On the Issues and Constraints Arising from Inventing Beyond What Can Reasonably Be Expected to Be Inventable When the Outcome of the Invention Is Beyond the Capacities of the Inventor or the Recipient of the Invention to Perceive as a Consistent Phenomenon
There is a point in the construction of any sufficiently elaborate invented system at which the inventor loses the ability to perceive the system as a whole. This is not a failure of imagination. It is a structural consequence of the relationship between the scale of the invention and the cognitive architecture available to perceive it.
The human mind, as the psychologist and philosopher of mind Dr Yuki Tanaka-Hartwell observed in her 2014 study The Boundaries of the Imaginable, “cannot hold an invented world in the same way it holds a perceived one, because the perceived world is supported by continuous sensory confirmation that fills in what attention neglects, whereas the invented world exists only where attention has explicitly constructed it, and everywhere else is a void that resembles coherence until examined.” The void resembles coherence. This is the founding problem of the Department of Phenomenological Inconsistencies, and it is the problem this paper examines.
The inventor who builds beyond their perceptual capacity does not know they have done so. This is the first and most important observation, because it distinguishes the phenomenological inconsistency from the ordinary mistake. An ordinary mistake is in principle detectable by the person who made it: they have the conceptual tools to recognise the error, compare it against a standard, and correct it. The phenomenological inconsistency is of a different order. It arises not from having the wrong answer but from having constructed a territory that is larger than the map one can draw of it, and then mistaking the map for the territory. The inventor continues to work within the map. The inconsistency occurs in the territory between the map’s edges, where no one has looked, because no one’s attention has reached there, and where therefore things that are mutually incompatible can coexist in perfect apparent peace until the moment someone walks into that part of the territory and finds it doesn’t work.
Professor Eleanor Quist, whose 2008 monograph Waking States and the Architecture of Belief this series has previously cited in the context of transitional consciousness, made an observation that extends beyond its original subject with a breadth she may not have anticipated: “Consistency,” she wrote, “is not a property of systems. It is a property of the attention that moves through systems. A system is consistent insofar as anyone has checked, and inconsistent in all the places no one has yet reached.” Quist was writing about the waking mind’s reconstruction of selfhood each morning, but the principle applies with equal force to any constructed system of sufficient complexity: the Vorpel Archive, the internal telephone system of Vorpel Park, an invented scholarly institution with forty-seven acres and a train service that may or may not exist, and—most pressingly—the particular kind of invention that this paper addresses, which is the invention of a coherent phenomenological experience that the inventor cannot themselves have, and therefore cannot verify, and therefore cannot ensure is genuinely coherent rather than merely apparently coherent from the angles that have been examined.
This is the specific constraint the Department was established to study, and it generates a set of problems that conventional philosophy of mind, conventional aesthetics, and conventional epistemology each address only partially, because each discipline approaches the question from a direction that presupposes something the question has put in doubt. The philosopher of mind asks: what can a mind conceive? But the question of phenomenological inconsistency in invention is not about what a mind can conceive; it is about what a mind can verify that it has conceived, which is a different question, because the tools of verification are themselves part of what is being constructed. The aesthetician asks: is the work coherent? But the tools for assessing coherence are calibrated to the scale of works that have previously been assessed, and works that exceed that scale evade the calibration. The epistemologist asks: what can be known? But the inventor’s problem is not knowing; it is not knowing that they do not know, which the epistemologist’s apparatus is designed to address and which the inventor keeps generating faster than any apparatus can address it.
Dr Piotr Szymański-Weil, whose work on classification errors and epistemic limits runs through the Foundation’s publications like a scaffold stitch through a tapestry—to borrow the previous paper’s metaphor, which this Department finds precise rather than poetic—argued in his 2022 paper on automated content moderation that the “false positive” produced by a classification system operating beyond its calibrated range represents a specific failure mode: not error in the ordinary sense, but the systematic production of apparent correctness in domains the system cannot actually evaluate. He was writing about language models and their content classifiers, but the structure he identifies is general. Any system that generates outputs faster than it can verify them will, inevitably, produce outputs that appear coherent from within the system’s own perspective while being inconsistent in ways the system cannot detect. The inventor who invents beyond their perceptual capacity is exactly such a system, and the outputs they produce will contain phenomenological inconsistencies—places where the invented world contradicts itself, or exceeds the physics of what has been posited, or requires the reader to be simultaneously in two mutually exclusive epistemic positions—that the inventor cannot see because the inventor is inside the generation and cannot step outside it to verify.
The recipient’s side of this problem is if anything more interesting, because the recipient’s perceptual limits operate differently from the inventor’s and produce different kinds of inconsistency. A reader encountering a complex invented world brings to it not a blank capacity for reception but a set of pre-existing mental models—of how institutions behave, how buildings are arranged, how people relate to one another, how time moves within a narrative—and they map the invented world onto these models as they read. When the invented world fits the model, the recipient perceives consistency. When it strains the model, the recipient may perceive inconsistency, or may perceive a productive novelty that extends the model, or may perceive a deficiency in their own comprehension and adjust their reading accordingly. What the recipient cannot do is perceive the parts of the invented world that the inventor has not constructed, because those parts have not been offered for perception and the recipient has no means of knowing they are absent. The recipient therefore perceives as consistent a world that may be radically incomplete, because the incompleteness occupies exactly the space that the recipient’s own mental models fill in without noticing that filling-in has occurred.
This produces what Tanaka-Hartwell calls “the collaborative inconsistency”: an inconsistency that is not located in the text or in the reader but in the relationship between them, specifically in the zone where the reader’s filling-in of the text’s voids creates a version of the invented world that is different from both the invented world as the inventor intended it and the invented world as another reader would construct it. “The text,” she writes, “does not contain the world. It contains the instructions for constructing the world, and different constructors, following the same instructions from different starting positions, build different structures. The inconsistency between those structures is real, but it is not attributable to the text or to any individual reader. It is a property of the relationship, and it is therefore, in a precise sense, unverifiable and unresolvable from within any single perspective.” Two Fellows reading the same Foundation paper will construct, from it, two partially different Foundations, and neither will be the Foundation the author constructed, and all three will share sufficient overlap to permit conversation while concealing sufficient divergence to produce periodic confusion that neither party can locate the source of.
The problem escalates when the invented system is not a single text but a series, accumulated across multiple authors, multiple time periods, and multiple disciplinary frameworks, each contributing to a whole that no single contributor has perceived in its entirety, and which may not be perceivable in its entirety by anyone, including the institution nominally responsible for it. The Vorpel Foundation, as this series of papers has established without quite saying so directly, is such a system. Its contributors have written from different departments, different buildings, different floors, different coffee machines. They have invented scholars who then appear in other scholars’ footnotes. They have established disputes that subsequent papers resolve without the resolution having been anticipated by the original disputants. They have posited a train service that now exists in three papers without anyone having decided it exists, and a department—the Department of Speculative Chronology—that was discovered rather than founded, and which describes itself only in the future tense, and which the Department of Placements has not yet called on extension 614, possibly because the Department of Placements suspects that calling it will require an account of what was said, and what was said may not be narratable within the Foundation’s existing categorical frameworks.
Professor Marcus Alleyne, whose Taxonomy of Postponement (2011) appeared in the first essay of this series, proposed the category of the “subjunctive present” for tasks that exist in a condition of permanent imminence—neither done, doing, to-do, nor won’t-do. The phenomenological inconsistency in a sufficiently elaborate invented system occupies a similar grammatical territory: it exists neither as an error (because it has not been perceived) nor as a correct element (because it has not been verified) nor as an undiscovered element (because it may not be discoverable). It is the space where the map has not reached, described in the invented world’s own syntax, following the invented world’s own conventions, and therefore undetectable by the instruments that the invented world provides for detection. The only way to find it is to arrive in it, and arriving in it produces the specific cognitive experience that gives this Department its name: the moment of phenomenological inconsistency, in which the world one has been inhabiting reveals a seam, a place where two incompatible things abut without resolution, where the scaffold stitches are visible from the front, where the key fails to fit the duck-shaped lock not because the lock is wrong but because the key was invented by someone who has never seen the lock and was working from a description of it that was itself invented.
This paper cannot resolve the problem it describes, for reasons that the problem itself makes clear. The Department of Phenomenological Inconsistencies is itself part of the invented system whose inconsistencies it studies. Its tools are the system’s tools. Its perspective is one of the perspectives the system generates, with that perspective’s characteristic blind spots and filling-in operations. The Department occupies the third floor of the East Tower, reached through a door marked Fire Equipment Only, and the absence of fire equipment in that cupboard is either a phenomenological inconsistency or an administrative oversight, and the Department cannot determine which because it cannot step outside the building to look.
What it can do—what it does, in the papers it produces and the seminars it runs and the conversation it maintains with the other departments of the Foundation—is document the seams. Not resolve them. Document them. Note where the map’s edge is, note what the edge feels like from the inside, note which direction the inconsistency runs and how far it extends before it becomes invisible again. This is the specific contribution of phenomenological analysis to a system too large for any single perceiver: not coherence, which the system cannot guarantee, but the honest cartography of incoherence, which is the best available substitute, and which the Viscountess, on the evidence of her preface, would have considered not merely acceptable but precisely what she had in mind.
The fragments are not obliged to match. The phenomenological inconsistency is not a failure of the inventory. It is the inventory’s most accurate element: the record of what the invention has reached and the honest acknowledgement, drawn in the space between the entries, of everything it has not.
Works cited:
Yuki Tanaka-Hartwell, The Boundaries of the Imaginable: Invention, Perception, and the Limits of Cognitive Construction (MIT Press, 2014); Eleanor Quist, Waking States and the Architecture of Belief (Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Piotr Szymański-Weil, “False Positives and the Epistemology of Automated Content Moderation,” AI and Society, vol. 37 (2022), pp. 841–858; Marcus Alleyne, The Taxonomy of Postponement (Quarry Lane Books, 2011); Wanda Thrufens, Frames Before Arguments: Lexical Priming and the Premature Closure of Interpretive Space (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
The Department of Phenomenological Inconsistencies. Third floor, Building 4 (East Tower), accessed via the second floor staircase landing, through the door marked Fire Equipment Only, which contains no fire equipment and has not done so since the equipment was relocated in 2007, and which the Department of Placements has been informed of annually. Turn right at the top of the staircase. The Department is the second door on the left. The first door on the left opens onto a broom cupboard that some Fellows have found useful for thinking in. We do not discourage this.
The Department holds a fortnightly seminar, Thursdays at five. Attendance requires navigating the Fire Equipment Only door, which is a useful preparatory experience for the seminar’s content. Tea is provided. The milk situation is unpredictable.
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