Science is often praised for its tolerance: of uncertainty, of revision, of error. This praise is not misplaced. Few human practices have shown greater capacity to abandon cherished beliefs in the face of recalcitrant evidence.
And yet.
Across its history, scientific thought has displayed a set of remarkably stable intolerances — limits beyond which it repeatedly refuses to go, even when its own successes push it there.
This series is about those limits.
Intolerance Is Not Failure
An intolerance is not a mistake. It is a pressure point.
Scientific theories do not fail when they encounter phenomena they cannot comfortably accommodate. On the contrary, this is often when they become most productive. What follows, however, is rarely neutral.
At such moments, explanatory strategies emerge whose function is not simply to explain, but to restore bearability.
What is restored may be clarity, continuity, determinacy, identity, causality, objectivity — or meaning itself.
What is lost is harder to see.
Recurrent Moves
Across very different domains — quantum physics, evolutionary theory, thermodynamics, neuroscience, economics — strikingly similar moves appear:
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limits of description are reinterpreted as limits of knowledge
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perspectival constraints are treated as subjective distortions
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possibility is collapsed into probability, probability into ignorance
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novelty is redescribed as recombination
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constraint is rebranded as optimisation
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relation is reduced to interaction between pre-given entities
These moves are rarely explicit. They feel natural. Often they are mathematically elegant.
They are also compensatory.
Why These Moves Matter
Each of these strategies performs a quiet repair.
They take something that has become ontologically uncomfortable — indeterminacy, relationality, incompleteness, non-identity — and relocate it somewhere safer:
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beneath the surface
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across many worlds
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inside the observer
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into deeper structure
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into longer timescales
But the cost is cumulative.
What is repeatedly refused is the possibility that the limits encountered are not defects in our theories, but features of the kind of reality those theories have made visible.
The Relational Stance (Implicit, Not Asserted)
This series does not argue that science should abandon explanation, nor that it should embrace indeterminacy as a virtue. It does not propose an alternative methodology.
It proceeds more cautiously.
It asks what scientific thought systematically cannot tolerate, and what that reveals about its inherited commitments — especially its residual attachment to representation, completeness, and independence from construal.
Relational ontology is present here not as a framework to be applied, but as a discipline of attention: a way of noticing when explanation quietly becomes repair.
What This Series Will Do
The posts that follow will not track individual theories in detail. They will examine:
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intolerances of indeterminacy
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intolerances of perspective
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intolerances of non-identity
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intolerances of meaning
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intolerances of constraint without cause
Each post will isolate a pattern, trace its recurrence, and let it speak — without resolving it.
What It Will Not Do
This series will not recommend reforms, propose new foundations, or offer a meta-theory of science.
It will not ask science to become philosophy.
It will ask it to notice where philosophy has been quietly smuggled in already — under the pressure of discomfort.
Why This Matters Now
The sciences are not in crisis. They are extraordinarily successful.
But success has a shadow.
When explanation works too well, it becomes difficult to see what it has learned not to see.
This series is an attempt to look there — not to undermine scientific thought, but to take it seriously enough to notice what it cannot bear.
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