Likely Misunderstandings of Relational Ontology: 3 Why Relational Ontology Is Not Idealism, Panpsychism, or Mentalism

A Field Guide for the Enthusiastically Wrong

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If Post 2 asked why relational ontology is not anti-science, Post 3 asks a more intimate question:

why it is not secretly idealism, or panpsychism, or mentalism in clever new drag.

The suspicion is understandable.

Relational ontology talks about construal, about meaning, about semiotic potential, about the system as theory-of-possible-instances.

To an inattentive reader, that all sounds like “the mind makes reality.”

It sounds like we’ve circled back to Bishop Berkeley, replaced the divine mind with the human one, sprinkled some quantum metaphors across the top, and are now calling it post-classical metaphysics.

This post exists to make something crystal clear:

Relational ontology is not a theory of mind.

It is a theory of relation — and mind is one of its late, local, parochial products.

Below, we dismantle the three most common misreadings.

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1. Why Relational Ontology Is Not Idealism

(or: No, the world does not depend on ideas)

Idealism, in its classical version, says that the world is ultimately mental or ideational.

Everything reduces to the activity of a mind or minds, human or divine.

Objects are mind-dependent.

The world is (in some sense) “in” the mind.

Relational ontology rejects this at a structural level.

• There is no privileged substance; there is no mental substrate; there is no ideational ground.

• There are only relational potentials, patterns of constraint, and the cuts through which they become actualised.

Construal is not the generative power that makes the world.

It is the perspectival traction through which a particular relational slice becomes an instance.

This is not idealism; this is ontology without substances at all.

Under idealism, the “mental” is primordial.

Under relational ontology, the “mental” is an emergent functional constellation produced by biological, social, and semiotic systems operating with particular forms of constraint.

The world is not mental.

The mind is worldly.

This is the difference between primordial mind and contingent semiotic leverage.

Only someone committed to representational metaphysics could confuse the two.

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2. Why Relational Ontology Is Not Panpsychism

(or: No, electrons aren’t having tiny subjective experiences)

Panpsychism arises when you perceive two options:

• either matter is fundamental, or

• mind is fundamental.
  But mind clearly exists, so… give mind to everything!

This binary is precisely what relational ontology dissolves.

Panpsychism is still trapped in the representational schema in which “mind” and “matter” are candidate substances with intrinsic properties.

Relational ontology has no truck with intrinsic properties of any kind.

There is no “mind-stuff” distributed across the cosmos.

There is no proto-consciousness lurking in quarks.

There is no chain of mental-like essence rising from particle to human.

Instead:

• Subjectivity is a relational achievement of organisms capable of semiotic construal.

• Experience is not an intrinsic property; it is a mode of relational coupling within a semiotic ecology.

• The universe is not suffused with mind.

• Mind is a late-born strategy of biological systems for navigating constraint.

Panpsychism imagines itself radical, but it leaves the metaphysical furniture untouched.

Relational ontology empties the room and asks:

Why did you assume “mind” was a kind of furniture in the first place?

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3. Why Relational Ontology Is Not Mentalism

(or: No, this is not a fancy way of saying “it’s all in your head”)

Mentalism is the assumption that explanation proceeds through internal mental states, representations, qualia, intentional objects, and other cognitive furniture.

Relational ontology avoids mentalism for two reasons:

(a) Construal is not a mental act

It is not a process in an inner theatre.

It is the structured relational interface where semiotic potential becomes an instance.

A shift in construal is a shift in the cut, not a shift in internal mental representation.

(b) Meaning is not inside individuals

Halliday’s canonical model is crucial here:

• Meaning is systemic, distributed, ecological.

• Semantics realises context — not interior mental content but a structured environment of potential meaning.

• Individual “minds” participate in meaning-making; they do not house meanings.

A mentalist reduction would violate the stratified relational architecture of the model.

Relational ontology stays faithful to Halliday precisely because it refuses psychologisation.

To put it differently:

Mentalism says: “The mind makes meaning.”

Relational ontology says: “Meaning is a semiotic ecology in which minds are one kind of participant.”

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4. The Deeper Point: Relation Without Residue

Idealism, panpsychism, and mentalism all depend on intrinsic essences — mind as a thing, consciousness as a substrate, experience as an irreducible property.

Relational ontology refuses intrinsicness entirely.

• There is no mental substance.

• There is no physical substance.

• There are only relational potentials and the cuts that actualise them.

Thus the question “is relational ontology idealist or realist?” has the same structure as

“is the Möbius strip inside or outside?”

The frame itself is wrong.

Relational ontology is not a compromise between mind and matter.

It is an alternative to the metaphysics in which that distinction is intelligible.

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5. Why the Misread Is So Common

Two reasons:

(1) Western metaphysics has only two poles

If you are trained to think in terms of mind vs matter, anything that isn’t matter is automatically filed under mind.

Relational ontology’s refusal of intrinsic materiality is thus misfiled as idealism.

(2) Construal sounds mental

But only to someone who has already decided that meaning lives inside individuals.

Once meaning is understood as emergent from semiotic systems, construal becomes relational, not mental.

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6. The 15-word summary for impatient realists

Relational ontology is not about mind;

it is about relation.

Minds are late local actualisations.

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In Post 4

We’ll address the next predictable misunderstanding:

“Does relational ontology deny reality?”

(A favourite accusation of realists who suspect everyone is secretly a postmodernist.)

In that post, we will dismantle the representational model of “the real,” show why relational ontology is the opposite of relativism, and clarify what it means to speak of constraint and potential without invoking substance metaphysics.