Readiness as Categorial Grammar: Inclination, Ability, and the Architecture of Potential: 1 Readiness as Potential: The Relational Ontology of Inclination and Ability

We begin with a simple but decisive reorientation:

readiness is not psychological, not biological, not dispositional.

It is a structured potential, construed from within a relational ontology in which nothing exists as an isolated substance, only as a configuration of possible relations.

What follows is the first cut in the series: defining inclination and ability as patterns inside potential, not as properties attached to things.

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1. System as Structured Potential

In the relational ontology we’ve been developing, a system is not a container of entities but a theory of its own possible instances.

It is potential, patterned.

An “actor” is thus not an object with attributes but a node of construal within a field of potential, characterised by:

• what kinds of shifts it can actualise, and

• how those shifts are patterned, constrained, or biased.

There is no readiness in the actor.

The actor is itself a particular organisation of readiness.

This is the starting point.

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2. Readiness: Potential Under Perspectival Constraint

Readiness names a structured potential for transition—a pattern in what can coherently follow from the current configuration.

Two aspects of this potential matter:

(a) Inclination — Endogenous Shaping of Potential

Inclination is the internal bias within the system’s potential:

a leaning toward certain transitions rather than others.

It is not “wanting.”

It is not “preferring.”

It is a skew in the architecture of potential itself.

A system may be poised toward certain transformations because of its internal relational shape.

This is inclination.

(b) Ability — Exogenous Compatibility with Wider Structure

Ability is the external coherence condition:

a measure of how the system’s potential aligns with the structures that surround it.

What is internally possible may be externally incoherent.

Ability is the boundary where the internal potential meets the external relational field and becomes admissible.

Thus:

• inclination: internal morphic orientation

• ability: external morphic compatibility

Readiness emerges precisely at the intersection of these two.

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3. Readiness is Not Scalar; It is Structural

Common construals treat readiness as something that comes in degrees (“more ready,” “not very ready”).

From a relational-ontological standpoint, this is misleading.

Readiness is not a scalar quantity.

It is a structural configuration:

• a specific geometry of possible transitions,

• a specific pattern of morphic admissibility,

• a specific alignment (or misalignment) of internal and external relational structures.

Scalar metaphors collapse this structure.

They obscure what readiness fundamentally is:

a way potential is patterned.

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4. The Need for a Grammar of Potential

If readiness is structural, then it is also formal.

It has coherence conditions.

It has invariants.

It can be transformed.

This means readiness requires a grammar—not a grammar of sentences, but a grammar of potential itself.

Category theory is uniquely suited to this task because it does not define structures by their substance but by their relations and transitions.

It does not describe what is, but how what is can become.

Thus the turn:

• Readiness is structured potential.

• Category theory is a metalanguage for structured potential.

• Therefore, category theory is a metalanguage for readiness.

This is the bridge on which the rest of the series will build.

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5. The Horizon Ahead

Everything that follows will deepen this perspective:

• inclination as internal morphic pressure

• ability as externally governed admissibility

• readiness as a functor connecting inner and outer structure

• actualisation as morphism selection

• events as perspectival cuts in potential

But for now, we hold this foundational insight:

Readiness = the architecture of potential as seen from a particular relational node.

It is formal, relational, pattern-governed, and categorically expressible.

With this groundwork set, we can move directly into the categorical view in Post 2.