Relational Cuts — Paradox as a Lens on Meaning, Mind, and Reality: 1 The Paradox of Inquiry (Meno) and the Relational Cut

Meno’s Paradox is usually introduced as a clever epistemological puzzle.

In Plato’s dialogue, the young Meno poses an apparently devastating question:

• If you know what you are inquiring into, inquiry is unnecessary.

• If you do not know what you are inquiring into, inquiry is impossible.

Either way, inquiry cannot begin.

In classical epistemology, this paradox is often softened by appeals to “partial knowledge,” “virtues of investigation,” or “implicit competence.” But all of these responses retain the representational assumption that knowledge is a store of discrete items, and inquiry is the operation of adding new ones. The paradox therefore persists — merely disguised by a more polite vocabulary.

Relational ontology, however, dissolves the paradox at its root.

Inquiry is not a representational operation on a body of knowledge; it is a perspectival cut across a structured potential.

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1. How the Classical Paradox Misconstrues Potential, Perspective, and Phenomenon

Meno’s argument trades on a representational picture of knowing:

1. Knowing = possessing an internal content.

2. Not knowing = lacking the relevant content.

3. Inquiry = attempting to move from lack to possession.

This schema presupposes that what is to be known exists as an object, fixed and determinate, awaiting retrieval. It also presupposes that the agent is a container either filled or unfilled with that object. The paradox arises because the container-image is incoherent: you cannot reach for an object whose identity is unknown, nor can you search for something you already possess.

From a relational perspective, this framework is untenable.

Knowledge is not representational content, and inquiry is not content acquisition.

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2. System as Structured Potential, Inquiry as Reconfiguration

Within relational ontology, a system is a structured potential — a landscape of possible meanings, possible construals, possible perspectives. It is not a database of objects.

An instance is not a retrieved piece of information but a perspectival actualisation — a cut across this potential seen from a particular configuration of relations.

A construal is a first-order phenomenon: the lived meaning of that cut.

From this vantage point, “knowing” and “not knowing” are not binary states.

They are orientations toward different regions of potential.

Inquiry is therefore not the retrieval of new content but the reconfiguration of perspective relative to the structured potential of the system.

The paradox evaporates, because the question “How do you inquire into what you do not know?” rests on a category mistake: treating potential as if it were an object.

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3. Inquiry as the Act of the Cut

Representational epistemology assumes:

• A fixed domain of objects

• A fixed knowing subject

• A bridge to be built between them

Relational ontology replaces this picture entirely.

Inquiry is the act that constitutes both:

• the phenomenon (the construed experience of the domain), and

• the perspectival position from which that phenomenon is actualised.

In other words:

Inquiry is not movement within knowledge but the shift that makes knowledge possible.

It is the ongoing process of cutting differently across potential, bringing new relational configurations into view. One does not need to “know” an object in advance; one needs only to inhabit a potential rich enough for new perspectives to be activated.

Thus, the paradox dissolves once the representational model of mind is abandoned.

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4. Construal vs. Representation: The Dissolution of Meno’s Dilemma

From within relational ontology:

• There is no pre-existing object called “the thing you seek.”

• There is no internal repository of “knowledge-items.”

• There is no binary of knowing vs. not knowing.

What exists is:

• A complex system of potentials

• A perspectival agent situated within that system

• A dynamic set of cuts that actualise phenomena

Inquiry is therefore the practice of reconfiguring the relational stance such that previously inactive potentials become actualisable.

Meno’s paradox survives only if we insist on treating knowledge as object-like and construal as retrieval. Once meaning is taken as first-order phenomenon, the paradox no longer describes anything real.

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5. Inquiry as Relational Co-Actualisation

The relational view also highlights something absent from the classical frame:

Inquiry is never solitary.

It is always co-actualised — through language, through social semiotic systems, through the relational structures that make a new perspective possible. The learner and the environment do not stand apart; they mutually configure each other in the act of cutting across potential.

Thus, inquiry is not a representational bridge but a relational alignment.

Meno’s dilemma collapses because it presupposes a gap that does not exist.

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6. From Paradox to Practice: A New Epistemology

In this light, Meno’s paradox becomes not a threat but an opportunity — an invitation to reject the representational grammar of traditional epistemology.

Inquiry, from a relational stance, is:

• A perspectival shift

• An actualisation of latent potential

• A reconfiguration of meaning

• A first-order phenomenon

• A relational act between system and agent

The paradox is not solved; it is dissolved by revealing its foundational misconstruals.