Languages as Ontologies II: 6 Construal of Internal vs. External Phenomena

In many philosophical traditions, experience is divided cleanly into “inner” and “outer” domains: thoughts here, world out there.

Relational ontology rejects that dichotomy. There is no pre-given “inner world” waiting to be expressed, nor an “external world” waiting to be represented. There are only cuts in experience — perspectival partitions enacted through construal.

Languages make these cuts differently. They pattern how experience becomes knowable, how evidence is tracked, how perception is distinguished from inference. This domain is crucial because it shows most clearly that languages are not representational devices; they are theories of access to phenomena.

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1. How experience is cut

Languages vary dramatically in how they distinguish firsthand experience, report, inference, and internal states:

• Evidentiality systems (Tibetan, Quechua, Turkish)
  These languages grammaticise whether the speaker saw the event, heard it, inferred it, or was told about it.
  The source of construal becomes part of the event structure itself.
  “It rained” is not complete without specifying how the rain became a phenomenon for the speaker.

• Internal vs. external mental events (Japanese, Korean)
  These languages often encode mental and emotional experience as relationally distributed, not internal possessions.
  Feelings “come over” or “happen to” a participant; they are emergent relational states, not interior substances.

• Accessibility and experiential reach (Dyirbal, Kalaallisut)
  Some languages distinguish visible vs. non-visible, proximal vs. distal, witnessed vs. unreachable phenomena.
  Knowledge is patterned as situated access, not as neutral representation.

• Inferential vs. experiential constructions (Classical Chinese, Newar)
  Certain languages foreground inference, making explicit whether a phenomenon is construed from signs rather than directly perceived.
  The language treats inference as a mode of experiencing, not a second-class substitute.

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2. Construal of evidence as ontology

These linguistic systems enact distinct ontological stances toward the relation between experiencer and phenomenon:

• Perceptually anchored ontologies
  A world where phenomena “count” only insofar as one has direct perceptual access (Tibetan, Quechua).
  Existence is contact-dependent: the phenomenon is defined through its experiential pathway.

• Relationally emergent ontologies
  Mental states do not live “inside” individuals but arise through interactions, situations, and affective fields (Japanese, Korean).
  The cut between “inner” and “outer” softens into situated emergence.

• Distributed access ontologies
  Some languages allocate epistemic rights and evidential access across participants or social roles, making knowledge a socially patterned phenomenon rather than an individual one.

None of these systems “encode reality”; each patterns what it is possible to regard as known, felt, or experienced.

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3. Implications for narrative and cognition

• Storytelling:
  Languages with rich evidential marking produce narratives that foreground perspective, source, and legitimacy of knowledge.
  Narrators in Japanese may downplay interiority, producing stories where emotion arises from context and relation rather than introspective declaration.
  Inference-heavy languages create narratives that hinge on clues, signs, and the co-arising of meaning.

• Cognition:
  Speakers learn to anticipate whether a phenomenon must be witnessed, inferred, or socially validated.
  They track access as part of the experience itself.
  This shapes how memory is structured, how testimony is trusted, and how emotion is understood.

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4. Closing reflection

This final domain shows the deepest point of the series:

Languages are not representational systems mapping a pre-made world.

They are ontological operators — patterned resources for carving experience into phenomena, relations, and perspectives.

Across these six domains — process, participant, space, agency, temporality, and experiential access — we see that each language enacts a distinct local ontology of the possible.

Languages differ not in what they “say about the world,” but in the worlds they make inhabitable.

Every construal is a relational cut; every cut is an opening into a lived reality.