Grammar and the Ghost in the Machine

1 A Haunted Inheritance

Philosophy is full of ghosts. It speaks in the voice of being, will, substance, mind, and essence — and calls them real. But beneath these timeworn abstractions lies something far more familiar: language. For while philosophy has asked for centuries what the world is made of, it rarely asks what its own materials are made of — the materials of thought, argument, and theory.

This series begins with a provocation:

What if many of the most enduring metaphysical ideas in philosophy are in fact reifications of semiotic architecture?

What if “being” and “form” and “substance” are not eternal truths but grammatical metaphors turned into metaphysical doctrines?

We propose that a theory of language — and in particular the systemic functional model developed by M.A.K. Halliday — can help us excavate the buried scaffolding of these ideas. By attending to how meaning is made in language, we gain a new vantage point on what has been taken for granted in centuries of thought.

Language: The Invisible Medium

Theories are realised in language. Whether in Plato’s dialogues, Descartes’ meditations, or Nietzsche’s aphorisms, theory always comes to us as text. But language is not simply a vehicle for ideas. It is itself a system of meaning — structured, patterned, and oriented to action. Like the observer in physics, language has often been left invisible, its shaping influence ignored.

But if language is what theory is made of, then a theory of language can reveal the architecture of theory itself.

This series will follow three key relations from Systemic Functional Linguistics:

• Instantiation: the relation between potential and its individual instances (e.g., from system to text).

• Realisation: the relation between levels of symbolic abstraction (e.g., from meaning to wording, or from system to structure).

• Grammatical Metaphor: the reconfiguration of meaning across strata (e.g., turning processes into things — “he decides” becomes “his decision”).

Each of these semiotic relations corresponds to familiar philosophical moves: from the abstract to the concrete, from appearance to essence, from act to identity. And each, we will argue, has been misrecognised as metaphysical when it is in fact linguistic.

Haunted Concepts

When Plato speaks of perfect Forms, is he not projecting the systemic pole of the cline of instantiation? When Descartes divides mind from body, is he not reifying the clause structure of mental projection? When Kant marks the noumenon as unknowable, is he not confronting the boundary where language can no longer construe?

These are not missteps. They are moments where language itself becomes visible — not because it is recognised, but because it is misunderstood. The philosophical tradition is haunted not by ghosts from another world, but by the unexamined grammar of this one.

Renovating the History of Thought

To renovate is not to destroy, but to rehouse: to take the ideas that have shaped us and place them in new conceptual architecture. The goal of this series is not to dismiss philosophy, but to reconstrue it — to understand it as a history of meaning-making, structured by language and illuminated by it.

In the posts that follow, we will explore how the scaffolding of language underpins some of philosophy’s most iconic ideas. We will begin, appropriately, with Plato — and with his realm of eternal Forms. But we will not climb to a world beyond. We will follow the cline of instantiation.

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2 Plato’s Forms and the Reification of Instantiation

Plato’s metaphysics begins with a distinction that has echoed across millennia: between the world of appearances and the world of Forms. The first is changeable, sensory, particular. The second is eternal, intelligible, universal. We live among the many; only the Forms are truly one.

But what if Plato was not discovering a transcendent realm, but projecting a semiotic architecture — one that belongs not to the cosmos but to language?

The Cline of Instantiation

In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), meaning is construed along a cline of instantiation:

• At one end is the system — a structured potential for meaning.

• At the other is the instance — a concrete enactment of that potential in a specific context.
  Every time we speak or write, we instantiate the system — and in doing so, we add to its potential.

Plato’s ontology closely mirrors this architecture.

• The Form is the pure potential: the universal, unchanging idea of Justice, Beauty, or Tree.

• The particular is the instance: the just act, the beautiful painting, the tree in the grove.

Plato treats the Form as more real than the instance. But in SFL terms, this is a reversal: the system is a potential that exists only by virtue of its instances. It is abstracted from what has been said and done — not the other way around.

From Ontology to Semiotic Architecture

What happens if we read Plato’s metaphysics not as a vision of a metaphysical order but as a misrecognition of the semiotic order? His world of Forms is the system pole of instantiation, reified into an independent realm. His world of appearances is the instance pole, treated as a poor copy of the ideal. But in language, the system and the instance are not in competition — they are mutually constitutive.

Each instance contributes to the shape of the system; each system makes further instances possible. There is no need to posit a second world to account for the regularities of this one. What Plato mistook for eternal reality was the abstract structure of meaning itself.

The Danger of Reification

Plato’s move is not unique. It is part of a wider philosophical habit: the reification of semiotic relations — taking structural features of language and treating them as metaphysical truths.

When the abstract is separated from the concrete, and treated as its origin, the result is metaphysics. But when we see that the abstract arises through the concrete, and returns to it in use, we shift from metaphysics to semiotics.

Instantiation, not Imitation

Plato calls the particular an imitation of the Form. But in SFL terms, it is not an imitation — it is an instantiation. It is not a flawed copy of a perfect original, but a meaning-making event that both draws on and contributes to a system of potential.

Plato's error — and perhaps philosophy’s original ghost — was to mistake the architecture of meaning for the structure of the world.

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Next time, we’ll trace another haunting: how the grammatical metaphor of action gives rise to the metaphysical concept of the Will.

3 The Will and the Reification of Desire

In Western metaphysics, the Will appears as a sovereign force. It acts, chooses, asserts — often in tension with reason, impulse, or fate. In some philosophies, it becomes the seat of the self; in others, the engine of the universe.

But from the perspective of language, the Will is not a metaphysical entity. It is a grammatical pattern, projected into the world and mistaken for its foundation.

Desire as a Grammatical Process

Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) classifies clauses according to process types, each construing a kind of experience as meaning. One such process is mental desiderative:

• I want a new idea.

• She hopes to understand.

• They wish it were otherwise.

Here, ‘want’, ‘hope’, and ‘wish’ are not expressions of force but semiotic processes. They construe the internal world of the speaker — not by referencing something called the Will, but by enacting a grammatical relation: a subject experiencing a mental orientation toward a desired object or outcome.

The Will is born when this pattern is reified. That is, when we take the linguistic projection of desire and treat it as a metaphysical force, as if wanting were a thing rather than a relational meaning.

From Process to Power

Grammar allows us to construe the self as a subject who acts. In doing so, it supplies the raw material for philosophical claims about agency.

• I decide.

• I resolve.

• I impose my will.

These are all clause structures in which the subject is medium and the process is intentional. But in language, such clauses are choices — not proof of a metaphysical faculty. The grammar of action provides a model of agency, but not its ontological foundation.

The Will arises when this model is lifted from its semiotic grounds and projected into the structure of reality — as if it were the cause of action rather than its construal.

The Fiction of the Autonomous Subject

The metaphysical Will also requires a metaphysical subject — a self that exists apart from its relations. But in SFL, the subject is a position in meaning, not an ontological entity. It is constituted by its participation in grammatical structures, including those of mental and verbal processes.

The autonomous self, like the Will it wields, is not a given. It is a construct, born of grammatical roles, culturally reinforced, and philosophically enshrined.

Unmasking the Ghost

When we see that language can construe desire as a process, not a power, the ghost of the Will begins to dissipate. What philosophy calls the Will, linguistics calls a desiderative clause. The metaphysical becomes grammatical — and in doing so, becomes tractable, analysable, and demystified.

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In our next post, we’ll look at causality — and how the grammar of transitivity shaped the metaphysical search for necessary connections in nature.

4 Cause and Effect — Transitivity and the Machinery of Nature

Causality is one of philosophy’s deepest problems. What does it mean for one thing to cause another? Is causation a force, a law, a regularity, or an illusion?

But in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), causation is not a mystery. It is a grammatical resource.

Transitivity: Grammar’s Model of Experience

In SFL, the grammar of the clause construes experience through transitivity — the system that organises processes and their participants. A clause like:

• The sun melts the ice
  …construes a material process (melts), an actor (the sun), and a goal (the ice).

This is not a metaphysical claim. It is a semiotic configuration. The grammar does not discover causation in the world; it construes experience as causative by selecting from available grammatical patterns.

There is no metaphysical necessity here — only a semiotic regularity.

From Clause to Cosmos

When we elevate these patterns into metaphysics, we reify them. Clause structures become models of the world’s deep machinery:

• X causes Y.

• The will moves the body.

• Every event has a cause.

These are not discoveries of pure reason or empirical law. They are grammatical construals taken for ontological structures.

In this way, the grammar of transitivity becomes the ghost in the machine — animating our models of force, change, and inevitability.

Necessary Connection or Grammatical Expectation?

Philosophers from Hume to Kant have wrestled with the idea of necessary connection. But if we look through the lens of language, the source of this expectation is plain:

Grammar allows us to construe sequences where one process leads to another:

• He dropped the glass. It shattered.

• Because it rained, the picnic was cancelled.

Here, logical and temporal relations are grammatically construed — not given by nature. The sense of necessity is a product of textual cohesion, not metaphysical structure.

What philosophy calls causality, grammar construes as sequenced process.

Causal Chains as Grammatical Chains

Scientific explanation often seeks causal chains. But these chains are not neutral observations; they are narratives, built from clauses in which agency, process, and goal are selected according to meaning.

To explain an event is to construe it in a particular voice — grammatically, not just empirically.

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In our next post, we’ll explore the reification of truth itself — and how logocentric philosophies mistake the grammar of projection for an external order of reality.

5 Truth and Projection — The Linguistic Architecture of Reality Claims

What is truth? A correspondence with reality? A coherence among propositions? A pragmatic utility?

In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), these abstract theories can be grounded in a concrete fact: truth is not discovered outside language — it is construed within it.

The Clause Complex and Projection

In SFL, the grammar of projection allows language to refer to itself:

• She said that it was raining.

• He believes the earth is round.

• I know that this is true.

Here, the projecting clause (she said, he believes, I know) introduces a projected clause — a meaning encoded as content. This is grammar’s way of construing semiosis itself as a phenomenon.

When philosophers speak of propositions, they are talking about projected clauses — language about language, meaning about meaning.

But when projection is reified, it ceases to be a grammatical function and becomes a metaphysical belief:

• Truth exists independently of thought.

• Propositions have truth-values.

• There is a realm of facts to be matched.

These are not philosophical discoveries. They are grammatical arrangements turned into ontologies.

Truth as Projection Reified

Consider the statement: It is thought that the Earth orbits the sun.

Here, "It is thought…" is a projecting clause construing the following as a proposition.

But now consider: The Earth orbits the sun.

The projecting clause is gone — the claim is presupposed, taken for granted, de-projected.

This shift from projection to assertion is a grammatical shift, but it is often mistaken for an epistemological one.

In reality, the grammar of projection allows us to navigate degrees of certainty, modality, and evidentiality — not to discover an objective realm of truth, but to construe our commitments to meaning.

Metaphysics as Misrecognised Grammar

Philosophy’s theory of truth often begins where grammar has already done its work. What was once a projecting clause becomes an ontological commitment. The distinction between content and commentary collapses into a belief in objective propositions.

Thus, the idea of truth as correspondence — a thought mirroring the world — is grammar misunderstood as metaphysics.

We do not discover truths. We construe propositions, and construe our orientation toward them.

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In our next post, we turn to the concept of essence — that oldest of metaphysical categories — and ask whether it, too, is not a ghost born of grammatical processes.

6 Essence and the Grammar of Being

Where does the idea of essence come from?

Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, Western philosophy has been haunted by the notion that behind every appearance lies an underlying substance — an essence — that makes a thing what it is.

But what if this metaphysical commitment to essence is, at its root, a grammatical commitment?

The Nominalisation of Process

In Systemic Functional Linguistics, one of the most powerful meaning-making strategies is nominalisation — the transformation of a process or quality into a ‘thing’:

• She is wise → Her wisdom

• They govern → Government

• We differ → There is a difference

Nominalisation allows language to package experience into stable entities that can be named, described, possessed, or analysed. This syntactic sleight of hand is the origin of many theoretical constructs — not only in everyday reasoning, but in philosophy, science, and law.

When philosophers seek the essence of courage, beauty, or justice, they often begin by treating these nominalised abstractions as if they were entities with hidden cores, rather than grammatical construals of process and relation.

Essence as Identifying Process

SFL treats identity as a process — a relational clause type. In sentences like:

• A circle is a round plane figure.

• Water is H₂O.

The verb is enacts an identifying relation — not a metaphysical union, but a semiotic equivalence between two functions in a clause. The structure makes one element the "Token" (the signifier) and the other the "Value" (the signified), inverting the usual logic of substance and property.

Philosophy often reifies this identifying relation into a theory of essence. It takes the structure of a clause and turns it into a structure of reality:

• What is X? becomes What is the essence of X?

But in grammar, this is simply a way of construing meaning — a form of categorisation, not a window into noumenal reality.

The Illusion of Inherent Properties

When we say:

• Gold is heavy.

• Justice is fair.

• The soul is immortal.

We are drawing on attributive relations, projecting qualities onto entities. These too are grammatical: they belong to the system of intensive attribution. Yet over time, the constant co-occurrence of entity and quality becomes naturalised — taken as evidence of essence rather than of meaning-making.

Thus, the ghost of essence is born: an abstract identity, imagined as real, sustained by patterns of language.

7 Language as Origin — A Semiotic Ontology of Thought

In this final post, we draw together the threads of our journey — from Plato’s Forms to Nietzsche’s Will — to propose not the rejection of the philosophical tradition, but a re-reading of it: not as a map of reality, but as an archaeology of meaning.

Throughout the series, we’ve suggested that many core philosophical concepts are not false as such, but fossilised — sedimented residues of semiotic processes that have been turned into metaphysical doctrines. In every case, the origin of the concept was not the world itself, but language’s way of making sense of it.

The Semiotic Roots of Ontology

Systemic Functional Linguistics shows that meaning is organised by systems of choices — systems that are both structured and dynamic. These systems allow us to construe experience as meaningful, to project thoughts, to track agency and causation, and to distinguish appearance from reality.

But these same resources can also become invisible. As philosophy turns its gaze outward — toward Being, Will, Substance, Truth — it often forgets that the terms in which it does so are themselves products of a semiotic architecture.

In other words: philosophy speaks the grammar of meaning without often knowing it.

This is not a critique of philosophy, but a proposal: that the concepts we inherit are crystallised expressions of the architecture of language. To understand their power — and their limits — we must make visible the semiotic scaffolding that supports them.

Theories as Reconstruals of Meaning

Science, philosophy, and mythology all reconstrue the meaning of language. They are not simply ‘ideas about the world’, but second-order systems that re-interpret first-order meaning.

To say that gravity ‘acts’ on bodies is to metaphorise a grammatical structure — transitivity — into a cosmological agent.

To say that the ‘soul’ is distinct from the body is to project mental clauses into metaphysical planes.

To say that there is a ‘will to power’ behind all life is to nominalise a grammatical process and universalise it.

In each case, the movement is the same: from semiotic process to metaphysical reification. A verb becomes a noun. A clause becomes a doctrine. A projection becomes a substance.

Philosophy, then, can be read as the metaphysics of grammar.

Language as Origin, Not Obstacle

Traditionally, language has been treated in philosophy as either a transparent medium (a vehicle for truth) or a frustrating barrier (a source of confusion). But SFL offers a third view: language is the origin of meaning, not its distortion.

We do not simply describe the world with language; we construe it. The categories of thought — subject, predicate, cause, agent, event, intention, possibility — are not given by nature, but constructed in and through language.

To speak is not just to say something about the world. It is to make a world meaningful.

A Semiotic Ontology of Thought

If we take this seriously, then a theory of language offers more than just a tool for interpreting texts. It becomes a meta-theory: a way of reading the history of ideas as the history of meaning-making.

Plato, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche — and countless others — were not wrong. They were, we might say, listening closely to the architecture of their own thought, without yet knowing its grammar.

A semiotic ontology does not replace philosophy. It re-grounds it. It shows that the most profound metaphysical questions — What is being? What is truth? What is self? — are also questions about the architecture of meaning.

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And so we conclude not with a rejection of metaphysics, but with its renovation. A theory of language does not solve the great problems of philosophy. It lets us see how those problems arose, and how — by attending to the meanings we live by — we might begin to live them differently.

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 Science: Rethinking Time, Matter, and Causality

1 Why Science Needs an Ontology of Relation

Science is often taken to be the least philosophical of human endeavours — a domain of hard data, concrete measurements, and methodical detachment. But beneath its rigorous methods lies a world of assumptions: about what exists, how it exists, and how we can know it. These assumptions are ontological, whether acknowledged or not.

This post inaugurates a series that brings those hidden ontologies into the light — and proposes a new foundation: an ontology of relation. We'll suggest that concepts long taken as givens in science — time, matter, energy, causality — are not pre-existing containers or forces, but relational abstractions. They are ways of making-with the world, not of standing outside it.

The Inherited Ontology of Substance

Since the Scientific Revolution, Western science has been haunted by the legacy of substance metaphysics. In this view, the universe is made of discrete objects — inert things that possess properties and exert forces. The role of science, then, is to discover and measure the properties of these things, and the laws that govern their interaction.

But this worldview is not neutral. It reflects a particular way of being in the world: one that privileges separation over connection, extraction over participation. And it generates abstractions — like "mass," "force," or "energy" — that are often mistaken for things rather than ways of organising experience.

The Illusion of Objectivity

Modern science prides itself on objectivity — the effort to remove the observer from the observation. But as quantum physics, systems theory, and even cognitive science have shown, there is no view from nowhere. Every act of knowing is a participation. Every measurement is a transformation.

This doesn’t mean science is invalid. It means science is relational: what we discover is shaped by how we approach, what we ask, and how we intervene. It means that concepts like “energy” or “time” don’t simply describe what is there — they organise a co-constituted reality.

Why This Matters Now

We live in an age of planetary crisis, when the limits of our extractive worldview are becoming devastatingly clear. The reductionist dream — of controlling the world by breaking it into parts — has shown itself to be unsustainable.

But the problem is not with science per se. The problem is with an ontology of separation that has often underwritten it.

What if we began again — not by throwing out science, but by re-grounding it in relation?

What if we understood time not as a background container, but as the unfolding of processes in co-emergence?

What if we saw matter not as stuff, but as patterned activity?

What if energy, causality, and even emergence could be reframed as relational events — not forces pushing from behind, but invitations pulling from within?

What This Series Will Explore

In the coming posts, we will trace concepts that sit at the heart of science — and reimagine them through the lens of relation:

1. Time, as not a container but a co-becoming

2. Matter, as not substance but patterned potential

3. Energy, as not thing but transformation

4. Emergence, as arising through entanglement

5. Causality, as resonance rather than force

6. Explanation, as poetics rather than proof

Our goal is not to dismantle science — but to offer it a deeper ground. Not to relativise truth, but to recognise that all truth is relation-bound — that even the most abstract concepts are born from our embeddedness.

An ontology of relation is not just a metaphysical proposition. It is a stance, a shift, a new way of participating in the world. One in which science becomes not the dispassionate mapping of what is, but the co-creative unfolding of what might become.

2 Rethinking Time — Not a Container but a Co-emergence

We usually think of time as something we move through — a river that carries us forward, or a line stretching from past to future. In physics, time is treated as a parameter: a neutral background in which events unfold. In everyday life, it is often seen as a container — a schedule to be filled, a resource to be spent.

But what if this view of time is a product of a deeper assumption — the ontology of substance — and not a necessary feature of experience or science?

In a relational ontology, time is not an external framework, but a pattern of co-emergence. It is not the thing through which things happen, but the happening itself — a rhythm that arises through the interrelation of processes.

Time as Instance, Not Continuum

In classical physics, time is often represented as a continuous axis, measurable and uniform — like a clock ticking in the background of the cosmos. But this presumes that time exists independently of the things that unfold within it.

In a relational view, time is not a container for change — it is the measure of change itself. It emerges with and through processes. Every unfolding of relation brings about its own time.

This aligns with insights from quantum theory and relativity. Time dilates and contracts not in absolute terms, but relative to processual relations — mass, acceleration, observation. It is not an invariant backdrop, but a participant in becoming.

The Experience of Temporal Relativity

Even in everyday experience, we feel that time stretches or contracts depending on what is happening and how we are involved. A moment of boredom feels endless. A moment of joy disappears in a flash. Time is not simply “passing” — it is being shaped by our relation to events, by our degree of involvement, by the quality of unfolding.

From a relational standpoint, these are not mere distortions of an objective timeline. They are expressions of how time actually works: not as a single thread, but as a tapestry of rhythms that arise from situated activity.

Time in Systems

In systems theory and complexity science, we already encounter time as nested, multi-scalar, and emergent. A tree, a forest, and a climate system each operate on different temporalities. Time in this sense is not a single clock, but a relational field of durational rhythms, arising from within and between systems.

A seed’s time is different from a market’s. A species' evolutionary time is different from the time of a technological transition. These different times do not exist within some larger Time — they are the very form of each system's unfolding.

Toward a Participatory Chronology

To reimagine time relationally is to undo one of the most foundational assumptions of the modern worldview: that time is “out there,” waiting to be measured.

Instead, we might understand time as always already situated. Each relation brings forth its own tempo, its own directionality, its own horizon of becoming.

In this view, science does not simply track time — it participates in it. Measurement is not a neutral observation of an independent variable, but a temporal co-creation. Every experiment has its own duration. Every observation occurs in time, but also helps bring it into being.

What We Gain by Letting Go of the Timeline

When we let go of time as container, several important gains become possible:

• We reconnect science to life. The living world does not unfold in clock time but in rhythms of emergence and decay, rest and activity, call and response.

• We make room for multiplicity. Time becomes plural, partial, ecological — not a single timeline, but a web of becoming.

• We open to new kinds of knowing. Not just prediction and control, but attunement, resonance, and participation.

To rethink time is to rethink science itself — not as a detached tracking of pre-existing events, but as a way of becoming-with the rhythms of the world.

3 Matter as Patterned Potential

What is matter? For centuries, Western science treated it as the ultimate “stuff” of the world — solid, enduring, independent. The atoms of Democritus, the billiard balls of Newtonian physics, the mechanical substrates of industrial modernity.

But quantum theory, field theory, and systems biology have all undermined this view. And yet, in much of our thinking, matter still carries the residue of that older metaphysics — as the “hard” substrate underneath the “soft” layers of life, mind, and meaning.

In this post, we’ll explore how a relational ontology reframes matter — not as a substance, but as patterned potential. Not what the world is made of, but what it is always becoming through.

Substance or Structure?

We inherit from the tradition of substance metaphysics the assumption that things must be something in themselves, and that matter is what gives them that reality.

But in a relational ontology, what defines a thing is not its internal substance, but its relational coherence — its pattern of becoming within a wider network of activity.

Matter, then, is not a passive stuff that is acted upon by forces. It is not inert. It is potential structured by relation — patterned, provisional, always in the midst of transformation.

This isn’t a poetic metaphor. It’s consistent with how physics now describes fields and particles: not as solid “things,” but as local excitations in a broader field — temporary actualisations of potential.

Quantum Matter: The Potential That Precedes the Actual

In quantum mechanics, matter appears not as something already there, but as something that becomes actual through interaction. A particle is not “present” in a definite position until it is observed — and even then, only in relation to the observational frame.

This is not an artefact of measurement, but a feature of how matter exists: as potential waiting to be instantiated.

The wavefunction, in this view, does not describe a hidden particle. It describes the structure of potential outcomes, which cohere according to patterns of probability — and which only become definite when enacted in a relational event.

Matter as Temporally Inflected Pattern

From the relational standpoint, matter is not only patterned — it is temporally patterned. That is, its identity at any moment is shaped by what it has done and what it is poised to do.

A cell, for example, is defined not only by its spatial structure, but by its capacity for metabolic process, genetic expression, and responsive change. It is matter-in-process — matter that is always becoming.

Likewise, even a rock is not “static,” but slowly weathering, gravitationally interacting, chemically active. Its form is not an essence, but a stability within larger patterns of transformation.

The Role of Fields: Relational Grounds of Materiality

In field theories — from electromagnetism to quantum field theory — particles are not “things” added into space. They are disturbances in a relational medium. The field is the enduring structure of potential, and particles are local manifestations of that potential — actualised in particular configurations.

Matter, in this sense, is never independent. It is always a situated actualisation — a temporary node in a relational field.

To speak of “a particle” is to speak of an event in a network of possible relations — not an object outside relation.

From Matter-as-Thing to Matter-as-Relation

This reframing is more than philosophical. It transforms how we think about:

• Material systems: as emergent and co-determined, not self-contained.

• Bodies and ecologies: as mutual becomings, not assemblages of things.

• Technology and design: as engagements with fields of possibility, not the imposition of form onto passive stuff.

And perhaps most importantly, it reminds us that matter is not mute. It does not simply wait to be shaped by us. It participates. It responds. It affords, resists, invites, withdraws.

Matter, in a relational ontology, is not the raw input for thought or culture. It is an active partner in world-making.

4 Science as Attunement, Not Control

Science has long been entangled with the idea of control. From Bacon’s dream of power over nature to the engineering triumphs of modernity, the scientific method has been praised for delivering predictive mastery: if we understand the laws, we can make the world obey.

But what if science is not about control at all?

In a relational view, science becomes not the means of dominating nature, but of attuning to it. Its power lies not in imposing order, but in deepening sensitivity — to pattern, possibility, and participation.

Let’s explore what it means to understand science not as command, but as attunement.

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From Mastery to Reciprocity

The control model of science is rooted in a subject-object metaphysics: the scientist as knower, nature as known; the experimenter as agent, the world as passive recipient.

But relational epistemology begins with the insight that we are not separate from the systems we study. Knowledge is always co-constructed — shaped by the apparatus, the frame, the context, the language.

Science, then, becomes a conversation — not with a mute object, but with an active world. We do not command it. We listen, respond, refine our questions, become more receptive to what the world is saying.

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Practices of Attunement

What does it mean to practice science as attunement?

• Observation becomes not passive looking, but disciplined listening — a practice of sensitivity to emergence, anomaly, rhythm.

• Experimentation becomes not the testing of a hypothesis on a system, but an encounter with a system — an unfolding relationship whose outcome depends on mutual configuration.

• Measurement becomes not an assertion of certainty, but a mode of entanglement — we do not observe from the outside, but participate in what becomes visible.

• Modelling becomes not prediction as domination, but exploration of possible worlds — scaffolds for imagination and responsiveness.

In all of this, science becomes a craft of attention, a means of honing our capacity to notice what the world is asking of us.

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The Ethos of Attunement

Attunement is not a method so much as a stance — a way of being with the world. It requires:

• Humility: an openness to being surprised, corrected, transformed by what we find.

• Responsiveness: a willingness to let our frameworks shift in response to phenomena, rather than forcing phenomena to fit our frameworks.

• Care: not only in the sense of precision, but in the deeper sense of commitment — a responsibility toward what we come to know.

This is not to romanticise science, but to remember its roots: in wonder, in encounter, in a desire to learn with the world rather than stand over it.

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Attunement Is Not Passivity

To attune is not to withdraw. It is to engage more deeply.

A violinist in tune with her instrument does not stand back. She participates fully — with technique, emotion, and discipline. She shapes sound in relationship with the wood, the string, the air, the room, the audience.

So too with science. Attunement does not mean silence or detachment. It means embodied, situated participation — a tuning-in to what the world can become in our midst.

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Toward a Relational Ethic of Inquiry

This shift from control to attunement reframes the very aim of science.

• It is no longer about extracting knowledge, but cultivating relationship.

• No longer about transcending the world, but dwelling within it more skilfully.

• No longer about reduction, but about making visible the patterns of interbeing.

Science becomes not the conquest of uncertainty, but the art of dancing with complexity.

And that, perhaps, is its deepest power: not to make the world obey, but to help us become more capable partners in its unfolding.

5 Objectivity as Situated Participation

If relational science invites us to shift from control to attunement, it also calls us to reimagine what we mean by objectivity.

For centuries, objectivity has been framed as detachment — the stance of a neutral, disembodied observer, capable of stepping outside context, emotion, or perspective to see the world “as it really is.”

But no such view-from-nowhere exists.

In a relational frame, objectivity is not the absence of perspective, but the deep recognition of situatedness. It is not a god’s-eye view, but a discipline of accountability — to the entanglements that make knowledge possible.

Let us explore what it means to reclaim objectivity as a practice of situated participation.

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The Illusion of Detachment

Classical science inherits the Enlightenment ideal of the rational observer: one who can rise above bias, suppress subjectivity, and deliver truths unsullied by perspective.

But this ideal collapses under scrutiny:

• No observation is free from framing. What we notice depends on what we expect, what we ask, what tools we use, what language we speak.

• No observer is free from embodiment. We are always located — in histories, cultures, values, affects.

• No method is free from intervention. The very act of inquiry changes the system inquired into.

The fantasy of detachment masks the real conditions of knowledge: we are always inside the world we study.

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Situatedness as Strength

If there is no neutral vantage point, then all knowledge is situated. But this is not a flaw — it is what makes knowing possible.

Situatedness grounds inquiry in real relationships: with tools, communities, practices, and places. It forces us to be explicit about the assumptions we bring and the conditions under which our claims hold.

A relational view thus redefines objectivity:

Objectivity is not what escapes perspective, but what owns it.

It is what can be held accountable across contexts, because it has made its commitments visible.

In this sense, objectivity is not a barrier to ethics — it is a mode of ethical relation. It says: here is what I see, from where I stand, with what consequences.

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Participation as Epistemic Virtue

Objectivity in relational science is not only situated — it is participatory. Knowing arises in interaction, not isolation.

This has radical implications:

• The observer is part of the phenomenon. We must account for how our methods and models shape what appears.

• The knower is in dialogue. Knowledge is not monologic, but emerges through engagement — with data, peers, communities, even nonhuman agencies.

• The claim is never final. Every result is an invitation to further testing, retuning, and recontextualisation.

This is not relativism. It is responsible pluralism: the understanding that truth is provisional, but not arbitrary; that robustness arises from diversity, dialogue, and iterative refinement.

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Accountability, Not Absolutism

In this framework, the integrity of science comes not from erasing the self, but from situating the self — and remaining accountable to its effects.

This means:

• Reporting not just what was done, but how and why.

• Acknowledging the frameworks and commitments that shaped inquiry.

• Welcoming critique as an opportunity for refinement, not as a threat.

Here, objectivity becomes not a position of control, but a process of ongoing negotiation — with the world, with others, and with ourselves.

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From Objectivity to Response-Ability

The deepest insight of relational objectivity is this:

To know is not to hold the world at a distance, but to become more response-able — more capable of responding to what we encounter.

This is not about abandoning rigour. It is about anchoring rigour in relationship.

It calls for a science that is:

• Transparent about its standpoint

• Reflexive about its effects

• Committed to dialogue, revision, and care

In short, a science that earns trust not by pretending to be outside the world, but by showing how seriously it takes its place within it.

6 Knowledge in the Web of Practice

Knowledge, in the relational view, is not a static set of facts stored in minds or texts. It is a living practice — something we do, together, in specific contexts, with specific tools, toward specific ends.

To know is to participate in a web of practices: conceptual, material, social, affective.

And practices are never neutral. They organise what can be seen, said, measured, imagined. They bring some realities forth while excluding others. They are modes of world-making.

In this post, we explore how a relational science reorients our view of knowledge — not as representation, but as participation in practice.

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Practices Make Knowledge Possible

Every scientific discipline is shaped by its practices:

• The kinds of instruments it uses

• The questions it finds intelligible

• The metaphors it draws on

• The categories it deploys

• The norms it enforces

These are not incidental. They constitute the field. What counts as data, explanation, rigour, insight — all are structured by the forms of life in which they are embedded.

As philosopher of science Karen Barad puts it:

“Scientific practices are not about discovering what is already there. They are about intra-acting with the world to bring forth specific phenomena.”

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Knowing Is Not Spectating

In this view, knowledge is not the mirror of nature. It is world-involving activity.

This means:

• We don’t find pre-given facts lying around. We enact realities by engaging with the world in specific ways.

• We don’t reveal a single truth. We generate multiple, partial, and often incommensurable truth effects, each anchored in different material-semiotic practices.

• We don’t stand outside the system. We are within the unfolding of what becomes real.

Knowing, then, is a way of inhabiting the world — of making sense in ways that are materially, socially, and ethically situated.

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Material-Semiotic Entanglements

In relational science, meaning and matter cannot be separated. Every practice is material-semiotic:

• The concepts we use are inseparable from the instruments we use to generate them.

• The measurements we take are entangled with the models that define what is measurable.

• The “results” we produce are shaped by our questions, methods, and interpretive frameworks.

There is no raw data untouched by theory, and no pure theory untouched by history.

Every scientific claim emerges from a network of enactments — a choreography of bodies, machines, languages, values, and protocols.

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Communities of Practice

This also means that science is not an individual pursuit, but a collective craft.

• Knowledge grows through interaction — not just with phenomena, but with peers, mentors, reviewers, readers.

• Disciplines function as communities of practice, where newcomers learn the ropes, acquire the gestures, inherit the vocabularies.

• Paradigms persist not because they are “true,” but because they hold up under specific constraints and reproduce institutional stability.

Scientific knowledge, like all cultural practice, is sustained by participation — and always carries the traces of its social, historical, and affective conditions.

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Situated Agency and the Ethics of Practice

To participate in knowledge-making is to exercise situated agency. We are not omnipotent, but neither are we powerless.

We inherit ways of seeing and doing, but we can reflect, revise, and reimagine them.

This gives rise to an ethics of practice:

• Are our methods inclusive or exclusionary?

• Do our tools conceal as much as they reveal?

• Are we attentive to what is rendered invisible, uncountable, or unintelligible?

The relational scientist does not simply ask “What is true?” but also “What does this practice do — and for whom?”

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Knowing as Making-with

If we are always entangled in the world we study, then knowledge is not a stepping back but a making-with.

It is a dance of alignment and invention — learning to feel the rhythms of the real, while crafting new ways of orienting within it.

To know is to participate in the weaving of world and meaning, responsibly.

And this, ultimately, is what relational science teaches:

Knowledge is not what we have. It is how we relate.

7 Science as Co-Creation

If relational science begins by abandoning the dream of pure detachment, it ends with a profound revaluation of what science is for.

Science, in the relational view, is not about domination.

Not about standing above, mapping below.

Not about fixing reality once and for all.

It is about co-creation — entering into relationship with the world in ways that generate new patterns of possibility.

This post gathers the strands of our series and weaves them into a final proposition:

A relational science is not a knowledge-extracting machine. It is a world-making practice of care.

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Science as Response-Ability

Throughout this series, we’ve seen that scientific knowledge is not a passive mirror but an active construction — shaped by:

• The models we build

• The measurements we take

• The categories we deploy

• The questions we ask

• The relations we enter

In every case, we are not just observers of the world, but participants in its unfolding.

To know is to be implicated.

This calls for a new ethic of science — one grounded not in objectivity as detachment, but in response-ability: the ability to respond well to what we are entangled with.

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From Mastery to Mutuality

Modern science arose with the promise of mastery:

Predict, control, and optimise nature for human ends.

But in the Anthropocene, this dream has become untenable — and dangerous.

Relational science offers a different ethos:

• From extracting value to co-creating meaning

• From standing over to standing with

• From control to care

This does not mean abandoning rigour. It means deepening it — recognising that every model and method is an ethical choice, shaping what kinds of futures become thinkable, sayable, and liveable.

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The Work of Reworlding

Relational science is not just about understanding how things are.

It is about participating in how things become.

This is what we might call reworlding:

• Reimagining what counts as knowledge

• Reconfiguring our ways of seeing and measuring

• Reweaving our relations with earth, others, and futures

It is not science as salvation, but science as companion — one among many practices of sense-making and care, grounded in humility and hope.

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Relational Science Is Already Here

This is not a utopian dream. It is already happening.

It is happening when Indigenous scientists and ecologists collaborate across knowledge systems.

When feminist and decolonial scholars challenge extractive paradigms.

When physicists ask not just “what is matter?” but “what relations make matter matter?”

Relational science is not a break from science. It is its ongoing transformation — a remembering of the truth that we are never outside the world we study.

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To Relate Is to Hope

The most radical thing about relational science is not its critique of objectivity or its metaphysics of entanglement.

It is its invitation to hope.

To relate is to remain open — to possibility, to transformation, to care.

Relational science does not pretend to hold final answers. It asks:

• What are we becoming together?

• What kinds of worlds are we helping to bring forth?

• How might we know in ways that honour the more-than-human, the invisible, the emergent?

To know is to choose.

To choose is to relate.

To relate is to take part in the shaping of the real.

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The End of a Series, the Beginning of a Practice

This brings our series to a close. But relational science is not a doctrine. It is a practice — one that must be lived, revised, and reimagined in context.

Thank you for travelling this path.

May your knowing be participatory, your questions hospitable, and your science a site of care.

Coda: A Note from the Author

This series has been, for me, a kind of epistemic pilgrimage — not toward certainty, but toward clarity about uncertainty. It has deepened my conviction that science, at its best, is not a distancing device but a relational act. Not a monument to truth, but a means of participating more carefully, more accountably, in the unfolding of what is.

What began as a question — what would science look like if we truly took relationality seriously? — has become a set of coordinates I can no longer unsee. Science, it turns out, is never neutral, never free from entanglement. But this is not a flaw to be fixed. It is a condition to be honoured — and a gift to be received with care.

I hope that, if these reflections have done anything, they have made space for thinking otherwise: for knowing with, instead of knowing over. For asking not just what is true, but what kind of world are we helping to bring forth by calling it so?