Reality precludes in two ways: first, by ruling out acts it leaves no room for; second, by ruling out the retraction of what an act has already done. Start with the first: take reading as the case at hand. That first way of precluding shows the same shape in each of the three roles reading depends on.

i. *Finishing a sentence not yet begun.* A sentence runs forward, word after word: each word is taken up only after the one before it is left behind — first the opening, then the close, in that order. To finish a sentence not yet begun is to reverse that order: the close taken first, standing where the opening should stand. A sentence already read through cannot be read as though it had never begun; the order that puts the first word before the last cannot run backward. First and last are not interchangeable labels for one line of sense. If they were, neither would be doing any work.

ii. *Reading a word without room for its letters.* Read a word and each letter stands in its own place, one after another, with an interval between. To read across a word is to cross that interval; letters heaped into one place leave no interval to cross. Heap them together and there are no longer separate letters to read — only one mass of dark, with nothing between its parts to mark them off as distinct letters. What is foreclosed is not a word too cramped to make out: there is no word at all, because reading across depends on the interval, and no interval remains. To read a word without room for its letters is to read nothing.

iii. *Reading with nothing carried across.* A sentence carries something across: the sense borne from word to word, from the word it leaves to the word it reaches. Carrying the sense from one word to the next takes two words — the one started with and the one reached — with the interval between them actually crossed. Suppose the reading comes to rest with nothing carried across: the eye reaches the last word, but nothing is gleaned, and the sense never comes through. There is then nothing for the reading to have been. It is not a quicker reading; it is no reading at all — a gaze moving from one word to another with nothing between them to account for the sense. To read is to have carried across.

The order, the interval, the carrying: not three readings but one, seen three ways.

The first of these already lives in the mind as much as on the page: remembering and predicting are its near kin. The reading showed the foreclosure on the page; these cognitive verbs show it in the mind. A verb anchored to the past or to the future loses its meaning the moment its direction is reversed. The same foreclosure runs internally in two further verbs. *Remembering the future.* *Remember* is a retrospective verb (looking back at what has been), and aimed forward it has no use. *Predicting that something will happen yesterday.* (Of course yesterday's events can be *inferred* from evidence; the foreclosed sense is *predict* as *will happen*.) A forward-aimed *predict* directed at yesterday denotes nothing. The same closure runs across the family: regret tomorrow, anticipate yesterday, plan what happened. The forbidden phrases are not false sentences. They are words held outside the direction that gives them meaning. Any claim about past and future has to use verbs whose meaning requires the very asymmetry the claim would deny. The foreclosure is not linguistic squeamishness about misused words; the words carry the asymmetry because the asymmetry is what they are for.

The pattern in these phrases reaches further than tomorrow and yesterday. Compare a different kind of mistake. "Everest is under water" is a sentence one can hold in mind clearly; it just happens to be wrong about the world. Now try to remember what you did tomorrow. *Remember* and *did* aim into the past; *tomorrow* points into the future. Trying to hold the phrase clearly is what reveals it cannot be held. The same goes for the other two. Reading a word without room for its letters, with no interval to cross; reading with nothing carried across: these are not situations the world happens to rule out. They are phrases whose terms lose their meaning once the conditions those terms require are removed. For these words, the description and the thing described are not two separate things that might fail to match. To apply the word is already to presuppose the structure it names. Describing and presupposing are the same job, seen from two sides.

A conceptualist objection says this shows only constraints on our concepts or language, not on Reality itself. This section does not settle that dispute: insofar as verbs like *remember*, *predict*, *read*, and *unread* state genuine claims about Reality rather than merely play inferential roles within a language, their application presupposes the asymmetries they encode. How those presuppositions are known, and the strongest deflationary alternatives, wait for Chapters 2 and 4.

Now the second foreclosure, running alongside the first. A capacity that runs one way can be transgressed from either side: not only by reading against the direction, but by trying to undo what reading along it has taken up. There is no undoing. What is done cannot be un-happened, un-placed, un-caused. You can return to a word, but you cannot read it again for the first time: the first reading is behind you, and no rereading reaches back to remove it. The page can be closed, the line struck through, the book shut — each a new act laid over what came before, not a retraction of it. A line struck through adds a cancellation to the record; it does not reach back to unread the reading. No later reading makes the first reading never have occurred. No later reading unbinds a word from the sense it delivered. One direction, two transgressions. The positive is unitary; the negative is dual. That single positive is what the next section names.

This foreclosure is modal, not merely descriptive: what it rules out is ruled out of every configuration it could take on. What Reality forecloses is included in no configuration. Reading a word without room for its letters could not really be the case; no circumstance opens up room where there is none, turning it into an interval you could still read across. That foreclosure is not just very unlikely, or hard to bring about in practice; it is impossible by its structure. A proposition Reality forecloses in this way has a definite modal standing, the one [§1.2](<1.2 Modal Status.md>) names *impossibility*.


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← [1.1 Reality](<1.1 Reality.md>) | [1.1.2 Reality Permits](<1.1.2 Reality Permits.md>) →
