Why Language Matters – Realisation and the Architecture of Meaning Across Domains

1 Language as Theory’s Condition of Possibility

Scientific theories, philosophical arguments, religious cosmologies — each of these may seem to open a window onto something outside of language: a world of objects, of ideas, of truths. Yet none of them can be formulated, communicated, or even thought without language. Theories do not merely travel through language as a vehicle; they are realised in language as meaning. And because of this, the architecture of language is also the architecture of theorising.

This blog adopts a simple but far-reaching proposition:

A theory of language has the potential to reconstrue the language of theories — because theories are realised in language.

What does it mean to say that a theory is realised in language? In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), meaning is stratified: what we say (or write or think) involves relations between different levels of symbolic abstraction. At one level, there is semantics — the meanings we make. At another, lexicogrammar — the wordings we use to realise those meanings. At yet another, phonology or graphology — the sounds or written forms we use to realise the wordings.

These levels are not separate codes; they are linked through realisation — a symbolic relation in which one level is the expression of another. In this sense, the semantic content of a theory is not independent of its expression: it is made possible by the symbolic architecture through which it is realised.

This has profound implications. It means that when a scientist proposes a law of nature, or when a philosopher defines a category of thought, or when a myth-maker names the origin of things, they are drawing on the same semiotic resources: the capacity of language to make meaning across levels of abstraction. It also means that the categories of science, philosophy, and myth can be examined not only for what they claim about the world, but for how they function as construals of meaning.

Language, then, is not just the medium of theory. It is its material. And if we want to understand how theories work — how they construct their objects, project their categories, and shape our understanding of the world — we need a model of the semiotic processes at work.

SFL offers such a model. Unlike formal linguistic theories that treat language as a syntactic code, SFL treats language as a social semiotic: a meaning-making system shaped by and shaping human experience. It equips us with tools — like realisation, instantiation, and individuation — for mapping how meaning is structured, how it becomes actual, and how it varies across contexts and communities.

In the posts that follow, we will explore how these tools can illuminate the symbolic architecture behind scientific, philosophical, and cultural theories — not to judge them from the outside, but to make visible their internal logics. Our aim is not to replace disciplinary knowledge, but to deepen its foundations by asking:

What becomes possible when we take the architecture of meaning as a starting point for inquiry?

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2 Realisation and the Architecture of Meaning

To understand how theories work, we need to understand how meaning works. At the heart of meaning-making in language is the concept of realisation: the symbolic relation between different levels of abstraction. In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), realisation is not just a matter of encoding meaning in words — it is a layered architecture that enables meaning to take form.

In the SFL model, meaning is stratified into levels:

• Semantics: the level of meaning — what is meant.

• Lexicogrammar: the level of wording — how the meaning is worded.

• Phonology/graphology: the level of sounding or writing — how the wording is expressed.

Each level realises the one above it. That is:

Wording is the realisation of meaning. Sound or writing is the realisation of wording.

This is not a material chain of causality, but a symbolic architecture. It is not that a thought causes a sentence or that a sentence causes a sound. Rather, each level is a symbolic abstraction of the one below it, and each meaning instance is an enactment of this relation: a semantic structure is realised in a grammatical structure, which is realised in a phonological or graphical structure.

To say that realisation is a symbolic relation is to highlight its character as identifying: it says what this is at a higher level of abstraction. For example:

• A given grammatical structure is the expression of a particular semantic structure.

• A sequence of phonemes is the expression of a particular grammatical structure.

In this sense, realisation organises language as a hierarchy of construal. The higher stratum construes experience in more abstract, semantic terms. The lower stratum construes that semantic meaning in terms of linguistic form. And it is only through these layers that meaning can be actualised in the world — in speech, in writing, in thought.

So why does this matter for theory?

Because every theory — scientific, philosophical, cultural — must travel through this architecture. Its concepts are not free-floating ideas; they are meanings realised in wordings. And those wordings are not neutral containers; they are structured, patterned, and shaped by the systems of grammar and discourse in which they are embedded.

If a theory defines “energy” as the capacity to do work, or “being” as that which is, or “grace” as divine favour, it is drawing on semiotic resources to make those categories meaningful. The theory’s sense of what exists, what is possible, and what is real depends on the symbolic architecture through which such meanings are construed and realised.

To understand a theory, then, is not only to trace its logic or test its claims. It is to examine how its meanings are realised — what symbolic systems they depend on, what assumptions they encode, what alternative construals they exclude.

This is not a purely linguistic concern. It is epistemological. It opens the possibility of seeing theory as constructed meaning, and invites us to explore how different theoretical traditions draw on different architectures of meaning — different ways of realising experience.

In the next post, we will examine the second major semiotic relation in the SFL framework: instantiation — the relation between meaning potential and meaning instance. If realisation explains how a theory is structured, instantiation explains how it is used.

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3 Instantiation – From Potential to Instance

If realisation is the symbolic relation between levels of abstraction — semantics, grammar, and expression — then instantiation is the relation between what is possible and what is actual. It is the semiotic process through which meaning potential becomes meaning instance.

In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), every language is a system of choices. At any given moment, speakers draw from a vast repertoire of possibilities — a meaning potential — to produce a particular text. That text, whether spoken or written, is an instance of that potential.

So, what does this mean?

It means that language is not a fixed code. It is a system organised around potential, and every instance of language use is a selection from that potential. Over time, repeated instances contribute to the probabilities of future instances — reinforcing or shifting the contours of the system itself. In this way:

The system shapes the instance; the instance reshapes the system.

This dialectic between potential and instance lies at the heart of all meaning-making, and by extension, all theorising.

Theories, too, have meaning potentials. A theory of gravity does not exist solely in a single equation or paragraph. It exists in the full range of meanings that can be activated within its conceptual framework. A given explanation or application is an instantiation — one realisation of many possible ones.

Importantly, the concept of instantiation also applies beyond language. It offers a lens through which we can understand scientific models, philosophical arguments, and even cultural performances as instances of broader semiotic systems. For example:

• A climate model is an instantiation of the potential meanings available in climate science.

• A legal ruling is an instantiation of the interpretive potential of legal precedent and statute.

• A ritual is an instantiation of a culture’s potential meanings about life, death, or the sacred.

By thinking in terms of instantiation, we resist the illusion that theories are static bodies of knowledge. We see instead that they live through their use — in what they make possible, in how they are deployed, and in what they bring into being.

This has deep implications for how we understand inquiry. It shifts us from a model of truth as correspondence (matching a theory to reality) to a model of meaning as selection — of what we bring forth, highlight, or foreground in the act of making meaning. Theories are not simply mirrors; they are modes of participation in a semiotic system.

In our next post, we will turn to the third major SFL relation: individuation — the relation between the collective meaning potential of a community or system and the particular meaning potentials of individual users. Individuation will help us understand how theories vary, evolve, and specialise through their deployment by different communities of meaning.

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4 Individuation – Meaning, Community, and Difference

Language is not just a system of options (potential) and their expressions (instances). It is also a shared resource. And yet, no two speakers mean in exactly the same way.

This tension between the collective and the particular is what Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) calls individuation — the relation between the meaning potential of a community (the system) and the meaning potential of individual users (their repertoires, voices, registers, styles).

Individuation acknowledges that:

We don’t all have equal access to the same systems of meaning. Our histories, communities, and experiences shape how — and what — we are able to mean.

In linguistic terms, individuation helps us understand why a physicist, a poet, and a child all speak English but do so with vastly different resources. Their meaning potentials are differently developed. The physicist has access to specialised semantic domains; the poet might foreground affect and rhythm; the child is still building their systemic repertoire.

But the principle extends far beyond language.

In science, individuation explains why different disciplines have different interpretive frameworks. The language of neuroscience is not the language of anthropology — even when they investigate overlapping questions. Each field instantiates meanings from a shared cultural and linguistic pool, but through distinct, individuated systems.

Even within a field, individuation plays out in schools of thought, methodological preferences, or regional traditions. A scientist trained in Kyoto may not frame their work in the same way as one trained in Chicago — not because of a failure of reason, but because of differences in meaning potential: in disciplinary lineage, educational environment, conceptual metaphors, and more.

Individuation also provides a powerful counter to the idea of a "view from nowhere." Every act of meaning is shaped by its locatedness in a history of practice, a community of discourse, and a personal trajectory. To individuate is to participate with difference — to speak as someone, somewhere, with some kind of voice.

And this matters deeply for theory. Because theories are realised in language, their very shape is influenced by the individuated meaning potential of those who build them. The more diverse our communities of inquiry, the richer and more reflexive our theories can become.

Individuation, then, is not a barrier to objectivity — it is a precondition for depth. It reminds us that the richness of our theoretical systems lies not in erasing difference, but in cultivating and accounting for it.

In our final post of the series, we will bring these insights together to consider what it means to use a theory of language to reconstrue the language of theories, and why this might be one of the most generative moves available to human thought.

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5 Why Language Matters – The Architecture of Meaning Across Domains

Why use a theory of language to reconstrue science, philosophy, or myth? Because all of them are realised in language.

Language is not a passive medium into which ideas are poured. It is a semiotic architecture that makes ideation, abstraction, and system-building possible in the first place. Its internal organisation — its relations between potential and instance, between content and expression, between the collective and the individuated — provides a grammar for theory itself.

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) gives us tools for recognising this grammar. With its distinctions between:

• Instantiation: the relation between system and instance,

• Realisation: the relation between levels of symbolic abstraction,

• Individuation: the relation between shared meaning systems and individual repertoires,

…we are equipped to understand how ideas take form, move through communities, and become structured systems of knowledge.

This meta-series has made a modest claim: that these linguistic distinctions have explanatory power beyond language. They are not metaphors imported into other domains — they are formal relations intrinsic to the systems in which those domains are expressed.

When we say a gene is instantiated through its activation, or a scientific tradition individuates knowledge through its lineage of thinkers, or a myth is realised in narrative and ritual, we are not drawing loose analogies. We are uncovering homologous architectures of meaning — recurring structural patterns that help us understand how knowledge becomes knowable.

This is not to reduce science, philosophy, or religion to language, but to acknowledge that their articulation, transmission, and evolution are linguistically mediated. Any field that relies on theorisation, explanation, or modelling relies — whether tacitly or explicitly — on a semiotic infrastructure.

And so, we offer this orientation:

This blog uses a theory of language to reconstrue the language of theories.

Because theories are realised in language, a theory of language has the potential to renovate the entire history of human thought.

Such renovation is not an act of demolition, but of reflexive architecture. It helps us see the scaffolding beneath the walls — to understand how knowledge is constructed, sustained, and made to mean.

And that is why language matters.

Relational Cosmology: Science, Spirit, and Sense-Making

1 Why Cosmology Must Be Relational

What is the universe?

It sounds like a question of fact, of inventory — as if the universe were a warehouse to be catalogued, a container of things to be explained. This is how most cosmologies — scientific and mythic alike — have tended to proceed. They begin by asking what exists, and then how those things behave. Matter, particles, laws, dimensions. Inheritance. Structure. Force.

But what if this way of questioning already hides an assumption?

The assumption is that reality is made up of things — discrete units that persist in themselves and relate only secondarily. The universe, in this view, is a stage on which separate entities appear and interact.

We propose a different premise:

that relation is not secondary, but primary.

That the universe is not made of things, but of togetherings — processes of co-emergence and mutual becoming.

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The Shift from Substance to Relation

This is not an esoteric metaphysical claim. It arises from the very heart of experience. Nothing arises alone. To see is to be seen. To breathe is to exchange. To think is to inherit language, to dwell in a history of meaning. Even the most basic 'thing' is already a confluence — a knot in a field of relations.

This is true not only experientially, but also physically. Quantum theory, for instance, resists efforts to describe isolated particles; it points us instead to entanglement, to wavefunctions that encode not individual properties but joint potentials. General relativity tells us that space and time are not neutral backdrops, but stretch and contract in response to mass — which is itself a measure of dynamic resistance to relational transformation.

Relation is everywhere — not as a feature, but as a ground.

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Cosmology as a Mode of Life

If this is so, cosmology is not simply the study of what exists, but the study of how things co-exist — how they arise through participation, influence, and transformation. In this sense, cosmology becomes an ethical project: a way of orienting ourselves to a world in which we are always already entangled.

To insist on relational cosmology is to insist that the way we imagine the universe shapes how we live in it.

It makes a difference whether we see the cosmos as cold machinery or as a dance of co-becoming.

It makes a difference whether we think of knowledge as extraction, or as resonance.

It makes a difference whether we imagine matter as inert, or as communicative.

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A Different Question

So the question is not “What is the universe made of?”

The question is:

“What kinds of relationships bring the universe into being?”

We begin here — not with substance, but with resonance; not with inventory, but with encounter. A cosmology not of separation, but of situatedness.

This is not merely a new theory, but a new stance:

to look outward as participants, not spectators;

to sense ourselves as within, not above;

to think, not of what-is, but of becoming-with.

Next, we’ll turn to the story of cosmic origin — the Big Bang — and reimagine it not as an explosion of substance, but as the genesis of relation itself.

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2 Rethinking the Big Bang

The Big Bang is often described as the origin of the universe — a single moment in which everything began. Space and time, energy and matter, all bursting forth from a singularity: infinitesimal, dense, and incomprehensibly hot.

But how should we understand such an “origin”?

What kind of beginning was it?

Most treatments of the Big Bang imagine it as an explosion of stuff — the birth of particles, the unfolding of space, the ticking of time. In this view, the singularity is the seed from which all things expanded, driven by forces and governed by laws.

Yet this framing subtly smuggles in a substance ontology. It imagines existence as composed of separable entities, set in motion by prior causes.

Relational cosmology suggests a different reading:

The Big Bang is not the origin of substance, but the origin of relation.

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From Nothing to With

It makes little sense to ask what existed “before” the Big Bang. Not just because time began then (as physics tells us), but because the very condition for anything at all is not a prior object, but a relational opening.

To say there was a beginning is to say there was a shift — from nothing to with.

Not from void to thing, but from absence of relation to the presence of co-actualisation.

In this light, the early universe is not a crowded furnace of particles, but a fluid interrelation — a wavefunction of possibility, still undifferentiated. Only gradually do determinate structures emerge: matter, charge, spin, space, time.

Each is a stabilised pattern of relating.

The birth of the universe, then, is not a moment in which things were made, but the moment in which making-with became possible.

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Becoming Local, Becoming Tangled

Cosmic evolution is the gradual unfolding of locality — not a decline into disorder, but the differentiation of situated relations.

Gravity does not pull things into existence; it intensifies participation by drawing them into mutual proximity.

Particles do not exist independently, but condense out of fields of relation.

Mass is not a property of an object, but a measure of entanglement with a field.

In this view, evolution is not a story of matter behaving in space and time.

It is a story of space and time themselves becoming textured through relation.

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From Myth to Meaning

Every cosmology is a mythos — not in the sense of a false story, but in the sense of a world-making narrative. The Big Bang, too, is a myth — a way of telling the origin in scientific terms.

Relational cosmology doesn’t deny the Big Bang. It reinterprets it.

It invites us to ask:

What if the true origin is not the first thing, but the first with?

What if what banged was not substance, but the possibility of resonance?

This reorientation does not discard physics.

It deepens it — by situating its abstractions within a story of becoming-with, where relation is not a complication, but the very ground of cosmos.

In the next post, we’ll follow this thread from origin to ontology, and consider what it means to say that reality is composed of relations all the way down.

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3 It’s Relations All the Way Down

We’re used to thinking of reality as built from smaller and smaller things: molecules from atoms, atoms from protons and neutrons, those from quarks. Dig deep enough, and you’ll hit bedrock — the final substance, the irreducible particle.

But what if there’s no bottom?

What if the further down we go, the less we find things, and the more we find relations?

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Abandoning the Bedrock

In physics, particles were once imagined as tiny billiard balls — solid and self-contained. But as theory progressed, this picture became untenable. Electrons have no known size or internal structure. Quarks cannot be isolated. Photons are quantised excitations of fields.

We haven’t uncovered fundamental building blocks.

We’ve uncovered patterns of interaction.

Quantum field theory no longer speaks of particles as things in space, but of fields in relation, where entities emerge as localised expressions of relational dynamics. An electron is not a discrete object so much as a recurrent ripple in a sea of potentiality.

This is not an oddity of quantum physics — it’s a shift in ontology.

The more deeply we examine matter, the more it dissolves into relations.

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Entanglement Is Not an Anomaly

Nowhere is this clearer than in entanglement.

Two particles interact, then fly apart — and yet, their properties remain co-defined. Measure one, and you instantaneously constrain the other. This has been experimentally verified time and again. There is no “hidden information” travelling faster than light.

Entanglement is not a loophole in locality.

It is a window onto relational being.

What we call “particles” are not isolated facts. They are nodes in a network, and the state of any node can only be understood through its entanglements with others.

Reality, then, is not made of things.

Reality is made of co-actualisations.

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From Particles to Participation

This reframe has profound implications. It means that identity is not prior to relation — it is composed through relation.

A quark is not a quark outside the context of a proton.

An organism is not alive outside its ecological mesh.

A person is not a self outside the weave of language, culture, and care.

The ontology of substance gives us a world of inert objects.

The ontology of relation gives us a world of mutually arising processes.

It is not that things relate. It is that relation is what things are.

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There Is No Background

In this light, even space and time lose their status as neutral containers.

Spacetime in general relativity is not a static stage but a dynamic fabric, warped by mass and energy. This warping is not an effect on space — it is space. Time does not flow independently of events — it is the dimension of their unfolding.

Space and time are not where things happen.

They are how relation happens.

There is no background reality that exists independently of interaction.

Everything arises in and through mutual conditioning.

In the next post, we’ll ask how this relational metaphysics reshapes our understanding of physics itself — and how it invites us to read scientific theories not as mirrors of reality, but as maps of meaningful relation.

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4 Physics as Relational Mapping

If reality is not built from things, but from relations, then physics is not the study of objects in space. It is the ongoing attempt to map the patterns of becoming in which objects arise.

This doesn’t mean physics is wrong.

It means we must reconsider what kind of truth it offers.

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Theory as Interface, Not Mirror

Scientific theories are often imagined as mirrors: polished reflections of the world “as it is,” independent of us. But this objectivist fantasy is hard to defend once we appreciate that observation is always interaction, and measurement is always participation.

What we call “data” is not raw reality.

It is a record of our structured engagement.

In this light, theories are not mirrors but interfaces: symbolic systems through which we stabilise our couplings with dynamic processes. They don’t show us what the world is made of. They show us how worlds unfold when enacted through certain practices.

Relativity tells us how spacetime behaves in relation to mass and motion.

Quantum theory tells us how probability collapses in relation to measurement.

Thermodynamics tells us how energy disperses in relation to gradients and constraints.

Every scientific law is a mapping of relation, not an edict of substance.

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Models as Meaningful Constraints

This does not mean all models are equal. Some fit better. Some predict more. But “fit” and “prediction” are not properties of the universe. They are properties of our engaged mappings.

We evaluate models by how well they coordinate our participations.

And we revise them when they fail to do so.

Importantly, a model’s usefulness does not depend on its metaphysical literalness. The Bohr model of the atom — with electrons orbiting like planets — is incorrect. Yet it was crucial in the development of quantum theory. Its power was not in being true, but in being fruitful.

This is the logic of all modelling: we render one domain intelligible in terms of another. This is not distortion — it is analogy in action. Every map is partial. But partiality is what makes navigation possible.

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The Observer Is Always Inside the Frame

If theories are relational interfaces, then who is doing the mapping matters. We are not abstract minds gazing from nowhere. We are embodied participants — organisms within fields of relation, observing from within the world.

This is why every scientific act requires a cut:

What counts as a system? What is environment? What is measured? What is ignored?

Even “objective” observations are made from positions — instrumentally, conceptually, affectively. This does not undermine science. It enriches it — reminding us that what we can know depends on how we relate.

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Relational Truth

Truth, in a relational cosmology, is not correspondence with an independent reality. It is the ongoing adequacy of relation: the fidelity with which our concepts, models, and theories coordinate meaningful participation.

This is not relativism.

It is relational realism.

The world is not whatever we say it is. But neither is it a brute fact waiting to be mirrored. It is an emergent field of co-actualisation, and knowledge is the art of finding stable, generative paths through it.

In the next post, we’ll ask how this view recasts the concept of law in physics — not as universal dictate, but as conditioned regularity within an unfolding dance of relation.

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5 Law as Conditioned Regularity

If the universe is a field of unfolding relations, then the laws of physics cannot be timeless commands imposed upon a mute reality. They must be patterns of regularity that emerge within particular conditions of relation.

A relational cosmology asks us to shift our understanding of law —

from transcendent decree to immanent habit.

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The Myth of Universal Law

Classical physics inherited its model of law from theology:

the universe as a system governed by divine reason, expressed in immutable rules.

But even Newton, despite his genius, assumed a fixed space and absolute time — a passive stage on which God's laws played out. Einstein shattered this view: spacetime is not fixed; it curves, stretches, contracts, depending on the presence and movement of mass and energy.

Quantum mechanics dealt another blow: measurement does not merely reveal what is, but helps bring what is into being. Law, here, is not about universal certainty, but probabilistic regularity, enacted in the context of experimental configuration.

What emerges from these revolutions is a vision of law that is not absolute, but relationally enacted.

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Conditions of Regularity

A law is not a commandment.

It is a pattern of constraint that becomes visible under particular conditions.

For instance, the laws of thermodynamics appear when we describe matter at scale, where individual atomic randomness becomes statistical order. They are not violated in the quantum realm — they simply do not apply in the same way, because the conditions are different.

Likewise, general relativity and quantum field theory describe different regimes, each mapping consistent patterns that hold under certain scales, speeds, and energies. The apparent “incompatibility” between them may not be a contradiction in reality, but a difference in the relational frame.

This means laws are not inscribed into the cosmos like runes on stone.

They are recurrent stabilities — robust enough to guide action,

but not metaphysical absolutes.

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Participation and Stability

The remarkable thing is not that there are laws.

It is that stable patterns emerge at all, in a world of ceaseless becoming.

Why should matter fall predictably, fields oscillate regularly, or particles decay consistently? Not because some legislator set the rules, but because relation itself can self-organise.

Form begets form. Patterns constrain possibilities.

Feedback loops build stability.

In this view, law is an attractor — a basin of relational possibility, sustained by the interplay of systems and constraints. These are not imposed from outside, but generated within the dance of participation.

And what we call "breaking a law" is better seen as entering a new regime: a shift in scale, energy, or context, where different patterns become dominant.

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Law as Lure

Law, then, is not limitation — it is invitation.

It invites coordination. It allows predictability. It creates the conditions for cooperation, construction, and world-making.

In a relational cosmos, law is not what binds the world into compliance.

It is what allows the world to stabilise enough to become.

And perhaps this is its greatest gift: not certainty, but trustworthiness — enough regularity to participate, enough openness to evolve.

In the next post, we’ll explore how such a cosmos supports emergence: how new structures and meanings arise, not by imposing form, but through the creative play of relation itself.

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6 Emergence as the Play of Relation

If laws are stable patterns that arise within particular relational conditions, then emergence is the appearance of new patterns — patterns not predictable from the parts alone.

Emergence is not an add-on to relational cosmology.

It is its pulse and principle.

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From Parts to Patterns

Classical science sought to explain the world by analysing it into parts. But parts, in isolation, do not explain wholes. A pile of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms does not explain the emergence of a living cell. The parts are necessary, but not sufficient.

It is how the parts relate — how they constrain, amplify, stabilise and transform one another — that gives rise to new kinds of being.

Emergence is the moment when relation becomes more-than the sum of its relata.

Not by magic, but by configuration — by the intricate choreography of dependencies, feedbacks, and co-regulations that make the whole a new centre of agency.

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Creativity Without Blueprint

In a relational ontology, emergence is not the unfolding of a fixed plan, nor the outcome of blind chaos. It is patterned novelty — the capacity of relation to surprise.

New structures — atoms, stars, cells, ecosystems, minds, meanings — come into being through thresholds of complexity. But these thresholds are not dictated by universal laws alone. They are negotiated through interaction.

There is no blueprint.

Only generative tension: between constraint and openness, stability and play.

This means emergence is not the exception. It is the rule.

The cosmos is not a clockwork machine with a few anomalies.

It is an ever-evolving network, where novelty is intrinsic to relation itself.

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Nested Worlds

Emergent forms give rise to new domains of relation.

The emergence of life generates new kinds of sensitivity, metabolism, reproduction. The emergence of mind introduces memory, anticipation, and reflection.

Each of these domains is not reducible to the previous one.

Yet each depends on and transforms what came before.

This creates nested ontologies: worlds within worlds, each with its own kinds of relation, its own patterns of lawfulness, its own forms of becoming.

To think relationally is to think through these layers — not erasing their differences, but holding their co-dependence in view.

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Emergence and Ethics

What emerges is not only structure, but meaning.

In each new layer of complexity, the world becomes capable of more — more perception, more expression, more care, more harm. Emergence carries with it the weight of responsibility. To participate in the becoming of a world is to help shape what it makes possible.

In this way, emergence is not only a scientific concept. It is an ethical challenge.

What kinds of worlds are we helping to bring forth?

What configurations do we stabilise, amplify, or suppress?

And how might we participate more wisely in the dance of becoming?

These questions bring us to the final post in the series:

“Cosmos as Kin: Toward a Participatory Metaphysics”

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7 Cosmos as Kin — Toward a Participatory Metaphysics

If the universe is a web of relations,

And emergence is the play of novel forms within it,

Then we are not mere observers of the cosmos —

We are participants in its becoming.

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From Object to Kin

Traditional metaphysics often casts the universe as a collection of discrete objects — inert, separate, knowable “things.”

Relational cosmology invites a radical rethinking:

The cosmos is a community of relations, a kinship network of becoming.

We are not detached subjects peering in;

We are nodes within the cosmic web, entangled and responsive.

This shift changes everything:

Knowledge is not about representing a static world.

It is about engaging with a world in formation.

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Participatory Knowing

Knowing is a dance — a mutual unfolding between knower and known.

Our observations, measurements, and theories do not merely describe the cosmos;

They co-create it.

This participatory knowing dissolves the strict boundary between subject and object, mind and matter, observer and observed.

It calls for humility, curiosity, and openness to the unexpected.

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Ethics of Participation

If we are kin with the cosmos, our actions ripple beyond ourselves.

We co-constitute not only knowledge but worlds.

The relational metaphysics demands ethics of participation:

• To act with awareness of our embeddedness and influence

• To nurture relations that sustain flourishing

• To resist domination and fragmentation that harm the whole

Participation is an ongoing practice — a continual negotiation with the world’s becoming.

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Toward a New Story

This view invites a new story for humanity:

Not masters of nature, but co-creators with it.

Not isolated egos, but interwoven presences.

Not consumers of a fixed resource, but caretakers of a living community.

Relational cosmology opens a space for wonder, responsibility, and transformation.

Relational Ontology of Desire

1 Desire Is Not Possession, but Orientation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But for now, we begin with this reframing:

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

2 Desire as World-Making

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We live in the worlds our desires help sustain.

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

What kind of world is your desire making possible?

3 The Grammar of Desire

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

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

• Cognitive: thinking, knowing, perceiving

• Desiderative: wanting, hoping, fearing, longing

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

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

Consider:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 Belief and the Affect of Commitment

What does it mean to believe in something?

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

And that makes it a different kind of act entirely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 Desire and the Lives of Others

Desire is never solitary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that is the beginning of an ethics.

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

6. The Ethics of Wanting-with

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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