After Bohm, who hid indeterminacy, Many Worlds, which abolished failure, and QBism, which withdrew the world, Carlo Rovelli proposes something that at first glance seems finally adequate:
Reality, he says, is relational.
Properties do not belong to systems absolutely. They exist only relative to other systems. There is no observer-independent state of affairs — only interactions.
For many readers, this feels like the long-awaited ontological turn.
It is not.
The Relational Promise
Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM) begins by rejecting a classical inheritance: the idea that physical systems possess determinate properties independently of interaction.
Instead, a property is always a property-for something. A spin is up relative to one system, down relative to another. No contradiction arises, because there is no absolute standpoint from which all properties must agree.
And yet, something crucial remains untouched.
Systems First, Relations Second
Despite its name, RQM does not treat relation as ontologically constitutive.
Systems still exist independently. They enter into interactions. Properties arise between them. Relation is fundamental in description — but not in being.
The world, on this view, is composed of interacting systems whose identities are given in advance. Relations modulate properties, but they do not bring systems into being.
This is relation as relativity, not relation as constitution.
The Relational Question
From a relational ontology perspective, this is the pivotal hesitation.
RQM does not answer these questions — because it does not think they need answering.
Relational ontology insists that they cannot be avoided.
The relational challenge is therefore this:
What if systems are not prior to relation, but are themselves products of construal?
Phenomena Without Cuts
Rovelli often echoes Bohr’s insistence on phenomena rather than objects. But where Bohr treated phenomena as irreducible events — inseparable from experimental arrangements — Rovelli treats them as relative property-assignments within a pre-existing network of systems.
What is missing is the cut.
In RQM, nothing is brought into being through instantiation. There are only relative facts, always already there for someone or something.
But instantiation, in a relational ontology, is not the registration of a fact. It is the actualisation of a possibility through a perspectival shift.
Without that shift, relation becomes bookkeeping.
Indeterminacy Revisited
RQM rejects absolute indeterminacy by distributing determinacy across perspectives. What is indeterminate globally is determinate locally, relative to each system.
This is an elegant move — but it relocates rather than resolves the problem.
Indeterminacy becomes a mismatch between descriptions, not a feature of becoming. The limits of description are acknowledged, but not treated as constitutive.
The temptation here is subtle: to treat perspectival constraint as a limitation on access rather than as the condition of actuality.
Relation Without Meaning
RQM is admirably austere. It avoids metaphysical inflation. It refuses collapse as a global event. It treats description as context-bound.
But it stops short of releasing the final representational reflex: the idea that descriptions, however relative, still describe something.
Relational ontology parts company here.
Descriptions do not describe a pre-given world from different angles. They participate in the construal through which phenomena emerge at all.
Without this move, relation remains epistemic.
The Cost of Restraint
Rovelli’s achievement is to show that physics does not require absolutes. His refusal is to let go of independent systems.
By holding onto systems while relativising properties, RQM preserves a minimal realism — but at the cost of making relation secondary.
What is lost is the possibility that reality itself is not a collection of things in relation, but a field of constrained possibility that only ever actualises through cuts.
Rovelli brings us very close.
But closeness is not arrival.
Between Relativity and Relationality
At this point in the series, the pattern is clear.
Each interpretation saves something precious — determinacy, continuity, agency, relation — by refusing to release something else.
The remaining question is whether any interpretation can tolerate the full cost of the cut.
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