Relational Epistemologies: 2 Knowing as Construal: Epistemic Stance as Perspectival Cut

To know is not to reflect. To know is to construe.

Knowledge is not a passive image of the world. It is a perspectival cut — a positioning of an agent within a lattice of potentialities, a selective alignment of constraints and affordances. Every act of knowing slices reality along particular axes, actualising some possibilities while leaving others dormant.

Consider the implications:

1. Knowledge is enacted: Observing, measuring, theorising — each is a relational act. The world is not an inert surface; it responds, aligns, and resists. To know is to participate in the unfolding of potentials.

2. Construal shapes actuality: What counts as “true” or “observable” is contingent on how we construe phenomena. A single phenomenon can yield multiple, equally valid cuts depending on perspective, context, and relational alignment.

3. Epistemic stance matters: Our positioning — what we attend to, how we frame it, the patterns we emphasise — determines what knowledge emerges. Knowledge is inseparable from the cut that generates it.

This perspective radically reframes familiar epistemic concepts:

• Truth is not correspondence; it is the stability of relational alignment across perspectives.

• Objectivity is not detachment; it is the reproducibility of relational cuts within aligned systems.

• Evidence is not mirror of reality; it is the interaction between construal and potential, the patterned actualisation of what a system can sustain as meaningful.

In practice, knowing as construal invites a shift from representation to relational responsibility. It asks: How do my cuts interact with the potentials I engage? Which alignments am I reinforcing? Which possibilities am I leaving unexplored?

Once this shift is made, knowledge becomes a living process, not a static possession. We begin to see epistemology as a lattice of relational cuts — dynamic, perspectival, and generative.

Mirrors may lie, but cuts reveal. To know is not to copy. To know is to participate, to construe, and to co-shape the world we inhabit.