Meaning, world, and mind without exile
This final post turns from diagnosis to reconstruction. If dualism has endured because it offered clarity through separation, then the task here is not to denounce clarity but to re‑inscribe relation as ontologically primary, without collapsing everything into an undifferentiated whole.
The aim is not monism. Nor is it a return to substance metaphysics by other means. It is a shift in what is taken to be basic.
1. Dissolving Dualism Without Collapsing Difference
Relational ontology does not propose that there is only “one kind of thing.” It proposes something more exacting:
What is primary is not thinghood but relation.
Mind and world do not need to be fused to escape dualism. They need to be de‑exiled—returned to a shared relational field from which their apparent separation arises.
Dualism fails not because it posits two domains, but because it treats those domains as ontologically prior to the cut that distinguishes them. Relation is then forced to re‑enter as an afterthought (“interaction”), producing mystery where none is needed.
In a relational frame:
Distinctions are real but derived.
Separation is an achievement, not a starting point.
Stability is the result of recurrent construal, not intrinsic essence.
Difference survives. What disappears is metaphysical exile.
2. Qualities as Relational Actualisations
The Galilean purification of nature required that qualities be sorted into two bins:
Primary (quantifiable, invariant, real)
Secondary (qualitative, perspectival, subjective)
Relational ontology rejects the binning itself.
Qualities are neither intrinsic properties of objects nor distortions added by minds. They are relational actualisations—the way structured potential becomes present under particular orientations and constraints.
Colour, texture, weight, resistance, salience:
are not “in the object,”
are not “in the subject,”
but arise in the cut that stabilises a phenomenon.
This does not weaken science. It specifies its domain.
3. Meaning Without Mental Residue
One of dualism’s longest afterlives is the treatment of meaning as something that must occur inside minds because it has been excluded from nature.
Relational ontology makes a sharper distinction:
Biological and social value concern coordination, cost, and consequence.
Meaning is symbolic value—the first‑order actualisation of relational potential that becomes available for further alignment.
Meaning is not a residue left behind once physics has finished. It is not a ghostly addition to an otherwise complete world.
It is a mode of relational stabilisation.
To construe is to make a world present—not by representing it, but by cutting potential into legibility.
4. Substances as Stabilised Perspectives
From this vantage, substances can be retained—but only with their status clarified.
A “thing” is:
a persistently stabilised pattern of construal,
a region of relational potential that has achieved durability across perspectives,
not an ontological atom.
Substances are perspectival achievements, not foundational units.
This reframing explains why they are so effective in practice and so misleading in metaphysics. We mistake the stability of our cuts for the structure of being.
5. Science Reclaimed as Semiotic Practice
Seen relationally, science is not the progressive removal of the observer from the world. It is the disciplined cultivation of accountable construal.
Objectivity is not horizon‑erasure. It is:
explicit orientation,
shared constraints,
reproducible cuts,
and openness to revision when relations shift.
Science becomes powerful not because it escapes relation, but because it manages it well within carefully bounded domains.
When those bounds are forgotten, metaphysics rushes in under the banner of necessity.
6. What Has Been Restored
This series has traced how dualism stabilised science by exile—and how that exile continues to generate false mysteries.
What relational ontology restores is not sentiment, subjectivity, or softness, but ontological continuity:
between meaning and nature,
between world and mind,
between explanation and experience.
Nothing is added. Nothing mystical is smuggled in.
What changes is simply this:
Relation is no longer treated as a problem to be eliminated, but as the ground from which intelligibility arises.
That is not the end of science.
It is the condition for its coherence.
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