Misreading Relational Ontology II: 5 “But Doesn’t This Collapse Into Cultural Relativism?”

(Why Relational Ontology Is the Opposite of Anything-goes Humanism)

This is one of the most predictable misreadings — and one of the most revealing.

Realists and materialists think they’ve found the fatal flaw, but what they have actually found is their own commitment to representation.

The objection usually goes like this:

“If knowledge is just construal, then every culture makes its own truth, and anything goes.”

This objection presupposes precisely what relational ontology denies:

• that meaning = internal content

• that truth = encoded propositions

• that culture = a domain of arbitrary conventions

Once those assumptions fall away, the entire fear of “relativism” evaporates.

1 Construal Is Not Arbitrary; It Is Systemically Constrained

Relational ontology is not voluntarist.

You cannot “just decide” to carve the world however you please.

Cuts are constrained by:

• biological potentials

• physical and ecological dynamics

• semiotic systems with patterned affordances

• social norms and material infrastructures

• interactional histories you inherit but cannot step outside

In short:

Construal is a disciplined negotiation with multiple systems of constraint — not a free-for-all.

Cultures differ, yes.

But they differ within the tight constraints of the systems they participate in, not the fantasies they entertain.

2 Cultures Don’t Invent Reality; They Partition It

Cultures are not “alternative universes”.

They are alternative cuts — patterned ways of:

• foregrounding different potentials

• stabilising different distinctions

• amplifying different affordances

• coordinating different modes of collective life

Relational ontology does not say:

“All truths are equal.”

It says:

“All truths are cuts, and some cuts are vastly better attuned to certain activities, systems, and potentials than others.”

This is not relativism.

This is meta-systemics.

3 Relativism Pretends All Cuts Are Optional — Relational Ontology Shows Why They Are Not

Relativism is fundamentally lazy: it treats cultural differences as lists of arbitrary choices.

Relational ontology, by contrast, demands you analyse:

• why a particular system produces a particular construal

• how that construal aligns with ecological and semiotic potentials

• what collective activities it enables

• what constraints it imposes

• what capacities it amplifies or suppresses

Relativism says:

“Everyone’s worldview is equally valid.”

Relational ontology says:

“Every worldview is constrained, patterned, system-specific, and evaluated through the activities it makes possible.”

These are not merely different positions — they are incompatible.

4 There Is No ‘View From Nowhere’ — Including the Realist One

The realist’s accusation of relativism only works if they imagine themselves standing outside all construal, occupying a supposedly neutral, objective, representational stance.

But that stance is:

• a myth

• a performative contradiction

• and a particular Western scientific construal masquerading as timeless truth

To accuse others of relativism from a universalist standpoint is to perform the very representational fallacy the ontology has already dismantled.

5 Relational Ontology Offers a Stronger Account of Objectivity

Objectivity is not “view from nowhere”.

Objectivity is:

Inter-constraint across multiple semiotic, biological, social, and ecological systems that no single perspective controls.

A construal is “objective” when:

• it remains robust across perspectival shifts

• it coordinates effectively across contexts and collectives

• it holds under transformations of scale, activity, and purpose

• it survives contact with the world’s potentials in multiple modalities

This is objectivity without representation —

objectivity as coherence across relational cuts, not correspondence to metaphysical objects.

6 Summary for the Philosopher Who Just Uploaded a YouTube Video Called “Relational Ontology Debunked in 12 Minutes”

• Relational ontology is not relativist.

• Construal is constrained by systems, potentials, and histories.

• Cuts differ, but they are not arbitrary.

• Objectivity = cross-perspectival robustness, not mirror-like fidelity.

• “Relativism” is a complaint only intelligible within representational epistemologies — and thus irrelevant here.

In short:

Relational ontology rescues objectivity from representationalism, not from culture.