Grammar and the Ghost in the Machine

1 A Haunted Inheritance

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

This series begins with a provocation:

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

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

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

Language: The Invisible Medium

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haunted Concepts

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

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

Renovating the History of Thought

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

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

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2 Plato’s Forms and the Reification of Instantiation

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

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

The Cline of Instantiation

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

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

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

Plato’s ontology closely mirrors this architecture.

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

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

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

From Ontology to Semiotic Architecture

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

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

The Danger of Reification

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

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

Instantiation, not Imitation

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

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

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

3 The Will and the Reification of Desire

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

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

Desire as a Grammatical Process

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

• I want a new idea.

• She hopes to understand.

• They wish it were otherwise.

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

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

From Process to Power

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

• I decide.

• I resolve.

• I impose my will.

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

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

The Fiction of the Autonomous Subject

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

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

Unmasking the Ghost

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

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

4 Cause and Effect — Transitivity and the Machinery of Nature

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

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

Transitivity: Grammar’s Model of Experience

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

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

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

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

From Clause to Cosmos

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

• X causes Y.

• The will moves the body.

• Every event has a cause.

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

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

Necessary Connection or Grammatical Expectation?

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

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

• He dropped the glass. It shattered.

• Because it rained, the picnic was cancelled.

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

What philosophy calls causality, grammar construes as sequenced process.

Causal Chains as Grammatical Chains

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

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

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

5 Truth and Projection — The Linguistic Architecture of Reality Claims

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

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

The Clause Complex and Projection

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

• She said that it was raining.

• He believes the earth is round.

• I know that this is true.

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

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

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

• Truth exists independently of thought.

• Propositions have truth-values.

• There is a realm of facts to be matched.

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

Truth as Projection Reified

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

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

But now consider: The Earth orbits the sun.

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

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

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

Metaphysics as Misrecognised Grammar

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

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

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

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

6 Essence and the Grammar of Being

Where does the idea of essence come from?

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

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

The Nominalisation of Process

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

• She is wise → Her wisdom

• They govern → Government

• We differ → There is a difference

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

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

Essence as Identifying Process

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

• A circle is a round plane figure.

• Water is H₂O.

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

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

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

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

The Illusion of Inherent Properties

When we say:

• Gold is heavy.

• Justice is fair.

• The soul is immortal.

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

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

7 Language as Origin — A Semiotic Ontology of Thought

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

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

The Semiotic Roots of Ontology

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

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

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

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

Theories as Reconstruals of Meaning

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

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

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

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

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

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

Language as Origin, Not Obstacle

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

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

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

A Semiotic Ontology of Thought

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

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

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

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

Relational Praxis: Action as Worldmaking

1 What Is Praxis? From Agency to Co-Agencement

If epistemology asks how we come to know, and desire asks how we come to want, then praxis asks: how do we come to act?

Praxis is not simply the execution of a plan or the carrying out of a will. It is not reducible to behaviour, movement, or even choice. The term has its roots in ancient Greek philosophy, where praxis meant action that arises from ethical reflection — not action upon the world, but in and with the world, grounded in a view of what it means to live well.

In this relational frame, we begin with a different premise: that action is never solitary. It is never just mine. To act is always to act with — with others, with histories, with contexts, with ecologies, with forces and affordances that exceed and include the self.

From Agency to Co-Agencement

Modern notions of agency often carry a deep residue of individualism: the agent as a bounded subject, a sovereign chooser. In this view, action is a form of imposition — something an agent does to the world. But this framing is insufficient for the kind of entangled reality we actually inhabit.

In relational thought, we shift from agency to what Deleuze and Guattari called agencement — not agency as possession, but as arrangement or assemblage. Agencement is not what one does, but what comes together to make action possible. And when this assemblage involves multiple parties — human and nonhuman — it becomes co-agencement: the relational configuration through which something happens.

Thus, in place of the image of an isolated agent acting on the world, we have a web of interdependent forces — bodily, social, material, historical — that coalesce to make action happen. Action, then, is not what I have, but what we emerge into together.

Praxis as Situated, Participatory Knowing-Doing

Praxis, in this sense, is always:

• Situated — It unfolds within particular relational and material contexts. There is no abstract action, only action somewhere, with something.

• Participatory — It arises through involvement, not detachment. To act is to enter into relation.

• Worldmaking — Every act helps shape the world we co-inhabit. Even inaction is not neutral.

This also means that every praxis is a kind of knowing-with — an epistemological moment in itself. When I participate in the making of something (a protest, a ritual, a shared meal, a new form of care), I am not merely acting; I am coming to know differently. I am coming to feel differently. Praxis is an epistemology in motion.

Why This Matters Now

In a world marked by ecological degradation, social fragmentation, and institutional collapse, the question of how we act — and with whom — is more urgent than ever. The old metaphors of control, mastery, and intervention are failing us. What we need are ways of thinking and doing that honour entanglement, vulnerability, and co-becoming.

Relational praxis offers not a blueprint, but a posture: a way of leaning in, of being responsive, of attending to the openings that emerge in the cracks of systems.

It is not heroic. It is humble, grounded, and collective.

And it begins, always, with the question: Who and what am I acting with?

2 Acts Are Never Alone — Meaning as Co-Enacted

If praxis is action as worldmaking, then each act is not a solitary event but a node in a dense network of relations. Actions ripple outward, entwined with the intentions, responses, histories, and materialities around them.

Action as a Co-Enacted Process

When we act, our deeds don’t float free. They are embedded within—and shaped by—the webs of relationships that surround us. Consider a simple gesture, like offering a cup of tea. This act:

• Involves the relationships between giver and receiver,

• Draws on cultural meanings around hospitality,

• Relies on material objects and their affordances (the cup, the tea),

• Resonates with histories of shared moments.

The meaning of this act is not fully contained in the one who acts. Instead, it is co-enacted — brought forth in relation, through interaction and interpretation.

From Intentionality to Distributed Meaning

Traditional views of action emphasise intentionality: the idea that meaning and purpose reside in the actor’s mind. But relational praxis invites us to see meaning as distributed across the acting assemblage.

The act is not a static “thing” with fixed meaning, but a dynamic event whose significance unfolds in the relational field. This includes:

• How others respond,

• The cultural and social contexts,

• The material environment,

• The historical moment.

Meaning is not carried by the act as a “package,” but emerges in the relational process.

Meaning as Emergent and Multiplicitous

This means an act can have multiple meanings, depending on who participates and how. A protest march can be:

• An expression of solidarity,

• A site of political conflict,

• A performance of identity,

• A moment of collective joy or grief.

Each of these meanings is real and enacted through participation.

Implications for Responsibility and Ethics

Because actions are never isolated, responsibility also becomes a shared and ongoing negotiation. To act is to enter a field of co-responsibility — with people, environments, and histories.

Ethics, then, is less about adherence to fixed rules and more about attuning to the complex relational dynamics and their effects. It is about listening, responding, and being accountable to the world one acts within.

3 Action as Language — The Grammar of Doing

If relational praxis reveals action as a co-enacted process of meaning-making, then it follows that our actions have a grammar — a systemic organisation that shapes how doing communicates meaning in the world.

Actions Are Structured Like Language

Just as language is more than words strung together — it has grammar, syntax, and patterns — so too do our actions have an underlying structure. This “grammar of doing” guides how acts relate to each other, how sequences unfold, and how meanings are realised.

Consider everyday actions:

• Greeting someone with a smile,

• Offering a handshake,

• Sitting down to eat a meal.

Each of these is patterned in culturally shaped ways that others understand and respond to.

Processes and Participants: Roles in Action

In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), language is analysed in terms of processes (verbs) and participants (nouns). Similarly, actions have:

• Processes: The kind of doing — giving, receiving, moving, creating, destroying.

• Participants: The actors and objects involved in the act.

This framework lets us analyse actions for their functional meaning: who is doing what to whom, with what effect.

Actions as Meaningful Choices

Just as speakers choose words from a system of possibilities, actors choose how to perform their actions within a system of cultural and social norms. This choice:

• Shapes how an act is interpreted,

• Influences its relational effects,

• Creates potential for new meanings and worldings.

From Individual Acts to Social Practices

Over time, repeated patterns of action become social practices — shared ways of doing that structure collective life. Social practices are the grammar of collective worldmaking, shaping how groups co-create meaning and shape reality.

Implications for Transformation

Understanding action’s grammar empowers us to:

• Become more conscious of how our actions “speak”,

• Recognise the patterns we inhabit,

• Explore new ways of acting that can shift relational fields and create new possibilities.

4 The Materiality of Action — Bodies, Environments, and Tools

If action is the grammar of doing, it is not a disembodied grammar. Action always unfolds somewhere, through someone, with something. Its medium is the material world — and its meanings are entangled with bodies, environments, and tools.

Bodies: The Lived Ground of Praxis

Every action is bodily, even the most “mental” of acts. Speaking requires vocal muscles. Thinking quietly often involves posture, breath, gaze. Our bodies:

• Constrain what is possible (we cannot fly unaided),

• Extend our capacities (a gesture can embrace or reject),

• Remember patterned actions (habits, muscle memory, choreographies of work and care).

The body is not a container of meaning but a medium of meaning — a living site where relation takes form.

Environments: Action Is Situated

We do not act in a vacuum. We act with and within environments:

• A conversation in a quiet garden feels different than one in a crowded subway.

• Walking barefoot on moss elicits different movements than walking on concrete.

• Cultural, architectural, and ecological environments invite and inhibit forms of action.

In relational terms, action is always a co-response to a setting that is itself partly shaped by previous actions. We are shaped by the worlds we co-shape.

Tools and Artefacts: Mediated Action

Tools are not neutral extensions of the body. They participate in meaning-making:

• A pen guides the gesture of writing differently than a keyboard.

• A smartphone mediates attention, pace, and tone.

• Ritual tools — chalices, incense, drums — infuse action with affective resonance.

Tools stabilise certain possibilities while closing off others. They are materialised memory, carrying histories of use and the intentions of their makers.

Material Semiotics: Matter Means

To speak of the “materiality” of action is not to reduce it to physics. It is to say that:

• Matter is semiotic — it helps make meaning,

• The material world is not mute but responsive,

• Knowing and doing emerge from this entanglement with the real.

In relational praxis, action is never merely symbolic or spiritual. It is always also material — and therefore consequential, embodied, and grounded.

5 Action and Temporality — Rhythm, Repetition, and Change

Action always takes place in time, but it does not merely occur in a neutral temporal container. It shapes time as it moves through it. In this post, we explore how action carries and creates temporalities — through rhythm, repetition, and transformation.

Action Is Rhythmic

No action is isolated. It pulses. It returns. It syncopates with other actions.

• Walking has a rhythm: step, step, step.

• Conversation has a rhythm: turn-taking, pause, reply.

• Cooking dinner, chanting in protest, brushing teeth — all are temporal patterns.

These rhythms are not trivial; they coordinate life. They bind us to shared worlds, linking inner tempo to social time.

Repetition: The Time of the Usual

Much action is repetitive. This is not failure — it is fidelity.

• Habits form through repetition, and so do skills, roles, identities.

• Shared rituals rely on repetition: lighting candles, bowing, saying grace.

• Political and cultural norms are enacted again and again, stabilised by the repetition of action across time.

Repetition is how meaning becomes durable. But repetition is never mechanical — it is always relational. We repeat differently depending on context, intention, feeling.

Transformation: The Time of the New

Every repetition holds the possibility of variation. Even the most familiar act may shift:

• A habitual gesture may take on new meaning in a different situation.

• A repeated phrase may suddenly be heard differently, provoking reflection or rupture.

• A tool used in a new way — a fork as a lockpick — can break expectation.

Through subtle or dramatic variation, change emerges from the inside of repetition. This is how action makes time not just cyclical, but historical — it builds toward difference.

Kairos and Chronos: Multiple Temporalities

Action unfolds in chronos (clock time), but also in kairos (opportune time):

• A protest at the “right moment” shifts a public conversation.

• A word said “too soon” or “too late” misses its mark.

• A kiss, a refusal, a revelation — all live or die by timing.

Praxis is not merely what we do, but when we do it — how we sense the moment, how we respond with attunement or dissonance.

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In relational praxis, action is not a point on a timeline. It is a shaper of time — rhythmic, recursive, and responsive. Through action, we create the temporalities by which we live.

6 Power and Responsibility — Acting-with vs Acting-over

All action is entangled with power. But not all power is the same. In this post, we explore how relational praxis reframes power not as dominance, but as participation — and how responsibility flows from this shift.

Power-Over: The Legacy of Control

In many traditions, power is imagined as power-over:

• The power to command, coerce, or control.

• The ability to enforce outcomes unilaterally.

• A model of agency rooted in separation and superiority.

This is the power of the sovereign, the CEO, the coloniser — the one who acts on the world, not with it.

But power-over fractures relations. It alienates the actor from the acted-upon. It suppresses the unpredictability of response. It treats others — human and nonhuman — as tools or obstacles.

Power-With: Relational Agency

Relational praxis shifts the frame: from power-over to power-with.

• Power emerges not from domination, but from coordination.

• Agency is not located in the isolated individual, but in the relation itself.

• Influence happens through dialogue, resonance, co-creation.

A conductor has power not by silencing the orchestra, but by playing with its potential. A skilled facilitator empowers action not by imposing vision, but by making space for emergence.

This is a power that does not diminish others but amplifies mutual becoming.

Responsibility Is Response-Ability

If power is relational, so is responsibility. It is not simply a duty to uphold fixed rules, but a capacity to respond well in entangled situations:

• To feel what the moment calls for.

• To listen before acting.

• To anticipate consequences not just for oneself, but for the shared field of life.

In relational terms, to act is always to involve others, and to be answerable to the worlds one helps shape.

Responsibility is not a burden imposed from without. It is the ethical contour of agency in a relational world.

Ethics as Worldmaking

Relational ethics is not rule-following. It is world-forming. Every action is a wager:

• What kind of relation does it enact?

• What kind of future does it make possible?

• What values are embodied in the way the act is performed?

Power-with and responsibility-with are not idealistic opposites to realpolitik — they are the conditions of sustainable becoming in a more-than-human world.

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Relational praxis understands power not as control but as participation, and responsibility not as guilt but as attunement. To act well is to respond well — and to craft a world in which others can, too.

7 Praxis as Poiesis — Making the World With(in) Us

The journey through relational praxis has brought us here — to a view of action not as intervention in a passive world, but as an act of worldmaking. In this final post, we bring the threads together by reclaiming an ancient word: poiesis.

Poiesis: The Making That Makes Us

In classical Greek, poiesis meant “to make” — but not just to fabricate or produce. Poiesis referred to a generative kind of making, one that brings something into being. A poem is not simply written; it is brought forth. A new friendship is not engineered; it is cultivated.

In relational praxis, all meaningful action is poietic:

• It does not just act on the world, but participates in its unfolding.

• It does not merely shape external reality, but transforms the actor themselves.

• It does not assume a finished self, but co-emerges with the world being made.

To act, then, is to be made — not just to make.

The World Within the Act

Every act — no matter how small — carries a worldview:

• The gesture of a hand either welcomes or excludes.

• The tone of a voice either dignifies or diminishes.

• The design of a system either enables or obstructs.

There is no neutral action. Every doing is a kind of saying. Every saying carries a grammar of value. To act is to perform a stance toward the world — and to make that stance real.

Co-Making, Co-Becoming

In this sense, praxis is always with:

• With others, whose responses shape and reshape what action means.

• With histories, which echo in our patterns and inheritances.

• With futures, which are seeded in the affordances we create or foreclose.

Relational praxis calls us to be craftspersons of possibility. To act not for dominance or display, but for resonance. For co-flourishing. For the patient shaping of more livable worlds.

An Invitation

We end this series not with a conclusion, but an invitation:
To see your next act — however ordinary — not as a unit of productivity, but as a poietic gesture.

What world will it bring forth?
What relation will it renew?
What self will it call you to become?

The answer is never yours alone. It is made with, and always in the making.

Beyond Belief: Desire, Myth, and the Modal Grounds of Knowing

1 From Knowing That to Believing In

In most accounts of knowledge, we are taught to distinguish belief from truth, and truth from justification. Knowing, in this model, is believing the right things for the right reasons — belief that p, where p is a proposition, and belief is judged epistemically valid if it corresponds with a fact and is formed through reliable means. This is the familiar territory of “justified true belief,” long considered the cornerstone of epistemology.

But something essential gets left out of this picture. There is another kind of mental orientation toward the world, one that shapes not what we claim to know, but what we hope for, desire, or commit ourselves to. This is the domain of desiderative meaning, and it asks not, Is this true? but What do I want to be true? or What must I act as though is true?

In this way, we can distinguish between:

• Belief that: a cognitive commitment, projecting propositions aligned with probability or usuality.

• Belief in: a desiderative commitment, projecting proposals aligned with obligation or inclination.

Both are semiotic processes, and both are central to human meaning-making — but only one is usually counted as “knowing.” In the relational view we’re developing here, this is an untenable divide.

Knowing with Desire

In the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), both knowing and desiring are types of mental process, and both project meaning. But they do so with different modal alignments. Knowing aligns with the domain of truth and likelihood, while desiring aligns with duty and want — two complementary axes of how we construe meaning potential.

Importantly, both kinds of mental process involve projection: we relate one clause to another in a way that constructs a secondary world — not the actual, but the possible, probable, obligatory, or hoped-for. In this sense, both “I know that it will rain” and “I hope that it will rain” are not just reports but acts of semiotic world-making.

So why has the cognitive dimension — knowing that — been treated as epistemology’s only proper concern?

A Lopsided Epistemology

The answer lies partly in the metaphysics of substance: if the world is made of fixed things and true facts, then knowledge must consist in aligning one’s beliefs with these facts. Desires, in contrast, are seen as subjective, internal, emotional — and thus irrelevant to the epistemic enterprise.

But this distinction collapses under relational scrutiny. If meaning arises through participation — if knowing is becoming-with — then there can be no sharp boundary between truth and value, or between cognition and commitment. Our acts of knowing are always already shaped by what we care about, what we fear, what we long for.

Belief-in, then, is not epistemic excess. It is a fundamental mode of participation in meaning.

Toward a Broader Epistemology

This series takes that proposition seriously. Over the coming posts, we will:

• Explore the modal dimensions of meaning — probability, obligation, inclination — and how they relate to knowledge.

• Re-examine myth not just as a cognitive schema (explaining the world), but as a desiderative structure (expressing hope, loss, longing).

• Recast the observer not as neutral recorder, but as participant, moved by desire as well as reason.

• And consider what it means to know not only about the world, but to know with it — in resonance, in commitment, in hope.

In short, we want to move beyond the epistemology of facts, and toward an epistemology of commitment. Not to abandon truth, but to enrich our account of what it means to be truthful — not only to the world, but to one another.

2 Mental Process Types and Modal Meaning

If our epistemology is to do justice to both belief that and belief in, then we need to take a closer look at how meaning is construed in language. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) offers a powerful starting point through its categorisation of process types — the different ways that language represents experience.

Among these, mental processes are especially relevant to epistemology. They represent inner experience — what we perceive, think, feel, and want. SFL distinguishes four types of mental process:

1. Cognitive (e.g. know, think, believe that)

2. Perceptive (e.g. see, hear, notice)

3. Desiderative (e.g. want, hope, wish)

4. Emotive (e.g. like, fear, enjoy)

Each of these constructs reality in a different way, and each projects a different kind of clause — a different world.

What we know and think (cognitive processes) is not the same as what we hope or want (desiderative processes), and yet both types of mental process construct relations between subjects and projected meanings. These are not just private mental states, but semiotic acts — ways of making meaning.

Projection and Modality

In SFL, both cognitive and desiderative mental processes project a secondary clause — one that is not asserted directly, but posited as the content of thought or desire.

Compare:

• I think that it will rain.

• I hope that it will rain.

The projected clause is structurally similar, but modally distinct. One projects a proposition, evaluated for probability (likelihood), while the other projects a proposal, evaluated for inclination (want) or obligation (ought).

This distinction is crucial. It tells us that knowing and desiring are not only different mental orientations, but different modal relations to the world. When we believe that, we align ourselves with what we think is likely or true. When we believe in, we align ourselves with what we think is desirable, valuable, or necessary — regardless of its likelihood.

Modal Meaning as Epistemic Ground

Modality, in SFL, refers to a speaker’s orientation toward the validity of a clause. There are two broad types:

• Modalisation: concerned with propositions (statements), and expressed through probability or usuality.

  • e.g. It will probably rain.

  • e.g. She usually arrives late.

• Modulation: concerned with proposals (commands, offers, suggestions), and expressed through obligation or inclination.

  • e.g. You must go now.

  • e.g. I really want to help.

In mental projection, these modal meanings get embedded in the subject’s interior world — not just what is, but what could be, should be, or must be, according to some inner compass.

And here’s the key: these modal meanings are not marginal. They are central to how we orient to the world, to one another, and to the future.

In privileging only modalisation — belief judged by likelihood — traditional epistemology narrows the field of knowing. It discounts how meaning is brought forth in the desire to act, to change, to hope, to belong. Desiderative mental processes bring modality to life in a different key.

The Semiotic of Desire

To recognise this is to understand belief-in not as epistemic failure or sentimentality, but as a different orientation to meaning. Desiderative mental processes construe a world not of facts, but of commitments — of what matters, of what calls us forth.

This is the neglected ground of much myth, religion, and ritual — not explanatory systems to be assessed for truth or falsity, but semiotic ecosystems of hope and obligation. We misunderstand them when we reduce them to propositions to be believed that they are true. What they do is help people believe in something — and thus to act, endure, transform.

And that, too, is a way of knowing.

3 Modal Worlds, Real and Imagined

Desiderative mental processes — like hope, wish, want, believe in — do not only reveal something about the speaker's interior state. They also project modal worlds: possible, desirable, feared, or idealised versions of the world that orient human action and meaning.

In this post, we explore how such modal worlds are not illusions or fantasies to be measured against a singular ‘reality’ but are themselves real in a different sense: semiotic realities that motivate, stabilise, and transform material life.

The Function of Modal Worlds

All social meaning is grounded in what we might call shared fictions — not because they are false, but because they are as-if realities: worlds that we orient to, negotiate within, and act upon.

• When someone says I believe in justice, they are not affirming a fact, but invoking a world — a world in which justice can be hoped for, fought for, and recognised.

• When someone says I hope to see my grandmother in the afterlife, they are not making a scientific prediction, but participating in a modal world whose structure is ethical, affective, and relational.

Modal worlds can be:

• Possible (It could happen)

• Desirable (I wish it would happen)

• Obligatory (It should happen)

• Feared (It must not happen)

• Enchanted (It always happens this way in stories)

These worlds are not secondary to ‘reality’; they mediate it. We move through life not only by perceiving what is, but by imagining what could or should be — and committing to it.

The Ontology of the Imagined

Our culture often contrasts ‘real’ with ‘imagined’ as if the latter is a diminished category. But from a relational and semiotic perspective, the imagined is not a retreat from reality, but an organ of orientation. It is part of how we live in time.

• We imagine futures to decide what to do.

• We imagine others' feelings to empathise.

• We imagine different selves to grow and change.

In this sense, imagining is a way of knowing — not just about the external world, but about what matters. Modal worlds are affectively charged, socially scaffolded, and historically inherited. They are not mere inventions of individual minds but shared and maintained by language, art, ritual, and belief.

To believe in something — whether it’s freedom, a better future, or divine grace — is to live as if that world is real enough to act on. And in that action, the modal becomes material.

Myth as Modal World

This is where myth enters not as primitive cosmology but as modal architecture. A myth does not need to be ‘believed’ propositionally to be meaningful. It evokes a world in which values are dramatised, orientations made visible, and life endowed with purpose.

• A myth tells us not just what happened, but how to live.

• It encodes not just facts, but desires, obligations, hopes.

To dismiss myth for lacking propositional truth is to miss its modality entirely. A modal world is not a false representation of what is; it is a relational invocation of what could be — a staging ground for ethics, emotion, and imagination.

Knowing Beyond Propositions

Modal knowing, then, is not concerned with likelihood alone, but with orientation — with how we situate ourselves in relation to possibilities. This is a kind of knowing that moves through hope, longing, promise, commitment. And it can be just as structured, just as meaningful, as propositional reasoning.

To believe in is not to deny reality, but to enact a relationship to it — a relationship shaped by values, desires, and the modal fabric of meaning.

4 Myth as Modal Architecture

In the previous post, we introduced the idea of modal worlds — possible, desired, feared, or idealised worlds that are brought forth by the desiderative mode of meaning. Now we turn to myth as a special kind of modal structure — not merely a story, but a way of orienting desire, value, and possibility.

Beyond Fact and Fiction

Myth is often misunderstood in modern discourse as a kind of failed science — an outdated attempt to explain the world before we had better tools. But this view presupposes that the purpose of myth is explanation in the propositional mode. From a relational perspective, this is a category error.

Myth does not aim to explain what is. It aims to enact what matters.

A myth constructs a world that:

• Shows what is worth striving for or guarding against.

• Dramatises the tensions between forces like love and power, chaos and order, sacrifice and survival.

• Positions the subject in relation to these tensions — as a hero, a pilgrim, a mourner, a supplicant.

In this sense, myth is modal architecture: it shapes the imaginative, ethical, and affective contours of the world we inhabit.

The Modal Grammar of Myth

Like any semiotic structure, myth has its own internal logic — not one of evidence and inference, but of orientation and enactment. Myths:

• Construe a beginning not to mark historical origin, but to set the terms of a world.

• Propose a telos — an end or aim — that is less about finality and more about value.

• Populate the world with forces, often personified, that represent modal oppositions: temptation vs duty, fate vs freedom, harmony vs transgression.

The result is not a static worldview but a living matrix in which meaning unfolds over time. Myths are dynamic: they are re-enacted, retold, ritualised — not to recall past events but to rehearse possibilities.

Belief in vs Belief that

When someone says I believe in the resurrection, they are not necessarily claiming a historical fact (belief that), but enacting a modal commitment (belief in). They are living toward a world in which death is not the last word. The difference is crucial:

• Belief that is cognitive, evidentiary, propositional.

• Belief in is relational, affective, ethical.

Myths operate primarily in the second register. They generate possibility spaces within which life can be oriented — and reoriented — in light of longing, loss, hope, or joy.

The Participatory Nature of Myth

To engage a myth is not to assess it, but to inhabit it. We do not stand outside it, judging its truth-value like a neutral observer. We enter it — not as dupes, but as participants in its drama.

This participation is not a matter of literal belief but of modal alignment. One lives as if the world disclosed by the myth is meaningful — and thereby brings it forth, not as delusion, but as semiotic reality.

In this way, myth is not a window onto an objective past, but a mirror that reveals what we value, fear, and strive for — and a map for orienting desire in a world of uncertainty.

Myth as a Technology of Desire

Modernity has sought to displace myth with method — to replace story with system. But desire cannot be methodically bracketed. It finds its way back through new myths: of progress, of nation, of romantic love, of personal branding. The question is not whether we live by myths, but which myths we live by, and whether we do so consciously or blindly.

A relational epistemology does not discard myth. It honours its role as a technology of desire — a way of shaping and sharing our orientations toward the possible, the good, the feared, and the sacred.

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5 Literalism and the Violence of Interpretation

As we saw in the previous post, myth is not a statement of facts but a semiotic architecture for desire — a living map of possible worlds that orients meaning, value, and action. But what happens when this modal fabric is flattened? When the world of myth is no longer lived as if it were meaningful, but enforced as though it were fact?

This flattening is literalism, and its consequences are profound.

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Literalism: A Collapse of Modal Awareness

Literalism is not simply a misunderstanding. It is a collapse of the modal distinctions that allow language — and life — to function relationally. Where myth opens a space of orientation and participation, literalism closes that space, reducing the polyphony of desire to a single voice of dogma.

In linguistic terms, literalism mistakes a proposal for a proposition, and a modal projection for a statement of fact. The mythic belief in becomes a propositional belief that — and this shift entails a profound change in the mode of knowing:

• The open-endedness of longing becomes a closed system of doctrine.

• The ethical encounter becomes an epistemic test of allegiance.

• The drama of transformation becomes a demand for affirmation.

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The Violence of Certainty

This reduction is not neutral. It exerts a kind of epistemic violence, because it enforces a single interpretation as the only legitimate access to meaning. It denies the relational nature of understanding and replaces it with compliance. This violence can take many forms:

• Doctrinal enforcement: Believe that the story is true, or be excluded.

• Hermeneutic control: Interpret the text this way, or be condemned.

• Affective policing: Feel this way about the myth, or be accused of irreverence.

Literalism closes the gap between map and terrain — and then punishes those who notice the difference.

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The Myth of Objectivity

Literalism is often defended as a form of reverence — fidelity to the truth of the tradition. But paradoxically, it is a modern deformation of myth, shaped by the same epistemic assumptions it claims to resist:

• It treats myth as information to be transmitted, rather than a world to be inhabited.

• It treats knowledge as possession, rather than participation.

• It confuses semantic fidelity (literal meaning) with modal resonance (relational significance).

In doing so, it imports the epistemology of science — clarity, certainty, reproducibility — into domains where ambiguity, multivalence, and transformation are essential.

Literalism, in this sense, is not too ancient but too modern.

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Recovering the Relational Space

To move beyond literalism is not to abandon myth. It is to recover its modal power — its ability to orient and re-orient desire, not by force of fact, but by the ethical and imaginative pull of meaning. This requires:

• Holding myth lightly — not as an object of possession, but as a living practice.

• Honouring its affective force — its capacity to move, trouble, or transfigure us.

• Welcoming multiple readings — not as threats, but as invitations to deeper participation.

In this way, we can recover what literalism obscures: that myth does not demand belief, but invites us into a relation — a shared orientation toward what matters most.

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6 Desire and the Ethics of Interpretation

Interpretation is never neutral. It is shaped not only by what we know, but by what we want — our desires, fears, longings, and ethical commitments. To interpret myth, then, is not just to assign meaning, but to position oneself in relation to meaning. It is, inescapably, an ethical act.

In this post, we explore the often-overlooked role of desire in interpretation — not only what the text means to us, but what we hope to find, fear to lose, or seek to preserve in the act of interpreting it.

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Beyond Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Much modern interpretation, especially in critical theory, has been animated by what Paul Ricoeur called a hermeneutics of suspicion — an orientation that seeks to unmask hidden ideologies, false consciousness, or oppressive structures. While this approach has yielded important insights, it often presumes:

• That meaning is hidden and must be uncovered.

• That the interpreter stands outside the text.

• That desire is delusion or distortion, to be overcome.

But desire is not always a danger to meaning. Sometimes it is what opens the space of meaning in the first place.

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Desire as Interpretive Horizon

Desire orients interpretation because it discloses what matters. It shapes not only what we notice in a myth, but how we respond to it:

• The one who hopes for redemption will read a myth of descent differently from the one who fears judgment.

• The one who longs for communion will interpret symbols of unity with different affect than the one who fears loss of self.

• The one who suffers will not read the promise of transformation as a mere metaphor.

Desire does not cloud meaning; it constitutes its relevance. We do not interpret despite our desires — we interpret through them.

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Myth and the Ethics of Response

To treat interpretation as ethical is to ask not just “What does this mean?” but also:

• “What does this ask of me?”

• “What kind of world does this myth make possible or impossible?”

• “Who is excluded, harmed, or uplifted by this reading?”

This means recognising that:

• Some readings are not wrong, but unjust — they marginalise, erase, or oppress.

• Some readings are not true, but transformative — they enable life to be lived differently.

• Some readings are not authorised, but responsible — they bear the weight of care.

Interpretation is thus not merely epistemological. It is existential and ethical: it reveals who we are in relation to what we read.

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Desire, Responsibility, and Participation

When we understand desire as an ethical horizon of interpretation, we recover the relational nature of knowing. We are no longer observers extracting meaning from myth, but participants co-creating meaning in light of our desires and responsibilities.

This calls for:

• Humility: Recognising the limits of one’s own reading.

• Reverence: Honouring the depth and affective weight of myth.

• Dialogue: Welcoming other desires, other interpretations, other worlds.

And above all, it calls for care — not only in how we interpret, but in how we live what interpretation reveals.

7 Myth as Transformative Orientation

In the end, myth is not simply a story we tell about the world. It is a way of orienting ourselves within the world — shaping how we perceive, how we feel, how we act, and what we become. It is a map, not of geography, but of possibility.

In this concluding post, we bring together the threads of epistemology, modality, and desire to frame myth not as static belief, but as a living orientation toward transformation — both individual and collective.

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Myth as Modal Compass

Throughout this series, we have distinguished two modal grounds of myth:

• Epistemic: Concerned with truth, probability, evidence — “Is this what happened?”

• Deontic/desiderative: Concerned with values, obligations, hopes — “Is this the world I long for?”

When we treat myth epistemically, it becomes belief — to be confirmed or denied.
When we treat myth desideratively, it becomes orientation — to be lived into or resisted.

This shift reveals that myth is less a description of reality than a proposal for living. It does not merely represent the world; it opens worlds.

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Myth and Transformative Knowing

A myth that truly orients us does more than tell us what is — it transforms what can be. It becomes:

• A way of seeing ourselves and others anew.

• A source of courage in times of despair.

• A frame through which action gains coherence and consequence.

Knowing myth, in this sense, is not a matter of having facts, but of being grasped — and moved — by meaning. It is a form of knowing-with: with the body, with the heart, with the community, with the Earth.

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Myth and Ethical Becoming

Because myth shapes how we live, it bears an ethical weight. A transformative orientation is not just one that feels meaningful — but one that:

• Respects difference.

• Cultivates responsibility.

• Enables flourishing across boundaries of self and other.

In this light, the question is not “Is this myth literally true?” but:

• “What kind of person does this myth invite me to become?”

• “What kind of community does it imagine?”

• “What world does it make possible?”

Such questions restore myth to its relational role: as a medium of becoming-with — not just knowing-about.

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Beyond Belief

If belief says, “I hold this to be true,” and doubt says, “I am not sure,” then orientation says, “I will walk this path.”

This is where myth lives: not in the certainty of facts, nor the insecurity of doubt, but in the courage of participation.

In a fractured world, myths that invite care, transformation, and solidarity are not optional luxuries. They are vital acts of ethical imagination — ways of opening what might yet be.

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Closing the Series

This series has suggested that myth is not simply a mode of knowing, but a modality of living. To honour it is not to explain it away, nor to enforce belief, but to recognise how deeply it touches desire, guides becoming, and sustains relation.

In rethinking myth beyond belief, we recover its power as an ethical and existential orientation — one that enables us not just to interpret the world, but to live it otherwise.

Series Reflection: From Knowing About to Living With

This series set out to explore a deceptively simple premise: not all knowing is belief, and not all myths aim to be believed. What began as a distinction between epistemic and desiderative modalities soon unfolded into a deeper inquiry — into the nature of meaning, orientation, and the ethical stakes of what we know and how we live.

What Did the Series Reveal?

1. Modal Plurality
   The dominant Western tendency to treat knowledge as propositional belief blinds us to the rich diversity of mental processes. Desiderative modes — wanting, hoping, believing in — are not deviations from rational knowing but essential modalities of being-in-the-world.

2. Myth as More Than Belief
   When viewed solely through an epistemic lens, myth becomes a primitive hypothesis. But when viewed through a desiderative lens, myth becomes a participatory orientation — one that calls us, forms us, and transforms us.

3. The Observer as Desirer
   We are not just observers of meaning but desiring participants in meaning-making. Our longings shape what we notice, value, and commit to — and thus shape reality as lived.

4. Myth and World-Making
   Myth is not about returning to a fantasy past but about animating a liveable future. Its truth lies not in its literal accuracy, but in its capacity to call forth new possibilities for ethical co-existence.

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How Has This Extended Our Epistemology?

The relational epistemology we’ve been developing is no longer just about knowing-with — it now includes hoping-with, believing-with, and becoming-with. Myth, from this view, is not merely a container of meanings but a relational process that unfolds between participants, desires, values, and time.

Just as belief seeks coherence with reality, hope seeks resonance with possibility. And both are shaped not in isolation, but in co-emergent relation with others — human and more-than-human.