Objects feel real, robust, and independent. We speak of them as if they exist autonomously, persist through time, and carry intrinsic properties. Scientific inquiry, legal systems, and everyday interaction all rely on treating objects as discrete entities.
Yet this reliability is relational, not ontological. Objects are stabilised relational cuts: they exist because interactions, measurements, and conventions hold them in place. They are convenient fictions, not metaphysical primitives.
Objects as Stabilised Cuts
An object is a pattern of relations drawn and maintained across contexts. Boundaries, properties, and identities are not inherent; they are actualised through coordinated construals.
For example, a table is individuated through human perception, functional relevance, and environmental contrast. Remove the relational context—observers, conventions, purposes—and the “object” loses its integrity. Its reality is not an illusion, but its independence is conditional.
Science and the Practical Object
Scientific practice demonstrates the same principle. A particle, a cell, or a planet is treated as an object for measurement, prediction, and explanation. Yet each object is only individuated relative to a chosen frame, experimental setup, or model.
In quantum mechanics, particles do not have definite positions or properties independent of measurement. In biology, a species is defined relationally through genetic, ecological, and behavioural patterns. Even in classical physics, the object is defined by boundaries that are never fully sharp; we approximate the world to allow calculation and prediction.
Objects are tools of coordination, not ultimate constituents of reality.
Social Objects
The same holds in social systems. Legal entities, roles, or institutions are robust only through relational stabilisation: shared recognition, enforceable norms, and repeated interactions. A corporation persists not because it has metaphysical essence, but because relational patterns maintain its boundaries, responsibilities, and identity.
Fiction, Not Falsehood
Calling objects “convenient fictions” is not to deny their efficacy or existence. It is to emphasise their dependence on relational frameworks. Objects are real in practice, robust enough to support action, measurement, and prediction—but only within the contexts that stabilise them.
Breakdowns—quantum indeterminacy, developmental plasticity, shifting social roles—reveal not failure, but the conditionality of the object’s integrity.
Implications for Understanding Reality
If objects are relationally stabilised, the philosophical quest for ultimate substances or essences misfires. There are no ontological primitives awaiting discovery—only patterns, relations, and perspectival cuts.
Recognising objects as convenient fictions allows a unified understanding across domains: physics, biology, and social reality all instantiate the same relational principle.
Looking Ahead
Having established the fictional nature of objects, the next post will explore why persistence is not identity: how entities maintain continuity without assuming immutable essence. This will further dismantle object-centrism and prepare the way for thinking in terms of trajectories rather than things.
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