Why Relational Epistemology, and Why Now?
Prelude to a Participatory Turn in KnowledgeWe are living through a moment of epistemic reorientation. The cracks in the old edifice are showing. From climate collapse to quantum entanglement, from AI-generated meaning to decolonial scholarship, the question of how we know — and who gets to know — is no longer safely tucked away in the margins of philosophy. It is erupting across disciplines. At stake is not simply a new method, but a new metaphysics: one that rethinks knowledge as a relational act.
This series is an invitation to consider what happens when we stop thinking of knowledge as a substance — as something that can be possessed, transferred, or stored — and start thinking of it as a relation: emergent, situated, participatory.
A relational epistemology begins not with the knower, nor with the known, but with the dynamic between them. It foregrounds encounter over extraction, process over possession. And it does so not as a theoretical luxury, but as a practical necessity in a world where the consequences of our ways of knowing are no longer containable.
Why now? Because the dominant epistemologies of modern science — forged in the image of objectivity, separation, and control — are no longer adequate to the entangled realities they helped reveal. Knowing-as-detachment cannot help us navigate a world constituted by relations. We need a different grammar of knowledge: one that can make sense of intra-action, co-becoming, and the ethical demands of participation.
In what follows, we will sketch the outlines of this relational turn. We will explore what it means to move from substance to relation, from knowing-about to knowing-with, from observer to participant. We will ask what becomes of knowledge when it is treated not as a thing to hold, but as a field of resonance — an unfolding of shared potential between knower and world.
Relational epistemology is not a rejection of science. It is a deeper commitment to its task: to understand the world in ways that remain open to the world’s unfolding. But it is also a reckoning — with the violence of disembodied knowledge, and with the colonial grammars that made conquest appear as comprehension.
What we are proposing here is both radical and ancient. It is a return to the wisdom that knowing is a form of participation. And it is a gesture toward what comes next — an ethics of entanglement, and a science that knows it belongs.
1 What Do We Know When We Know?
“To know is not to grasp a thing, but to participate in a becoming.”
Knowing as a Relational Act
In modern life, we often speak of knowledge as if it were a possession — something you have, something you acquire, something you can hold on to. Knowledge is treated like an object: discrete, transferable, measurable. But this is not the only way to think about knowing.
This series begins from a different premise: that knowing is not possession but participation. To know is not to hold something in the mind, but to enter into relation with it. It is not a static state, but a dynamic becoming-with. Knowledge, in this view, is a process of co-emergence between knower and known.
The Epistemic Myth of Separation
Much of the scientific and philosophical tradition has leaned on an ideal of objectivity — the knower as a detached observer, a neutral spectator peering in on the world from some epistemic nowhere. But this image is itself a fiction. All knowing takes place from somewhere, and every act of knowing implicates the knower.
Relational epistemology begins by acknowledging this: that there is no view from nowhere, and no knowledge without relation. To ask What do we know when we know? is to ask not just about the content of knowledge, but about the relation that gives rise to it.
Knowing as a Mode of Being
To know something is to let it affect you, and to be affected in return. It is not just to register a fact, but to undergo an experience. In this way, knowledge is inseparable from life. It is not a passive reflection of what already is, but a participatory event that helps bring the world into being — and the knower along with it.
This does not mean that anything goes. But it does mean that knowledge is not outside the world. It is one of the ways the world unfolds.
From Representation to Participation
This series sets out to reframe knowledge not as representation but as relation. We will explore:
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How knowing co-arises with being
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How objectivity can be redefined as intersubjective coherence
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How meaning emerges not in things but in relations between things
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And how this changes our understanding of science, experience, and ourselves
Rather than asking what the world is, we will ask what it becomes in relation to us. This does not reduce reality to subjectivity — but it insists that reality is never independent of relation.
A Shift in Grammar
To help make this shift, we will turn to relational metaphors and models — including ideas from systemic linguistics, quantum theory, and ecology. Where conventional epistemology favours nouns, substances, and categories, relational epistemology foregrounds verbs, processes, and becomings.
Just as we no longer think of an organism as in an environment, but as part of it, we will treat knowledge not as about the world, but as of it — as a mode of participation in its unfolding.
Toward a Relational Epistemology
This is not a denial of truth, but a repositioning of it. Truth is not that which is free from perspective, but that which is coherent within a relation. And as we will see, this view does not make knowledge less rigorous — it makes it more accountable, because it acknowledges the place of the knower in what is known.
2 There Is No View from Nowhere
“All knowledge is from a place, by a body, through a history. There is no clean window onto the world.”
The Illusion of Detachment
The classical ideal of knowledge assumes a kind of purity: that the knower can withdraw from the world, erase their particularity, and see things as they really are. This is the image of the detached observer — standing outside the world, unmoved and untouched, recording its truths from a privileged distance.
It is a powerful image, and it has served the rise of modern science. But it is not how knowing works.
Every act of knowing is embedded in a context: physical, cultural, linguistic, historical. What we know is shaped by who we are, where we are, and how we have learned to attend. There is no such thing as a neutral gaze.
Situated Knowers
To say that knowledge is situated is not to say it is arbitrary. It is to say it is relational. The world we know is not the world in itself, but the world in relation to us. This does not mean that the world is a projection of the mind — but it does mean that every knower brings something to the relation.
The tools we use to know — our concepts, our categories, our grammars — are themselves the products of our histories. And these shape what we can see, and how we can see it.
The Observer Is Inside the System
This truth becomes particularly evident in quantum mechanics. The observer is not an external party but an active participant in what is observed. Measurement does not merely reveal the state of a system; it contributes to that state.
But this is not just a feature of physics. It is a feature of all knowing. The observer is always inside the system they seek to understand — not perched above it, but entangled in it.
Objectivity Reframed
What, then, becomes of objectivity?
Relational epistemology does not reject objectivity, but redefines it. It is no longer the fantasy of a view from nowhere. It is the practice of accountable positioning — of making visible the standpoint from which knowledge emerges, and the relations that sustain it.
Objectivity becomes less about detachment and more about transparency. It means recognising one’s own embeddedness, and cultivating intersubjective rigour: that is, coherence and consistency across perspectives, rather than erasure of perspective itself.
Knowing-in-Relation
There is no view from nowhere — and that’s not a flaw, it’s a feature. It is what makes knowledge dynamic, plural, and alive. We do not uncover a pre-given world, but participate in the unfolding of one.
This does not collapse truth into relativism. It calls us to a deeper responsibility: to recognise the world not as a fixed object to be mastered, but as a shared becoming to be navigated — together, from where we are.
3 From Substance to Relation
“What if the fundamental units of reality are not things, but relationships?”
The Legacy of Substances
Western thought has long been shaped by a metaphysics of substance. From Aristotle to Descartes to Newton, the world has been imagined as composed of discrete, self-contained entities — things with properties, existing in a neutral backdrop of space and time.
In this view, relations are secondary. A substance can exist on its own; relationships are merely add-ons, accidents of interaction rather than constitutive of being.
But this model begins to break down under closer scrutiny — not only in modern physics, but in biology, cognition, and language. What emerges instead is a vision of reality in which relations are primary.
Fields, Not Particles
Quantum field theory, for instance, tells us that particles are not little marbles flying through space. They are excitations of fields — disturbances in a fabric of relational potential. The identity of a particle is not intrinsic; it is defined by the relational structure of the field in which it appears.
Even mass, energy, and charge are not properties of isolated objects but expressions of relational dynamics. What we call a “particle” is a brief coherence in a larger web — a ripple in the relational sea.
Biology Without Essence
The same shift is echoed in biology. Organisms are not machines made of parts, but processes sustained through ongoing interaction. Life is not a thing, but a pattern of relations — metabolic, ecological, semiotic. A cell only functions in relation to its environment. A species only exists within an ecosystem.
Identity in such systems is not fixed, but fluid — a matter of belonging, co-regulation, and structural coupling.
Language as Relation
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) makes a similar move. It treats language not as a code, but as a social semiotic system: a network of meaning potentials realised in contexts of use. Words do not carry meanings in isolation. They mean in relation to other meanings, and within situations of dialogue.
Meaning is not transferred from speaker to listener like a parcel — it is co-constructed in a field of relation.
Reality as Intra-Action
The physicist-philosopher Karen Barad proposes a powerful term: intra-action. Unlike interaction, which presupposes separate entities that then relate, intra-action suggests that entities emerge through their relations. Boundaries are not pre-given — they are enacted through specific configurations of relational process.
From this view, reality is not made of things that interact, but of relations that materialise as things.
The Relational Turn
To move from substance to relation is not merely to adopt a new vocabulary — it is to reconfigure the ontology on which our epistemology stands. It invites us to see the world not as populated by objects with intrinsic natures, but as a living matrix of interdependencies and co-becomings.
And if what we know is relational, then so too is how we know. Knowledge becomes not an act of extraction, but of attunement — a way of entering into the dynamics of the world as a participant, not an outsider.
4 Meaning Is Not Carried, but Brought Forth
“Meaning is not in the signal, but in the encounter.”
The Container Metaphor
In everyday talk about communication, we often treat meaning as if it were a substance — something contained in words and transferred from one mind to another. This is the conduit metaphor: language as a pipe, messages as parcels, understanding as unpacking.
But this model misrepresents what meaning is and how it arises.
In relational epistemology, meaning is not carried; it is brought forth — enacted, not extracted. What a text, a gesture, or a sound means depends on how it is taken up in a given context, by a given participant, drawing on a history of shared semiotic potential.
Meaning, in other words, does not lie in the form. It emerges with the form in use.
Enacting Meaning: A Second-Order Reality
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) provides a powerful framework for this. Language is a semiotic system, a network of meaning potentials that are actualised through use. The spoken or written text is not a container of meaning — it is an instance, the semiotic actualisation of a specific selection from the meaning potential.
And crucially, the text is not the end of the process. It must be interpreted — that is, instantiated again by a receiver who brings their own meaning potential to the act.
What this means is that meaning is not a first-order property of physical signals. It is a second-order phenomenon — a construal, a co-constructed semiotic reality that emerges in the relation between a meaning potential, a material form, and a participant.
The Participatory Act of Knowing
This relational view resonates deeply with the enactivist tradition in cognitive science. According to Francisco Varela and colleagues, cognition is not the internal representation of a pre-given world, but the bringing forth of a world through embodied action.
Perception is not passive reception, but participation. Meaning arises in the relation between perceiver and world — not in either alone.
Just as a text must be instantiated to mean something, so must a world. Reality as lived is not simply perceived; it is enacted.
Beyond Objectivity
This doesn’t mean “anything goes” or that meaning is purely subjective. On the contrary, meaning is relationally constrained. It is shaped by social systems (like language), by material affordances, and by the histories of meaning-making that precede each act.
What it does mean is that knowledge is not the mirroring of an independent world, but the co-arising of world and knower in the act of knowing.
Objectivity, then, is not neutrality or detachment, but accountability to the relations in which one participates — linguistic, social, ecological, ontological.
From Meaning Transfer to Meaning Participation
To shift from the conduit metaphor to a relational epistemology is to change how we think about understanding itself. It becomes not a transmission, but a transformation — not delivery, but dialogue. Not what does this mean? but how is meaning being brought forth here — and by whom, and for what?
Meaning, in this view, is always in the making.
5 The Observer as Participant
“We never observe from nowhere. We are always already in the world we seek to know.”
The Illusion of Detachment
The classical image of the scientist is that of a detached observer: an individual who stands apart from the system they observe, measuring, recording, and explaining without interfering. This ideal, inherited from Enlightenment rationalism, underpins the notion of objectivity as distance — epistemic cleanliness, untouched by bias or embodiment.
But this image is misleading. Observation is never neutral. It is always situated, always shaped by the means of observation and by the position — conceptual, physical, historical — of the observer. In practice, observation is intervention, and knowledge is not passive discovery but active participation.
From Objectivity to Intra-action
In quantum mechanics, this participatory role of the observer becomes unavoidable. To observe a quantum system is to disturb it — not by accident or technical limitation, but in principle. The system does not possess definite properties until a measurement is made, and that measurement is not a revelation of a pre-existing state, but a co-production of observer and phenomenon.
This is what Karen Barad calls intra-action: not interaction between separate entities, but the entangled co-constitution of meaning, matter, and measurement. The observer is not outside the system; they are a condition of its emergence as a phenomenon.
The Observer in Language
Systemic Functional Linguistics offers a semiotic analogue. Meaning does not pre-exist its expression in language, waiting to be encoded and decoded. Instead, language construes experience — it makes meaning possible by shaping what can be said, thought, and known.
When we interpret language, we do not recover meaning; we re-enact it. The reader or listener is not a passive recipient but a co-instantiator of meaning. What is meant depends on what is said and how it is taken up. In other words, the observer of meaning is a participant in its formation.
Observation as Meaningful Action
In both physics and linguistics, then, we find that observation is not a view from nowhere but a relational act. It involves choice: what to attend to, how to frame it, what to bring forth. These choices are shaped by social, cultural, and historical contingencies — by systems of meaning that both enable and constrain our knowing.
To observe is to act meaningfully — and to take responsibility for how our acts participate in the reality they bring forth.
Participation as Epistemic Responsibility
Relational epistemology does not deny reality, but repositions it. It is not out there, waiting to be mirrored, but arises in and through our relations with it. These relations are not arbitrary, but structured — by language, by embodiment, by history, by matter.
Knowing is not about standing back, but about stepping in — not about removing ourselves from the frame, but about becoming conscious of how we are always already within it.
And with this comes a shift in the meaning of objectivity: from detachment to responsibility for participation.
6 Knowing-with, Not Knowing-about
“To know something is not to hold it at arm’s length but to live with it, respond to it, and become changed by it.”
From Representing to Relating
Traditional epistemology treats knowledge as representation: to know something is to form an accurate mental or linguistic model of it — a picture in the mind that corresponds to a reality outside it. This picture is presumed to be objective, transferable, and detachable from the knower.
But relational epistemology proposes a different metaphor. Knowledge is not a mirror of nature, but a relation with it. It is not a passive likeness of what is, but a process of becoming with. To know is not to depict, but to participate.
Knowing with
This shift from "knowing-about" to "knowing-with" draws attention to the mutuality of knowledge. We do not come to know by standing apart from what we seek to understand, but by entering into dynamic relationship with it — by responding, adapting, co-emerging.
This is evident in ecological science, where knowledge of an ecosystem cannot be abstracted from one's situated involvement with it — the rhythms of the land, the practices of care, the long attention to pattern and change. Indigenous knowledge systems have long recognised this: that to know a river, for instance, is not to measure its flow, but to live with it, fish it, drink from it, speak of it, and listen to it.
Knowing-with is not a metaphorical flourish. It is an ontological orientation.
The Linguistic Analogy
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) provides a powerful lens for this orientation. In SFL, meaning is not encoded and transmitted; it is instantiated — brought forth in context, shaped by the co-deployment of a shared potential. This means that language does not carry meaning from one mind to another. It makes meaning possible by furnishing a terrain on which meaning can be enacted.
To understand a text is not to extract the author's intention, but to enter the same semiotic space and re-live the meaning as one's own — with one's own systems, histories, and interests in play.
Just as meaning is always co-instantiated, knowledge is always co-emergent.
Knowledge as Co-becoming
Relational knowing is not additive — it is transformative. When we know with, we are changed by the encounter. Our understanding grows not by accumulation, but by reconfiguration — of our concepts, categories, identities, and actions.
This kind of knowing cannot be owned. It is not a possession, but a practice — one that takes time, attentiveness, and vulnerability. It is grounded in response-ability: the capacity to be affected and to respond in ways that honour the otherness of what we know with.
Rethinking Objectivity
To know with is to acknowledge that we are never outside the world we seek to know. We are of it, with it, through it. Objectivity, then, is not the erasure of perspective but the deepening of relational accountability — the ethical commitment to let the world matter in how we speak, act, and inquire.
7 Knowledge as Ethical Encounter
“Every act of knowing is also an act of relating — and thus, of responsibility.”
From Epistemology to Ethics
In the classical view, knowledge is ethically neutral: we ask whether it is true, not whether it is good. But relational epistemology insists that the two cannot be separated. When knowing is a form of participation, then every act of knowing is also an act of positioning — a stance we take toward the world and those within it.
To know with something or someone is not simply to grasp or observe, but to enter into relation — to be changed by that relation, and to be accountable to it.
What We Choose to Know
There is an ethics in what we choose to pay attention to, to inquire into, to bring into focus. Do we treat the world as resource — as a stockpile of objects to master and manipulate? Or do we encounter it as presence — as a community of beings to respect and respond to?
In scientific discourse, it is easy to forget that the questions we ask shape the kinds of answers we can receive. The framing of inquiry is already an ethical act — it determines what is rendered visible, and what remains excluded or silenced.
The Matter of Method
Relational epistemology invites us to reframe method itself as an ethical question. How do we approach what we wish to know? Do we isolate, control, and reduce in order to predict and possess? Or do we attend, accompany, and engage in order to understand?
This is not a call to abandon rigour. On the contrary, it is a call to deepen it — to hold ourselves responsible not only for the accuracy of our claims, but for the consequences of our knowledge practices.
Language, Meaning, and Care
As we have seen throughout this series, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) shows that meaning is not passed along but brought forth — co-instantiated in relation. In such a model, understanding is not achieved by decoding, but by enacting: by participating in a shared potential for meaning.
This view reminds us that language is not neutral. It is a semiotic ecology — a living system in which meanings are cultivated, maintained, and transformed. How we mean is always a question of how we live together.
Relational Accountability
To know relationally is to accept that we are not separate from what we know — and that knowledge binds us to the world in new ways. With knowledge comes response-ability — the ethical capacity to respond with care, humility, and attentiveness.
In Indigenous epistemologies, this is not an abstract idea but a lived ethic. Knowledge is relational, and relation implies obligation: to the land, to ancestors, to future generations. Knowing is not a right; it is a responsibility.
The Closing Move
Relational epistemology does not end in certainty. It ends in co-becoming: in the recognition that we know only through our participation in the world, and that this participation is ongoing, unfinished, and open-ended.
In the final account, to know is not to own a truth, but to live in truth — to let the world transform how we see, how we speak, and how we act.
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