The Relations of Possibility: VIII. Where Possibility Comes From

We began with a simple question:

What is a relation?

We thought of relations as connections between things.

But gradually the picture changed.

Relations differentiate.

Differences can become constraints.

Constraints distinguish among possible futures.

And those futures, when they become actual, change the relations from which further possibilities arise.

Perhaps, then, possibility does not come from somewhere else.

Perhaps it comes from relation itself.

A relation establishes a difference.

A difference changes what can happen.

What can happen constitutes a field of possibility.

And when one possibility becomes actual, the relations change again.

So possibility is neither an abstract space containing everything that might happen nor a product of imagination.

It is generated by the organisation of the world.

The world does not first exist and then acquire possibilities.

Its relations are already possibilities in formation.

This gives us a different way of thinking about becoming.

Becoming is not simply the passage from one fixed state to another.

It is the transformation of the relations that determine what can happen next.

The present makes some futures possible.

Those futures are not guaranteed.

But neither are they arbitrary.

They arise from the relations that constitute the present.

And when one becomes actual, the field changes.

Relation → difference → constraint → possibility → becoming → new relation.

The sequence has no obvious beginning.

There is no moment at which possibility has to be introduced from outside.

Nor is there any need for a completed catalogue of possible futures waiting to be revealed.

Possibility is continually being generated as relations change.

This also changes what we mean by a world.

A world is not merely a collection of things.

It is a changing organisation of relations through which possibilities become available.

A world therefore has a history not only of what has happened, but of what could happen.

And because what can happen changes, the future is never simply waiting ahead.

It is continually being made possible.

Perhaps this is why constraint matters so much.

Constraint does not close the world.

It gives the world a shape within which something new can emerge.

Without difference, there is no distinction.

Without distinction, no constraint.

Without constraint, no structured possibility.

Without possibility, no becoming.

And without becoming, the relations could never change.

We began by asking whether a relation is merely a connection between things.

We can now give a different answer.

A relation is one of the ways in which a world makes a difference to what can become.

Perhaps, then, the world does not contain possibilities.

The world generates possibilities through its relations.

And perhaps becoming is what happens when those possibilities begin to change the relations from which they arose.

The question we started with has therefore turned back upon itself.

Where does possibility come from?

From the relations already in play.

And where do new relations come from?

From what those possibilities become.

The circle does not close.

It continues.

The Relations of Possibility: VII. When Possibility Changes

We have been treating possibility as something the present makes available.

But the present does not remain still.

Relations change.

And when relations change, possibilities change with them.

Consider a landscape after a bridge is built.

The river has not disappeared. The banks have not moved. The landscape may look much the same.

Yet the field of possible movement has changed.

A journey that once required a long detour can now take a direct route.

A new possibility has appeared because a relation has changed.

This is true at every level.

Biological evolution changes the relations among organisms and their environments, opening possibilities that did not previously exist.

Social change alters relations among people, institutions and practices, making new forms of action possible.

Conceptual change alters relations among distinctions and meanings, making new ways of understanding the world available.

In each case, possibility changes because relations change.

This gives evolution a deeper meaning.

Evolution need not be understood simply as the production of new things.

It can be understood as the transformation of the field of possibilities.

Something new becomes possible because the relations constituting the present have changed.

And once that possibility is actualised, the relations change again.

A new organism alters its environment.

A new social practice alters the relations among participants.

A new concept alters the distinctions through which a situation can be understood.

The new does not simply occupy the old world.

It changes the world of possibilities from which further novelty can arise.

This makes becoming inherently recursive.

The present generates possibilities.

Some possibility becomes actual.

That actuality changes the relations.

The changed relations generate new possibilities.

And so on.

Relations → possibilities → becoming → new relations → new possibilities.

There is no need to imagine novelty arriving from nowhere.

Nor do we need to imagine the future already containing everything that might ever happen.

The future can be genuinely open while still being relationally constrained.

What becomes possible tomorrow depends upon what has become actual today.

This also means that possibility itself can evolve.

The world of a bacterium is not the world of a human being. The world of a child is not the world of an adult. The conceptual world of a society can change as its distinctions change.

The world does not merely contain different participants.

Different relations constitute different fields of possibility.

Perhaps, then, evolution is not fundamentally the movement of things through a fixed space of possibilities.

Perhaps it is the continual transformation of the space itself.

And if the possibilities of a world can change, then becoming is more than the actualisation of what was already possible.

Sometimes, becoming changes what is possible next.

Which leaves us with the largest question of all:

Where does possibility come from in the first place?

The Relations of Possibility: VI. Affordances of a World

If possibility is what the present leaves open, then possibility is always possibility for something.

A branch affords support for a bird.

A doorway affords passage for a person.

A path affords movement through a landscape.

The possibility is not simply a property of the branch, the doorway or the path. Nor is it simply a property of the creature that encounters them.

It arises from a relation.

This is the insight contained in the idea of affordance.

An affordance is a possibility made available by an organisation of relations.

The same object can therefore afford different possibilities to different participants.

A wall may afford shelter to one creature and obstruction to another. A gap may afford passage to a mouse but not to a human. A particular sound may afford one response in one situation and something quite different in another.

Possibility is not floating free.

It is situated.

And this helps us understand something that has been easy to miss.

A world is not merely a collection of things with properties.

It is a field of affordances.

What matters about a world is not only what exists within it, but what the relations among its participants make possible.

This is true far beyond the physical.

A language affords certain distinctions and not others. A social institution affords certain actions and constrains others. A conceptual framework makes some questions visible while making other possibilities difficult even to formulate.

In each case, the possibilities arise from relations.

The world does not first contain a complete inventory of possibilities, to which organisms, societies or thinkers subsequently respond.

Rather, possibilities emerge from the way participants are situated within an organised world.

This also explains why changing a relation can transform a world without transforming all the things within it.

Move a chair across a room and the room has changed affordances.

Open a door and a passage appears.

Change a rule and an action that was previously impossible may become permissible.

Change a concept and something previously unnoticed may become thinkable.

The things may remain.

The possibilities have changed.

This gives affordance a deeper significance than a theory of perception or action.

It provides a way of understanding how relational structure becomes a field of becoming.

Relations establish differences.

Differences establish constraints.

Constraints open some futures and close others.

Affordances are those possibilities as they become available within a world of participants.

The world, then, is not simply what is there.

It is what its relations make possible.

And once possibilities are understood in this way, another question follows.

If relations can change the affordances of a world, then what happens when the relations themselves evolve?

For when possibilities change, what can become changes with them.

The Relations of Possibility: V. A Future Is a Relation to What Has Not Happened

We often speak of the future as though it were somewhere ahead of us.

The present is here.

The past is behind us.

The future lies in front.

It is an appealing picture.

But what exactly is this future?

It cannot be a thing waiting somewhere beyond the present. Nothing has happened there yet.

And yet the future is not nothing.

We can already distinguish between futures that are possible and futures that are not.

A seed may become a plant. A stone may fall. A door may open.

The possibilities are present before the events themselves are.

So perhaps the future is neither a place nor a collection of events waiting to occur.

Perhaps it is a relation between the present and what has not yet happened.

The present stands in different relations to different possible continuations.

Some are open.

Some are constrained.

Some are excluded.

A ball at the top of a hill has not yet rolled in any particular direction. But the possibilities available to it are structured by its position, the shape of the ground, and the relations in which it participates.

The future is therefore not simply what comes next.

It is what can come next.

This also means that possibility is always relational.

There is no future in isolation from something for which that future is possible. A future is a possible continuation of a particular present.

Change the present relations, and the futures change.

This is why becoming cannot be understood simply as movement through a pre-existing timeline.

To become is for a present configuration of relations to give rise to another configuration of relations.

And when that happens, the field of possibility changes again.

The future that becomes actual is not merely selected from a pre-existing catalogue. Its actualisation transforms the relations from which subsequent possibilities arise.

The process is therefore recursive:

present relations → possible futures → actual becoming → new relations → new possible futures

Nothing has to be added from outside.

The possibilities emerge from the relations already in play.

This gives the future a curious status.

It is not yet actual, but it is not merely imagined either.

It belongs to the structure of the present as what the present leaves open.

Perhaps, then, the future is not something we move towards.

Perhaps it is something the present continually makes possible.

And if that is so, then becoming is not a journey through a future that already exists.

It is the continual transformation of the relations from which new futures can arise.

Which brings us to a more difficult question:

What does it mean for a world to afford a future?

The Relations of Possibility: IV. The Possible Is Not the Imagined

We can imagine almost anything.

A mountain can fly. A stone can speak. Tomorrow can contain an event that has never occurred before.

But imagination is not possibility.

The distinction matters because we often use possible to mean little more than conceivable.

If we can imagine something without contradiction, we are tempted to call it possible.

But the world is less permissive than imagination.

A stone may be imagined floating in the air. Yet whether it can actually do so depends upon the relations in which the stone participates: its mass, its surroundings, the forces acting upon it, and the structure of the physical world.

Possibility is therefore not simply a property of an idea.

It is a property of a situation.

More precisely, it is a property of what the relations constituting that situation leave open.

This changes how we should think about possibility.

The possible is not an invisible collection of events waiting somewhere in the future. Nor is it a catalogue of everything that can be described without contradiction.

It is what the present permits to become actual.

A door makes passage possible because of its relation to the spaces on either side, the opening itself, and the things that might pass through it.

A road makes some journeys possible because of its relation to the landscape.

A physical system makes some future states possible and excludes others because of the relations that constitute its present state.

Possibility therefore has a history.

Change the relations, and the possibilities change with them.

This is why the future cannot be understood simply as an unknown region containing everything that might happen.

The future is constrained by the present.

But it is not determined in the sense that only one outcome must necessarily occur.

There may be several futures that remain open.

What matters is that they are not arbitrary.

They arise from the structure of what exists now.

We can now see the significance of the distinction.

Imagination asks:

What can I conceive?

Possibility asks:

What can this situation become?

The first belongs to the space of thought.

The second belongs to the relations of the world.

And the two can diverge dramatically.

A black hole makes the distinction especially clear. We can imagine an object escaping from inside the event horizon. But the causal structure of the geometry does not leave that future open.

The imagined future remains conceivable.

The physical future does not.

So possibility is neither everything we can imagine nor everything we can describe.

It is what relational structure leaves open.

And now the question becomes more precise.

If the possible is what the present leaves open, then perhaps a future is not something waiting ahead of us at all.

Perhaps a future is a relation to what has not yet happened.

The Relations of Possibility: III. When Relation Becomes Constraint

A difference becomes consequential when it changes what can happen.

But when does it become a constraint?

A locked door gives us an easy example. The relation between the door and the room has changed. Passage is no longer available.

The door has not merely become a different object.

It has changed the field of possible action.

This is what a constraint does.

It does not necessarily prevent everything. It distinguishes between what remains possible and what no longer is.

And this is important, because we often think of constraint as the opposite of possibility.

But without constraint, possibility has no structure.

If absolutely anything could happen, there would be no meaningful distinction between one possible future and another. Possibility would become indistinguishable from mere imagination.

A constraint gives possibility a shape.

The road constrains where the journey can go, but in doing so it makes a journey possible. The grammar of a language constrains what can be said, but those constraints make an enormous range of meanings available. The structure of a physical system constrains its behaviour, while simultaneously providing the conditions for that behaviour to occur.

Constraint, then, is not simply restriction.

It is differentiation among futures.

Some remain open. Others close.

This is why relations matter so much. A relation can establish a constraint without anything having to act as an external force.

The structure itself can determine what follows.

We saw this in the black hole. Inside the event horizon, the geometry does not need to push an object towards the singularity. The causal structure has changed so that every future-directed causal path leads towards decreasing radius.

The constraint is geometrical.

And because it is geometrical, it is also a constraint on becoming.

What can happen next depends upon the relations that constitute the present.

This gives us a different way of thinking about the world.

The present is not simply a collection of things and their properties. It is an organisation of relations that opens some futures and closes others.

Possibility therefore does not float freely above reality.

It is structured by constraint.

And constraint is not something imposed upon possibility from outside.

It is one of the ways possibility comes into being.

Which leaves us with a curious inversion.

We usually imagine possibility first, and constraint second: many things might happen, until something prevents them.

Perhaps the order is closer to the reverse.

Relations establish differences.

Differences establish constraints.

Constraints differentiate possible futures.

The possible may therefore begin not with freedom from constraint, but with constraint itself.

And that raises the next question:

If possibility is structured by the present, what exactly do we mean by “possible”?

The Relations of Possibility: II. Difference Makes a Difference

Not every difference matters.

A stone may differ from another stone in colour, weight or shape. Some of those differences may matter for what we do with them. Others may make no difference at all.

So it is not difference alone that interests us.

It is difference that makes a difference.

A door that is open differs from a door that is locked. The difference may be physically small, but relationally it is enormous. One permits passage; the other does not.

The important thing is therefore not simply that two states are different.

It is that the difference changes what can happen.

This gives difference a more active role than we usually give it. We tend to think of differences as features that can be observed: this is larger than that, this is nearer than that, this happens before that.

But some differences do more than distinguish.

They differentiate possibility.

A river and a road may both provide routes across a landscape, but they do so through very different relations. A bridge changes those relations. What was previously difficult or impossible becomes accessible.

Nothing magical has been added to the world.

The relations have changed.

And with them, the possibilities.

This is why constraint is so important. A constraint is not simply something that prevents an action. It establishes a difference between futures: some remain available, while others do not.

The wall does not merely occupy space.

It makes one trajectory possible and another impossible.

The horizon of a black hole provides an extreme physical example. The geometry does not merely tell us where an object is. It changes the distinction between possible future-directed paths. Inside the horizon, escape to the exterior is no longer among them.

The geometry has made a difference.

And that difference makes a difference to the future.

We can now see why relations matter.

Relations differentiate the world, but some differentiations alter the possibilities that follow from them. A changed relation can therefore become a changed future.

Perhaps, then, possibility does not begin with a list of things that might happen.

Perhaps it begins much earlier:

with a difference in the relations that constitute the present.

The next question is unavoidable.

When does a difference become a constraint?

The Relations of Possibility: I. A Relation Is Not a Connection

We ordinarily think of relations as connections between things.

There is a tree, and beside it there is a rock. The tree is near the rock. The rock is heavier than the tree. Two things exist, and a relation connects them.

It is an intuitively attractive picture.

But it quietly assumes that the things come first.

The relation is then something added afterwards: a connection between entities that already exist independently of it.

What happens if we reverse the order?

Consider something as simple as a doorway.

The doorway is not merely an object standing between two rooms. It establishes a relation between spaces: passage and obstruction, inside and outside, here and there. Its significance depends upon what can pass through it, for whom, and under what conditions.

The relation is not simply between already meaningful things.

It helps constitute what those things can be for one another.

This becomes clearer when we consider that changing a relation can change what is possible without changing the things themselves.

A locked door and an open door may be physically almost identical objects. What has changed is the relation.

Yet the field of possibility has changed dramatically.

Passage has become inaccessible.

The important difference, then, is not between two things. It is between possibilities generated by different relations.

This suggests that a relation is more than a connection.

A connection joins.

A relation differentiates.

It establishes ways in which something can be situated with respect to something else, and in doing so it can alter what becomes possible.

That does not mean that things disappear into relations. It means that what a thing is cannot always be separated from the relations through which it participates in a world.

And once we see this, a further question appears.

If relations can make some possibilities available and others unavailable, then relations are not merely descriptions of how the world is arranged.

They are part of how the world can become.

That is a much more consequential claim.

For possibility does not arrive after relations.

Perhaps possibility begins with them.

And if that is so, then the question is no longer simply:

What is related to what?

It becomes:

What differences do relations make possible?

Black Holes Without Space and Time: III. The Geometry of Becoming

We have followed the black hole inward.

Far from it, space and time appear to be familiar things: distance separates events, duration separates their occurrences. Closer in, their relations become increasingly differentiated. At the event horizon, the geometry changes the structure of possible futures. Inside, decreasing radius is no longer simply a spatial direction. It is part of the future toward which every future-directed causal path proceeds.

But what happens at the centre?

Here we must be careful.

The classical theory does not describe an infinitely small object sitting at the centre of the black hole. It describes a singularity: a point at which the geometry cannot be continued in the ordinary way.

If space and time are not substances, this becomes conceptually important.

There is no tiny piece of space being compressed until it becomes infinitely small. Nor is there an infinitely stretched duration waiting at the end of the journey.

There is instead a relational structure whose classical description reaches a limit.

This changes how we might understand the journey toward the singularity.

It is not simply a journey through space over the course of time.

It is a sequence of changing relations between events—a geometry that increasingly constrains what can happen next.

Inside the horizon, the singularity is therefore not merely somewhere the observer will eventually be. It is the boundary toward which the observer's future-directed trajectory proceeds.

In this sense, the black hole gives us a remarkable picture of becoming.

The geometry does not merely describe where things are. It structures the possibilities of what can happen next.

Far outside the black hole, many futures remain available.

Near the horizon, those possibilities become increasingly restricted.

Inside it, the future is constrained toward decreasing radius.

And at the singularity, the classical geometry can no longer tell us how the sequence continues.

The final mystery of the black hole is therefore not necessarily a mysterious object hidden at its centre.

It is the failure of our familiar geometry to describe what comes next.

Perhaps this is what a relational ontology allows us to see most clearly.

Space is not a container.

Time is not a substance flowing through it.

Spacetime is not a thing being bent.

They are aspects of a changing structure of relations—relations that constitute the possibilities of extension, duration and becoming.

A black hole takes that structure to an extraordinary limit.

And at the singularity, the theory does not reveal a thing.

It falls silent.

Perhaps that silence is not the end of the question.

Perhaps it is where the next geometry begins.

Black Holes Without Space and Time: II. Where Space Becomes Time

There is a strange fact about a black hole.

Outside its event horizon, we can distinguish rather comfortably between moving through space and moving through time. Inside the horizon, that distinction becomes radically altered.

In the Schwarzschild description, the radial coordinate (r) takes on the character of a timelike direction, while the coordinate (t) takes on the character of a spacelike one.

This is sometimes described, rather loosely, as space becoming time.

But nothing has literally changed one kind of substance into another.

The deeper lesson is that the distinction between space and time is not fundamental in the way our everyday experience suggests.

What matters physically is the structure of the possible paths through spacetime—the causal relations between events.

Outside the horizon, an object can move inward or outward while its proper time carries it toward the future. At the horizon, the geometry changes the relation between these possibilities. Inside, every future-directed causal path leads toward decreasing (r).

The object is not being forced through space toward the centre by some invisible hand.

Rather, the geometry has made decreasing radius part of its future.

This is why the familiar picture of falling into a black hole can mislead us. We imagine an object travelling through an already existing space, with time flowing alongside it.

But the relational picture suggests something different.

Space and time are not two containers through which the object travels. They are aspects of the relations between events, and those relations determine what trajectories are possible.

The horizon is therefore not the place where space suddenly turns into time.

It is the place where the geometry makes visible something that was true all along:

space and time are not independent ingredients of reality.

They are differentiated aspects of a single relational structure.

Inside the horizon, that structure becomes so strongly directional that what we ordinarily call a spatial direction becomes inseparable from the future-directed character of an event.

And this gives the black hole its peculiar temporal character.

The centre is not simply a place to which the falling object is travelling.

It lies in its future.

The question is therefore no longer merely Where will the object go?

It becomes:

What kind of geometry makes a particular direction part of the future itself?

To follow that question all the way inward is to encounter the strangest feature of the black hole of all.

At the centre, it is not merely our distinction between space and time that reaches its limit.

The geometry itself does.

That is where becoming begins to matter.

Black Holes Without Space and Time: I. Beyond Space and Time

We are accustomed to thinking of space and time as the two great dimensions of reality: space provides the arena in which things exist, while time provides the dimension in which things change.

General relativity already unsettles this picture. Space and time are not independent backgrounds. Together they form spacetime, whose geometry changes with the distribution of mass-energy.

But perhaps we can go one step further.

What if space and time are not things at all?

A distance is not a substance existing between two instances. It is a relation between them. A duration is likewise not a substance flowing between two events. It is a relation between them.

From this perspective, spatial extension and temporal duration are different aspects of a relational structure.

Gravity therefore need not be understood as something that distorts space and, separately, dilates time. These are two descriptions of how the same underlying relations change.

Near a concentration of mass-energy, spatial intervals become progressively differentiated from one another. Temporal intervals likewise become progressively differentiated relative to one another. What general relativity expresses as curvature is the geometry of these changing relations.

This gives us a useful reversal of perspective.

We do not begin with a pre-existing space and time, and then ask how gravity distorts them.

We begin with relations, whose changing structure gives us what we describe as spatial and temporal dimensions.

The distinction between space and time therefore becomes less fundamental than it first appears.

And the black hole provides an extraordinary place to test this thought.

Far from the black hole, we can comfortably distinguish spatial distance from temporal duration. As we approach the event horizon, that distinction becomes increasingly dependent upon how we describe the geometry. Inside the horizon, the familiar roles of the radial and temporal coordinates can no longer be maintained in the same way.

Space has not literally turned into time.

Rather, the geometry is telling us that our distinction between the two was never as fundamental as our ordinary language suggests.

The black hole thus invites a deeper question than How is space curved? or How much does time dilate?

It asks:

What kind of relational structure can give rise to both space and time—and what happens when that structure becomes extreme?

That is the question we shall follow into the black hole.

Gravity Without Things: III. The Centre Where Relations Break Down

We have followed gravity inward: from the relatively undisturbed relations of distant space, through progressively differentiated geometry, to the event horizon, where the structure of possible futures changes.

What happens next?

The usual picture invites a peculiar image. Matter continues falling inward until everything is compressed into an infinitely small point: the singularity at the centre of the black hole.

But this image may already have gone wrong.

If space is not a substance, then there is no spatial stuff to be compressed into a point. There is only the changing pattern of relations that constitutes spatial extension.

And classical general relativity does not actually describe the singularity as an extraordinarily dense object sitting at the centre. Rather, its geometry becomes singular: certain paths through spacetime cannot be continued, and quantities describing curvature can diverge.

The distinction matters.

Our relational interpretation therefore suggests a different way of reading the final stage:

progressive differentiation of relations → increasingly constrained geometry → singularity of the classical description.

The singularity need not be a thing that exists somewhere inside the black hole. It may instead mark the point at which the relational structure described by classical general relativity can no longer be continued.

This changes the question.

Instead of asking:

What is the singularity made of?

we might ask:

What has happened to the relations that constituted the geometry?

The answer supplied by classical general relativity is, in effect: the description has reached a boundary.

That does not tell us what lies beyond it. Indeed, we should resist the temptation to imagine that there must be a "beyond" in the ordinary spatial sense.

A theory that replaces general relativity at such scales may not reveal a smaller object hidden inside the singularity. It may reveal a different way in which relations can constitute what we call space and time.

The black hole would then present us with a remarkable conceptual progression.

Gravity begins not as a force acting upon things, but as a change in their relations.

Those relations progressively alter the geometry.

The altered geometry constrains the possibilities of motion.

At the horizon, escape ceases to be among those possibilities.

And at the classical singularity, the geometry itself ceases to provide a coherent continuation.

Nothing has been pulled through a substance called space.

Nothing has necessarily been compressed into an infinitely small thing.

Rather, the relations have carried the geometry to the limit of the theory that describes them.

Perhaps this is the deepest lesson the black hole has to offer a relational ontology:

The mystery is not what lies at the centre of space.

The mystery is what happens when there is no longer a geometry of relations that classical physics can describe.

Gravity Without Things: II. Falling Into a Black Hole Without Falling Through Space

If gravity is a changing pattern of spatial relations, what happens when we approach a black hole?

Far from the black hole, the difference is barely noticeable. As we approach it, the relations become increasingly differentiated. The geometry becomes progressively less like the approximately flat geometry of empty space.

But nothing special happens at the event horizon itself.

The horizon is not a surface on which space suddenly contracts, nor is it a boundary surrounding a region of unusually dense matter. An observer falling freely into a sufficiently large black hole would cross it without encountering a local physical barrier.

So what, then, is the horizon?

It is a boundary in the structure of possible relations.

Outside the horizon, there are possible future-directed paths that lead away from the black hole. At the horizon, the geometry changes so that the boundary between escape and non-escape is reached. Inside it, every future-directed causal path leads toward decreasing areal radius.

This is why the usual image of an object falling through space toward the centre can be misleading.

The object is not being dragged through some pre-existing spatial substance. Rather, the relational geometry determines what future-directed motion can mean.

Outside the horizon, moving inward is one possibility among others.

Inside it, moving toward smaller radius is no longer merely a direction one may choose. It is part of the structure of one's future.

The horizon therefore does not mark the place where gravity suddenly becomes stronger. It marks a transformation in the possibilities afforded by the geometry.

This gives the black hole a remarkable relational character.

The further inward we go, the more strongly the relations constrain what can happen next. The geometry does not simply tell us where an object is. It increasingly determines where it can become.

And this raises a final question.

If the relational structure can become so strongly constraining that escape ceases to be possible, what happens when we follow that structure all the way to the centre?

Perhaps we should not expect to find an extraordinarily small thing waiting there.

Perhaps we should expect the relations themselves to reach their limit.

That is where the singularity enters the story.

Gravity Without Things: I. Gravity Without a Gravitational Force

We are accustomed to thinking of gravity as a force. General relativity asks us to think differently: massive bodies do not pull objects through space; rather, mass-energy changes the geometry in which motion occurs.

But even this formulation can leave us imagining space as a thing—an arena that can somehow be bent or distorted.

A relational ontology suggests a further step.

Space need not be understood as a substance at all. What we call spatial extension is constituted by relations between instances. A distance is not something that exists between things; it is the relation itself.

Gravity can then be conceived as a differential change in those relations.

Consider a sequence of spatial intervals extending toward a concentration of mass. If the intervals in the radial direction progressively contract relative to intervals in orthogonal directions, the geometry becomes increasingly differentiated. A trajectory that would otherwise be geodesic in an approximately flat relational structure follows a different path.

What general relativity describes as the curvature of spacetime can therefore be given a relational reading: curvature is not the bending of a spatial substance, but the consequence of the changing relations that constitute spatial geometry.

The important word is differential. Uniform change would not produce the gravitational geometry we observe. It is the progressive difference in the relations that matters.

This gives us a different order of explanation:

mass-energy → differential relational change → geometry → geodesic motion

rather than:

mass-energy → force → motion

The distinction is more than verbal. Nothing has to pull an object toward the centre, and nothing has to bend a pre-existing space. The changing relations themselves constitute the geometry through which objects move.

Gravity, on this view, is not something that happens in space.

It is something that happens to the relations by which space exists.

And if that is so, the black hole presents a particularly interesting case.

What happens when this progressive differentiation of relations is followed all the way to the event horizon—and beyond it?

That is where the geometry becomes strange.

And perhaps the strangest thing about it is that there may be no "space" there, in the ordinary sense, through which anything is falling.

The Knowing World: Postscript — Affordances and the World That Pushes Back

There is another way of approaching the question we have been asking.

Paul Thibault, drawing on J. J. Gibson's notion of affordance, challenges the idea that meaning is something contained within a semiotic system.

An affordance is not simply a property of an object.

A chair affords sitting.

But it does so only in relation to something capable of sitting.

The possibility belongs neither entirely to the object nor entirely to the organism.

It belongs to the relation between them.

This is important.

It suggests that meaning need not begin inside a system of signs. It can begin much earlier, in the ways a world makes possibilities available to organisms participating in it.

This brings us back to something we encountered near the beginning of our journey:

mattering.

A difference matters when it enters into the conditions of further difference.

An affordance is one way in which this can happen.

Something in the environment makes a difference to what an organism can do. The organism's capacities, in turn, make some possibilities in that environment available.

Meaning therefore does not have to be imagined as something added to an otherwise meaningless world.

But neither should we identify meaning with affordance itself.

A difference can matter without yet being meaningful.

A stone can obstruct an animal's movement without the obstruction becoming a distinction within a system of meaning.

Something more has to happen.

Mattering has to become organisable.

A possibility has to become available as a distinction that can enter into further distinctions.

This is where our account begins to meet Halliday.

Gibson helps us see how an organism can be coupled to a world without requiring an internal representation standing between them.

Thibault extends this insight into languaging: meaning emerges through the ongoing activity of organisms and their material, social and cultural environments rather than being contained within an autonomous linguistic system.

Halliday gives us another part of the picture.

A semiotic system is a potential for meaning.

It organises possibilities for construing experience.

The two perspectives therefore need not compete.

Perhaps they describe different stages in the same movement.

Affordance makes possibilities available.

Mattering makes differences consequential.

Articulation makes those differences available for further meaning.

And now something we said near the end of our series takes on a new significance.

The world pushes back.

If meaning were entirely immanent within a semiotic system, the system could in principle generate its own distinctions indefinitely.

But it cannot.

The world continually presents differences that exceed the distinctions currently available.

An organism encounters what it cannot accommodate.

A languaging system encounters what it cannot yet say.

A theory encounters an instance that does not quite fit.

The system changes.

A new distinction becomes possible.

The horizon moves.

This means that affordances are not merely opportunities offered by a pre-existing world.

They may be part of the ecological history through which a world becomes articulate.

The world does not first become meaningful and then offer affordances.

Nor does meaning simply arise from affordances.

Rather, through participation, differences become consequential; through organisation, consequences become distinctions; through semiotic articulation, distinctions become available for further meaning.

And perhaps this gives us a way of avoiding two opposite mistakes.

We need not imagine meaning as immanent in signs.

But neither need we imagine meaning as constructed by minds.

Between these lies something more interesting:

a world of affordances, organisms, systems and meanings, continually altering one another.

Perhaps the deepest lesson of Gibson, Thibault and Halliday is therefore not a theory of meaning at all.

It is a different picture of where meaning lives.

Not inside the organism.

Not inside the sign.

Not outside in the world.

But in the ongoing relations through which a world becomes capable of mattering, and through which what matters can become articulate.

The world pushes back.

And perhaps that is precisely how it teaches us what it can mean.

The Knowing World: Epilogue — The World That Knows

We began with a question that seemed simple:

How do we know the world?

But the question has changed along the way.

Before knowledge, there was difference.

Difference became mattering.

Mattering became distinction.

Distinctions became organised.

The world became articulate.

Systems emerged that could make instances intelligible.

Instances, in turn, could transform the systems through which they were understood.

And meaning became available for further meaning.

At no point did a knower have to step outside the world and look back at it.

Knowing emerged within the world.

This does not mean that the world literally thinks.

It means something quieter.

The world contains processes through which differences can become consequential, distinctions can persist, patterns can be organised, and meanings can become available for further articulation.

Life makes a world matter.

Social organisation makes differences consequential in new ways.

Language makes experience available as an organised potential for meaning.

Knowledge is one of the forms this continuing articulation can take.

Perhaps, then, the deepest mistake was to imagine the knower and the known as two things standing on opposite sides of a divide.

The world is not first there, fully articulated, and then represented by a knower.

Nor is it invented by the systems through which it becomes intelligible.

It is encountered, constrained, distinguished, organised and continually rearticulated.

The world pushes back.

The system changes.

New distinctions become possible.

And the world becomes different—not because reality itself has been manufactured, but because more of what can matter has become available to meaning.

Perhaps this is what it means for the world to know.

Not that the universe possesses a mind.

Not that everything is conscious.

But that, within the history of the world, there have emerged processes through which the world can become articulate to itself.

A living system distinguishes.

A social system organises.

A semiotic system means.

And wherever meaning can become available for further meaning, the world has acquired another way of becoming intelligible.

Knowing, then, may not be a window through which we look out upon the world.

It may be one of the ways the world continues to become a world.

And perhaps that was the question we were really asking all along:

What kind of world can become capable of knowing?

The answer may be:

a world in which differences can matter, distinctions can persist, meanings can grow—and nothing that knows ever stands completely outside what it knows.

The Knowing World: X. Two Directions of the Same Movement

We began with a familiar distinction.

Ontology asks what exists.

Epistemology asks how we know it.

But the path we have followed has made the boundary less secure.

A world must have some capacity for difference before anything can become knowable.

Differences must matter before they can become distinctions.

Distinctions must become organised before experience can become articulate.

And systems of articulation can themselves be changed by the instances they make intelligible.

So which comes first?

Perhaps neither.

Ontology looks in one direction.

It asks what has become articulate as being: what kinds of things, processes and relations can be distinguished within a world.

Epistemology looks in the other.

It asks through what relations those distinctions have become available as knowledge.

But both questions concern the same movement.

The articulation of a world.

From the ontological direction, we see a world becoming differentiated.

From the epistemological direction, we see those differences becoming meaningful.

Neither movement can be completed independently of the other.

There is no fully articulated ontology waiting for epistemology to discover it.

But neither is there an epistemology freely constructing an ontology from nothing.

The world pushes back.

The system responds.

The system changes.

New distinctions become possible.

New instances become intelligible.

And what counts as a thing, a process or a relation may change with them.

This is why knowing can alter ontology without simply inventing reality.

It changes what can be articulated as real.

And ontology can constrain knowing without simply determining it.

It provides the world of differences within which further articulation must occur.

Perhaps, then, ontology and epistemology are not two domains separated by a boundary.

They are two directions of participation in a world that is continually becoming articulate.

To ask what exists? is already to ask what distinctions can sustain a claim about existence.

To ask how do we know? is already to ask how those distinctions became possible.

The two questions meet in the same place:

where a difference becomes meaningful enough to count.

And perhaps this is where our inquiry has finally brought us.

Not to a theory of knowledge.

Not to a theory of being.

But to something prior to their separation:

a world becoming knowable by becoming articulate.

Which leaves only one question.

What kind of world is it that can participate in its own articulation?

The Knowing World: IX. When the World Pushes Back

If knowledge is meaning that has become available for further meaning, it might seem that everything depends upon the system.

The system provides the distinctions.

The distinctions make instances intelligible.

What, then, is left for the world to do?

Quite a lot.

Because the world does not have to fit the distinctions we have available.

Something happens that our system cannot quite accommodate.

The distinction fails to hold.

The instance refuses its classification.

A relation appears where we expected none.

A consequence occurs that our theory cannot explain.

The world has pushed back.

This does not mean that the world has spoken to us in some mysterious language of its own.

It means something simpler.

Our potential for meaning has encountered a limit.

That limit is not necessarily a failure of the world.

It may be a failure of the distinctions through which we have been trying to make it intelligible.

And this is where the system–instance relation becomes productive.

An instance can exceed the system that makes it recognisable.

It can reveal that what we thought was one kind of thing contains a difference we had not distinguished.

The pressure of the instance can therefore produce a new distinction.

The system changes.

The horizon moves.

And suddenly what was previously unintelligible can become an instance of something new.

This is not the world correcting a mistaken picture of itself.

It is the world participating in the transformation of the potential through which it can be construed.

The world pushes back because it is not exhausted by any particular system of meaning.

That is what keeps knowing open.

Without resistance, a system could simply confirm itself indefinitely.

There would be no reason for its distinctions to change.

No new possibilities would emerge.

Knowledge would become repetition.

But the world continues to offer differences that can matter in ways the existing system did not anticipate.

So perhaps uncertainty is not merely a defect in knowledge.

It is one of the conditions under which knowledge can grow.

The world does not tell us what it is.

It does something more interesting.

It gives us occasions to discover that what we can say about it is not yet enough.

And if knowing is constrained participation in the articulation of a world, then the constraint is not an obstacle to knowledge.

It is what makes further knowledge possible.

Which leaves us with the question that has been waiting underneath the whole inquiry:

If the world and the system continually alter one another, are ontology and epistemology really two different movements at all?

The Knowing World: VIII. Knowledge Is Meaning

We often imagine knowledge as something that exists before language.

First we know something.

Then we put what we know into words.

But perhaps this reverses the relationship.

If a theory is a structured potential for making instances intelligible, then knowledge cannot simply be information stored somewhere behind meaning.

Knowledge is what happens when an instance has become meaningful within a system of distinctions.

To know something is not merely to have encountered it.

It is to have transformed it into something that can be distinguished, related, recognised and carried forward into further meaning.

This is why the relation between instance and system matters so much.

An occurrence becomes knowable when it can be construed as an instance of something.

The particular enters a system of potential.

It becomes part of an organised field of meaning.

And once it does, it can be used to construe something else.

Knowledge therefore has a peculiar direction.

It does not simply point backwards, from meaning to an experience that existed independently of it.

It also points forwards.

What has become meaningful becomes available for further meaning.

A distinction can be reused.

A relation can be extended.

An instance can become evidence for another construal.

A theory can be revised.

In this sense, knowledge is not a storehouse.

It is a potential for further articulation.

This also explains why knowledge can change without the world simply changing underneath it.

The world may remain what it is while our system of distinctions changes what can be made intelligible within it.

And sometimes the reverse happens.

Something in the world resists the distinctions available to us, forcing the system to change.

Knowledge lives in this movement between the two.

So perhaps the question is not:

How does meaning represent what we know?

Perhaps it is:

How does what has become meaningful become capable of being known again?

Knowledge may be neither a picture of the world nor something hidden inside a knower.

It may simply be meaning that has become available for further meaning.

And if that is so, then we are approaching the point where the world itself enters the argument.

Because a system can organise only the differences it can accommodate.

And sometimes the world refuses to cooperate.

What happens when the world pushes back?

The Knowing World: VII. When an Instance Becomes an Instance Of

An instance occurs.

But when does it become an instance of something?

The difference is small in language, but perhaps enormous in consequence.

A particular event occurs. We construe it as an instance of a process.

A particular organism appears. We recognise it as an instance of a kind.

A particular utterance occurs. We understand it as an instance of a pattern.

In each case, something singular is being related to something more general.

But the generality is not simply sitting behind the instance, waiting to be discovered.

It is part of the system through which the instance becomes intelligible.

For something to be an instance of something, the system must be able to sustain a distinction between this occurrence and the kind of occurrence it can count as.

The instance is particular.

The type is potential.

And yet they are not separate.

The type exists, for the system, in the possibility of recognising further instances. The instance exists, for the system, as something that can be construed through that possibility.

This gives the tiny word of its importance.

It marks a relation between occurrence and potential.

But there is a further complication.

An instance need not fit perfectly.

It may resemble previous instances without being identical to them. It may belong to a familiar type while displaying something unexpected. Indeed, without variation between instances, there would be no need for a system capable of recognising them as instances in the first place.

Identity therefore cannot mean sameness.

It means that a difference can be sustained as a difference within a continuing relation.

The instance becomes an instance of something when its particularity can be carried into a larger organisation of possibilities.

And that means that classification is not merely putting things into boxes.

It is one of the ways a world acquires continuity.

Something happens here.

Something similar happens there.

The system makes it possible for us to say that they are instances of the same thing.

But now the direction of movement reverses again.

For if new instances can become instances of an existing type, they can also accumulate differences that eventually make the type itself inadequate.

A new kind of instance may be waiting to be recognised.

So perhaps the relation between instance and system is also the beginning of novelty.

The system tells us what something can be an instance of.

The instance may eventually tell us what the system has not yet learned to distinguish.

And now the question becomes unavoidable:

What happens when what we can recognise is no longer enough to say what we are seeing?

The Knowing World: VI. The System and the Instance

If a theory is a structured potential for making instances intelligible, then we need to look more closely at the relation between the two.

A system is a field of possibilities.

An instance is something that occurs within that field.

The system makes the instance intelligible by providing distinctions through which it can be construed.

But the instance is not simply an example of what the system already knows.

Something happens.

We ask what it is.

The system gives us possibilities for answering.

And sometimes the answer does not quite fit.

This is where the relation becomes interesting.

An instance can confirm the distinctions already available. It can also expose a distinction that is too crude, a relation that has been overlooked, or a possibility that the system did not previously contain.

The instance can therefore act back upon the system.

This does not mean that every anomalous instance overturns a theory.

Most instances simply disappear into the existing potential. But occasionally an instance creates enough pressure for the system to change.

A new distinction appears.

A new relation becomes possible.

The horizon moves.

So the relation between system and instance is not one-way.

The system makes the instance intelligible; the instance can make the system inadequate.

This gives us a different picture of knowledge.

Knowledge is not simply the accumulation of instances under an increasingly elaborate theory.

It is a continuing movement between potential and occurrence.

The system opens a space in which something can become intelligible.

The instance tests what that space can contain.

And when the instance exceeds it, the potential itself may change.

Perhaps this is why a living theory cannot be separated entirely from what it construes.

It is not a finished structure imposed upon experience.

It is a potential that remains capable of being altered by the very instances it makes possible to recognise.

The system and the instance are therefore not two independent things.

They are two moments in a continuing process of articulation.

And this brings us to a tiny word that may carry an extraordinary amount of weight:

What does it mean for an instance to be an instance of something?

The Knowing World: V. The Theory of Experience

We usually think of a theory as something we construct about the world.

First there is experience.

Then, somewhere afterwards, we build a theory to explain it.

But there is another possibility.

Perhaps a theory is not primarily a description of experience. Perhaps it is a structured potential for making experience intelligible.

This is close to what Halliday means when he describes the ideational metafunction as a theory of experience.

A theory, in this sense, is not necessarily a set of propositions.

It is an organisation of distinctions.

It provides possibilities for saying what can count as a thing, an event, a relation, a process, a circumstance. It makes some differences available as significant differences, and connects them so that further distinctions become possible.

Experience does not arrive already divided into these categories.

Nor are the categories simply imposed upon an otherwise featureless world.

Rather, a system of distinctions provides a potential through which what happens can become articulate.

This gives the word theory a rather different meaning.

A theory is not merely something we know about experience.

It is part of what makes experience knowable as something.

And this means that a theory is always more than its individual instances.

The system provides a potential for construing what happens. The instance is what occurs when some of that potential is taken up.

But the movement can also go the other way.

An instance may reveal something the system could not quite accommodate. It may confirm an existing distinction, expose its limits, or require a new one.

The system makes the instance intelligible.

The instance can make the system change.

Perhaps, then, theory is not the opposite of experience.

It is the organised potential through which experience can become meaningful—and through which experience can, in turn, transform the potential that made it intelligible.

The theory of experience is therefore not standing outside experience, looking in.

It is already part of the world becoming articulate.

And that leaves us with a deceptively simple question:

What happens when a theory meets an instance?

The Knowing World: IV. The World Becomes Articulate

A distinction can persist without yet becoming meaningful.

Something can be different, and that difference can matter. It can even be distinguished again.

But meaning requires something further.

The distinction must become available within an organisation of other distinctions.

This is what allows a difference to become articulate.

To articulate something is not simply to name it. It is to place a distinction into relations through which it can have further significance.

A distinction between inside and outside can organise further distinctions. A distinction between food and poison can become part of an organism's continuing organisation. A distinction between one social role and another can organise what participants can do.

At each point, what matters becomes connected to what else matters.

The world has not been divided up by an observer.

Rather, distinctions have become capable of participating in further distinctions.

This may be what meaning-making systems add to the longer history of mattering.

They do not create differences. They organise differences as possibilities for further organisation.

And once this becomes possible, the world can begin to appear as a world of things, processes, relations and circumstances—not because these were simply waiting there to be named, but because distinctions have acquired the capacity to organise experience into an intelligible pattern.

The world becomes articulate.

But articulation is never final.

Every system of distinctions makes some differences available while leaving others in the background. What can be articulated depends upon the relations the system makes possible.

And so the world that becomes articulate is not the whole world.

It is the world that can be made meaningful within a particular potential for meaning.

This is not a limitation imposed upon the world from outside.

It is a condition of there being a world for a meaning-making system at all.

And now we are ready for a more precise question.

What kind of system can provide a theory of experience?

The Knowing World: III. From Difference to Distinction

A difference can matter without yet being a distinction.

A change may have consequences simply because of what happens to be connected to what. But a distinction does something more.

It makes a difference available as a difference.

For this to happen, the difference must have some stability. It must be possible for something to count as different again.

This does not require a mind to recognise it.

A biological system can respond differently to conditions that matter to it. In doing so, it does not merely undergo different events. Its organisation incorporates a difference into what can happen next.

The distinction is beginning to acquire a history.

This is important because identity does not require permanence.

Something can remain distinguishable while continually changing. A living organism is not the same collection of matter from one moment to the next, yet its organisation persists sufficiently for differences to matter to it as the same organism.

Perhaps, then, distinction is not the opposite of change.

It is stability within change.

A distinction persists when a difference can be carried forward into further relations and consequences.

And once this happens, something new becomes possible.

A difference that can recur as a distinction can enter into an organised pattern of further differences.

This is the beginning of a world in which something can be this rather than that; where one thing can be distinguished from another; where what happens now can matter again later.

We are still some distance from meaning.

But the conditions for meaning are beginning to appear.

For meaning will require not merely differences that matter, but differences that can be organised as distinctions within a continuing system.

And that raises the next question:

What happens when distinctions themselves become capable of being organised?

The Knowing World: II. What Matters

Not every difference matters.

A difference may occur and disappear without consequence. But another may alter what happens next.

That is where we should begin.

To say that something matters need not mean that anyone cares about it. Mattering begins more simply.

A difference matters to the extent that it enters into the conditions of further difference.

One physical event alters another. A biological change affects whether an organism continues. A social action changes what others can do. A distinction in a meaning-making system can organise further meanings.

At each point, something has become consequential.

This suggests that mattering has a history.

The world need not wait for consciousness before differences can have consequences. Nor need meaning appear as something imposed upon an otherwise indifferent universe.

Meaning-making develops within a world in which differences were already making differences.

But a further transformation is still required.

For a difference merely to have consequences is not yet for it to become meaning. Meaning requires that its mattering can be organised: related, distinguished and made available for further meaning.

That development will concern us later.

For now, one point is enough.

Before anything can be known, something must matter.

And before we ask what a knower knows, we may need to ask:

What has to happen for a difference to become consequential at all?

Perhaps knowing begins not when the world is represented.

Perhaps it begins in the much older history of what can make a difference to what comes next.

The Knowing World: I. Before Knowledge

What was there before knowledge?

The question sounds as though we should be able to make a list.

Objects, perhaps. Events. Matter. Space. Time. A world waiting to be discovered.

But there is a difficulty.

To call something an object is already to have distinguished it from its surroundings. To call something an event is already to have distinguished change from continuity. To speak of matter, space or time is already to have organised experience according to particular distinctions.

So perhaps we should begin further back.

Not with objects, but with difference.

The world changes. Things affect one another. Some differences persist; others disappear. Some relations matter to what happens next; others do not.

None of this requires a knower.

But neither does it yet give us a world composed of the kinds of things that a knower might subsequently discover.

There is simply an unfolding of differences and relations.

Something happens.

Something is affected.

Something persists.

Something changes.

And already, perhaps, we have the beginnings of what will later become knowledge: not information, but mattering.

A difference matters when it makes a difference to what can happen next.

For an organism, a change in its surroundings may affect its survival. For a social system, a distinction may alter what its participants can do. For a meaning-making system, a difference may become available for further articulation.

At no point need we imagine a mind standing outside the process and inspecting it.

Knowledge may emerge from something much more modest:

a world in which differences can make differences.

If so, then knowledge does not begin when a subject first represents an object.

It begins somewhere in the longer history by which the world becomes capable of mattering to something.

And that suggests a strange possibility.

Perhaps before asking how anything can know the world, we should ask:

How does a world become capable of making a difference?