Showing posts with label mythos. Show all posts

29 June 2025

When Grammar Pretends to Be God: A Relational Ontology Perspective

Introduction

This companion series to When Grammar Pretends to Be God deepens the critique by turning to ontology itself. It asks how grammar — specifically the grammar of the clause — has shaped not just what we say about the world, but what we believe the world is. Drawing on a relational ontology informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), we explore how grammar enacts a world of relations — and how Western metaphysics forgets this enactment, reifying those relations into things. God, force, consciousness — these are not pre-existing entities that language names, but interpretive relations that language actualises. When grammar forgets its own semiotic architecture, it performs a sleight of hand: a god trick. This series aims to expose that trick — and offer another way of thinking.

1 Relations, Reified

Western metaphysics has long mistaken its own language for the world.

The clause — that smallest unit of meaning which binds a Subject to a Process and a Complement — is not a mirror of reality. It is a semiotic act: a way of making meaning through relation. And meaning is how reality comes into being. The clause does not depict a world already there; it enacts a relation, and in doing so, actualises a world.

Yet across theologies and sciences alike, this grammatical architecture has been misread as ontology. Relations encoded by grammar have been mistaken for things that exist.

In Christian theology, the Subject becomes God-as-agent, the Process becomes divine action ("created," "redeemed"), and the Complement becomes the world — a patient, acted upon. But these roles are not ontological categories. They are functional meanings in a clause, projected into metaphysical space. The clause gives us not just God's Word, but God's grammar.

Science, too, inherits this scaffolding. Forces act. Energy flows. Laws govern. But what is "energy" apart from our need to assign agency in a transitive clause? What is a "law" but an interpersonal projection of obligation onto the cosmos? Even the Big Bang, the ultimate Process in cosmological grammar, is framed as if it had a Subject, a cause, and a trajectory.

Our relational ontology offers a different reading.

Instead of reifying Subject, Process, and Complement as existing entities, we read them as semantic functions — relational positions within a meaning instance. These roles do not reflect the architecture of the world. They enact a relation within the architecture of meaning.

And meaning is not a thing among things. It is potential — the structured readiness of a system to be actualised in relation. And when it is actualised, that is reality: not something described, but something enacted between speakers, strata, and systems.

This series will lay bare how Western thought has mistaken the architecture of language for the architecture of being. It will show that God, like gravity, may not be a substance at all — but a clause misunderstood.

The Word was not made flesh. The clause was made God.

And it's time we read it differently.

2 The Clause as the Lie That Tells the Truth

The clause is a marvellous fiction.

It construes a world of doing, sensing, being — a world in which agents act, things happen, events unfold. But this is not because the world is like that. It is because our grammar makes it like that. The clause tells a story of reality by fabricating relations between functions: Subject, Process, Complement. It is not the world's camera — it is its stage.

And what appears on this stage?

In transitivity, every clause is a little drama. A Process (e.g. creates, destroys, understands) is a happening or doing. It is relational, a semantic phase between participants. But Western metaphysics reinterprets these relational roles as entities: the Actor becomes an agent (e.g. "God"), the Goal becomes a patient (e.g. "the world"), and the Process becomes a force or power — as if these were parts of being rather than roles in meaning.

This is what our relational ontology seeks to reverse.

The Subject is not an entity, but a semantic function — an interpersonal role in the exchange of meaning. The Process is not a force, but an experiential relation. The Complement is not a substance, but another interpersonal role. These do not exist in the world before language. They exist in language as our way of construing the world — and in doing so, they actualise a world of kinds: agents, forces, causes, selves.

It is only when these relational functions are reified — frozen into ontological status — that grammar becomes metaphysics. We forget that "God created the heavens and the earth" is not a description but a construal — a construal with history, ideology, and theology woven into every function.

Our ontology reintroduces meaning as relational potential, not as categorical presence. In this model:

The clause is an instance of meaning — and meaning is how reality becomes actual.
The world construed by grammar is semiotic — and that is what being means.
Grammar enacts relation; it does not discover substance.

The so-called "lie" of the clause — that there are Subjects and Complements in the world — is also its truth. For by telling this lie, we do make meaning. We enact a shared world. But to believe that world precedes the meaning that brings it forth — to treat the clause as a report, not a relation — is to mistake enacted actuality for independent substance.

The clause is not fiction. It is formation.

3 Reification and the Ontology of the Frozen Relation

Grammar is not innocent. It does not simply name what is there — it brings it into being, and then forgets that it did so. This forgetting is what we call reification.

A relational function — like "Subject" or "Process" — becomes a thing, a substance, an entity. The clause enacts a semantic relation, but we read it as if it refers to a metaphysical reality. In this sleight of hand, grammar pretends to be God.

Let's take a familiar example:

Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.

This clause enacts a relational Process ("is") linking two Participants — one Token ("consciousness"), one Value ("an emergent property of the brain"). In SFL terms, this is an identifying relational clause: it construes one meaning as being equivalent to another. But when read ontologically, it makes a much stronger claim — that "consciousness" is, as if it exists independently, out there, waiting to be found.

What our relational ontology reveals is this:

This clause doesn’t uncover a truth — it instantiates a relation. It’s not mapping the world; it’s making meaning. It is semiotic, not metaphysical. And once we see that, the implications are profound.

God exists is not a statement of ontology, but an identifying relation: it actualises a potential relation between a Subject and a Process.

The mind causes action is not the discovery of a causal agent, but the instantiation of a transitive clause structure: Actor – Process – Goal.

Time moves forward is not a metaphysical law, but a projection of temporal Process onto an abstract Participant.

Each is a clause. Each enacts a construal. And each has been reified — taken as a representation of what is. But when we treat these semiotic enactments as ontological realities, we confuse grammar for being.

The antidote is not to discard grammar, but to see it for what it is: a powerful engine of relational construal — not a mirror of a world, but a world-making tool. In this view, meaning does not refer to pre-given entities. It brings forth relational actualities. And metaphysics is the forgetting that we did this ourselves.

4 The Metaphysics of the Clause — And How to Undo It

When grammar pretends to be God, it pretends not just to mean but to be. It takes the fleeting, contingent nature of semiotic choice — and freezes it into ontology.

What enables this sleight of hand?

The clause.

In SFL, the clause is a figure — a quantum of meaning that construes experience in terms of processes and participants. It does not represent an objective world. It offers one way of construing meaning from potential: a snapshot of what is being meant now.

But from a Western metaphysical stance, the clause gets misread as a report of reality. It shifts from being an act of meaning to a statement of fact. From semiotic construal to metaphysical claim.

This happens most insidiously in relational clauses:

God is love.
Force is mass times acceleration.
Reality is language.

Each of these is structurally an identifying clause. Each equates two participant roles. And each, in philosophical hands, has been taken as a metaphysical truth.

But a relational ontology — informed by SFL — sees it differently:

These clauses instantiate meaning; they don’t discover it.
The copula is enacts a relation; it does not reveal a hidden essence.
The clause realises a semiotic relation, not an ontological identity.

This does not mean that such clauses are wrong. It means they are doing something different than metaphysics has assumed. They are not unveiling what exists. They are construing what means — in a particular context, through a particular semiotic system.

So what does it mean to undo the metaphysics of the clause?

It means returning to the clause as meaning in motion — not frozen truth. It means understanding that "God," "mind," "self," "reality" are not entities — but the names we give to dense knots of meaning, realised in semiotic relation. It means seeing that every clause is a move in meaning-making — not a mirror held up to the world. And it means recognising:

Grammar does not reflect being.
It enacts relation.
Only when we forget this, does grammar pretend to be God.

Epilogue: The World We Make With Grammar

We began with a provocation: that grammar pretends to be God. That, beneath the surface of metaphysical systems and ontological claims, lies a sleight of hand — a forgetting of how meaning is made.

Each part of this series has traced a path through that forgetting:

We saw how relational processes give rise to the illusion of substances — as if meaning were found, not made.
We examined how identities are not innate but enacted — instantiated in semiotic relation.
We uncovered how reification freezes relations into things — making thought look like the world.
And we reclaimed the clause itself as a unit of meaning, not of metaphysical fact.

At the heart of it all is a simple shift in perspective:

From things that exist to relations that are made.
From ontology as essence to ontology as instantiation.
From substance to actualisation.

This is not a retreat from reality — it is a shift in how we understand reality itself. For reality is not what lies behind meaning, but what comes into being through it.

What we call “the world” is not out there, waiting to be named. It is continually brought forth — actualised as meaning — through the dynamic interplay of systems in relation. Reality is not discovered; it is enacted. Not named, but made meaningful — again and again.

Grammar is not divine. But it is generative. It does not mirror the world. It makes worlds — worlds of meaning, of value, of relation.

When grammar pretends to be God, it forgets this. But when grammar is reclaimed as our own — as the architecture of meaning — we remember:

We are not prisoners of language. We are its participants. And the world it builds is not ours to reflect — it is ours to enact.

For meaning is not about things. Meaning is how things come to be.

27 June 2025

The World is Not Made of Things: A Relational Ontology of Meaning

Preface: A New Architecture of Meaning

What if the foundations of our understanding — of self, reality, and knowledge — were built on a hidden assumption? A tacit belief that the world is made up of isolated things, discrete entities locked in place?
This series challenges that assumption by proposing a relational ontology of meaning: a view where meaning is not static or contained but is dynamic, emergent, and fundamentally interwoven with interaction.
From the birth of the self in the semiotic interplay of caregiver and child, to the ghosts of metaphysical grammar haunting theology and science, to the reconstruction of thought itself as a semiotic engine, this collection explores how meaning potential underpins everything we know and are.
Drawing on systemic functional linguistics, semiotics, and contemporary philosophy, we unravel how meaning is enacted and individuated — and how our reality is less a world of things than a web of relations.
Whether you are a student of language, philosophy, cognitive science, or simply a curious mind, these essays invite you to rethink what it means to be.
To read these pages is to embark on a journey where to mean is to be, and to be is to relate.
Welcome to the architecture of meaning — the world remade.

1 Not Substance, but Relation

Western thought has long been preoccupied with things — with substances, entities, and essences. Philosophers have searched for the ultimate building blocks of reality: atoms, ideas, selves, substances, subjects. But what if this entire metaphysical project has been shaped not by insight into the world, but by the form of the language used to describe it?

This piece argues for a relational ontology of meaning: a view in which reality is not made of things with properties, but of meanings enacted through relations. Meaning is not contained in objects or residing in minds; it emerges through patterned interaction — semiotically, socially, and systemically.

In place of a world composed of static entities, we are invited to see a world construed in motion — not because reality itself is reducible to language, but because language is the means by which we make sense of what-is. And the model of language we draw on makes all the difference.

From Substances to Systems

Traditional metaphysics begins with things: God, soul, matter, mind, truth. These are often conceived as self-subsistent entities — each with its own inner nature, existing independently of its relations. This view is so deeply ingrained that it is rarely questioned.

But from a systemic-functional perspective, this starting point is itself a theoretical choice — one heavily shaped by the architecture of the clause. When grammar makes meaning in terms of Subject + Process + Complement, it predisposes us to see the world in terms of agent + action + patient. This, as earlier series have explored, is not an innocent projection. It is an ontological commitment, albeit an unconscious one.

In contrast, a relational ontology begins not with things but with systems of options. In the SFL tradition, the architecture of meaning is not substance-based, but relational:

A system is a set of options — potential ways of meaning.
An instance is a selection from those options.
Meaning arises through relation: between selected features, between strata, between individuals and collectives, between potential and actual.

This model reverses the metaphysical default. It does not treat meaning as carried by forms or stored in minds. It treats meaning as a pattern of relations instantiated through use.

Three Planes of Relation

In place of metaphysical dualisms (e.g. mind vs body, idea vs matter), a relational ontology recognises three interwoven planes of meaning-making:

Stratification – the relation between levels of symbolic abstraction
(semantics realised by lexicogrammar, which is realised by phonology)
Instantiation – the relation between potential and actual
(a system of meaning is instantiated as text, and texts accumulate into system)
Individuation – the relation between collective and personal meaning potential
(the self is not given, but formed through differential access and repeated instantiation)

Each plane is constituted by relation, not by substance. Stratification is not a stack of layers; it is a system of realisation relationships. Instantiation is not a sequence of outputs; it is a dynamic of probabilistic actualisation. Individuation is not the revelation of a pre-existing inner essence; it is the ongoing shaping of a personal semiotic profile through patterned participation in collective meaning.

These planes are not metaphorical. They constitute a semiotic ontology: an account of reality in which what-is is construed not through things, but through the patterned unfolding of meaning in context.

2 Reification as Ontological Error

If the world is not made of things but of relations, then how did it come to seem otherwise? The short answer is: we reified our own semiotic resources. We mistook our ways of meaning for the structure of the world. And once reified, those ways of meaning began to masquerade as metaphysical truths.

This is not a new insight. Philosophers from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein have warned of the perils of treating language as a transparent window on reality. What a relational ontology adds is a precise account of how reification works, and how deeply grammar is implicated in it.

From Meaning Function to Metaphysical Category

In the systemic-functional model, grammatical structure enacts meaning across three simultaneous metafunctions:

Experiential: construing experience as configurations of process, participant, and circumstance
Interpersonal: enacting roles and relationships between speakers
Textual: organising information flow in context

These are not domains of content, but functions of language in use. The clause functions simultaneously in all three ways — not to describe what is, but to enact meaning in context.

But when these grammatical functions are stripped of their semiotic role and treated as ontological categories, reification occurs:

The Subject becomes the essential Self
The Process becomes an Action or Force in the world
The Complement becomes a Thing that is acted upon

This is not simply a mistake in philosophical interpretation — it is a structural risk built into the architecture of the clause. Language construes meaning through function, but those functions are easily misread as entities.

God as Grammatical Projection

As explored in the earlier Grammar and the Ghost in the Machine series, one of the clearest examples of reification is theological:

In the beginning, God created...

This clause is not merely a declaration of faith. It is a projection of a particular semantic configuration: a Subject acting on a Complement through a transitive Process. And it sets the template for an entire metaphysics of agency. God becomes the ultimate Subject; creation becomes the ultimate action.

But this is not a neutral observation — it is a grammatical decision mistaken for metaphysical fact. The clause did not merely express belief in a creator; it structured belief around the transitive grammar of action. It became possible to imagine divinity itself in the image of the clause.

The same holds for Cartesian metaphysics. I think, therefore I am presumes that “I” is an independent Subject, thinking is an autonomous Process, and “being” is a resultant state. But each of these is a grammatical projection. There is no necessity that existence be transitive, or that subjectivity be singular and stable. The metaphysics derives from the syntax.

Science in the Image of the Clause

The same transitive logic finds its way into scientific discourse:

Gravity pulls.
Electrons flow.
Forces act.
Laws govern.

These are not simple descriptions. They are clauses: structured configurations of Subject, Process, and Complement. The world, in scientific narration, becomes a cascade of entities acting upon entities. Even where science resists metaphysical speculation, it often cannot escape grammatical reification.

In this light, both theology and science are not merely different genres of thought. They are semantic enactments shaped by the same underlying architecture: the clause as the organising unit of meaning, projected onto the cosmos.

Undoing the Illusion

To unthink reification is not to abandon meaning, but to locate it properly: not in the things language names, but in the systems of choice from which language draws.

This is the heart of Halliday’s system/instance framework. Systems are not categories of things; they are sets of potential relations. An instance does not point to an essence; it selects from a network of meaning possibilities. And over time, these selections form patterned tendencies — probabilistic potentials that evolve with use.

Reification short-circuits this dynamic. It freezes potential into substance. It treats the instantiation as the reality, and forgets the system that made it possible. It mistakes functional relation for ontological identity.

A relational ontology refuses this move. It keeps meaning in motion, refusing to let a semantic configuration harden into a metaphysical object.

3 Relational Being and the Cline of Instantiation

If language is not a system of labels for things, but a semiotic system for enacting meaning in context, then our ontology must reflect this. Being is not a state. It is a relation — and more precisely, a relation in motion.

This is the insight encoded in what Halliday called the cline of instantiation. The cline describes the relation between the system (the total meaning potential of a language or a speaker) and its instances (actual selections made in context). Meaning does not exist in either pole alone — it is the tension between them that constitutes semiosis.

To apply this to ontology is to say: what is, is what has been instantiated from potential. And what is not (yet) is still real — as potential.

Being as Selection from Meaning Potential

The cline of instantiation is not a continuum of degree, but a semiotic relation: a functional dependence of instance on system, and of system on the sum of its instantiations.

In this view:

A system is not a repository of rules or forms, but a structured potential — a network of options available for meaning.
An instance is not an object or utterance per se, but a selection: a particular realisation of meaning from that potential.

And over time, the instances themselves modify the potential. Meaning potential evolves by use.

This means that being is not fixed, but is inferred from patterns of instantiation. What something is cannot be defined in isolation, only in relation to the systems it realises and the contexts in which it is realised.

Relational Ontology: Not Essence, but Relation

Traditional metaphysics looks for essences — underlying substances or forms that define what a thing is. But in a relational ontology grounded in semiosis, essence gives way to relation:

A clause is not a thing, but a relation among systemic choices.
A person is not an essence, but a trajectory of instantiations across time and context.
Even identity is not a fixed self but a pattern of semiotic individuation — a personalisation of shared potential.

This perspective reshapes how we understand everything from agency to knowledge. A scientific law, for instance, is not a truth about reality but a pattern of meaning instantiations, regularised in a way that allows prediction. It is a kind of grammatical condensation: a semantic habit mistaken for a necessity.

Grammatical Being Is Not Ontological Being

The implications here are profound. If being is construed semiotically — and instantiated through grammar — then we must learn to distinguish grammatical being from ontological being.

To say The universe expands is not to identify an objective fact in neutral terms. It is to deploy a clause, with a Subject (the universe) and a Process (expands), in a transitive configuration. That configuration construes experience in a particular way — but does not prove that the universe is a ‘thing’ that ‘does’ something.

The clause realises a semantic construal, not a metaphysical entity.

And that is enough. For meaning does not require metaphysical guarantees — it requires semiotic accountability: coherence within a system of relations.

The Metaphysics of the Actual

In a relational ontology, the actual is not more real than the potential. It is simply more contextually salient. Potential meaning is not a shadowy prelude to reality — it is part of the architecture of being.

Every instance draws from a system; every system is shaped by instances. This reciprocal movement is the ontological rhythm of meaning: from potential to actual, and from actual back into potential, through memory, abstraction, and re-selection.

To be is to be instantiated.

To become is to be instantiated again — differently.

Part 4: The Individual as a Meaning System

What is a person?

Western thought often answers with some version of essentialism: the soul, the self, the rational mind, the subject of consciousness. But if we take the cline of instantiation seriously — if we understand meaning as a structured potential realised in context — then the individual is not a thing at all.

The individual is a system of meaning potential, continually reshaped by the meanings it instantiates and the meanings instantiated around it.

This is not a metaphor. It is a semiotic fact.

From System to Instance: Personalisation of Meaning

In Halliday’s framework, every speaker draws from the larger system of language — what he called the “meaning potential of the language as a whole.” But no individual realises the full system. Instead, each speaker develops a subsystem: a personalised repertoire of choices shaped by the contexts they’ve lived through, the meanings they’ve made, and the communities they inhabit.

This is individuation: the relation between the meaning potential of the system and the meaning potential of the individual.

Just as instances actualise the system, individuals are partial, patterned systems of the collective semiotic potential. The self is not separate from language. It is a particular way language has been actualised — and can be actualised again.

Instantiating the Self: Meaning as Becoming

If an individual is a system of meaning potential, then personhood is not a static identity but a trajectory of instantiations:

The meanings I have made are my history.
The meanings I can make are my potential.
The meanings I am making now are my becoming.

Every utterance is a selection — not just from the lexicon, but from the self. And over time, these selections accrue. Just as language evolves through use, so does the self. We become what we mean.

This is not a metaphorical claim. It is a grammatical one. The self is not a substance that uses language — it is a pattern of language in use.

The Individual as a Site of Semiotic Tension

What gives rise to individuality, then, is not separation from the system, but a particular relation to it.

Each individual negotiates tensions between:

Collective potential (language, culture, discourse)
Personal potential (the individual’s meaning system)
Instantial variation (the selections made moment by moment)

This triadic tension is where individuation lives. The self is not reducible to its system, nor to its instances. It is a site of semiotic resonance — where systemic meaning meets contextual selection in ways that are never fully predictable, never fully stable, and never entirely repeatable.

To speak is not only to mean. It is to become.

You Are Not a Thing. You Are a System.

This reframes our understanding of identity, agency, and social life. It means:

You are not a self-contained subject.
You are a semiotic self — a personalised organisation of meaning potential.
Your individuality is not prior to language.
It is realised through language, over time.

This also has ethical force. If each person is a system of meanings in motion — not a fixed category — then dialogue is not just interaction. It is a site of mutual becoming. To engage another person is to enter a shared field of potential. And what emerges is not given in advance.

5 The Relational Ethics of Meaning

Ethics as Semiotic Responsibility

If the individual is not a self-contained substance but a semiotic system of meaning in relation, then ethics is fundamentally about how we engage with that system—how we participate in each other’s meaning-making and individuation.

Ethics is not primarily about rules or laws. It is about responsibility in the unfolding of meaning.

To speak, listen, respond, and interpret is to affect the semiotic potentials of others — to alter their fields of possible meanings and identities.

Meaning is Never Solo

Because meaning is always realised in interaction — always relational — every act of communication is an ethical act.

When we speak, we do not simply transmit information. We enter into a dynamic process where:

We acknowledge the other’s meaning potential.
We negotiate meanings without fixing or reducing.
We create openings for alternative instantiations.

To deny the semiotic personhood of another — to treat them as a fixed object or a mere conduit — is to close down their potential to become.

The Ethics of Indeterminacy

Relational ontology acknowledges that meaning is never fully determined. This uncertainty is a source of creativity — but also of vulnerability.

Ethical meaning-making requires:

Tolerance for ambiguity — allowing meanings to unfold without premature closure.
Openness to transformation — embracing that identities and meanings evolve through interaction.
Careful listening — respecting how others instantiate their meaning potentials.

The ethical act is to support the semiotic freedom of the other, even when it challenges our own meanings.

Interdependence and Semiotic Ecology

Ethics emerges not just between isolated individuals, but within a web of semiotic relations — a shared ecology of meaning.

Our meanings depend on others’ meanings, and the community’s shared potentials.

This demands a relational humility:

Recognising that our own meaning potentials are co-constituted by others.
Understanding that we are part of a larger semiotic system, not autonomous islands.

Ethics is care for this semiotic ecosystem — nurturing the conditions for meaningful dialogue and shared becoming.

Conclusion: Ethics as Semiotic Praxis

In this relational ontology, ethics is an ongoing praxis of meaning — a continuous engagement with the semiotic potentials of self and other.

It demands that we approach communication as a shared creation, not a mere transaction.

And in doing so, we participate in the co-creation of selves, societies, and realities — always in flux, always becoming.

Coda: Becoming in Relation — The Future of Meaning

As we conclude this journey through a relational ontology of meaning, a vital insight emerges: the world is not composed of isolated things, but of relations — of meaning always in motion, always becoming.

This view invites us to rethink long-standing assumptions about self, knowledge, and reality itself. The individual is never a fixed entity, but a semiotic process continuously shaped by interaction with others. Meaning is not a static code or mere representation, but a living architecture enacted and re-enacted in dialogue.

Such a perspective transforms philosophy, science, and theology — revealing how much of what we call “reality” is an unfolding semiotic performance, a dance of potentials actualised through encounter.

The implications are profound:

For identity: We are not born but made — constantly individuating through relation.
For knowledge: Truths are not fixed but provisional, emerging through semiotic negotiation.
For ethics: Responsibility lies in nurturing others’ meaning potentials, sustaining the shared semiotic ecosystem.
For being: Existence itself is less a “thing” and more a becoming, a dynamic web of relational meaning.

To embrace this is to live with humility and openness — to recognise that our own meanings and selves are intertwined with the world’s ongoing story.

The path ahead is one of continuous dialogue — with others, with ourselves, and with the ever-unfolding semiotic cosmos.

In the end, to be is to mean — and to mean is to relate.

25 June 2025

When Grammar Pretends to Be God: Reifying the Clause in Theology and Science

1 Grammar with Delusions of Grandeur

Western thought is not just haunted by ghosts of metaphysical speculation — it is possessed by the shadow of its own grammar.

The clause — the fundamental unit of meaning in most languages — has long masqueraded as a mirror of the world. Subject, Process, Complement: these grammatical functions are not merely tools for expressing meaning, but have been reified into ontological categories. (Note: In systemic functional linguistics, these elements span multiple metafunctions: the Subject is interpersonal, the Process experiential, and the Complement interpersonal. The simplified triad here reflects the common metaphysical misreading of grammar as a direct map to reality, not the nuanced functional grammar model.) The Subject becomes an agent, the Process becomes action, and the Complement becomes a recipient or patient of that action. Meaning turns into metaphysics. Syntax, into substance.

From this projection, an entire theology and science are born. God, in Christian theology, is not merely a symbol of potentiality or totality — he is rendered as the Subject par excellence, the transcendent originator who acts. In the beginning, God created... The syntax is not incidental. It installs agency and transitivity at the heart of the cosmos. The clause doesn’t just describe God — it makes God in its own grammatical image.

Likewise, modern science, despite its claims to objectivity, inherits the same semantic scaffold. Forces act. Particles move. Laws govern. The universe is not merely construed — it is narrated in clauses that re-enact the same trinity of subjecthood, process, and object. And we believe it, because our grammar compels it.

But what if none of this is ontologically necessary? What if these ‘actions’ are interpretive, not intrinsic — the result of semantic architecture rather than metaphysical truth? What if being is not inherently transitive?

This series will set out to expose the illusion. Not to deny the value of theological or scientific discourse, but to reveal their hidden architecture: the deep grammar that underwrites centuries of metaphysical thought. For in the beginning was not the Word — but the clause.

And the clause has much to answer for.

2 “In the Beginning”: The Clause as Creation Myth

The Book of Genesis does not begin with a concept. It begins with a clause.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

This is not a neutral description of divine action — it is a canonical enactment of transitive syntax. The Subject ("God") acts through a Process ("created") upon a Complement ("the heavens and the earth"). The structure is archetypal. It is not merely what God does; it is how we make sense of doing — and by implication, of being.

But here’s the problem: this clause is not a window onto reality. It is a projection of a linguistic system. And in projecting it, we mistake grammar for cosmology.

The Grammatical God

God becomes the ultimate Subject — absolute, agentive, initiating. The verb "create" grants Him total transitivity: nothing is co-constructed, nothing evolves, nothing emerges — it is simply done unto. The Complement (heaven and earth) has no agency, no potential of its own. The metaphysics is built into the syntax.

And so theology inherits its metaphysical scaffolding from the architecture of language. “I AM” becomes the divine name, rooted in the copula — the verb of being. But what does it mean to predicate being through a copular clause? What is assumed when existence itself is construed in subject–predicate form?

God is not the mystery of meaning; he becomes the grammatical necessity of clause structure.

Theology as Clause-Projection

When the New Testament proclaims, “In the beginning was the Word”, it reiterates this metaphysical commitment. Logos becomes divine not only in concept but in structure — not just Word as reason, but Word as clause, and clause as the ordering principle of the cosmos. And thus:

God is Subject.
Logos is Process.
Creation is Complement.

This is not Trinitarian theology; this is trinitarian syntax.

What follows is a reification of clause roles into ontological roles. Father (Subject), Son (Process), Spirit (Complement or Circumstance?) — metaphysics begins to orbit the gravitational centre of grammar. We are not so much interpreting the divine as re-enacting the clause on a cosmic scale.

The Ontological Consequences

The consequences are profound:

Being becomes equated with clause-level Subjecthood.
Action becomes the privileged mode of reality.
Creation is construed as a one-way process, not a dialogue.
The world is rendered passive — said, done, willed into being.

But what if the clause is not a mirror of creation, but a mechanism of construal? What if meaning is dialogic, not transitive? What if God's 'being' is not agentive, but semiotic — the unfolding of meaning potential within a system of interaction?

In other words: what if Genesis is not a report, but a semantic performance?

3 From Let There Be Light to Newton’s Laws — Clause Structure Goes Scientific

Once grammar had carved its niche in theology, it did not retire. It mutated. Enlightenment rationality simply stripped off the robes of religion and redressed the same clause structure in the language of natural law.

Force moves bodies.
Energy transfers through systems.
The universe expands.

Each of these is a clause, not a fact. A Subject initiates, a Process unfolds, and a Complement is acted upon. In science, just as in theology, the metaphysics is silently scaffolded by the syntactic.

Science as Secularised Syntax

Let us be clear: Newton did not discover transitivity. He inherited it — from Latin, from logic, from the scholastic worldview where action must have an agent. The laws of motion read like transitive clauses because that’s what they are: God has exited stage left, but the syntax remains intact.

Subject: force, energy, gravity, evolution
Process: moves, pulls, adapts, causes
Complement: matter, organisms, spacetime

The syntax of agency is never questioned. “Gravity pulls”, as if gravity were an old man with a rope. “Natural selection favours”, as if it held a clipboard. These are not metaphors used by poets — they are metaphors embedded in scientific logic, metaphors turned into ontology through repeated grammatical performance.

The Persistence of the Transitive Fantasy

Even in contemporary physics, the clause structure clings on. We say:

A particle interacts with a field.
The Higgs boson gives mass to other particles.
The universe obeys mathematical laws.

But pause. What kind of thing is a law, that it can be obeyed? Who enacts it? Is the particle a Subject, or are we simply projecting semantic roles onto mathematical formalisms?

The semiotic reality: these expressions are meanings, not mirrors. The clause does not report a reality; it enacts a construal. And that construal is shaped by the logics of grammar, not the structures of the cosmos.

Grammar as Invisible Epistemology

We may speak of “forces acting on bodies” or “information being transmitted”, but these are syntactic metaphors, not empirical observations. No one has ever seen “a force” do anything. It is not the presence of evidence, but the pressure of grammar, that demands such formulations.

We must ask: Why do our scientific theories look like transitive clauses? Why must every phenomenon be rephrased as Subject–Verb–Object?

Because we’re not merely observing the world. We are grammatically rebuilding it.

4 Cogito Grammaticus — The Clause Rewrites the Self

Having traced the clause from theology to science, we arrive at its final masquerade: the grammar of selfhood. No longer divine, no longer empirical — now the clause becomes introspective. It turns inward, slips behind the eyes, and declares its most famous tautology:

I think, therefore I am.

Descartes’ formula is not just a philosophical proposition. It is a clause. Subject + Process. I (Subject) think (Process), therefore I am (another clause, copular this time: Subject + Relational Process + Attribute). His metaphysics is a syntactic artefact.

What Descartes discovered was not the indubitable foundation of being, but the grammatical illusion of agency. The clause enacts a Subject that thinks, and then grants that Subject ontological status. I do, therefore I am. The clause makes it so.

The Grammar of Consciousness

Our everyday experience is no less enchanted:

I see a bird.
I feel tired.
I know the answer.
I am sad.

In each case, grammar assigns a first-person Subject — I — and grants it power over a Process (see, feel, know, be). But are these really discrete events happening to a stable entity? Or is the “I” simply a grammatical placeholder for coherence?

The self, then, is not the source of meaning but its grammatical projection. The repeated instantiation of Subject–Process constructions gives the illusion of a persistent entity beneath experience.

Grammar as Ontological Prosthesis

Even the idea of agency depends on transitivity. “I made a decision.” But what is a decision? Is it an act or a state? Is it observable or merely declared? It doesn’t matter. Grammar renders it real. Once it enters the clause, it exists.

And when we move to inner experience — intention, belief, desire — the syntactic fiction deepens. Grammar doesn’t merely describe the mind; it conjures it.

I want
I believe
I remember
I hope

These are grammatical acts of possession and process. Without them, the mind would be formless, a soup of impressions. The clause gives it shape. The clause gives it selfhood.

The Linguistic Delusion of the Subject

Western philosophy treats the Subject as a metaphysical starting point. But what if it is a grammatical artefact? What if our entire notion of individuality — of being a unified knower, actor, and feeler — is scaffolded not by neurons or soul, but by the default structures of clause grammar?

The Subject is not the origin of the clause. It is its product.

And so we return to the beginning:

In the beginning was the clause.
And the clause was with meaning, and the clause was meaning.
And the clause made flesh the Subject, the Process, and the Complement —
And lo, metaphysics was born.

Coda: When Language Turns to Look at Itself

Across this series, we've followed the ghostly traces of grammar as it moves through philosophy, theology, science, and selfhood. What began as linguistic organisation — clause, system, stratum, instance — has, over centuries, become mistaken for the structure of reality itself.

The danger is not grammar; it is forgetting that grammar is ours — a semiotic technology for construing experience, not a mirror held up to metaphysical truth. The clause is not the cosmos. The Subject is not the soul. The verb is not creation itself. But when these patterns of meaning lose their status as semiotic constructs, they return as reifications — haunting our disciplines, deifying their categories, ossifying thought.

By retracing this path, we have attempted not just critique but renewal. To show that language is not a veil to be lifted from reality, but the very condition of meaning. Not a system to be mastered, but a terrain we enact with others. Meaning is not inherited; it is instantiated. And in that act of semiotic becoming, the self is forged.

If there is a theology of language, it is this:
In the beginning is not the Word, but the dialogue.
Not the Subject, but the interaction.
Not God as noun, but meaning as process.

Language is not our prison. It is our possibility.

Series summary:

When Grammar Pretends to Be God has tracked the reification of grammatical structures across theology, science, and selfhood. The same transitive fantasy underwrites divine creation, Newtonian causality, and Cartesian consciousness.

It is not reality that speaks through grammar — it is grammar that speaks reality into being.