Bohr and the Grammar of Phenomena: A Relational Reinterpretation

Niels Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics is often treated as austere, even conservative: no hidden variables, no metaphysics, no stories about what the world is “really” doing behind the scenes. And yet, beneath his famously cautious prose lies an extraordinarily radical claim: there is no phenomenon until a phenomenon is described. Quantum objects do not carry determinate properties. What we call “the physical world” is inseparable from the experimental conditions through which it becomes intelligible.

Bohr’s insistence that “physics concerns what we can say about nature” has often been reduced to a linguistic form of modesty—as though it were merely a warning against speculative excess. But this reading misses the depth of the move. For Bohr, the act of measurement does not reveal an underlying property; it constitutes the phenomenon. Complementarity is not a feature of nature but a feature of the conditions of description that allow nature to become an object of discourse at all.

Seen from a relational ontological perspective, Bohr’s move is not epistemic modesty—it is an early articulation of the relational cut.

Where Bohr insists that the properties of quantum systems are defined only in the context of a measuring apparatus, relational ontology reframes this in more general terms:

phenomena are not latent entities awaiting revelation but construed events actualised from a system of relational potential.

Bohr’s “experimental arrangement” becomes the perspectival shift by which a system (a theory of possible instances) is actualised as an instance (a construed phenomenon). The essential insight—already implicit in his writing—is that no description precedes the conditions that make the description meaningful. The phenomenon is not simply observed; it is co-actualised through the relational alignment of observer, apparatus, and conceptual framework.

In Bohr’s complementarity, mutually exclusive descriptions (particle vs wave, position vs momentum) are not contradictions. They are distinct cuts—distinct construals of the relational system that produce different actualisations. What mainstream physics treats as “incompatibility,” the relational ontology recognises as the inherent perspectivality of meaning itself. There is no unconstrued phenomenon behind the cut: no world of determinate attributes waiting to be uncovered, no hidden ontology beneath the descriptions. The “quantum world” is the world already after a cut has been made.

Where Bohr resists metaphysics, relational ontology simply reorganises what he already gestures toward. Instead of taking complementarity as a limitation on knowledge, it treats it as a structural feature of meaning:

systems do not possess properties; they possess the structured potential for different kinds of actualisation, depending on the construal enacted.

The quantum postulates become linguistic rather than merely physical: not statements about the secret behaviour of electrons but about the conditions under which events become intelligible as phenomena at all.

In this light, Bohr’s otherwise cryptic statements become perfectly coherent:

• A phenomenon is not the behaviour of a system but the result of the entire experimental constellation.

• There is no description-independent world of attributes.

• Different cuts produce different phenomena without implying different underlying realities.

Bohr’s complementarity, in other words, anticipates the relational claim: there is no fact except the fact-as-construed. What he lacked—what relational ontology provides—is a generalised grammar of system and instance: the theoretical space in which potential is structured, and the perspectival shift through which actuality is rendered.

Bohr refused to speculate on what “really exists” behind quantum phenomena. Relational ontology replies: nothing exists behind them except the structured relational potential from which they are drawn. The phenomenon is not the endpoint of inquiry but the event of construal, the moment the relational system is brought into meaningful alignment.