Relational Ontology: From Things to Participations [Digest Version]

Introduction: Releasing the Grip of the Object

This series begins with a shift—a loosening of the grip that object-thinking holds over our intellectual and cultural habits. For too long, the world has been parsed into discrete things, and knowledge construed as their accurate representation. But cracks are appearing in this edifice. Climate change, quantum indeterminacy, algorithmic entanglements—these are not anomalies, but symptoms of a deeper incoherence.

What follows is not a proposal for abandoning knowledge, rigour, or realism. It is a call to rethink their foundations. Relational ontology does not reject objects, but refuses to treat them as primary. Instead, it begins from the premise that relation precedes identity, that to be is to participate.

This change of starting point has consequences. It alters how we speak of meaning, causality, objectivity, and truth. It offers a way of thinking that is not merely about the world, but in it and with it. Each post unfolds one aspect of this transformation, inviting the reader to consider what it would mean to think, speak, and act as if relation were not a property of things, but the condition of their emergence.

1 Why Relation? Why Now?

We begin with a question that quietly unsettles the foundations of modern thought: What if the world is not composed of things, but of relations?

For centuries, Western metaphysics has taken the substance as its unit of reality—discrete objects with defined properties, existing independently and interacting externally. But what if this picture is misleading? What if relations are not merely what connect things, but what constitute them?

This is not a merely abstract concern. The ecological crisis, the collapse of stable identities, and the politics of interconnectedness all demand a rethink of the ontology that underwrites our concepts, categories, and practices. Relational ontology is emerging across disciplines as a way of making sense of a world that no longer fits into tidy, isolated boxes.

In this series, we propose that relation is not secondary to being. It is the condition of being. To be is to be with. From physics to philosophy, from semiotics to science studies, we are witnessing the rise of a worldview in which the fundamental unit is not the atom, but the entanglement.

This first post introduces the shift from substance to relation. The posts that follow explore its implications: how it changes our understanding of reality, knowledge, objectivity, and the work of living ethically in a shared world.

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2 The Substance Mistake

What is the problem with substances? At first glance, nothing. We encounter entities—rocks, rivers, cats, chairs—and it makes sense to treat them as things that exist in themselves. This common-sense realism is useful, even necessary. But as a metaphysics, it is limiting.

Substance ontology assumes that entities precede relations. A cat exists, and then it relates—to its food, to the sunbeam, to us. The cat has properties: furry, four-legged, autonomous. But these properties are its own, possessed independently of interaction.

Relational ontology turns this around. It holds that what a cat is cannot be separated from its relations—biological, ecological, semiotic, affective. There is no cat apart from the world it co-constitutes. Its 'properties' are patterns of participation.

This shift echoes across disciplines. Quantum physics teaches us that particles do not have definite states until they are measured—their 'being' is relational. Ecology shows that no organism is self-contained—all are nodes in metabolic webs. Linguistics reveals that meaning arises not from words alone, but from systems of difference and co-text.

Substance ontology is not wrong so much as partial. It freezes the flow of becoming into snapshots of being. It mistakes the temporary coherence of entities for their independent existence. Relational ontology restores motion, mutuality, and becoming to the heart of being.

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3 Participation All the Way Down

If relation is primary, what kind of world does this describe? It is a world not of things that have relations, but of relations that enact things. Entities are not the building blocks of the world. They are events—emergent patterns of participation within larger relational flows.

To be is to participate. And participation is not a surface feature, but a structuring principle. The world becomes a meshwork of interdependencies, where agency is distributed and identity is always in formation.

This changes what we mean by 'individuals'. An individual is not a bounded unit, but a site of intersection. It is where particular patterns of relation temporarily stabilise into recognisable form. But that form is dynamic, sustained only through ongoing processes of interaction.

This also changes our conception of causality. Causes are not billiard-ball pushes from one thing to another, but intra-actions within relational fields. What 'causes' an event is the configuration of the entire field—a mutual responsiveness, not a linear chain.

Language, too, must be rethought. Meaning is not transmitted from one mind to another. It is co-enacted, co-instantiated, within systems of shared potential. Every utterance is an event of actualisation—a becoming-together of meaning.

In short, the world is not made of nouns, but of verbs. Not things, but happenings. Not substance, but participation.

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4 Meaning as Relational Actualisation

One of the most profound implications of a relational ontology is its redefinition of meaning. Meaning is not a content that floats above reality, nor a code that maps cleanly onto the world. It is an emergent effect of participation. Meaning happens in relation.

To mean something is to enact a difference that makes a difference—within a field of potential meanings. It is to participate in the unfolding of sense, where context, co-text, and interaction all matter. Meaning is never fully owned by a speaker nor wholly determined by a system. It arises in the event of semiotic actualisation.

This is why no meaning is ever final. It is always provisional, situated, responsive. It depends on histories of use, affective investments, and material constraints. It is not decoded from above, but co-constituted from within.

From this view, semiotics becomes the study of relational actualisation—of how systems of meaning potential are instantiated in specific contexts. It is the tracing of how signs participate in world-making, not as transparent labels, but as active agents in the shaping of perception, action, and affect.

In Systemic Functional Linguistics, this is formalised as a model of instantiation: meaning potentials (systems) are actualised in meaning instances (texts). But instantiation is not one-way. Every instance also feeds back, subtly shifting the potential. Meaning, then, is a field of recursive participation—a site where experience, history, and symbol co-evolve.

Meaning is not in things. It is in the relation that brings forth a difference, a coherence, an orientation. It is an act of becoming-with.

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5 Rethinking Objectivity

The idea that the world is a participatory event invites a pressing question: what becomes of objectivity? If all knowledge is situated within relational unfolding, does this collapse truth into relativism? In a relational ontology, the answer is no—but only if we are prepared to rethink what objectivity means.

Objectivity is not abandoned. It is transformed. It ceases to be the view from nowhere and becomes a practice of accountable participation. The goal is not to escape relation, but to recognise and reckon with our place within it.

From Detachment to Situatedness

In substance-based ontologies, objectivity is often associated with detachment: the ability to observe without interference. But in a relational ontology, such detachment is impossible. Observation is always an act of participation. We do not merely receive data; we enact selections, set parameters, collapse potentials into actuals. This is not a failure of objectivity—it is its condition.

What shifts is the ideal. The aim is no longer to erase the observer, but to foreground the structure of participation: to trace how our perspective has come to be, what it opens up, and what it forecloses.

Epistemology Within Relation

Knowing is not a disembodied achievement. It is a mode of being-with. Every act of knowing is situated in a nexus of relations—historical, material, symbolic, affective. The question is not whether we can remove ourselves from these, but how we can move within them with greater precision, humility, and care.

This is what accountable participation means. It is not a denial of objectivity, but a commitment to an objectivity that begins with situatedness—one that asks not only what is true? but also how does this truth come to matter? and for whom?

Patterns of Recurrence and Inference

Importantly, relational ontology does not deny regularity, repeatability, or inference. Quite the opposite. Patterns emerge precisely through the recurrence of relational configurations. What changes is the status of such patterns: they are not features of a world out there, but expressions of the system’s actualisations over time. They can be tracked, modelled, and made increasingly robust—but they remain contingent upon the relations that produce them.

This is not relativism. It is realism—but of a kind that recognises the world as dynamically co-constructed rather than statically pre-given.

Reflexivity and the Practice of Objectivity

A relational approach demands reflexivity: a continual awareness of the conditions and consequences of our participation. This includes the disciplines we work within, the tools we use, and the metaphors we inherit. It is not enough to speak of “data” or “facts” as if they emerge unshaped. Every fact is the outcome of selection, framing, and interpretation. This does not make facts unreal; it makes them relationally real.

Objectivity, then, becomes a virtue of openness: openness to revising frames, testing assumptions, and acknowledging entanglements. It is a practice, not a position.

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6 Knowing With—Toward a Relational Epistemology

If the world is constituted through relation, and objectivity is a practice of accountable participation, then knowing is not a private act of acquisition, but a shared process of co-becoming. In this final post, we articulate a relational epistemology: not knowing about, but knowing with.

To know is to enter into relation—to be changed by what one seeks to understand. This is not a failure of rigour; it is its fulfilment. In a relational world, epistemology becomes a mode of responsiveness: a way of living attentively in the presence of others, human and more-than-human, where every act of understanding is also an act of world-making.

Knowledge as Participation

In traditional models, knowledge is possession: one gains knowledge, accumulates facts, builds conceptual systems. But within a relational ontology, this metaphor no longer holds. Knowledge cannot be owned. It is not a static entity that sits in a mind or on a page. It is a process—a pattern of co-actualisation between knowers and knowns.

Knowing, then, is not separable from being. To know something is to become-with it, to let its potentials shape one’s own. Knowledge is not what I have about the world, but what we come to be together through our mutual engagement.

From Representation to Intra-Action

This shifts the function of knowledge from representation to intra-action—a term that underscores how entities do not pre-exist their interactions but emerge through them. Knowing is not the mirroring of a world already made; it is a participation in the making of the world. To know is to intervene, to co-compose, to respond.

This entails responsibility. What we bring into view is not neutral. It is a commitment—a participation in particular worldings, with their own inclusions, exclusions, and consequences.

Knowing-with as Ethical Practice

Relational epistemology is inseparable from ethics. If knowledge is participation, then all knowing is also a form of relating—and all relations carry ethical weight. What matters is not only what we know, but how we participate in the knowing: whether we make space for the other, whether we flatten difference, whether we listen or extract.

This is not a call to abandon analysis, but to deepen it—to let rigour and relationality inflect one another. Knowing-with is rigorous not because it pretends to be neutral, but because it strives to be reflexive, situated, and attentive to the difference that makes a difference.

Knowledge as World-Making

In this framework, knowledge becomes a form of world-making. Not because it invents reality from nothing, but because it selects, frames, and instantiates potential into particular actualities. Our categories, our questions, our models—all participate in shaping the world we inhabit and inherit.

This is not to say that anything goes. It is to say that everything matters. Each act of knowing is an intervention in the unfolding of relation. As such, the epistemic is always also the ontological.

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Afterword: From Relation to Responsibility

To adopt a relational ontology is not simply to choose a different lens. It is to participate differently in the world’s unfolding. If reality is relational, then our categories are not innocent. Our epistemologies are not neutral. Our descriptions are themselves interventions.

This insight demands a reflexive stance—not only towards what we know, but how we come to know, and what our knowing does. The point is not to relativise truth, but to situate it; not to discredit facts, but to understand them as the outcome of particular participations, with particular effects.

Such a stance is not only philosophical, but ethical. Relational knowing is never detached. It is an act of response and responsibility. It asks not only what is?, but also who are we becoming by the ways we ask?

If this series has traced a movement—from things to participations, from detachment to intra-action, from objectivity to accountability—it ends by returning us to the question that animated it: What kind of world do we bring forth when we treat relation as the ground of reality?

The answer, perhaps, is not a world we can control, but one we might learn to inhabit more wisely, more attentively, and with greater care.

Relational Ontology: From Things to Participations

1 What Is a Relational Ontology?

Ontology concerns itself with the question of being — of what exists and in what manner. It is not a question of what we know, nor of what we value, but of the fundamental presuppositions we bring to our engagement with the world. This series addresses such presuppositions explicitly, with a focus on what we will call relational ontology.

Traditionally, Western thought has been dominated by a substance ontology: a metaphysical stance that treats entities as primary and their relations as secondary. According to this view, the world is composed of discrete objects, each possessing intrinsic properties, and any relation between them is incidental or externally imposed.

By contrast, a relational ontology begins with the premise that relations are prior to relata. That is to say, it is not things that relate, but relations that bring things into being. “Things,” on this view, are not foundational elements of reality, but emergent phenomena: transient stabilisations within ongoing patterns of interaction. From this standpoint, reality is not composed of self-contained units but of events, processes, and participations. It is not the presence of substance that grounds being, but the ongoing actualisation of potential through relation.

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Ontology and Everyday Assumptions

While the term may suggest abstract metaphysical speculation, ontology has direct and pervasive implications. It conditions the frameworks within which we conceptualise knowledge, identity, language, ethics, science, and more. Consider the contrast:

• If knowledge is construed as the accumulation of facts by a detached observer, then inquiry becomes a matter of acquisition. If, instead, knowledge is relationally constituted — a matter of participation — then inquiry becomes a practice of attunement.

• If the self is imagined as an autonomous, bounded entity, then sociality becomes secondary, even optional. But if selfhood is emergent within relation, then sociality is constitutive of subjectivity.

• If language is seen as a code for representing pre-existing objects, then meaning appears static. But if meaning is realised through relational instantiation, then language is an unfolding of interaction, not a mirror of the world.

These examples indicate the far-reaching consequences of one’s ontological commitments. A shift in ontology is not simply philosophical — it is transformative.

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Toward a Participatory World

The position we wish to articulate in this series is that participation is prior to presence. What exists is not first a set of entities and only later their relations, but rather a field of unfolding potential, in which instances of meaning, action, and being are co-actualised through relation. This is a world not of fixed realities but of emergent configurations — not of static identities, but of mutual becoming.

This orientation is informed by several disciplinary commitments:

• A systemic functional linguistic account of meaning as relationally stratified and contextually instantiated;

• A neurobiological model of consciousness as selection within nested systems of coordination;

• A quantum theoretical framework in which observation constitutes, rather than merely records, phenomena;

• And an overarching commitment to understanding reality not as objective presence but as semiotic participation.

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Looking Ahead

This first post offers an outline. The five that follow will articulate this ontological orientation in more detail. They will address the priority of relation, the ontological status of potential and instance, the world as participatory event, and the implications of grounding without foundation. A final post will draw these threads together in reflection.

For now, we will close with a proposition that frames what follows:

If there are no things prior to relation, then ontology is not a study of what is, but of how being is made possible through participation.

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2 The Priority of Relation

At the heart of relational ontology lies a reversal: rather than beginning with entities and asking how they relate, we begin with relation itself. This reversal is not simply theoretical; it reconfigures how we understand existence, agency, and structure. It challenges us to see that relations do not connect pre-existing things — they bring things into being.

In this view, relation is ontologically prior to relata. That is to say, what we think of as “things” — bodies, selves, objects, identities — do not pre-exist the network of relations in which they participate. They are not the source of relation but its effect. This is not merely a re-description; it is a different metaphysical stance, one that refuses the assumption of atomism and posits instead a world constituted in and through ongoing interaction.

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Emergence, Not Construction

To say that entities emerge through relation is not to say they are constructed in the sense of being artificial or illusory. The charge of “anti-realism” often levelled at relational perspectives mistakes emergence for fabrication. But relational ontology does not deny the reality of things; it denies their independent reality. It insists that what is real is real as a function of relation — and that to understand anything apart from the relations that make it possible is to misunderstand it fundamentally.

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The Individual as Emergent Node

Take the example of the self. In a substance ontology, the self is a bounded individual, self-identical across contexts, capable of standing apart from its environment and engaging it at will. In a relational ontology, the self is a node in a field of relations — not reducible to that field, but not separable from it either. Its identity is not given once and for all but enacted through patterns of participation.

This view resonates with certain traditions in systems theory, cognitive science, and anthropology. But here we are framing it ontologically: not simply as a way the self behaves, but as a condition of its being.

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Meaning as Relational Actualisation

The same applies to meaning. Meaning is not a property of signs, nor a correspondence between language and world. It is a relation — a triadic relation in which a sign functions for an interpreter in a given context. Systemic Functional Linguistics offers a particularly powerful model of this process, understanding meaning not as pre-existing but as instantiated in and through contextually motivated choices within a structured potential.

Meaning, then, is neither located in the signifier nor in the signified, but in the relation between potential and instance, between system and situation. It is a process of actualisation — always dependent, always situated.

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Implications for Knowledge

When relation is given ontological priority, knowledge cannot be the apprehension of fixed truths about independent objects. Instead, knowing becomes a relational practice — an act of coordination, participation, and co-emergence. It is not that the world is unknowable, but that what we know of it is inseparable from how we come to know. This is not relativism. It is a call for reflexivity, for attentiveness to the ways in which knowing is always already embedded in relation.

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A World Made of With

Relational ontology insists that we live not in a world of things, but in a world of with. We are never alone, never outside. We are in relation — and through relation, we become.

The next post will extend this line of thought by examining the ontological status of potential. If relational ontology begins with relation, what does it mean to speak of the potential from which instances emerge?

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3 The Ontological Status of Potential

If relational ontology begins with relation, it must also account for that which can come into relation. This brings us to the concept of potential. What is potential, and how does it differ from — yet condition — the actuality of things?

In a substance ontology, potential tends to be treated as secondary or derivative: the possible is simply that which is not yet actual. In a relational ontology, by contrast, potential is a mode of being in its own right. It is not the negation of actuality, but the field from which actualisation becomes possible. This view requires a careful rethinking of both potential and instance, and of the relation between them.

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Potential Is Not a Shadow of the Actual

To approach potential relationally is to reject the idea that the actual is more real than the possible. Instead, potential is what makes actualisation possible. It is not what things lack before they come into being; it is the structured horizon of becoming — the web of affordances, constraints, and systemic tendencies from which instances emerge.

In Systemic Functional Linguistics, this is the distinction between meaning potential and meaning instance: the potential is structured, not amorphous; and the instance is an actualisation, not an exception. The same applies at the ontological level: the potential is not an unformed void, but a differentiated field of possibilities shaped by patterns of past actualisations and the systems that make them available.

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Instantiation as Ontological Process

The process by which potential becomes instance — instantiation — is not merely a linguistic phenomenon. It is an ontological principle. Actual entities are not static things but emergent outcomes: instances of relational actualisation. They do not stand apart from the field of potential; they express it. Each instance reconfigures the potential from which it emerged, just as each utterance in language shifts the probabilities within the meaning system for future utterances.

In this way, instantiation is not a linear unfolding from possibility to reality; it is a recursive process, a dynamic interplay between what has been and what may yet become.

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The Temporality of Potential

Potential is inherently temporal. It is what could happen, not in some detached logical sense, but in the thick present of the unfolding world. It is always situated — conditioned by history, shaped by pattern, and open to contingency. In quantum physics, for instance, the wavefunction describes a field of potential outcomes, and measurement instantiates one among them. But the wavefunction is not “less real” than its collapse. It is a different mode of reality: a reality of openness and relation.

Similarly, in the relational ontology articulated here, potential is the mode in which relational configurations can take shape. It is not inert. It is active possibility.

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From Possibility to Participation

To understand potential relationally is to recognise that possibility is not a neutral backdrop against which action occurs. It is a product of past actualisations and an invitation to future ones. It is not that we act upon potential; we participate in its unfolding. Thus, the shift from a substance to a relational ontology is also a shift from acting on the world to participating with it.

The instance is not a singularity but a node — a moment of coalescence that draws from, and returns to, the field of potential. And that field, in turn, is not fixed, but continuously reshaped through participation.

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Looking Ahead

The next post will explore the consequences of this view for how we understand the world itself — not as a set of objects, but as a participatory event. If all beings are emergent from relation, and all relations unfold from a field of potential, then what is the world but the ongoing play of their co-actualisation?

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4 The World as Participatory Event

If relational ontology gives ontological primacy to relation and recognises potential as a mode of being, then it follows that the world itself is not a static container filled with things, but a dynamic unfolding of participatory events. This view entails a radical reconfiguration of what we mean by “world.” The world is not a stage on which entities act, but the ongoing relational becoming of those entities — an event continually co-composed by its participants.

This is not a metaphor. It is a metaphysical claim: the world is not made of things, but of the relations that instantiate things in particular ways at particular times.

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Against the Background/Foreground Divide

In substance ontology, the world is often conceived as a backdrop — an objective, external environment in which subjects and objects appear. This assumption underwrites many dualisms: mind/world, subject/object, figure/ground. But a relational ontology resists this division. There is no neutral background against which things stand out; what appears does so only through participation.

The world is always already involved. It is not a setting for events but their condition — not external to relation, but its expression. To exist is to participate in the event that is world-making.

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Participation as Ontological Category

In this view, participation is not an epistemological feature (how we know the world), but an ontological one (what the world is). To be is to participate. This applies not only to human beings, but to all entities, forces, and processes — from cells to stars, from atoms to meanings. Nothing is outside relation. Nothing is outside the world-event.

Participation is thus the mode in which all actuality occurs. And crucially, it is non-isolable. No entity can be wholly disentangled from the relations through which it comes to be. Even attempts to define or delimit something — to draw a boundary — are themselves acts of participation, reconfiguring the potential for what can be seen, said, and done.

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The World as Recursively Co-Actualising

If the world is an event of participatory unfolding, then it is not simply happening to us. We are happening with it. This “with” is not additive — it is generative. Our participation does not occur within a pre-given world; our participation is the world, or more precisely, a moment in its continual becoming.

This has profound consequences. It means the world is never finished. It is not the sum of all that exists, but the ongoing play of emergence, collapse, and reconstitution — a recursive negotiation between potential and instance, where each instance modifies the potential for future participation.

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The Ethics of Co-Becoming

To frame the world as participatory event is also to reframe responsibility. If we are always already participants, then our task is not to seek a position of objective neutrality, but to cultivate attentiveness to the patterns we co-actualise. Knowing is no longer a matter of standing apart, but of leaning in — carefully, critically, and with care for what we bring into being.

This is not simply a philosophical point. It is a call to engage differently — with each other, with the more-than-human, with the systems and structures through which meaning and matter take shape.

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Next: The Limits of Objectivity

The next post will confront a central implication of this view: if the world is participatory, what becomes of objectivity? Is it still possible to speak of knowledge that does not collapse into mere perspective? We will argue that the problem lies not in abandoning objectivity, but in rethinking what it can mean — not as detachment, but as accountable participation.

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5 Rethinking Objectivity

The idea that the world is a participatory event invites a pressing question: what becomes of objectivity? If all knowledge is situated within relational unfolding, does this collapse truth into relativism? In a relational ontology, the answer is no — but only if we are prepared to rethink what objectivity means.

Objectivity is not abandoned. It is transformed. It ceases to be the view from nowhere and becomes a practice of accountable participation. The goal is not to escape relation, but to recognise and reckon with our place within it.

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From Detachment to Situatedness

In substance-based ontologies, objectivity is often associated with detachment: the ability to observe without interference. But in a relational ontology, such detachment is impossible. Observation is always an act of participation. We do not merely receive data; we enact selections, set parameters, collapse potentials into actuals. This is not a failure of objectivity — it is its condition.

What shifts is the ideal. The aim is no longer to erase the observer, but to foreground the structure of participation: to trace how our perspective has come to be, what it opens up, and what it forecloses.

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Epistemology Within Relation

Knowing is not a disembodied achievement. It is a mode of being-with. Every act of knowing is situated in a nexus of relations — historical, material, symbolic, affective. The question is not whether we can remove ourselves from these, but how we can move within them with greater precision, humility, and care.

This is what accountable participation means. It is not a denial of objectivity, but a commitment to an objectivity that begins with situatedness — one that asks not only what is true? but also how does this truth come to matter? and for whom?

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Patterns of Recurrence and Inference

Importantly, relational ontology does not deny regularity, repeatability, or inference. Quite the opposite. Patterns emerge precisely through the recurrence of relational configurations. What changes is the status of such patterns: they are not features of a world out there, but expressions of the system’s actualisations over time. They can be tracked, modelled, and made increasingly robust — but they remain contingent upon the relations that produce them.

This is not relativism. It is realism — but of a kind that recognises the world as dynamically co-constructed rather than statically pre-given.

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Reflexivity and the Practice of Objectivity

A relational approach demands reflexivity: a continual awareness of the conditions and consequences of our participation. This includes the disciplines we work within, the tools we use, and the metaphors we inherit. It is not enough to speak of “data” or “facts” as if they emerge unshaped. Every fact is the outcome of selection, framing, and interpretation. This does not make facts unreal; it makes them relationally real.

Objectivity, then, becomes a virtue of openness: openness to revising frames, testing assumptions, and acknowledging entanglements. It is a practice, not a position.

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Toward a Relational Epistemology

In this light, epistemology itself must be rethought. Knowing is not the accumulation of representations, but the cultivation of capacities to participate meaningfully in a co-actualising world. It is not a conquest of the unknown, but an invitation to enter more deeply into the unfolding of relation.

The final post in this series will explore the implications of this view for what it means to know with — to understand not as possession, but as mutual emergence.

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6 Knowing With — Toward a Relational Epistemology

If the world is constituted through relation, and objectivity is a practice of accountable participation, then knowing is not a private act of acquisition, but a shared process of co-becoming. In this final post, we articulate a relational epistemology: not knowing about, but knowing with.

To know is to enter into relation — to be changed by what one seeks to understand. This is not a failure of rigour; it is its fulfilment. In a relational world, epistemology becomes a mode of responsiveness: a way of living attentively in the presence of others, human and more-than-human, where every act of understanding is also an act of world-making.

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Knowledge as Participation

In traditional models, knowledge is possession: one gains knowledge, accumulates facts, builds conceptual systems. But within a relational ontology, this metaphor no longer holds. Knowledge cannot be owned. It is not a static entity that sits in a mind or on a page. It is a process — a pattern of co-actualisation between knowers and knowns.

Knowing, then, is not separable from being. To know something is to become-with it, to let its potentials shape one’s own. Knowledge is not what I have about the world, but what we come to be together through our mutual engagement.

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From Representation to Intra-Action

This shifts the function of knowledge from representation to intra-action — a term that underscores how entities do not pre-exist their interactions but emerge through them. Knowing is not the mirroring of a world already made; it is a participation in the making of the world. To know is to intervene, to co-compose, to respond.

This entails responsibility. What we bring into view is not neutral. It is a commitment — a participation in particular worldings, with their own inclusions, exclusions, and consequences.

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Knowing-with as Ethical Practice

Relational epistemology is inseparable from ethics. If knowledge is participation, then all knowing is also a form of relating — and all relations carry ethical weight. What matters is not only what we know, but how we participate in the knowing: whether we make space for the other, whether we flatten difference, whether we listen or extract.

This is not a call to abandon analysis, but to deepen it — to let rigour and relationality inflect one another. Knowing-with is rigorous not because it pretends to be neutral, but because it strives to be reflexive, situated, and attentive to the difference that makes a difference.

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Knowledge as World-Making

In this framework, knowledge becomes a form of world-making. Not because it invents reality from nothing, but because it selects, frames, and instantiates potential into particular actualities. Our categories, our questions, our models — all participate in shaping the world we inhabit and inherit.

This is not to say that anything goes. It is to say that everything matters. Each act of knowing is an intervention in the unfolding of relation. As such, the epistemic is always also the ontological and the ethical.

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An Invitation

Relational ontology does not give us a stable platform on which to stand. It invites us into a practice of becoming-with — of living knowledgeably and responsibly in a world that is never merely given, but always in the making.

To take this seriously is not to despair over the loss of certainty. It is to recognise that we are always already involved, and to ask: what kinds of worlds do we want to participate in bringing forth?

Relational Ontology of Desire

1 Desire Is Not Possession, but Orientation

Desire is often spoken of as if it were a hunger: a private lack that seeks satisfaction in an object. In everyday speech, we “want something,” “yearn for it,” “try to get it,” “have it,” or “lose it.” The grammar of possession saturates our metaphors of desire. But what if this is not the most helpful way to think about wanting?

This series proposes an alternative: that desire is not a form of ownership, but a form of orientation — a way of being turned toward the world, entangled with it, directed through it.

In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), mental processes — the processes of consciousness — are classified into types. One such type is the desiderative, including verbs like want, wish, hope, fear, long for, and believe in. These are not descriptions of inner containers of emotion. They are projections: the speaker positions themselves toward a possible future or state of affairs. To desire is to mean — not just about the world, but toward it.

When a child says “I want to be an astronaut,” they are not expressing a transaction with a future object. They are articulating a stance toward the world — one of openness, aspiration, and alignment with certain values. That desire orients them. It brings parts of the world into relevance (rockets, stars, exploration) while backgrounding others. Over time, that orientation may be reinforced or redirected. The child may become a physicist or a teacher or a poet. But the initial desire was not a failed possession. It was a direction taken — a line of flight.

This shift from possession to orientation is crucial for a relational ontology. It allows us to see desire as something fundamentally ecological. We are not sealed units pursuing self-contained goals. We are situated beings, always already interwoven with contexts, histories, and others. Our desires emerge not from inner voids, but from our participation in a world that is already meaningful — and always becoming more so.

When we treat desire as possession, we often reduce it to commodity: “I want this thing.” But when we recognise desire as orientation, we begin to ask: “What kind of world am I aligning with? Who else is affected by this orientation? What does this desire make possible — or impossible?”

To desire is to lean. To angle oneself. To feel the pull of something not yet realised. In this view, even unfulfilled desire is not failure; it is trajectory.

In the posts to come, we will explore how desire participates in world-making, how it is patterned by language, how myth expresses collective longing, and how to cultivate a more ethical stance of wanting-with.

But for now, we begin with this reframing:

Desire is not what we have — it is how we move.

2 Desire as World-Making

Desire is not just something we feel — it is something we do. And in doing it, we help bring worlds into being.

The metaphor of desire as lack has long dominated Western thought. From Plato’s eros to Freud’s drive theory, desire is imagined as a deficit to be filled. But if we approach desire as orientation rather than possession, a different ontology emerges: desire becomes a generative force. It is not the shadow of what-is-missing, but the movement of what-is-becoming.

To desire is to make selections: from the endless flow of experience, we highlight, foreground, and follow certain paths. These selections are not neutral. They form patterns of attention, care, memory, and meaning. Desire links objects, people, places, and possibilities into constellations. These constellations shape not only how we see the world, but what the world becomes.

This is why desire is never private. Even our most solitary longings are saturated with the social: shaped by language, culture, history, and ideology. When I say “I want,” I am already participating in meaning systems that predate me and extend beyond me. My desire is mine only in the sense that it is my way of orienting through our shared world.

In this sense, desire is performative. It helps enact the realities it projects. When a community desires freedom, dignity, or justice, it is not simply naming what it lacks — it is constructing the horizon toward which it moves. The same is true of desire for wealth, power, or purity. Desire doesn’t just express a world; it helps institute one.

This is most visible in collective narratives. Myths, ideologies, spiritual traditions, even branding campaigns — all shape desire by telling stories of what is worth wanting. They offer orientations: toward salvation, success, belonging, transcendence, or transformation. And in orienting ourselves within these stories, we contribute to their ongoing enactment.

This is world-making — not in the sense of solipsistic fantasy, but in the deeply relational sense that meaning and reality are always co-constituted. What we desire matters, because it matters materially: desire directs action, binds communities, configures values, and inflects possibility.

We live in the worlds our desires help sustain.

In the next post, we’ll explore how this plays out in language, especially through the grammar of desiderative mental processes. But for now, let us pause and ask:

What kind of world is your desire making possible?

3 The Grammar of Desire

If desire is a way of orienting toward the world, then language is one of its most powerful instruments. Not because language represents desire, but because it enacts it. And like all enactments, it has a grammar — a set of patterned ways in which desire is construed and made real in meaning.

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) offers us a useful lens. In this model, meaning is shaped by processes, each type bringing its own ontological commitments. Among these are mental processes, which are concerned with the inner life of consciousness. These divide into two major subtypes:

• Cognitive: thinking, knowing, perceiving

• Desiderative: wanting, hoping, fearing, longing

Where cognitive processes tend to project propositions — statements about what is or might be — desiderative processes tend to project proposals. They construe what ought to be, or what is wished for, feared, sought, or resisted.

In other words, cognition aligns with probability; desire aligns with obligation and inclination. And this distinction is not only grammatical — it is ontological. Knowing and wanting are not simply different acts of mind; they are different ways of participating in the unfolding of meaning.

Consider:

• I know she’ll come (projection of a likely proposition)

• I hope she’ll come (projection of a wished-for proposal)

• I want her to come (projection of a desired outcome)

• I fear she’ll come (projection of an unwanted possibility)

Each of these projects a different relation between self and world. The subject is not static, but dynamically involved in shaping — or resisting — the potential actualisation of meaning.

What this tells us is profound: desire is not just a content of thought; it is a semiotic relation. It positions the subject toward the possible. It is a kind of leaning-into the world, through language, shaping not only what is said, but what is pursued, avoided, imagined, or enacted.

The grammar of desire thus gives us access to its social life. For while desire often feels deeply personal, it is always already public — expressed in genres, echoed in clichés, institutionalised in rituals, entangled in systems. Even the way we say “I want” is shaped by norms and narratives far beyond our control.

And this matters. Because if we learn to read the grammar of desire, we can begin to recognise how we are positioned — and how we might reposition ourselves and others. We can begin to ask not only what we desire, but how that desire is structured, and who it serves.

In the next post, we’ll pursue this line of thought into the domain of myth and belief — not as failures of knowledge, but as projects of affective commitment. What are we really doing when we believe in something?

4 Belief and the Affect of Commitment

What does it mean to believe in something?

Not just to believe that something is true — as one might believe that the Earth orbits the sun, or that tomorrow it will rain — but to invest oneself in a proposition as a matter of affective commitment. This kind of belief — the in kind — is not primarily cognitive, but desiderative. It is not about verification, but about orientation. It is not a claim about what is, but a gesture toward what matters.

And that makes it a different kind of act entirely.

To believe in justice, in love, in an afterlife, or in a mythic figure — these are not statements waiting for falsification. They are semiotic investments, alignments of the self with a world that is not fully present, but powerfully imagined. They are expressions of desire: to hope, to belong, to be vindicated, to resist despair.

In this sense, belief is a mode of world-making. It projects not the probable, but the desirable; not the actual, but the aspirational. And it does so not merely at the individual level, but across collective life. Myths, rituals, symbols, and shared narratives function as technologies of belief, drawing communities into participation with imagined orders.

We might say, then, that myth is not failed science, but a different kind of knowing — one that binds affect to meaning. Not knowledge about the world, but knowledge with and through the world, as experienced by those who live within its semiotic textures.

To say “I believe in God” or “I believe in love” is not to offer a hypothesis. It is to position oneself toward a value, and to dwell there. It is to enact a certain kind of self-relation and world-relation — one marked by commitment, vulnerability, and continuity. Even when such beliefs are not epistemically justified, they are ethically meaningful.

That is why belief in this sense cannot be reduced to credulity or illusion. It is not naïve cognition, but affective alignment. It may indeed be wrong in factual terms, but it can still be right in relational ones. The question, then, is not always “Is it true?” but “What is made possible by this believing-with?”

To believe in something is to live toward it — to hold space for it in one's semiotic horizon. And that changes everything.

In the next post, we will explore how such desires and beliefs implicate us in ethical relations, and how the act of wanting is never neutral — but always already entangled with the lives of others.

5 Desire and the Lives of Others

Desire is never solitary.

Even when it feels like the most intimate expression of our inner life — a longing, a wish, a hope — it is already shaped by our relations with others. We come to want not simply through personal inclinations, but through shared imaginaries, inherited grammars, and relational attunements. Desire is, in this sense, always co-constituted.

This is not just a sociological point; it’s an ontological one. If the world is not made up of discrete entities but of relations, then our wanting is itself a kind of becoming-with. Every desire takes shape within a landscape of others — human and nonhuman, present and absent, remembered and imagined.

And so, we must ask: Whose life does our desire depend on? And whose life does it affect?

To want something is not neutral. It implicates us in the lives of others, because what we want often demands something of the world — its resources, its attention, its compliance. When we want to be recognised, supported, admired, believed — these desires make claims on others. Even the desire to be left alone is a relational move, marked by withdrawal rather than engagement.

If we are to take desire seriously, then, we must begin to see its ethical dimension. This means asking not just what we want, but how we want — and with whom. It means becoming attuned to the affective costs of our wanting, and to the structures of exclusion or extraction that our desires may unconsciously participate in.

Much of the violence in the world is justified by desire: the desire for safety, for purity, for certainty, for greatness. But so too are acts of care, solidarity, and resistance. The difference is not the presence or absence of desire, but the way it is oriented — whether it opens us to the lives of others, or seeks to secure itself at their expense.

To desire well is to desire with. It is to recognise that our longings do not begin or end within us, but are woven into shared fields of affect and meaning. It is to ask not “How can I get what I want?” but “What kind of world does my wanting help bring forth?”

And that is the beginning of an ethics.

In our final post, we will explore this ethical dimension of desire more fully — asking what it might mean to want-with rather than want-over, and to live desire as a shared responsibility rather than a private pursuit.

6. The Ethics of Wanting-with

If knowing is not about grasping an object but about participating in a world, then desiring is not about seizing a prize — it is about living-with a world.

Desire, we’ve seen, is relational through and through. It arises not in isolation but in the dense weave of encounters, histories, imaginaries, and attunements. And if that is true, then the way we desire is never just a matter of private feeling — it is always also a matter of public ethics.

This gives rise to a crucial distinction: wanting-over versus wanting-with.

Wanting-over sees desire as a zero-sum game. It treats the world as a resource to be used, others as obstacles or instruments, and fulfilment as a matter of control or acquisition. It underwrites extractivism, domination, and coercion — not just in economies, but in relationships, cultures, and spiritualities.

Wanting-with, by contrast, sees desire as an act of attunement. It recognises the other as co-participant in the field of becoming. It seeks not to bend the world to one’s will, but to form desires in relation — to want in ways that are mindful of others’ flourishing, of shared possibilities, of mutual transformation.

This is not an ethics of self-denial. It is not about suppressing desire or sacrificing joy. On the contrary, it invites us into richer, deeper, more sustaining forms of longing — desires that are not about possession but about connection, not about certainty but about openness, not about purity but about participation.

It challenges the myth of autonomous desiring subjects and instead affirms the reality of our interdependence. Our wants are never just ours; they emerge in worlds already shaped by care, by trauma, by power, by dreams. To want-with is to acknowledge this — and to choose to desire in a way that deepens, rather than denies, the web of life we’re part of.

This also invites a new spiritual imaginary. In place of myths of reward and punishment — of a God who satisfies the faithful and punishes the unbeliever — we might begin to imagine divinity itself as the desiring-with of all that is: a longing not to control, but to co-become. A yearning not to judge from above, but to join in love. A desire that honours the freedom of the other without withdrawing from relationship.

Such a vision does not end desire. It deepens it.

And so we end not with answers but with an invitation:
To become aware of what we want.
To trace where those wants come from.
To notice who they touch.
And to ask, again and again:

Is this the kind of wanting that makes the world more whole?

Relational Epistemology: Knowing as Becoming-With

1 Knowledge as Relation, Not Possession

Reframing epistemology in a co-emergent world

What does it mean to know, when knowledge is not a possession but a relation?

In many dominant traditions, knowledge has been imagined as a kind of object — something we acquire, hold, store, and transfer. We “gain” knowledge, “possess” insights, and “accumulate” information, as if understanding were a commodity and the knower a solitary collector.

But this metaphor of knowledge-as-possession arises from — and reinforces — a particular ontology: one in which entities are discrete, self-contained, and fundamentally separate from one another. From this view, to know something is to stand at a distance, to observe without entanglement, and to translate the world into representations we can control.

What if that picture no longer holds?

In this series, we want to explore what happens when we reimagine knowing through the lens of a relational ontology — one in which entities emerge through relation, not apart from it. In such a world, to know something is not to stand outside it, but to participate in its becoming. Knowledge is not the mapping of a pre-existing terrain, but the unfolding of meaning in and through relation.

This idea is not without precedent. Indigenous epistemologies, feminist science studies, Buddhist interdependence, and ecological thought have all questioned the myth of the isolated observer. In relational systems, objectivity is not neutrality, but accountability. And knowing is no longer an act of extraction, but of entanglement.

Our own model emerges from this same impulse. Drawing on systemic functional linguistics, neuronal group selection, and relational process thought, we view meaning as not pre-given but semiotically co-actualised — a product of shared potential and local instantiation. From this vantage point, to know is to bring forth a world together.

In the posts to come, we’ll explore:

• how the subject–object divide collapses in a relational universe

• how language mediates shared becoming

• why all knowledge is situated, embodied, and historically contingent

• what kind of ethics emerge from epistemic entanglement

• and how reverence for the unknowable may be the most relational epistemic act of all.

We invite you, then, not to acquire these ideas, but to enter into relation with them. Let them change you — even if slightly. Let them listen back.

Because to know is not to have —

It is to become with.

2 The Collapse of the Subject–Object Divide

From observer to participant in the act of knowing

The modern Western tradition has long been shaped by a powerful epistemic split: the division between subject and object, knower and known. This binary underlies many of our institutions and practices — from the scientific method to legal discourse, from education to economics. It frames the world as a collection of objects, and the self as a separate subject that can stand outside, observe, and represent.

But from a relational perspective, this split begins to unravel.

If beings come into being through relation, then there are no subjects without objects, and no objects without subjects. The distinction itself is an artefact of a particular mode of meaning-making — one that favours distance, fixity, and control. In reality, the knower and the known are co-constituted in the act of knowing.

To observe is already to participate.

We see this clearly in quantum mechanics, where the act of measurement collapses the wavefunction — not because the observer’s consciousness imposes itself, but because the very framework of observation brings forth a particular actuality from a field of potential. But this is not limited to physics. Every act of perception, of language, of meaning, is an actualisation of shared potential — an event in which world and mind emerge together.

In systemic functional linguistics, meaning arises from the interplay of potential and instance, and unfolds across strata: from experience to semantics, from semantics to wording. There is no pure observer; there is only the unfolding of meaning as relation. The speaker is not a solitary source, but a node in a network of historical, cultural, and intersubjective potentials.

And in Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, consciousness itself is not the mirror of a pre-given world, but the emergent property of a nervous system undergoing experience-dependent selection. What the self “knows” is inseparable from how it has become.

This means that to know is not to grasp a pre-existent object, but to enter into relation — to instantiate one possibility among many, co-shaped by one’s perspective, location, and history.

In a relational epistemology:

• Knowledge is process, not product.

• The subject is enmeshed, not removed.

• The world is responsive, not passive.

• And every act of knowing changes both the knower and the known.

This is not the end of rigour or clarity. It is the beginning of accountable entanglement.

It is the shift from knowledge as certainty, to knowledge as participatory unfolding.

Next, we’ll look at how language makes this possible — how it not only mediates meaning, but enacts the relationality at the heart of knowing.

3 Language as Relational Act

Meaning arises in the space-between

If knowledge is not possession but participation, then how does this participation take form?

Through language.

Language is often imagined as a code — a tool for labelling objects and transmitting information from one mind to another. But from a relational epistemology, this model fails to capture the generative role of language in world-making. Language does not simply represent a world already there. It co-creates it.

In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), language is a semiotic system — a system of meaning potential that is instantiated in concrete acts. These acts unfold across multiple strata (semantics, lexicogrammar, phonology) and serve three simultaneous functions:

• Ideational: construing experience

• Interpersonal: enacting relationships

• Textual: weaving meaning into flow

What we call a “fact” is already a construal — the result of selections from a system of potential meanings. And these selections are never neutral. They enact positions, relationships, values, and ontologies.

Language, then, is not a mirror but a gesture: a semiotic act that brings forth a world in dialogue with others. Each utterance is a thread in the web of shared becoming. It presupposes a listener, anticipates a response, and is shaped by the histories of meaning that precede it.

From this perspective, language is not in the mind. It is a relational field:

• An attractor space of shared habits, histories, and resonances

• A zone of tension between what is known, what is possible, and what is becoming

• A medium in which knower and known meet, not as fixed entities, but as co-emergent presences

Even the notion of a “subject” relies on language. In SFL terms, the self is not the origin of meaning but an interpersonal enactment: the I that says “I” exists because it is said, not before. The self is a semiotic figure — an ongoing performance in a field of voices.

And just as potential meanings are actualised through instantiation, so knowledge itself is always instance-bound: specific to its conditions of utterance, yet drawing on collective resources.

To know, then, is not simply to internalise. It is to enter a dialogue, to respond, to take up a position in a web of meanings that precedes and exceeds us.

We become knowers by participating in the language-worlds of others.

In the next post, we will explore the implications of this view for objectivity, and what it might mean to be “rigorous” in a relational universe.

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4 From Observation to Participation: Rethinking Objectivity

The story of Western knowledge has often been told as a progressive refinement of objectivity. To know truly, we were told, was to see without bias, to stand apart from the world, and to observe it as it is — unclouded by our subjectivity. This myth of the detached knower brought powerful tools and a certain kind of mastery. But it also obscured something vital: we are never not part of the world we seek to know.

The Observer is Always Embedded

In a relational ontology, there is no Archimedean point — no view from nowhere. Every act of knowing is situated. We know from somewhere, with others, and through the lenses of meaning systems we inherit and co-create.

Science itself has recognised this. In quantum mechanics, the act of measurement collapses potentiality into actuality. In ecology, the observer is part of the system. In anthropology, knowledge is inseparable from cultural standpoint. Across disciplines, cracks have appeared in the illusion of detachment — and through them, a richer vision of participation is emerging.

Knowing as Intra-action

Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action replaces the notion of interaction between pre-existing entities. It suggests that entities do not pre-exist their relations — they emerge through their relations. In this light, knowing is not about mapping an independent world; it’s about becoming-with the world through patterns of entanglement. Epistemology becomes relational practice.

Objectivity, then, must be reframed. Not as distance from, but as accountability to. Not as removal of the self, but as conscious inclusion of one’s position, values, and relational responsibilities. In this sense, objectivity becomes a stance of ethical situatedness — not erasure of perspective, but clarity about how one’s perspective shapes the knowing.

The Relational Epistemic Stance

To know relationally is to shift from observer to participant, from explanation to engagement, from certainty to attunement. It asks:

• What are the relations that make this knowing possible?

• How do I participate in the emergence of this knowledge?

• What does this knowledge make possible — and what does it foreclose?

Such questions do not undermine rigour — they deepen it. They invite humility, curiosity, and responsiveness. They make space for other ways of knowing — Indigenous, poetic, embodied — that have long been marginalised by the myth of dispassionate observation.

Knowing is a Form of Care

In this view, knowing is not just cognitive but ethical. It is a form of care — a way of relating that transforms both the knower and the known. To know something is not simply to grasp it, but to participate in its becoming, to be shaped by its presence, and to respond to its needs.

In relational epistemology, knowledge is not a possession. It is a practice of participation, grounded in the shared world we co-create.

5 Learning as Transformation: Becoming-with What We Know

If knowing is a form of participation, then learning is not simply the accumulation of information. It is a transformation of who we are, through our entanglement with what we come to know. In a relational ontology, learning is not just acquiring knowledge — it is becoming-with the world.

From Acquisition to Transformation

Traditional models of education often cast learning as transfer: knowledge is a commodity held by one party and passed to another. But this assumes that the learner remains fundamentally unchanged — a stable self that merely receives.

In contrast, relational epistemology frames learning as ontogenetic — it changes the knower. To learn something deeply is to reconfigure one’s patterns of attention, action, and relation. The learner is not an empty vessel but a node in an unfolding web of becoming.

This shift echoes what happens in developmental systems theory and in Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection: new patterns emerge not from imprinting but from dynamic reorganisation. Just as neural circuits are strengthened through lived experience, our ways of meaning-making are sculpted through our participation in meaningful practices.

Co-Transformation and Mutual Becoming

Relational learning is not individualistic. It happens in relation: with others, with environments, with texts, with traditions. And in each of these relations, something shifts — not only in the learner, but in the world.

When we engage with a concept, a story, a landscape, or a community, both parties are changed. The world becomes differently knowable through us, and we become differently possible through it. This is co-transformation — learning as a mutual unfolding.

This view challenges the false neutrality of traditional schooling, which too often treats learning as assimilation into pre-existing structures. A relational pedagogy asks: What is being transformed? What is being sustained? What is being silenced?

The Temporality of Learning

Learning unfolds in time — but not clock time. It unfolds in meaningful temporality, the felt rhythm of processes of change. From this angle, learning is less like crossing off outcomes and more like tending a garden: slow, recursive, attuned to conditions and possibilities.

In relational temporality, learning is not linear progression. It is spiral, recursive, dialogic. We revisit ideas in new contexts, re-make meanings through new relations, re-compose ourselves again and again.

Learning as Ethical Becoming

To learn relationally is to enter into a practice of care. It matters what we learn — and it matters how we are changed by that learning. Not all transformations are life-affirming. Not all knowledge nurtures the possible.

Thus, relational learning is not just a pedagogical theory. It is a practice of discernment: Which relations do I enter? Which knowings do I deepen? How do I stay accountable to what I become-with?

In this view, education is not the production of skilled individuals for a system. It is the cultivation of relational beings who can respond wisely and compassionately to the worlds they co-create.

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6 Beyond the Mirror: The Limits of Objectivity in a Co-Emergent World

We often imagine knowledge as a kind of mirror — a faithful reflection of the world "out there." Science, in this view, is the supreme polisher of the mirror, offering an ever-clearer image of reality. But what if there is no static reality to reflect? What if the world, and the knower, are co-emergent?

Objectivity as Distance

The Enlightenment ideal of objectivity promised detachment. To know truly, one must step back, set aside bias, and observe from a neutral vantage point. The ideal observer is outside the system, unaffected by what is observed.

But in a relational universe, such detachment is a fiction. All knowing is entangled — situated in bodies, cultures, ecologies, languages. The very act of observing is also a way of participating. To observe is to select, to frame, to relate.

This is not a failure of objectivity — it is a revelation of how knowing works.

Entangled Observation

Quantum physics has long taught us that the observer affects the observed. But this is not just a quirk of subatomic particles. In human meaning-making, too, our ways of seeing shape what is seen. Theories are not just mirrors — they are tools that cut grooves into the world, making some pathways possible and others invisible.

In this light, knowledge is not neutral representation. It is intra-action (as Karen Barad puts it): a coming-into-relation that brings both knower and known into being.

We do not find truth lying there in the world, untouched. We enter into a relationship with what is. And in that relationship, both the world and the knower are transformed.

Situated Knowledges

Feminist epistemologists such as Donna Haraway have insisted on situated knowledges — an alternative to the view-from-nowhere. All knowledge arises from a location, a history, a set of relations. This does not make it false; it makes it accountable.

From a relational perspective, knowledge gains its richness not from abstract distance but from concrete engagement. A farmer knows the soil differently than a satellite does. A patient knows pain differently than a clinician. Both knowings are valid — and partial.

Objectivity, then, is not purity from relation. It is responsibility within relation. It means being answerable to the ways our knowing shapes the world and to the consequences of our conceptual tools.

Knowing Otherwise

In a co-emergent world, there is no God's-eye view. But there are many eyes, many voices, many ways of knowing. Rather than striving for control over truth, we can listen across difference, learn in dialogue, and co-create more livable futures.

This does not mean “anything goes.” It means we go together, carefully, aware that knowledge is never solitary. It is always a weaving — of bodies, histories, ecologies, and desires.

In the end, to know relationally is to enter the dance: not mastering the steps, but moving responsively, attuned to the rhythms of the world and to the calls of others.

7 Wisdom as Relational Attunement: Knowing-with in a Living World

As we arrive at the end of this inquiry, we find ourselves far from the domain of static facts and finished truths. In their place, we encounter something more fluid, more fragile, and more alive: wisdom — not as a body of knowledge, but as a practice of attunement.

From Knowing About to Knowing-With

We began by unseating the myth of the solitary knower, the one who stands outside the world and names it from a distance. What emerged instead is a vision of knowledge as relational: we know with, not just about. We become part of what we seek to understand.

In this shift from separation to entanglement, we discover that wisdom lies not in control, but in participation. It’s not the accumulation of facts, but the deepening of responsiveness — the ability to notice, to care, to respond in kind to the needs of a moment, a community, a living world.

The Rhythms of Attunement

To attune is to move in resonance with others — not only with other humans, but with animals, forests, rivers, ancestors, symbols, dreams. In a relational epistemology, all of these become sites of knowing. They are not passive objects of study, but active participants in the unfolding of understanding.

Wisdom listens. It senses shifts in tempo, texture, and tone. It recognises that meaning is emergent, and that knowing means staying open — porous — to what has not yet fully arrived.

Attunement requires slowness. Stillness. The relinquishing of the desire to grasp. It is a posture of receptive presence, of abiding-with.

The Ethical Dimension

Because knowing is never neutral, wisdom bears an ethical charge. It asks not just Is this true? but What is this relationship asking of me? It is not about possessing knowledge, but being answerable to it — recognising that knowing reshapes both the world and ourselves.

This moves us from epistemology to ethics, from understanding to care. If we are always becoming-with, then we are also always responsible-for. The world we come to know is not something we can leave unchanged. It changes with us.

Reclaiming the Sacred in Knowing

In a relational universe, knowing is not just mental. It is affective, bodily, symbolic, storied. It participates in the sacred — not as a separate domain, but as the depth dimension of all becoming.

To know wisely is to honour this depth — to treat the world not as object, but as thou. In this spirit, wisdom is not cleverness. It is reverence. It is humility in the face of complexity, and trust in the co-arising of understanding through relation.

We might even say that wisdom is what knowing becomes when it has been softened by love.

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The Way Ahead

As we conclude this series, we offer not a map but an invitation. To know is not to conquer mystery, but to walk with it. To live relationally is to live in meaning — not as a thing we hold, but as a space we co-inhabit and co-create.

Let us meet the world, not as masters, but as kin. Let us listen, attend, respond — and in so doing, let us become wise.