1 Why Science Needs an Ontology of Relation
Science is often taken to be the least philosophical of human endeavours — a domain of hard data, concrete measurements, and methodical detachment. But beneath its rigorous methods lies a world of assumptions: about what exists, how it exists, and how we can know it. These assumptions are ontological, whether acknowledged or not.
This post inaugurates a series that brings those hidden ontologies into the light — and proposes a new foundation: an ontology of relation. We'll suggest that concepts long taken as givens in science — time, matter, energy, causality — are not pre-existing containers or forces, but relational abstractions. They are ways of making-with the world, not of standing outside it.
The Inherited Ontology of Substance
Since the Scientific Revolution, Western science has been haunted by the legacy of substance metaphysics. In this view, the universe is made of discrete objects — inert things that possess properties and exert forces. The role of science, then, is to discover and measure the properties of these things, and the laws that govern their interaction.
But this worldview is not neutral. It reflects a particular way of being in the world: one that privileges separation over connection, extraction over participation. And it generates abstractions — like "mass," "force," or "energy" — that are often mistaken for things rather than ways of organising experience.
The Illusion of Objectivity
Modern science prides itself on objectivity — the effort to remove the observer from the observation. But as quantum physics, systems theory, and even cognitive science have shown, there is no view from nowhere. Every act of knowing is a participation. Every measurement is a transformation.
This doesn’t mean science is invalid. It means science is relational: what we discover is shaped by how we approach, what we ask, and how we intervene. It means that concepts like “energy” or “time” don’t simply describe what is there — they organise a co-constituted reality.
Why This Matters Now
We live in an age of planetary crisis, when the limits of our extractive worldview are becoming devastatingly clear. The reductionist dream — of controlling the world by breaking it into parts — has shown itself to be unsustainable.
But the problem is not with science per se. The problem is with an ontology of separation that has often underwritten it.
What if we began again — not by throwing out science, but by re-grounding it in relation?
What if we understood time not as a background container, but as the unfolding of processes in co-emergence?
What if we saw matter not as stuff, but as patterned activity?
What if energy, causality, and even emergence could be reframed as relational events — not forces pushing from behind, but invitations pulling from within?
What This Series Will Explore
In the coming posts, we will trace concepts that sit at the heart of science — and reimagine them through the lens of relation:
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Time, as not a container but a co-becoming
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Matter, as not substance but patterned potential
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Energy, as not thing but transformation
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Emergence, as arising through entanglement
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Causality, as resonance rather than force
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Explanation, as poetics rather than proof
Our goal is not to dismantle science — but to offer it a deeper ground. Not to relativise truth, but to recognise that all truth is relation-bound — that even the most abstract concepts are born from our embeddedness.
An ontology of relation is not just a metaphysical proposition. It is a stance, a shift, a new way of participating in the world. One in which science becomes not the dispassionate mapping of what is, but the co-creative unfolding of what might become.
2 Rethinking Time — Not a Container but a Co-emergence
We usually think of time as something we move through — a river that carries us forward, or a line stretching from past to future. In physics, time is treated as a parameter: a neutral background in which events unfold. In everyday life, it is often seen as a container — a schedule to be filled, a resource to be spent.
But what if this view of time is a product of a deeper assumption — the ontology of substance — and not a necessary feature of experience or science?
In a relational ontology, time is not an external framework, but a pattern of co-emergence. It is not the thing through which things happen, but the happening itself — a rhythm that arises through the interrelation of processes.
Time as Instance, Not Continuum
In classical physics, time is often represented as a continuous axis, measurable and uniform — like a clock ticking in the background of the cosmos. But this presumes that time exists independently of the things that unfold within it.
In a relational view, time is not a container for change — it is the measure of change itself. It emerges with and through processes. Every unfolding of relation brings about its own time.
This aligns with insights from quantum theory and relativity. Time dilates and contracts not in absolute terms, but relative to processual relations — mass, acceleration, observation. It is not an invariant backdrop, but a participant in becoming.
The Experience of Temporal Relativity
Even in everyday experience, we feel that time stretches or contracts depending on what is happening and how we are involved. A moment of boredom feels endless. A moment of joy disappears in a flash. Time is not simply “passing” — it is being shaped by our relation to events, by our degree of involvement, by the quality of unfolding.
From a relational standpoint, these are not mere distortions of an objective timeline. They are expressions of how time actually works: not as a single thread, but as a tapestry of rhythms that arise from situated activity.
Time in Systems
In systems theory and complexity science, we already encounter time as nested, multi-scalar, and emergent. A tree, a forest, and a climate system each operate on different temporalities. Time in this sense is not a single clock, but a relational field of durational rhythms, arising from within and between systems.
A seed’s time is different from a market’s. A species' evolutionary time is different from the time of a technological transition. These different times do not exist within some larger Time — they are the very form of each system's unfolding.
Toward a Participatory Chronology
To reimagine time relationally is to undo one of the most foundational assumptions of the modern worldview: that time is “out there,” waiting to be measured.
Instead, we might understand time as always already situated. Each relation brings forth its own tempo, its own directionality, its own horizon of becoming.
In this view, science does not simply track time — it participates in it. Measurement is not a neutral observation of an independent variable, but a temporal co-creation. Every experiment has its own duration. Every observation occurs in time, but also helps bring it into being.
What We Gain by Letting Go of the Timeline
When we let go of time as container, several important gains become possible:
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We reconnect science to life. The living world does not unfold in clock time but in rhythms of emergence and decay, rest and activity, call and response.
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We make room for multiplicity. Time becomes plural, partial, ecological — not a single timeline, but a web of becoming.
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We open to new kinds of knowing. Not just prediction and control, but attunement, resonance, and participation.
To rethink time is to rethink science itself — not as a detached tracking of pre-existing events, but as a way of becoming-with the rhythms of the world.
3 Matter as Patterned Potential
What is matter? For centuries, Western science treated it as the ultimate “stuff” of the world — solid, enduring, independent. The atoms of Democritus, the billiard balls of Newtonian physics, the mechanical substrates of industrial modernity.
But quantum theory, field theory, and systems biology have all undermined this view. And yet, in much of our thinking, matter still carries the residue of that older metaphysics — as the “hard” substrate underneath the “soft” layers of life, mind, and meaning.
In this post, we’ll explore how a relational ontology reframes matter — not as a substance, but as patterned potential. Not what the world is made of, but what it is always becoming through.
Substance or Structure?
We inherit from the tradition of substance metaphysics the assumption that things must be something in themselves, and that matter is what gives them that reality.
But in a relational ontology, what defines a thing is not its internal substance, but its relational coherence — its pattern of becoming within a wider network of activity.
Matter, then, is not a passive stuff that is acted upon by forces. It is not inert. It is potential structured by relation — patterned, provisional, always in the midst of transformation.
This isn’t a poetic metaphor. It’s consistent with how physics now describes fields and particles: not as solid “things,” but as local excitations in a broader field — temporary actualisations of potential.
Quantum Matter: The Potential That Precedes the Actual
In quantum mechanics, matter appears not as something already there, but as something that becomes actual through interaction. A particle is not “present” in a definite position until it is observed — and even then, only in relation to the observational frame.
This is not an artefact of measurement, but a feature of how matter exists: as potential waiting to be instantiated.
The wavefunction, in this view, does not describe a hidden particle. It describes the structure of potential outcomes, which cohere according to patterns of probability — and which only become definite when enacted in a relational event.
Matter as Temporally Inflected Pattern
From the relational standpoint, matter is not only patterned — it is temporally patterned. That is, its identity at any moment is shaped by what it has done and what it is poised to do.
A cell, for example, is defined not only by its spatial structure, but by its capacity for metabolic process, genetic expression, and responsive change. It is matter-in-process — matter that is always becoming.
Likewise, even a rock is not “static,” but slowly weathering, gravitationally interacting, chemically active. Its form is not an essence, but a stability within larger patterns of transformation.
The Role of Fields: Relational Grounds of Materiality
In field theories — from electromagnetism to quantum field theory — particles are not “things” added into space. They are disturbances in a relational medium. The field is the enduring structure of potential, and particles are local manifestations of that potential — actualised in particular configurations.
Matter, in this sense, is never independent. It is always a situated actualisation — a temporary node in a relational field.
To speak of “a particle” is to speak of an event in a network of possible relations — not an object outside relation.
From Matter-as-Thing to Matter-as-Relation
This reframing is more than philosophical. It transforms how we think about:
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Material systems: as emergent and co-determined, not self-contained.
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Bodies and ecologies: as mutual becomings, not assemblages of things.
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Technology and design: as engagements with fields of possibility, not the imposition of form onto passive stuff.
And perhaps most importantly, it reminds us that matter is not mute. It does not simply wait to be shaped by us. It participates. It responds. It affords, resists, invites, withdraws.
Matter, in a relational ontology, is not the raw input for thought or culture. It is an active partner in world-making.
4 Science as Attunement, Not Control
Science has long been entangled with the idea of control. From Bacon’s dream of power over nature to the engineering triumphs of modernity, the scientific method has been praised for delivering predictive mastery: if we understand the laws, we can make the world obey.
But what if science is not about control at all?
In a relational view, science becomes not the means of dominating nature, but of attuning to it. Its power lies not in imposing order, but in deepening sensitivity — to pattern, possibility, and participation.
Let’s explore what it means to understand science not as command, but as attunement.
From Mastery to Reciprocity
The control model of science is rooted in a subject-object metaphysics: the scientist as knower, nature as known; the experimenter as agent, the world as passive recipient.
But relational epistemology begins with the insight that we are not separate from the systems we study. Knowledge is always co-constructed — shaped by the apparatus, the frame, the context, the language.
Science, then, becomes a conversation — not with a mute object, but with an active world. We do not command it. We listen, respond, refine our questions, become more receptive to what the world is saying.
Practices of Attunement
What does it mean to practice science as attunement?
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Observation becomes not passive looking, but disciplined listening — a practice of sensitivity to emergence, anomaly, rhythm.
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Experimentation becomes not the testing of a hypothesis on a system, but an encounter with a system — an unfolding relationship whose outcome depends on mutual configuration.
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Measurement becomes not an assertion of certainty, but a mode of entanglement — we do not observe from the outside, but participate in what becomes visible.
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Modelling becomes not prediction as domination, but exploration of possible worlds — scaffolds for imagination and responsiveness.
In all of this, science becomes a craft of attention, a means of honing our capacity to notice what the world is asking of us.
The Ethos of Attunement
Attunement is not a method so much as a stance — a way of being with the world. It requires:
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Humility: an openness to being surprised, corrected, transformed by what we find.
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Responsiveness: a willingness to let our frameworks shift in response to phenomena, rather than forcing phenomena to fit our frameworks.
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Care: not only in the sense of precision, but in the deeper sense of commitment — a responsibility toward what we come to know.
This is not to romanticise science, but to remember its roots: in wonder, in encounter, in a desire to learn with the world rather than stand over it.
Attunement Is Not Passivity
To attune is not to withdraw. It is to engage more deeply.
A violinist in tune with her instrument does not stand back. She participates fully — with technique, emotion, and discipline. She shapes sound in relationship with the wood, the string, the air, the room, the audience.
So too with science. Attunement does not mean silence or detachment. It means embodied, situated participation — a tuning-in to what the world can become in our midst.
Toward a Relational Ethic of Inquiry
This shift from control to attunement reframes the very aim of science.
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It is no longer about extracting knowledge, but cultivating relationship.
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No longer about transcending the world, but dwelling within it more skilfully.
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No longer about reduction, but about making visible the patterns of interbeing.
Science becomes not the conquest of uncertainty, but the art of dancing with complexity.
And that, perhaps, is its deepest power: not to make the world obey, but to help us become more capable partners in its unfolding.
5 Objectivity as Situated Participation
If relational science invites us to shift from control to attunement, it also calls us to reimagine what we mean by objectivity.
For centuries, objectivity has been framed as detachment — the stance of a neutral, disembodied observer, capable of stepping outside context, emotion, or perspective to see the world “as it really is.”
But no such view-from-nowhere exists.
In a relational frame, objectivity is not the absence of perspective, but the deep recognition of situatedness. It is not a god’s-eye view, but a discipline of accountability — to the entanglements that make knowledge possible.
Let us explore what it means to reclaim objectivity as a practice of situated participation.
The Illusion of Detachment
Classical science inherits the Enlightenment ideal of the rational observer: one who can rise above bias, suppress subjectivity, and deliver truths unsullied by perspective.
But this ideal collapses under scrutiny:
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No observation is free from framing. What we notice depends on what we expect, what we ask, what tools we use, what language we speak.
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No observer is free from embodiment. We are always located — in histories, cultures, values, affects.
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No method is free from intervention. The very act of inquiry changes the system inquired into.
The fantasy of detachment masks the real conditions of knowledge: we are always inside the world we study.
Situatedness as Strength
If there is no neutral vantage point, then all knowledge is situated. But this is not a flaw — it is what makes knowing possible.
Situatedness grounds inquiry in real relationships: with tools, communities, practices, and places. It forces us to be explicit about the assumptions we bring and the conditions under which our claims hold.
A relational view thus redefines objectivity:
Objectivity is not what escapes perspective, but what owns it.It is what can be held accountable across contexts, because it has made its commitments visible.
In this sense, objectivity is not a barrier to ethics — it is a mode of ethical relation. It says: here is what I see, from where I stand, with what consequences.
Participation as Epistemic Virtue
Objectivity in relational science is not only situated — it is participatory. Knowing arises in interaction, not isolation.
This has radical implications:
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The observer is part of the phenomenon. We must account for how our methods and models shape what appears.
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The knower is in dialogue. Knowledge is not monologic, but emerges through engagement — with data, peers, communities, even nonhuman agencies.
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The claim is never final. Every result is an invitation to further testing, retuning, and recontextualisation.
This is not relativism. It is responsible pluralism: the understanding that truth is provisional, but not arbitrary; that robustness arises from diversity, dialogue, and iterative refinement.
Accountability, Not Absolutism
In this framework, the integrity of science comes not from erasing the self, but from situating the self — and remaining accountable to its effects.
This means:
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Reporting not just what was done, but how and why.
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Acknowledging the frameworks and commitments that shaped inquiry.
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Welcoming critique as an opportunity for refinement, not as a threat.
Here, objectivity becomes not a position of control, but a process of ongoing negotiation — with the world, with others, and with ourselves.
From Objectivity to Response-Ability
The deepest insight of relational objectivity is this:
To know is not to hold the world at a distance, but to become more response-able — more capable of responding to what we encounter.
This is not about abandoning rigour. It is about anchoring rigour in relationship.
It calls for a science that is:
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Transparent about its standpoint
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Reflexive about its effects
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Committed to dialogue, revision, and care
In short, a science that earns trust not by pretending to be outside the world, but by showing how seriously it takes its place within it.
6 Knowledge in the Web of Practice
Knowledge, in the relational view, is not a static set of facts stored in minds or texts. It is a living practice — something we do, together, in specific contexts, with specific tools, toward specific ends.
To know is to participate in a web of practices: conceptual, material, social, affective.
And practices are never neutral. They organise what can be seen, said, measured, imagined. They bring some realities forth while excluding others. They are modes of world-making.
In this post, we explore how a relational science reorients our view of knowledge — not as representation, but as participation in practice.
Practices Make Knowledge Possible
Every scientific discipline is shaped by its practices:
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The kinds of instruments it uses
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The questions it finds intelligible
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The metaphors it draws on
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The categories it deploys
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The norms it enforces
These are not incidental. They constitute the field. What counts as data, explanation, rigour, insight — all are structured by the forms of life in which they are embedded.
As philosopher of science Karen Barad puts it:
“Scientific practices are not about discovering what is already there. They are about intra-acting with the world to bring forth specific phenomena.”
Knowing Is Not Spectating
In this view, knowledge is not the mirror of nature. It is world-involving activity.
This means:
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We don’t find pre-given facts lying around. We enact realities by engaging with the world in specific ways.
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We don’t reveal a single truth. We generate multiple, partial, and often incommensurable truth effects, each anchored in different material-semiotic practices.
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We don’t stand outside the system. We are within the unfolding of what becomes real.
Knowing, then, is a way of inhabiting the world — of making sense in ways that are materially, socially, and ethically situated.
Material-Semiotic Entanglements
In relational science, meaning and matter cannot be separated. Every practice is material-semiotic:
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The concepts we use are inseparable from the instruments we use to generate them.
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The measurements we take are entangled with the models that define what is measurable.
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The “results” we produce are shaped by our questions, methods, and interpretive frameworks.
There is no raw data untouched by theory, and no pure theory untouched by history.
Every scientific claim emerges from a network of enactments — a choreography of bodies, machines, languages, values, and protocols.
Communities of Practice
This also means that science is not an individual pursuit, but a collective craft.
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Knowledge grows through interaction — not just with phenomena, but with peers, mentors, reviewers, readers.
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Disciplines function as communities of practice, where newcomers learn the ropes, acquire the gestures, inherit the vocabularies.
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Paradigms persist not because they are “true,” but because they hold up under specific constraints and reproduce institutional stability.
Scientific knowledge, like all cultural practice, is sustained by participation — and always carries the traces of its social, historical, and affective conditions.
Situated Agency and the Ethics of Practice
To participate in knowledge-making is to exercise situated agency. We are not omnipotent, but neither are we powerless.
We inherit ways of seeing and doing, but we can reflect, revise, and reimagine them.
This gives rise to an ethics of practice:
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Are our methods inclusive or exclusionary?
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Do our tools conceal as much as they reveal?
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Are we attentive to what is rendered invisible, uncountable, or unintelligible?
The relational scientist does not simply ask “What is true?” but also “What does this practice do — and for whom?”
Knowing as Making-with
If we are always entangled in the world we study, then knowledge is not a stepping back but a making-with.
It is a dance of alignment and invention — learning to feel the rhythms of the real, while crafting new ways of orienting within it.
To know is to participate in the weaving of world and meaning, responsibly.
And this, ultimately, is what relational science teaches:
Knowledge is not what we have. It is how we relate.
7 Science as Co-Creation
If relational science begins by abandoning the dream of pure detachment, it ends with a profound revaluation of what science is for.
It is about co-creation — entering into relationship with the world in ways that generate new patterns of possibility.
This post gathers the strands of our series and weaves them into a final proposition:
A relational science is not a knowledge-extracting machine. It is a world-making practice of care.
Science as Response-Ability
Throughout this series, we’ve seen that scientific knowledge is not a passive mirror but an active construction — shaped by:
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The models we build
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The measurements we take
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The categories we deploy
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The questions we ask
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The relations we enter
In every case, we are not just observers of the world, but participants in its unfolding.
To know is to be implicated.
This calls for a new ethic of science — one grounded not in objectivity as detachment, but in response-ability: the ability to respond well to what we are entangled with.
From Mastery to Mutuality
But in the Anthropocene, this dream has become untenable — and dangerous.
Relational science offers a different ethos:
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From extracting value to co-creating meaning
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From standing over to standing with
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From control to care
This does not mean abandoning rigour. It means deepening it — recognising that every model and method is an ethical choice, shaping what kinds of futures become thinkable, sayable, and liveable.
The Work of Reworlding
This is what we might call reworlding:
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Reimagining what counts as knowledge
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Reconfiguring our ways of seeing and measuring
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Reweaving our relations with earth, others, and futures
It is not science as salvation, but science as companion — one among many practices of sense-making and care, grounded in humility and hope.
Relational Science Is Already Here
This is not a utopian dream. It is already happening.
Relational science is not a break from science. It is its ongoing transformation — a remembering of the truth that we are never outside the world we study.
To Relate Is to Hope
The most radical thing about relational science is not its critique of objectivity or its metaphysics of entanglement.
It is its invitation to hope.
To relate is to remain open — to possibility, to transformation, to care.
Relational science does not pretend to hold final answers. It asks:
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What are we becoming together?
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What kinds of worlds are we helping to bring forth?
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How might we know in ways that honour the more-than-human, the invisible, the emergent?
The End of a Series, the Beginning of a Practice
This brings our series to a close. But relational science is not a doctrine. It is a practice — one that must be lived, revised, and reimagined in context.
Thank you for travelling this path.
May your knowing be participatory, your questions hospitable, and your science a site of care.
Coda: A Note from the Author
This series has been, for me, a kind of epistemic pilgrimage — not toward certainty, but toward clarity about uncertainty. It has deepened my conviction that science, at its best, is not a distancing device but a relational act. Not a monument to truth, but a means of participating more carefully, more accountably, in the unfolding of what is.
What began as a question — what would science look like if we truly took relationality seriously? — has become a set of coordinates I can no longer unsee. Science, it turns out, is never neutral, never free from entanglement. But this is not a flaw to be fixed. It is a condition to be honoured — and a gift to be received with care.
I hope that, if these reflections have done anything, they have made space for thinking otherwise: for knowing with, instead of knowing over. For asking not just what is true, but what kind of world are we helping to bring forth by calling it so?