The Boundary of Meaning

Imagine a map that extends in every direction, yet wherever you travel, the edge of the paper is always just ahead. You can walk, sail, or fly across it, but when you arrive at what looked like the border, you find new lines, new regions, new terrain unfolding seamlessly. Still, you sense that there must be a limit — some point beyond which the map gives out.

In this thought experiment, the boundary of meaning is that elusive edge: the sense that meanings are bounded, finite, and closed, even though every attempt to reach the edge produces more meaning, more construals, more possibilities.

Here the paradox is stark: meaning appears bounded precisely because it is relationally unbounded. The horizon of construal — the system’s capacity to mean — continually generates its own edges as a perspectival effect. From inside, we experience these edges as final limits, yet they dissolve as soon as we approach them, revealing themselves as cuts made by our own construal.

The experiment suggests that what we call the "boundary" of meaning is itself a meaning — a construal of limit that emerges within the system’s ongoing reflexivity. There is no absolute outer wall to meaning, only the recursive experience of its own framing and reframing.

Philosophical stakes:

• What if finitude is not a property of meaning itself, but of the way we cut it?

• What becomes of “outside” and “beyond” if every boundary is an effect of construal rather than a fundamental constraint?

• Might this show why attempts to posit the ineffable, the unsayable, or the inconceivable always end up becoming more meanings in turn?