Potential, Probability, and the Relational Turn: II Modulation and Readiness

In the first post, we separated probability from potential, showing that what we often treat as indeterminacy in the world is actually readiness: the field of dispositions, capacities, and inclinations that define what can actualise.

Here, we deepen that insight by examining SFL modulation — the grammatical articulation of readiness — and mapping it onto relational ontology.

---

1. Modulation in SFL

Systemic Functional Linguistics identifies modulation as the grammatical expression of readiness: how a speaker signals the ability or inclination of a participant to act.

It has two core dimensions:

• Ability – the capacity or competence to bring about an outcome.
  Example: “She can lift the box” → expresses structural capacity.

• Inclination – the willingness or tendency to bring about an outcome.
  Example: “She will lift the box” → expresses directed readiness toward actualisation.

Modulation is enactive, not epistemic: it signals what is poised to become, not what is probable in the speaker’s knowledge.

---

2. From grammar to ontology

Relational ontology invites us to see these dimensions not as linguistic curiosities but as a map of systemic readiness.

• Ability = structural potential
  Every system (physical, social, symbolic) possesses capacities: the configurations it can instantiate. These are the topological features of the field of possibility.

• Inclination = directional potential
  Systems also have tendencies — local vectors of alignment that make some actualisations more likely than others, without collapsing the field into probability.

Together, ability and inclination define a dispositional topology: the ways a system can actualise while maintaining coherence within its relational field.

---

3. Why readiness is ontologically primary

Shifting from probability to readiness dissolves a fundamental confusion in science and philosophy:

• Probability quantifies our uncertainty about outcomes (epistemic).

• Readiness is the structure of potential itself (ontic).

An instance is not the “realisation of probabilities” but the alignment of capacities and tendencies.

Actualisation is perspectival: it is what emerges when the field of readiness is cut, creating a local, coherent configuration.

---

4. Recursive and relational nature of readiness

Readiness is relational and recursive:

1. Every actualisation shifts the field of readiness, creating new inclinations and modifying abilities.

2. Local readiness is embedded in larger fields: capacities and tendencies scale across social, cognitive, and physical domains.

3. Human symbolic activity — language, theory, technology — both reflects and modifies readiness across scales.

In other words, readiness is alive and dynamic: the world is a continuously evolving field of modulative potential.

---

5. Practical implications

Understanding potential as readiness rather than probability reshapes our approach to reality:

• Scientific modeling: Wavefunctions encode readiness, not probability; “uncertainty” measures epistemic limits, not ontic indeterminacy.

• Philosophical clarity: Distinguishing ontic from epistemic resolves long-standing confusions about causality, determinism, and indeterminacy.

• Human action: Every intervention participates in a field of readiness; knowing this allows ethical and creative alignment rather than blind manipulation of “probabilities.”

---

6. Preview of Part III

Next, we will explore the historical confusion of epistemology in ontology — why physics and philosophy conflated probability with potential, and how relational ontology restores the proper ordering of these strata.

We will see how separating readiness from probability allows us to reinterpret quantum mechanics, symbolic systems, and human agency in a single, coherent framework of potential.