Applying relational ontology beyond diagnosis
Relational Thinking as Guide
Having established cuts, construals, horizons, and readiness, relational ontology offers disciplined guidance across domains without imposing metaphysical claims. It provides a meta-tool for responsible innovation: steering modelling, interpretation, and intervention while preserving relational capacity.
Artificial Intelligence
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Models and algorithms can be designed to monitor readiness explicitly.
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Horizon awareness prevents overfitting, spurious extrapolation, and brittle behaviour.
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Relational constraints guide adaptive learning: AI maintains flexibility without enforcing dogmatic inference.
Ethics and Decision-Making
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Ethical systems are reframed as horizon-aware practices, balancing inclination (norms, tendencies) with ability (capacity to act relationally).
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Relational ontology avoids absolutist moral prescriptions by foregrounding actualisable possibilities and the relational room for future choices.
Cultural Theory and Semiotics
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Cultural practices and language emerge through construals within relational horizons.
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Readiness-sensitive analysis illuminates how traditions, symbols, and narratives preserve or collapse relational potential.
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Over-closure explains dogma, ideological rigidity, and systemic miscommunication.
Science and Complex Systems
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Models track relational capacity explicitly, diagnosing horizon exhaustion rather than postulating unseen forces.
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Criticality, resilience, and adaptation are understood as readiness phenomena, not ontological absolutes.
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Innovation is guided by horizon-aware stewardship, not formalist compulsion.
The Payoff
Relational ontology:
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Preserves generativity: Systems remain capable of new construals.
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Prevents metaphysical smuggling: Models and theories remain accountable and transparent.
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Unifies domains: Physics, mathematics, cognition, semiotics, AI, ethics, and culture share a common relational vocabulary.
Closing Gesture
By extending readiness, horizons, and relational capacity into practical and speculative domains, relational ontology opens a space for disciplined, horizon-sensitive innovation.
It allows us to ask: How can we act, model, and interpret responsibly, knowing the relational limits of what can be actualised — without imposing unseen essences or metaphysical inevitabilities?
This is the future that relational thinking points toward: flexible, accountable, and relationally coherent practice across all domains.
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