This blog has grown through excursions — Gödel reframed, semiotics before space, the category-theoretic insistence that relation precedes entity.
What follows is not a summary of those paths but a synchronous articulation of the ontology that has emerged through them.
This is the cut as it stands: a system of potential articulated through construal, instantiated as event, and ordered through relation rather than representation.
1. System as Structured Potential
A system is not a collection of things, nor a space populated by entities.
A system is a structured potential — a theory of possible instances.
It is not ontologically prior in a temporal or substantial sense; it is prior only in the direction of the construal.
A system is what a perspective treats as the horizon of its own possible actualisations.
This aligns with the Hallidayan notion of system as a network of choices, but here extended beyond language:
possibility is primary; actuality is a perspectival selection within it.
2. Instantiation as a Perspectival Shift
Instantiation is not an event in time.
It is a shift of perspective, a cut from the system (potential-as-theory) into the instance (actual-as-event).
Nothing “emerges from” the system; nothing “descends into” the instance.
Rather:
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the system is the set of potential construals;
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the instance is the potential construed as such;
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the cut is the shift that distinguishes them.
There is no ontological substance behind the distinction — only the distinction itself.
3. Construal and Phenomenon
All meaning is construal.
There is no phenomenon without construal; no “raw” world waiting to be interpreted.
The phenomenon is construed experience: first-order meaning, an event of systemic potential cut through perspective.
Metaphenomena (explanations, abstractions, analyses) belong to second-order meaning:
ways of construing construal.
There is no route “behind” construal to a more fundamental reality.
The moment you imagine one, you have already construed it.
4. Relation Without Entity
Entities are effects of construal, not the furniture of the universe.
They have no standing apart from the relational cuts that bring them into salience.
In this ontology, relation does not connect things; relation makes things possible.
Category theory is useful here not as a structural model to import, but because it demonstrates, cleanly, that:
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identity is a special case of relation,
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transformations come first,
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“objects” are nodes of relational consistency, not primitive givens.
This does not replace our ontology with category theory; it simply shows that mathematics has already built the kind of relationality we require.
5. Individuation as a Cline of Potential
Individuation is not a process by which a pre-entity becomes itself.
It is the cline between:
The individual and the collective are not different types of being; they are different orientations across the same structured potential.
Individuation is perspectival, not substantial.
6. Stratification Without Representationalism
The ontology aligns strictly with canonical Hallidayan stratification:
Context is realised by semantics; register is a functional variety of language that realises a situation type.
The two are not conflated.
Crucially, this stratification is not representational.
Semantics does not “represent” context; it actualises potential that construes context in the instance.
Meaning does not mirror reality.
Meaning is the reality of construal.
7. Meaning and Value: Distinct Orders
Biological or social coordination systems (including value systems) are not meaningful.
They have consequences, constraints, affordances — but not semiosis.
Meaning arises only in construal, and construal is a semiotic act.
Value and meaning interact, but they are not the same order of phenomenon.
This distinction is essential.
To blur it is to fall back into representational metaphysics.
8. No Primordial Space, No Primordial Time
Space and time are not backgrounds into which phenomena appear.
They are higher-order metaphenomenal regularities: stable modes for organising construals.
A phenomenon does not “occur in time”; the construal of temporal sequence is a way of stabilising relations among phenomena.
Space is not a container; it is a semiotic schema for patterned difference.
Time is not a flow; it is a mode of ordering perspective.
What comes before space and time is not chaos — but structured potential.
9. The Primacy of the Cut
Everything begins with the cut:
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system/instance
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potential/actual
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perspective/event
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construal/phenomenon
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individual/collective
The cut is neither an operator nor an entity.
It is a difference instantiated within relational potential.
The cut is not something the ontology describes —
the ontology is the cut described.
10. Reality as the Becoming of Possibility
Reality is not a pre-given world that meaning attempts to map.
Reality is the ongoing construal of structured potential, the event of possibility becoming actual in perspective.
This is why mythos, mathematics, semiotics, logic, and narrative all converge here:
they are different ways of cutting potential into form.
Nothing in this ontology is static.
The system evolves as its instances recursively inform the conditions of further construal.
Reality is not “what is.”
Reality is what becomes possible.
Conclusion
This statement is not a final document.
It is a snapshot of the ontology at this moment — the shape of the structured potential as construed here and now.
Future posts will push the cut in new directions. But this is the centre of gravity.
This is the relational ontology as it currently stands.
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