Horizon of Construal: 1. The World We Already Have

We tend to begin with a world that is already complete.

There are things.

There are events.

There are places and times, causes and effects, objects that persist and processes that change.

Then there is us, encountering this ready-made world and trying to describe it.

It seems so obvious that it is difficult to see it as an assumption.

But consider what we actually encounter.

Before we can say this is a thing, something must have become distinguishable as this rather than that.

Before something can be an event, there must be some way in which its occurrence can be distinguished from what continues around it.

Before something can persist, there must be some basis on which what is encountered at one moment can count as the same as what is encountered later.

The distinctions seem to belong to the world.

But perhaps that is because, once they are working, we no longer notice the work they are doing.

This does not mean that we invent the world.

It means that the world does not necessarily arrive already divided according to the distinctions through which we can understand it.

A thing is not simply a piece of reality with the label thing attached.

It becomes available as a thing within a particular pattern of distinctions and relations.

And the same may be true of events, objects, boundaries, causes and possibilities.

Perhaps, then, the question is not merely:

What is the world like?

Perhaps we should also ask:

What has to happen for something to become intelligible as the kind of thing we say it is?

That is the first step toward understanding construal.

The world we already have may not be the world before construal.

It may be a world already made intelligible through it.

The Horizon of Construal: Prologue — The Edge of the Map

We are accustomed to thinking of the world as something already there.

There are things in it, events that happen to them, relations between them. There are places and times, causes and effects, objects that persist and processes that change. We encounter this world, and then we describe it. Some descriptions are accurate, others mistaken. Some concepts are useful, others misleading.

It is an appealing picture.

It is also a remarkably difficult one to maintain.

Consider a map.

A map is useful because it distinguishes things that matter for the journey: roads, rivers, towns, boundaries, landmarks. It leaves other things out. No one expects a map to contain the whole territory.

But suppose we reach the edge of the map.

The obvious thought is that the territory continues. We simply need a larger map.

Sometimes that is exactly right.

But not always.

There are occasions when reaching the edge of a map tells us something about the map itself. Perhaps the scale has ceased to be appropriate. Perhaps the distinctions it provides are no longer useful. Perhaps the very coordinates by which we have been locating things no longer make sense.

The difficulty is that we tend naturally to interpret such an edge as though it belonged to the territory.

We ask:

What is out there?

But perhaps the more revealing question is:

What has happened to the way we were representing the territory?

This distinction matters.

A description can fail without the thing described failing. A coordinate system can cease to function without space disappearing. A biological category can become unstable without organisms ceasing to exist. A physical theory can encounter a singularity without nature containing a peculiar object called a singularity.

The edge of a description is not necessarily the edge of the world.

This is the problem we want to explore.

We will call the activity by which something becomes intelligible in a particular way construal.

The word is deliberately modest. It does not mean that we invent the world. Nor does it mean that we passively copy a world that has already been divided into the forms our descriptions require.

To construe something is to make it available as something.

An event becomes distinguishable from what surrounds it. A thing becomes recognisable as something that persists. A boundary becomes significant. A relation becomes consequential. A background becomes available against which something can stand out.

We ordinarily notice the result and forget the conditions that made it possible.

The map hides its cartography.

And this is where the edge becomes interesting.

For while a successful construal allows us to move through a world of familiar distinctions, its failure may reveal something that success conceals: the conditions under which the world had become intelligible in the first place.

This gives us a different way of thinking about horizons.

A horizon is not necessarily a wall at the end of reality. It may be the point at which a particular way of making reality intelligible can no longer carry us further.

At such a point, the temptation is to ask what lies beyond.

But perhaps there is another question we should ask first:

What does the horizon reveal about the way we have been construing the world?

That question will take us into some strange territory.

We will encounter objects that are not quite objects, boundaries that do not belong neatly to either side, mathematical infinities that need not correspond to infinite things, material worlds whose materiality is itself something to be understood, and possibilities that seem to emerge rather than wait in advance for us to choose among them.

We will also return to an old question:

Where did the universe begin?

But perhaps by then we will see that the most interesting part of the question was never simply where the beginning was.

It was the map we brought with us when we went looking for it.

And perhaps, when we reach its edge, we should resist the urge to draw a larger map.

Perhaps we should first look carefully at the one we have.

For the edge may be telling us something.

Not about what lies beyond the world.

But about how a world became intelligible to us at all.