22 June 2025

Typologies of Reification

1 Processes Reified — Will, Becoming, Differentiation

How philosophers mistake linguistic unfolding for the movement of the world

Introduction

This post begins our typological survey of metaphysical reification. While the first two Ghosts series explored how individual philosophers misrecognised meaning as being, this series groups such reifications by grammatical function.

We begin with processes: the grammatical means by which language construes change, action, relation, and being. In systemic-functional linguistics (SFL), a process is realised by a verbal group — it organises participants, locates them in time, and enacts the semantic logic of experience.

When reified, processes become forces, flows, or logics within reality itself. This is not simply poetic metaphor: it is a deep metaphysical error in which the dynamics of meaning are mistaken for the dynamics of being.

Three major examples will serve to illustrate this pattern:

  1. Nietzsche’s Will — A reification of interpersonal process

  2. Heraclitus and Hegel’s Becoming — A reification of existential and material process

  3. Deleuze’s Differentiation — A reification of systemic potential and unfolding

1. Nietzsche’s Will: Modality and Interpersonal Process

Nietzsche posits will to power as the fundamental force behind all phenomena — not as a psychological impulse alone, but as an ontological principle. Life is not composed of things, he claims, but of willings, strivings, commandings.

This is a reification of modality — the interpersonal dimension of clause structure.

  • In SFL, modality expresses degrees of obligation or inclination (e.g., must, should, want to, intend to)

  • These are resources for enacting interaction between speakers — a semiotic force, not a material one

  • Will, in language, is not a thing: it is a feature of interpersonal engagement, negotiation, and projection

Nietzsche transposes this modality from the grammar of dialogue into the metaphysics of being. The modulated clause becomes the metaphysical engine.

This is the first gesture of reification: treating interpersonal meaning as a force in the world.

2. Becoming in Heraclitus and Hegel: The Clause as Ontology

Heraclitus's doctrine that "everything flows" (panta rhei) and Hegel’s dialectic of becoming are both attempts to model change as the deep structure of reality.

But change is not first observed — it is first construed in language, through processes.

  • The clause is the minimal unit of experiential unfolding in SFL

  • Different process types (material, mental, relational, etc.) are selected to construe different types of experience

  • Tense, aspect, and phase further position these processes in time and transition

What Heraclitus and Hegel identify as the structure of the cosmos is better understood as the structure of the clause.

  • For Heraclitus, change is eternal flux

  • For Hegel, change is contradiction and sublation, structured in triadic logic

Both elevate the sequencing of meaning — what SFL calls clause complexing — into a logic of being. The reification lies in mistaking the semiotic means of construing change for the metaphysical laws by which change occurs.

Becoming is not the nature of being; it is the mode by which meaning unfolds in grammar.

3. Deleuze’s Differentiation: The Virtual as Systemic Potential

As explored in Ghosts II, Deleuze radicalises process into differentiation — a kind of generative unfolding that resists typology and identity. His goal is not to capture things but to think becoming without being.

What he captures, unwittingly, is the logic of instantiation:

  • The system offers a structured field of semiotic potential

  • Instances do not repeat types; they realise new selections, which alter the potential itself

  • This is not repetition of the same, but repetition with difference

Deleuze reifies this semiotic productivity as a metaphysical ontology of difference. His “virtual” is the meaning potential of the system. His “actual” is the instance. His “differentiation” is the ongoing semiotic unfolding of the cline.

But this is not ontology. It is the logic of language: how meaning works, not how reality works.

Conclusion: What Happens When We Reify Process

Reifying process transforms semiotic architecture into metaphysical engines:

  • Will becomes a substance

  • Becoming becomes a structure

  • Differentiation becomes an essence

But all of these are first and foremost linguistic resources: ways of construing the flow of meaning in relation to time, force, agency, and change.

When philosophers forget that these are resources for making meaning — not features of the world in itself — they conjure powerful ghosts: metaphysical entities built from the shadow-logic of grammar.

Processes reified are meaning mistaken for motion.

2 Participants Reified — Substance, Soul, Monad

How the placeholders of process became the essence of being

Introduction

In the grammar of meaning, participants are not independent entities — they are functional roles within the architecture of the clause. They take part in processes, serve as actors, sensers, carriers, or tokens, and are defined by the relations in which they are involved.

But in philosophy, participants are often reified into things. They become substances, souls, monads — enduring, self-identical, and foundational.

This post explores how philosophy has repeatedly reified participant functions into metaphysical entities. The grammatical figures of meaning are mistaken for the furniture of the cosmos.

Three canonical reifications guide the analysis:

  1. Spinoza’s Substance — The infinite participant with no process

  2. Aristotle’s Soul — The participant as the telos of form

  3. Leibniz’s Monad — The participant as an instance divorced from process

1. Spinoza’s Substance: The Participant without a Clause

Spinoza describes substance as that which is in itself and is conceived through itself — infinite, indivisible, and necessarily existing. Everything else (attributes, modes) inheres in this one infinite substance.

From a grammatical point of view, this is the participant role divorced from any process:

  • In SFL, participants are defined within a process: someone does, feels, has, or is something

  • Without a process, a participant is grammatically incomplete — a semantic abstraction

  • To say something is without construing what it does or undergoes is to float a subject without a clause

Spinoza’s substance is just that: a metaphysical subject position with no process, no time, no vector of change. It is a participant purified of function, reified into ontology.

Substance, then, is the ghost of grammar’s actor — left hovering in metaphysical space.

2. Aristotle’s Soul: Telos as Participant Role

In Aristotle’s De Anima, the soul is “the form of a natural body having life potentially.” It is not a thing but the actualisation of form in matter — the organising principle of a living being.

Yet the soul becomes, in later philosophy and theology, a reified participant: a distinct thing that survives death, persists over time, and serves as the seat of identity.

What was originally a functional role — the coordination of potentialities in a biological system — becomes a metaphysical noun.

In grammatical terms:

  • Aristotle’s soul corresponds to a Carrier in a relational clause: X is Y

  • It describes a configuration of properties — not an independent essence

  • The soul is not in the body; it is the construal of the body’s being-alive

The reification occurs when this relational structure is misread as ontology: when “having a soul” is taken to mean “containing a thing” rather than instantiating a function.

Thus the soul is not a participant; it is a way of construing participants. Its metaphysical status is a residue of grammatical projection.

3. Leibniz’s Monad: The Isolated Participant

Leibniz’s monads are simple substances without parts — each a unique window on the universe, unfolding its own internal logic without interacting with others.

Monads are thus participants stripped of context:

  • They neither act nor are acted upon

  • They do not enter into processes with others

  • They are internally complex but externally inert

Grammatically, this is a participant cut off from process and from clause complexing:

  • No Actor/Goal relation

  • No mental process (they do not sense or think with others)

  • No projection — only self-enclosed reflection

The monad is the ultimate reification of the instant: a meaning instance detached from system, trajectory, or field.

Leibniz, in effect, abstracts the participant from interaction, from process, from dialogue — and builds a metaphysics of pure instantiation, frozen and isolated.

Conclusion: From Roles to Realities

Participants are not things. They are functions within meaning. Their role in the clause is to locate entities in relation to processes, perspectives, and contexts. But when philosophers forget the architecture of grammar, participants become:

  • Substance: the participant with no process

  • Soul: the participant misconstrued as essence

  • Monad: the participant severed from relation

Each is a ghost — the echo of grammar mistaken for the structure of the real.

When roles are mistaken for realities, metaphysics loses its footing. It wanders in search of entities that were never there to begin with — only ever figures in the dance of meaning.

3 Projection Reified — Mind, Truth, Representation

How the architecture of saying became the structure of being

Introduction

Projection is one of language’s most remarkable capacities: it allows meanings to be metaphenomenal — to be meanings about other meanings.

When someone says, He thinks it will rain, the clause it will rain is projected by the mental process thinks. Projection allows us to say what is thought, said, believed, doubted — enabling language to move beyond experience into its construal.

But in philosophy, this semiotic structure becomes metaphysics.

The capacity to project meaning is reified into:

  1. Mind — a thing that houses thought

  2. Truth — a relation between meaning and reality

  3. Representation — a mirror of the world within language

In each case, projection — a grammatical function — is misunderstood as a metaphysical faculty, relation, or structure.

1. Mind: The Reification of Mental Projection

When Descartes says cogito ergo sum, he inaugurates a vision of mind as a container for thought — a thing that thinks.

But in language, thinking is a mental process, and mind is not a thing but a role in projection:

  • The clause I think that X projects another clause (that X)

  • The “I” here is not a metaphysical subject but the Senser in a mental process

  • Thinking, knowing, believing — all construe semiotic acts, not metaphysical facts

Philosophy often reifies this Senser role into the Subject of metaphysics: a mind that thinks, perceives, judges.

But from a grammatical perspective, mind is not a thing — it’s a function in the semiotic system. It enables projection; it does not contain thought. It is position, not entity.

To treat projection as evidence of an inner realm is to forget that projection is itself semiotic — it tells us how language works, not what the world is.

2. Truth: Projected Clauses as Ontological Commitments

The notion of truth is tightly bound to projection:

  • In It is true that X, the clause X is projected

  • “Truth” is a stance taken toward a projection

  • It involves modality and evidentiality, not just correspondence

But philosophy has long treated truth as a relation between language and world, as though language refers and truth confirms.

From a grammatical standpoint, however:

  • A projected clause does not mirror reality — it construes meaning

  • Truth-values are evaluations of projection, not features of clauses themselves

  • What is true is not a thing, but a stance we take toward meaning

Frege and the early analytic tradition attempt to formalise truth as a property of propositions. But even this logic relies on projection — a layer of meaning about meaning.

Truth is not a metaphysical glue between language and world. It is a grammatical affordance, riding on the back of projection and evaluation.

3. Representation: The Mirror as Grammar

Peirce's semiotics, like much of post-Kantian philosophy, is preoccupied with representation — how signs come to stand for objects.

Representation is typically understood as a relation between mind and world, or sign and referent.

But in SFL terms, representation is not a metaphysical bridge; it is a grammatical function:

  • Language does not represent the world in a mirror-like fashion

  • It construes experience through systems of transitivity, projection

  • A “representation” is simply a meaning — structured semiotically, not ontologically

Peirce’s threefold division (icon, index, symbol) captures something important, but it risks projecting levels of abstraction into layers of reality.

When representation is reified, we get:

  • The world in the mind

  • The sign standing for something else

  • A metaphysics of mediation rather than a semiotics of meaning

Projection is the actual engine — it allows one meaning to include another. Representation is simply the ghost that arises when this function is mistaken for a metaphysical structure.

Conclusion: When Saying Becomes Being

Projection enables us to think about thoughts, speak about speech, doubt beliefs. It is a hall of mirrors, but one built by grammar.

Philosophy, forgetting this, has repeatedly reified projection into:

  • Mind: the source of meanings

  • Truth: the fit between meaning and world

  • Representation: the bridge between signs and things

Each is a metaphysical illusion cast by the semiotic architecture of projection. In every case, language about language is mistaken for the structure of the real.

Philosophy, it seems, has not just been haunted by grammar — it has often mistaken its own voice for the voice of the world.

4 Existentials Reified — Being, Nothingness, Presence

When grammatical existence becomes metaphysical essence

Introduction

In language, existential clauses serve a modest but powerful function: they allow us to bring something into discourse.

  • There is a cat on the mat

  • There was a revolution in 1917

  • There is nothing to be done

These constructions are grammatical strategies for introducing participants into a discourse field — signalling that something exists in the semiotic field, not necessarily in the world.

But philosophers, captivated by these structures, have often taken them as metaphysical pronouncements about Being, Nothingness, or Presence.

In this post, we examine three such reifications:

  1. Being — as in Heidegger’s ontology

  2. Nothingness — as in Sartre’s existentialism

  3. Presence — as in Derrida’s critique of metaphysics

Each emerges from a grammatical illusion: mistaking semiotic existence for ontological existence.

1. Being: The Illusion of Existential Substance

Heidegger's central question — What is the meaning of Being? — is framed by a profound sense of metaphysical mystery. But from a grammatical point of view, Being is not a substantive entity. It is a function of language.

In existential clauses like:

  • There is a tree

  • There are questions to be asked

The verb is/are serves to introduce an entity into a clause as existent within a particular frame.

Heidegger’s Dasein — the being-there of Being — tries to make grammatical presence into metaphysical structure. But in SFL terms:

  • There is X means X is now semiotically salient

  • The existential clause construes discourse, not being

  • Being is the effect of grammatical presence, not the ground of existence

To mistake existential grammar for existential ontology is to reverse the direction of construal — to treat grammar as a window onto metaphysics, rather than as a tool for construing meaning.

2. Nothingness: The Semiotics of Absence

Sartre famously claimed that nothingness is not a mere lack, but an ontological reality. In Being and Nothingness, he argues that absence structures human freedom.

But how does nothingness arise in language?

  • There is nothing on the table

  • Nothing matters anymore

Here, nothing plays the role of a pseudo-participant in an existential clause — a negative token that fills the same grammatical position as any noun (There is a book → There is nothing).

But this absence is semantic, not ontological. It’s the construal of a negative set — not X — not the positing of an actual entity called Nothingness.

Philosophy often reifies this:

  • Nothing becomes something: a strange object with properties

  • Absence becomes presence of absence, rather than a grammatical strategy

  • The grammar of negated existence is mistaken for a metaphysical force

From the standpoint of language, however, nothing has no independent referent — it is grammar’s way of signalling a negative existential field. Sartre’s ontologising of absence is thus another case of semiotic projection turned ontology.

3. Presence: The Spectre of Immediate Meaning

Derrida’s critique of presence as the hidden assumption of Western metaphysics challenges precisely the kind of reification that existential grammar supports.

But even Derrida, in tracing this metaphysics, does not always foreground the grammatical origins of presence.

In language, presence is often indexical:

  • There is John (as he walks in)

  • Here comes the bus

These expressions invoke temporal and spatial deixis — shifters that locate something in the field of shared perception.

But when presence is reified, it becomes:

  • The ideal of immediate meaning

  • The ground of self-evident truth

  • A metaphysical origin that guarantees reference

Derrida deconstructs this — but what he deconstructs is itself a grammatical mirage: the effect of deixis, existential predication, and projected immediacy.

SFL reminds us that presence is a resource for managing semiotic salience, not an ontological reality. It is not something in the world, but something in the text.

Conclusion: From Existential Clause to Ontological Claim

Existential clauses are not claims about the being of beings. They are strategies for bringing something into meaning — for introducing participants into the unfolding flow of discourse.

Philosophy’s reification of these structures gives us:

  • Being as substance

  • Nothingness as paradoxical presence

  • Presence as metaphysical immediacy

But all of these emerge from the grammar of introducing participants and managing salience — not from the structure of the universe.

To take there is as a metaphysical operator is to confuse discourse with ontology, semiotic prominence with existential status.

The ghosts of grammar, it seems, still haunt the metaphysical imagination.

5 Temporality Reified — Time, Duration, Eternity

When tense and aspect masquerade as metaphysics

Introduction

Time has long preoccupied philosophy — from Plato’s eternity and Kant’s a priori intuitions, to Bergson’s durée and Heidegger’s temporal Being. But what if many of these conceptions are not so much metaphysical discoveries as projections of linguistic systems?

In language, temporality is not merely expressed; it is construed. Through systems of tense, aspect, and modality, we structure processes across time: we locate them in the past, present, or future; we construe them as completed, ongoing, or hypothetical.

This post explores how philosophical accounts of temporality often reify the semiotic architecture of grammatical time, mistaking it for the nature of time itself.

We focus on three major reifications:

  1. Time — as structured succession (Kant)

  2. Duration — as indivisible flow (Bergson)

  3. Eternity — as timeless being (Plato)

Each case reflects not direct insight into time, but a semiotic projection — a shadow of grammar mistaken for a metaphysical truth.

1. Kant’s Time: Sequentiality as a Transcendental Form

Kant argued that time (along with space) is a form of intuition — a necessary precondition for human experience. All events, he claimed, are apprehended in succession, in a single temporal framework.

But in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), such sequentiality is not metaphysical. It is a product of:

  • Tense: locating a process relative to the speech event (past/present/future)

  • Logical structure: clause complexing arranges processes in linear order

  • Grammatical metaphor: nominalising temporal processes into entities (e.g., the passing of time)

Kant’s insight is profound, but it can be reframed: the mind doesn’t impose temporal order on raw sense data because time is transcendental — rather, we experience the world temporally because we construe it through language that is unavoidably sequenced.

Thus, time as structured succession is a semiotic artefact, reified into a metaphysical frame.

2. Bergson’s Duration: Aspectual Flow Turned Metaphysics

Bergson opposed the spatialisation of time in scientific and philosophical discourse. He argued for duration (la durée) — a continuous, qualitative flow, not a divisible sequence of moments.

But language, too, encodes temporal flow — in its aspect system:

  • I eat (simple present)

  • I am eating (progressive aspect)

  • I have been eating (perfect progressive)

  • I used to eat (habitual aspect)

These distinctions are not empirical records of time’s structure. They are resources for construing the phase, flow, and internal temporal texture of a process.

Bergson’s durée can thus be seen as a hypostatisation of aspect — the metaphysical projection of a grammatical capacity to construe process as flow.

When Bergson criticises static, clock-like time, he is in effect challenging a different set of grammatical metaphors: the nominalisation of time into countable units (e.g., a moment, an hour), and the reduction of process into bounded events.

His solution, however — durée — may still be grammar’s ghost, just cast in a different metaphysical register.

3. Plato’s Eternity: Tense-less Idealism

Plato’s Forms are often said to exist eternally — outside time, unaffected by becoming. Eternity, in this view, is not endless duration but absence of temporal change.

But in grammar, this absence of tense has its own semiotic role. We can:

  • Construct tenseless clauses (e.g., Two plus two is four, Water boils at 100°C)

  • Use generic reference to suggest timeless truths (e.g., Humans need sleep)

  • Deploy modality rather than tense to express truth-value (e.g., It must be true)

Plato’s eternity may thus reflect grammar’s capacity to construe propositions as timeless — as type-like rather than token-bound, as general truths rather than episodic claims.

But this grammatical function has been ontologised — turned into a metaphysical domain in which unchanging entities dwell beyond the flux of the world.

Eternity is not a realm beyond time — it is a grammatical stance, read metaphysically.

Conclusion: The Temporal Machinery of Meaning

Time in philosophy is often haunted by grammar’s architectures of tense and aspect:

  • Kant reifies sequentiality

  • Bergson reifies aspectual flow

  • Plato reifies tenseless generality

Each mistake the construal of time in language for the structure of time in reality.

SFL reminds us that tense and aspect are semiotic resources: they allow us to construe experience as temporally located and textured. But they do not mirror the metaphysical form of time — they make time meaningful in the act of meaning itself.

In reifying these structures, philosophy confuses the conditions of saying with the conditions of being.

Time, it seems, is one of grammar’s most pervasive ghosts.

6 Modality Reified — Necessity, Freedom, Contingency

When modal meaning is mistaken for metaphysical modality

Introduction

Philosophy has long sought to determine what must be, what can be, and what might have been otherwise. Concepts like necessity, freedom, and contingency are often taken as fundamental categories of reality — properties of the world itself, or constraints on thought and action.

But what if these notions are not metaphysical discoveries, but semiotic projections?

Language is inherently modal. Through the grammar of modality, we can express:

  • Degrees of certainty (must, might, could, probably, certainly)

  • Degrees of obligation (should, ought to, have to)

  • Degrees of permission (may, can)

  • Degrees of inclination (willing to, want to, reluctant to)

In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), these meanings form a system of interpersonal meaning — they are resources for negotiating commitment, obligation, and possibility between speakers.

This post explores how philosophy reifies these interpersonal resources into ontological categories — mistaking the semiotics of commitment for the metaphysics of being.

We focus on three exemplary reifications:

  1. Necessity — as logical or metaphysical compulsion (Leibniz)

  2. Freedom — as unconstrained agency (Kant)

  3. Contingency — as metaphysical indeterminacy (Deleuze)

Each, we argue, arises from reading the grammar of meaning as a theory of the world.

1. Leibniz’s Necessity: The Ghost of High-Modality Assertion

Leibniz famously distinguished between necessary truths (true in all possible worlds) and contingent truths (true in the actual world, but could have been otherwise). His metaphysics is built on the notion of logical necessity — truths that must be so.

But necessity, in SFL terms, is a matter of modal responsibility. When a speaker says:

  • It must be true that p

  • He has to go

  • This cannot be denied

They are interpersonally negotiating certainty, obligation, or prohibition. These are not properties of propositions themselves, but stances taken toward them.

Leibniz reifies this semiotic stance into a metaphysical category. He treats "must" not as a grammatical commitment, but as a structural condition of truth across possible worlds.

But possible worlds are not semantic necessities — they are logical reconstruals of what language allows us to imagine. The ghost here is the modal verb turned metaphysical.

2. Kant’s Freedom: The Unrealisable Clause

Kant’s theory of freedom hinges on the idea that we are autonomous agents capable of acting according to moral laws we give ourselves. But this freedom is not empirical — it is a transcendental condition for moral responsibility.

In language, we construe freedom through:

  • Mood: declarative, interrogative, imperative — allowing choice in speech roles

  • Modality: volition and inclination (willing to, want to, refuse to)

  • Projection: construing internal dialogue or intention (I told myself to stop)

When Kant claims we must presuppose freedom, he is elevating a semiotic possibility — the ability to mean otherwise — into a metaphysical principle.

But freedom, as construed in grammar, is not metaphysical. It is the unrealised clause — the potential for variation, the opening for negotiation, the capacity for projection.

What Kant calls the kingdom of ends might be better understood as the modal space of meaning, in which we construe ourselves as actors who could choose otherwise.

3. Deleuze’s Contingency: Difference Without Commitment

Deleuze resists all metaphysical fixity. His philosophy foregrounds contingency, difference, and the refusal of necessity. He celebrates a world in which everything could be otherwise.

This is a reification of low-modality discourse — a grammar of indeterminacy:

  • Might, perhaps, there’s no reason why not

  • Modal adjuncts expressing hedging (possibly, arguably, in some cases)

  • Disjunctive logic: refusing closure through alternatives (either... or..., not necessarily)

Deleuze constructs a metaphysics of open systems, but this openness is grammatically realised through choices not made, stances not fixed, structures not closed.

His ontology of contingency is, in this reading, a philosophical elaboration of the non-obligatory pathways through grammar — the uncommitted clause as metaphysical principle.

Conclusion: The Mood of Philosophy

Modality in language is interpersonal. It is about how we manage uncertainty, obligation, possibility, and negotiation. It is not about the structure of reality, but the stance we take toward propositions and actions.

Philosophy has often taken these stances and recast them as absolute properties:

  • Necessity as metaphysical law

  • Freedom as ontological autonomy

  • Contingency as structural openness

But SFL reminds us: modality is the grammar of meaning, not being.

To mistake modality for metaphysics is to take the interpersonal negotiation of meaning as a map of the cosmos.

In that sense, modality is not just a grammatical category — it is philosophy’s ghostwriter.

7 Taxonomy Reified — Universals, Categories, Essences

When the grammar of classification is mistaken for the structure of reality

Introduction

Much of Western philosophy has been preoccupied with what things are, what kind of things they are, and what makes them what they are. From Plato’s universals, to Aristotle’s categories, to Aquinas’s essences, philosophers have imagined a deep architecture of being — a taxonomic order that underlies the diversity of experience.

But this concern with classification may not stem from metaphysical insight. It may instead reflect the semiotic architecture of language itself — in particular, the grammar of class membership and taxonomic relations.

In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), classification is a feature of ideational meaning: language structures the world by grouping, nesting, and relating entities within taxonomic hierarchies. These hierarchies are grammatical construals — not of what is, but of how experience is sorted into meaning.

This post examines how philosophy has reified this semiotic sorting mechanism into metaphysical structures — treating our ways of meaning as if they were the architecture of reality itself.

1. Plato’s Universals: The Class Without Members

Plato’s theory of universals holds that for any set of things that share a property (e.g. all beautiful things), there exists a corresponding Form — the ideal universal that makes those things what they are.

But in SFL terms, what Plato is describing is the grammar of class membership:

  • A rose is a flower

  • Courage is a virtue

  • That is an example of justice

These are relational clauses, establishing a taxonomic relationship between tokens and types.

Plato turns the logical type into a real entity — the Form. But the type is not a thing; it is a meaning function — a way of locating a token within a system of generalisation.

To say this is just is not to invoke an ethereal justice, but to position an instance within a semiotic network of likeness and contrast.

In other words, Plato ontologises class relations — mistaking the grammar of classification for the existence of transcendent types.

2. Aristotle’s Categories: Grammatical Functions as Metaphysical Classes

Aristotle systematised the world into ten categories — such as substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and affection — which he took to be the basic ways of being.

But these "categories" closely mirror grammatical functions:

  • Substance → Participants

  • Action → Processes

  • Quality/Quantity → Attributes

  • Place/Time → Circumstantial adjuncts

  • Relation → Relational processes

Aristotle’s taxonomy reflects the ways in which language construes experience — the functions participants serve in processes, the modifiers that qualify them, the circumstances that locate them.

Rather than discovering the basic kinds of being, Aristotle may have catalogued the major semantic roles that grammar affords — giving metaphysical status to what are, in effect, functional components of clause structure.

His "categories" are not categories of being; they are categories of how we mean being.

3. Aquinas’s Essences: Features as Things

Aquinas builds on Aristotle to distinguish between essence (what something is) and existence (that something is). He argues that everything has an essence that determines its nature — what it must be to be what it is.

But essence, in linguistic terms, is not a metaphysical object — it is a feature in a system of oppositions. When we say:

  • A triangle has three sides

  • A human is a rational animal

  • Water is H₂O

We are not referring to inner substances, but to feature bundles that distinguish one kind of entity from others.

Essences, in this view, are the most stable and typical features assigned to a class — the core of prototypicality, not the kernel of being.

Aquinas treats these systemic regularities — these patterned selections from a network of oppositions — as if they were metaphysical realities.

But the essence of X is not something X contains — it is a semiotic expectation about what makes X recognisable within a taxonomy of meanings.

Conclusion: The Ghost of the Nominal Group

Philosophy has long been haunted by classification. It has mistaken the relational work of the clause, the hierarchical structure of nominal groups, and the features of lexical sets, for the structure of reality itself.

  • Plato’s universals are types reified into transcendent forms.

  • Aristotle’s categories are grammatical functions reframed as kinds of being.

  • Aquinas’s essences are prototypical features turned into ontological nuclei.

But these taxonomies are tools of language, not truths of ontology. They reflect how language builds systems of meaning — how it relates parts to wholes, members to classes, tokens to types.

To reify a type is to forget that it is a node in a semiotic network — and to imagine instead that it is a property of the world.

In that sense, philosophy’s taxonomies are not just conceptual — they are grammatical. And the ghost haunting them is the architecture of the nominal group.

8 The Metaphysics of Grammar

When the architecture of meaning becomes the architecture of being

Introduction

Philosophy, in its quest to describe reality, has often mistaken the forms of meaning for the forms of existence. What if metaphysics has not uncovered the structure of the world, but simply elaborated the deep grammar of our semiotic systems?

This post brings together the findings of this series, which has traced the reification of grammatical architecture into metaphysical thought. Each major philosophical domain — will, being, truth, time, essence — corresponds not to a metaphysical discovery but to a grammatical projection, function, or structure misconstrued as an ontological substrate.

It is not that philosophers made errors. It is that they made language mean more than it should — or rather, failed to recognise that what they were talking about was language itself.

1. Processes Reified: Making Meaning Do

Philosophy often takes doing, changing, or becoming as ontologically primary: will, flux, dialectic, differentiation.

But these are not discoveries about reality. They are process types — part of the grammatical architecture that enables us to construe experience dynamically.

Nietzsche’s will, Heraclitus’s becoming, Hegel’s synthesis, and Deleuze’s difference are all semantic energies — processual meanings treated as metaphysical forces.

The world may indeed be in flux, but grammar makes it so — by construing experience through material, mental, and relational processes that model change and transformation.

2. Participants Reified: Turning Roles into Things

Substance, soul, monad — these are not empirical discoveries but participant functions made metaphysical.

Grammar requires participants to animate its clauses: actors, sensers, carriers. They are not beings; they are functional roles in the construal of being.

Spinoza’s single substance, Aristotle’s ensouled body, and Leibniz’s windowless monads all begin life as actants in a grammatical system — roles that grammar fills so meaning can unfold.

When these roles are ontologised, we are no longer describing how language makes experience intelligible; we are describing that intelligibility as if it were intrinsic to the world.

3. Projection Reified: Ideas, Minds, and Truths

Much of philosophy rests on projection — modelling meanings about meanings: thought, belief, truth, representation.

These are made possible by projecting clauses: He said, She thought, It is true that.

Descartes’s mind-body dualism, Frege’s logic of sense and reference, Peirce’s theory of representation — all stem from semantic projection mechanisms.

They take the semiotic doubling of experience (language about language) and treat it as ontological layering: the mind as the space of thought, truth as correspondence, representation as relation.

But these are all functions of metafunction — grammar’s power to embed, report, and construe. When this semiotic scaffolding is forgotten, a metaphysics of minds and meanings emerges.

4. Existentials Reified: The Obsession with Being

"Being" is not a thing. It is a grammatical function — the function of existential clauses.

  • There is a tree.

  • There was once a king.

  • There exists a principle.

These clauses construe presence — not in space, but in meaning. Heidegger’s Being, Sartre’s Nothingness, and Derrida’s Presence are deep philosophical engagements with what is, isn’t, or might be — but always through the existential frame.

They inherit a grammatical ghost: the clause that says there is, and from it infer a reality that must be.

5. Temporality Reified: From Tense to Time

Tense is not time. It is a semiotic system — a way of construing events relative to a reference point.

Kant’s a priori time, Bergson’s durée, Plato’s eternal forms — these are not clocks or dimensions. They are interpretations of grammatical resources: tense, aspect, phase, and projection into time.

When grammar construes temporality, philosophy mistakes this construal for the metaphysical fabric of the world.

We speak as if time flows. But it is grammar that flows — from past to present to future — and we follow its current into metaphysics.

6. Modality Reified: Necessity and Freedom as Semiotic Potentials

Necessity, possibility, contingency — these are not properties of events, but modal meanings.

They are grammar’s way of managing uncertainty, commitment, and expectation.

Leibniz’s necessity, Kant’s freedom, Deleuze’s contingency: all are modal values that emerge from the grammar of potentiality — not from observation of the world, but from how language constrains what could, must, or might happen.

When modality is ontologised, we get metaphysics of fate and freedom. But the semiotic origin lies in interpersonal negotiation, not cosmic law.

7. Taxonomy Reified: The Myth of Essences and Universals

Grammar classifies. It builds hierarchies of meaning: classes, types, tokens, features.

Philosophy takes these and makes them real: Plato’s Forms, Aristotle’s categories, Aquinas’s essences.

But class membership is not ontology. It is a meaning relation — a way to make sense of diversity through semiotic generalisation.

Essence is not what something is. It is the set of features most expected in a system of classification.

Reification of taxonomy is the final step in grammar’s journey into metaphysics — the mistaking of the map for the territory.

Conclusion: Reading Philosophy as Semiotic History

If philosophy is haunted by grammar, then metaphysics is a palimpsest of semiotic architecture — a record not of what is, but of how we have construed what is.

Each major philosophical construct can be traced back to a grammatical resource:

  • Process types become becoming

  • Participant roles become substance

  • Projection becomes mind and truth

  • Existential clauses become Being

  • Tense and aspect become Time

  • Modality becomes Freedom

  • Taxonomy becomes Essence

In short, grammar does not describe reality — it creates the conditions under which reality can be described. And philosophy, in forgetting this, has often turned linguistic constraints into ontological necessities.

This typology is not a refutation of metaphysics. It is a semiotic archaeology: a reading of the ghosts in the machine — the invisible grammars that gave rise to the greatest abstractions in human thought.

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