Fault-Lines of the Old Paradigms: Introduction: Why the Grand ‘Isms’ Collapse Under Relational Pressure

For more than two millennia, philosophy has been performing the same card trick: take a complex, relationally constituted world and pretend it can be grounded in some privileged thing, substance, mind, material, flow, or representational mirror. Each “ism” claims to have the master key. Each promises a clean foundation. And each fails in exactly the same way:

it tries to secure reality by denying the primacy of relation—

and ends up sawing off the branch on which it sits.

This series is not a survey, not a taxonomy, not a polite guided tour of intellectual history. It is a forensic analysis of the hidden fractures that make these grand frameworks buckle the moment relational ontology applies pressure. We’re not here to rehabilitate them. We’re here to show why they were never structurally sound in the first place.

The relational position we're working from is simple, but uncompromising:

• there are no stand-alone things, only relational potentials

• actuality is always a perspectival cut through a structured possibility space

• meaning is constituted through construal, not inherited from some pre-construed world

• no phenomenon is unconstrued; no system exists without instances; no instance exists without a system

• experience, knowledge, reality, and discourse all emerge through relational organisation, not representation

Once you take relation as primary, the traditional “isms” show their cracks immediately.

They were built to answer questions that only arise when you imagine the world as made of independent entities. Remove that assumption, and the edifice dissolves.

So in this series, we will examine—one by one—the foundational problems these “isms” cannot fix:

• how substance ontology depends on the very relations it denies

• how idealism collapses into regress

• how materialism cannot define “matter” without meaning

• how dualism secretly presupposes a third ontological category

• how linguistic idealism ignores the stratification of language

• how constructivism cannot account for the constructor

• how reductionism erases the world it wants to explain

• how holism melts distinctions into fog

• how realism cannot bridge representation and world

• how anti-realism empties out possibility and experience

• how monism kills differentiation

• how pluralism kills coherence

• how emergentism relies on magic-level transitions

• how process philosophy smuggles in structure under cover of flow

• how systems theory uses relations without ever theorising relation

Each instalment will dissect one contradiction.

Each will be short, precise, and structurally aligned with relational ontology.

And each will leave a clear residue: these paradigms collapse not because they are old, but because they were never grounded.

If the previous series revealed how these “isms” misunderstand relational ontology,

this one reveals why they cannot, even on their own terms, stand up.

Let the dismantling begin.