The Becoming of Possibility: 12/16/25

Tuesday, 16 December 2025

Why Explanation Keeps Failing: 6 Stability Is Not Necessity

Introduction: When the World Seems Settled

Some explanations draw their force not from drama, but from calm.

They point to regularity, persistence, and repetition. They note that certain patterns recur, that certain arrangements endure, that certain outcomes reliably reappear. From this stability, an impression of inevitability quietly forms.

This post argues that this impression is mistaken.

Stability is not necessity.

When regularity hardens into inevitability, explanation quietly fails.

1. The Seductive Logic of Regularity

Regular patterns invite a simple inference: if something keeps happening, it must have to happen.

This inference feels reasonable because regularity reduces uncertainty. Stable arrangements are easier to plan around, model, and predict. Over time, predictability acquires the sheen of necessity.

But repetition alone does not establish inevitability. It only establishes habit.

2. From Description to Constraint

A common explanatory slide occurs when a description of what does happen is treated as a statement about what must happen.

At this point, explanation shifts from:

these conditions tend to produce this outcome
to this outcome could not be otherwise.

What was once a contingent regularity is recast as a binding constraint.

3. How Stability Acquires Authority

Stability gains authority through duration.

The longer a pattern persists, the more it appears natural. Alternative possibilities fade from view, not because they are impossible, but because they are no longer imagined.

Explanations then begin to cite stability itself as evidence of necessity:

this has always been the case,
it works because it endures,
change would disrupt a proven order.

These are rhetorical moves, not ontological discoveries.

4. The Erasure of Possibility

When stability is mistaken for necessity, possibility is erased.

Phenomena are no longer understood as ongoing accomplishments of relation, but as expressions of fixed structure. What persists is treated as what must persist.

This erasure is subtle. Nothing dramatic is denied. Alternatives simply stop appearing as alternatives at all.

5. Why Meaning Suffers Again

Meaning-bearing phenomena are especially vulnerable here.

Norms, roles, and expectations often exhibit stability. When this stability is misread as necessity, meaning becomes destiny. Reasons harden into rules; patterns of coordination become inner properties.

What is lost is the sense that these phenomena continue to require maintenance, uptake, and recognition.

Conclusion: Restoring Contingency Without Chaos

Recognising that stability is not necessity does not plunge us into disorder.

It restores a crucial distinction:

What persists does so because relations continue to hold, not because alternatives are impossible.

A relational approach keeps explanation oriented toward the conditions that sustain regularity, rather than treating regularity as explanation itself.

In the final post, we will draw these threads together and ask what explanation would look like if it remained open to possibility rather than closing it down.

Why Explanation Keeps Failing: 5 When Measurement Replaces Meaning

Introduction: The Authority of Numbers

Measurement carries an aura of objectivity.

Numbers appear neutral, portable, and decisive. They promise clarity where interpretation seems messy and certainty where judgment feels fragile. In contemporary explanation, measurement is often treated not merely as a tool, but as a guarantor of reality itself.

This post examines what happens when measurement stops supporting explanation and begins replacing meaning.

1. What Measurement Actually Does

Measurement does not discover phenomena. It operationalises them.

To measure something is to decide:

what counts as a unit,
what distinctions matter,
what variation can be ignored.

These decisions are not neutral. They presuppose a prior understanding of what the phenomenon is supposed to be.

Measurement, therefore, depends on meaning before it can quantify anything at all.

2. From Indicator to Identity

A common explanatory slippage occurs when an indicator becomes an identity.

What begins as:

this variable tracks some aspect of the phenomenon
quietly turns into:
this variable is the phenomenon.

At that point, explanation collapses into reporting. To explain is simply to cite the number.

What the phenomenon means — how it is lived, interpreted, or oriented — disappears from view.

3. Why Quantification Feels Final

Quantitative accounts feel conclusive because they resist argument.

You can debate an interpretation, but it is harder to dispute a figure once its legitimacy has been institutionally secured. Measurement thus acquires epistemic authority that exceeds its explanatory role.

Numbers end conversations not because they explain better, but because they explain faster.

4. The Erasure of Context

Meaning-bearing phenomena are inherently contextual. They depend on relations, histories, norms, and expectations.

Measurement strips context in order to stabilise comparison.

This trade-off is sometimes worth making. But when stripped context is treated as explanatory residue rather than loss, meaning is quietly erased.

What remains is a flattened phenomenon that behaves well statistically and poorly ontologically.

5. When Measurement Becomes Ontology

The deepest error occurs when what is measurable is treated as what is real.

At this point, phenomena that resist quantification are reclassified as:

subjective,
secondary,
or explanatorily irrelevant.

This is not a discovery about the world. It is an artefact of the measurement regime.

Conclusion: Recovering Meaning Without Rejecting Measure

The problem is not measurement itself. It is the forgetting of what measurement presupposes.

A relational approach insists that:

Measurement must answer to meaning, not replace it.

Numbers can illuminate relations, but they cannot constitute them.

In the next post, we will examine how explanation fails in a final, subtler way: when descriptions of stability are mistaken for explanations of necessity.

Why Explanation Keeps Failing: 4 Models That Answer for Us

Introduction: From Aid to Authority

Models are among the most powerful tools of explanation.

They simplify, stabilise, and render phenomena tractable. They allow us to see patterns that would otherwise remain diffuse or invisible. At their best, models support inquiry by sharpening questions and clarifying relations.

But models have a tendency to change roles.

This post examines what happens when models stop assisting inquiry and begin answering on our behalf.

1. What Models Are For

A model is not a mirror of reality. It is a selective construction designed to foreground certain relations while bracketing others.

Properly understood, a model:

highlights relevant variables,
suppresses distracting detail,
makes explicit a set of assumptions.

Crucially, a model is meant to be used, not believed.

Its value lies in how it orients investigation, not in how comprehensively it describes the world.

2. When Models Become Answers

Trouble begins when a model’s outputs are treated as explanations rather than prompts.

At this point, inquiry shifts from:

Is the model adequate to this phenomenon?
to How does this phenomenon instantiate the model?

The direction of fit reverses. The phenomenon must now conform to the model in order to be intelligible.

What started as a tool becomes an authority.

3. Informal Models and Conceptual Shortcuts

This substitution does not require mathematics or formalism.

Informal models — metaphors, narratives, typologies — can perform the same function. Once a familiar explanatory pattern is in place, it begins to answer questions automatically.

Examples include:

equilibrium metaphors,
optimisation stories,
signal–response schemas,
agent-based caricatures.

These models feel explanatory because they are familiar, not because they are adequate.

4. The Quiet Loss of Phenomenal Contact

As models take over explanatory work, direct engagement with phenomena diminishes.

Anomalies become noise. Context becomes decoration. Meaning becomes an output variable.

The model continues to function smoothly precisely because it is no longer answerable to what it was meant to explain.

Inquiry has not advanced; it has been delegated.

5. Why This Feels Like Progress

Model substitution feels like progress because it produces:

faster answers,
cleaner narratives,
scalable explanations.

What it does not produce is deeper understanding.

The smoothness of explanation masks the growing distance between the model and the phenomenon.

Conclusion: Keeping Models in Their Place

The problem is not that we use models. It is that we forget what they are.

A relational approach treats models as provisional articulations of possible relations, not as engines of truth.

Models should sharpen our questions, not silence them.

In the next post, we will examine a closely related temptation: the urge to replace explanation with measurement, and the quiet authority that numbers acquire when models are taken for reality.

Why Explanation Keeps Failing: 3 The Seduction of Total Accounts

Introduction: When Explanation Wants Everything

Some explanations do not merely aim to clarify a phenomenon. They aspire to explain everything.

They promise coherence across domains, unification of disparate facts, and a single framework within which all relevant questions can be answered. Their appeal is obvious. If one account can do all the work, inquiry becomes efficient, elegant, and complete.

This post argues that such total accounts are not merely ambitious. They are explanatorily dangerous.

Theories that explain everything tend to hollow out what they explain.

1. The Appeal of Totality

Total accounts are seductive because they resolve fragmentation. They offer a single explanatory language that seems to travel effortlessly across levels, contexts, and phenomena.

Once adopted, they allow us to say:

this too is an instance of the same principle,
that apparent exception is really just another case,
nothing lies outside the scope of the theory.

This produces a powerful sense of mastery.

But mastery is not the same as understanding.

2. When Scope Replaces Precision

As explanatory scope expands, precision often contracts.

To explain everything, a theory must abstract away from the particularities that differentiate phenomena. What remains is a thin explanatory template that fits widely precisely because it says little.

The danger is subtle. The theory continues to generate correct-sounding explanations while quietly losing contact with the phenomena’s specific modes of intelligibility.

What is gained in coverage is lost in depth.

3. Phenomena Reduced to Instances

Total accounts tend to treat phenomena as interchangeable instances of a general mechanism or principle.

Once this move is made, the work of explanation shifts:

from asking what makes this phenomenon intelligible,
to showing how it fits the theory.

The phenomenon no longer resists explanation. It is absorbed.

But resistance is precisely what keeps inquiry alive.

4. The Illusion of Explanatory Completion

Because total accounts leave little unexplained, they create the impression that inquiry has reached its endpoint.

Questions that do not fit the framework are reclassified as misguided, superficial, or already answered “in principle”.

This is not explanatory success. It is explanatory foreclosure.

The theory has not explained the world; it has shrunk the space in which explanation is allowed to occur.

5. Why Meaning Suffers First

Meaning-bearing phenomena are especially vulnerable to total accounts.

Because meaning is constituted relationally and contextually, it resists uniform explanation. Total frameworks respond by flattening meaning into:

signals,
functions,
outputs,
or effects.

The appearance of explanation remains, but meaning itself thins out. What is lost is not accuracy but intelligibility.

Conclusion: The Cost of Explaining Everything

The problem with total accounts is not that they are false. It is that they succeed too well on their own terms.

By explaining everything, they leave nothing to investigate.

A relational approach insists on a different explanatory virtue:

An explanation should make room for the phenomenon to push back.

In the next post, we will examine how models and frameworks begin to answer questions on our behalf—and what is lost when inquiry is delegated in this way.

Why Explanation Keeps Failing: 2 Causal Depth Is Not Ontological Depth

Introduction: The Deeper the Better?

When explanations feel unsatisfying, the usual remedy is to go deeper.

If a phenomenon is puzzling, we look for a cause beneath it. If that cause seems thin, we look for a deeper one still — further back in time, further down into mechanism, further away from the surface of experience.

This reflex is so familiar that it rarely appears as a choice. Depth is assumed to be explanatory virtue.

This post challenges that assumption.

Its central claim is simple:

Reaching further back in time or mechanism does not, by itself, produce better explanation.

Causal depth and ontological depth are not the same thing.

1. What Causal Depth Offers

Causal explanations trace sequences: this happened because that happened, which in turn was caused by something else.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Causal depth can reveal:

dependencies,
constraints,
enabling conditions,
vulnerabilities.

In many domains — engineering, epidemiology, materials science — deeper causal chains genuinely increase explanatory power.

The trouble begins when causal depth is mistaken for ontological sufficiency.

2. The Slide from Cause to Constitution

A common explanatory slide occurs here:

A phenomenon is identified.
A prior cause is located.
The cause is treated as constitutive of the phenomenon itself.

At this point, explanation changes character. What once described how something came to be possible is now taken to explain what it is.

This slide is rarely argued for. It is assumed.

But causes do not automatically constitute the things they enable. A history can condition a phenomenon without determining its present intelligibility.

3. Temporal Distance and Explanatory Authority

Explanations that reach far back in time often feel especially authoritative. Ancestry, origin, and deep history carry rhetorical weight.

The farther away the cause, the harder it becomes to contest.

Yet temporal distance does not guarantee relevance.

An account of how something emerged does not, by itself, explain how it functions now, what relations sustain it, or why it means what it does in the present.

When temporal depth substitutes for ontological analysis, explanation becomes displacement.

4. Mechanism Without Meaning

A similar issue arises with mechanistic depth. Breaking a phenomenon into smaller parts and processes can be illuminating — up to a point.

But not all phenomena are constituted by mechanisms in the same way.

Meaning-bearing phenomena, in particular, cannot be explained solely by decomposing them into sub-personal processes. No matter how detailed the mechanism, it does not tell us:

what counts as a reason,
why a norm binds,
how an action is intelligible in context.

Mechanistic depth explains how something can occur, not what it is as a phenomenon.

5. Ontological Depth as Relational Structure

Ontological depth concerns what must be in place for a phenomenon to exist as the kind of thing it is.

From a relational perspective, this means asking:

what relations constitute the phenomenon,
what distinctions it presupposes,
what alternatives it excludes.

Depth here is not a matter of going further back or further down, but of clarifying the structure of possibility within which the phenomenon is actualised.

This kind of depth keeps inquiry oriented toward the present.

Conclusion: Depth Without Displacement

The problem with many contemporary explanations is not that they go too deep, but that they go deep in the wrong direction.

By equating depth with causal distance, they trade ontological clarity for narrative authority.

A relational approach insists on a different standard:

An explanation is deep only insofar as it clarifies what makes the phenomenon what it is.

In the next post, we will examine a powerful temptation that arises once depth is misidentified: the urge to explain everything at once, and the hollowing effect of total accounts.

Why Explanation Keeps Failing: 1 When Explanation Stops Thinking

Introduction: The Feeling of Having Understood

There is a distinctive sensation that accompanies a good explanation. The pieces seem to fall into place. Uncertainty recedes. The question that was pressing a moment ago loses its urgency.

That feeling is not incidental. It is one of the primary signals by which we judge explanatory success.

This post argues that the signal is unreliable.

Many explanations fail not because they are incorrect, but because they are too satisfying. They resolve the discomfort of not knowing by ending inquiry rather than deepening it.

1. Explanation as Relief

Explanation often functions as relief from uncertainty. Faced with complexity, contingency, or ambiguity, an explanation offers narrative, structure, and direction.

This is not a defect. Without some stabilisation, inquiry cannot proceed at all.

But relief becomes a problem when it is mistaken for understanding.

An explanation that feels complete can discourage further questioning even when it has not made the phenomenon more intelligible in its present relations.

2. The Difference Between Answering and Orienting

There is a crucial distinction between explanations that answer questions and explanations that orient inquiry.

Answering explanations aim to terminate a line of questioning. They identify a cause, a mechanism, or an origin and treat it as sufficient.

Orienting explanations, by contrast, clarify what kind of thing is being investigated, what relations matter, and what further questions are now meaningful to ask.

Much contemporary explanation prioritises answers at the expense of orientation.

3. Why Closure Feels Like Success

Explanatory closure feels like success because it reduces cognitive load. Once a phenomenon has been located within a familiar framework, the pressure to keep thinking eases.

This effect is amplified when explanations:

appeal to deep causes,
invoke authoritative domains,
or reach far into history.

The further away the explanation is placed, the harder it becomes to re-enter the phenomenon itself.

4. What Gets Lost When Inquiry Ends

When explanation ends too soon, several things are quietly lost:

the present conditions under which a phenomenon is intelligible,
the relations that sustain or transform it,
the possibility that it might be otherwise.

What remains is a description of how it came to be, standing in for an account of what it is.

Conclusion: Keeping Explanation Alive

This series begins from a simple suspicion: that explanation has been asked to do the wrong kind of work.

Rather than keeping inquiry alive, many explanations function to stop it. They answer questions that feel urgent while leaving the phenomenon itself underexamined.

In the next post, we will examine one of the most common ways this happens: the confusion of causal depth with ontological depth.

Against Evolutionary Psychology: 8 What a Relational Account Would Say Instead (Without Saying It Yet)

Introduction: Ending Without Replacing

This series has been deliberately critical. It has taken evolutionary psychology at its word, followed its explanations to their limits, and shown where they close inquiry rather than extend it.

What it has not done is offer a rival theory of behaviour, cognition, or mind.

That restraint is intentional.

The aim of this final post is not to replace one explanatory framework with another, but to show how a relational ontology reframes the very questions evolutionary psychology believes it answers.

1. Relation as Primary

A relational ontology begins from a simple but far‑reaching commitment:

Relations are not secondary connections between pre‑existing entities; they are constitutive of what entities are.

On this view, individuals are not self‑contained bearers of traits that then interact. They are nodes in structured fields of relation, actualising possibilities made available by those fields.

This shift is decisive.

Questions framed in terms of what is inside the individual give way to questions about what relations make this phenomenon possible.

2. Meaning Is Constituted, Not Inherited

From a relational perspective, meaning does not travel through history as a latent content waiting to be expressed. It is constituted in present relations:

linguistic,
social,
institutional,
symbolic.

Biology and history matter—but as constraints on what can be actualised, not as carriers of meaning themselves.

To ask why an action means what it does is not to ask about its ancestral origin, but about the relations that make it intelligible now.

This reframing does not deny evolution. It relocates it.

3. Explanation Without Essence

Relational explanation does not seek hidden inner essences to stabilise behaviour. It traces how regularities emerge, persist, and transform through structured relations.

What evolutionary psychology calls “human nature” appears here as sedimented relational patterning—durable, influential, but never necessary or exhaustive.

Explanation remains accountable to contingency.

4. Systems as Open Theories of Possibility

In a relational ontology, systems are not causal machines that generate outcomes. They are theories of possible instances: structured spaces that specify what can count as a phenomenon.

To explain an instance is to show how it is made possible within such a system, not to reduce it to a hidden cause.

Crucially, this form of explanation does not end inquiry. It invites re‑entry.

If relations change, possibilities change. If meanings shift, phenomena shift.

5. Why Explanation Must Remain Open

Meaning‑bearing phenomena are not solved once and for all. They are continually re‑actualised in new contexts.

Any explanation that claims finality—whether through biology, history, or essence—mistakes stability for closure.

A relational account resists that temptation. It treats explanation as orientation rather than termination, as a way of keeping phenomena intelligible without exhausting them.

Conclusion: Saying Less to See More

This series has argued that evolutionary psychology explains too much too quickly, and in doing so, explains away the very phenomena it seeks to understand.

A relational ontology proposes no counter‑myth. It offers a different discipline of explanation—one that keeps relations visible, meaning constitutive, and inquiry open.

What it would say instead is therefore best expressed negatively:

Not that behaviour is written inside us, but that it is made possible between us.

Saying more than this, for now, would be premature.

Against Evolutionary Psychology: 7 Ideology Without Villains: Why the Politics Follows Anyway

Introduction: No Conspiracy Required

Critiques of evolutionary psychology are often met with a familiar defence. Whatever its flaws, the argument goes, the field is scientific, not political. Its practitioners are not ideologues, and its claims are not prescriptions.

This defence is partly correct—and deeply misleading.

The problem with evolutionary psychology is not that it secretly smuggles in a political programme. It is that its ontological commitments reliably stabilise particular political effects, regardless of intention.

This post advances a careful but firm claim:

Evolutionary psychology need not be ideologically motivated to function ideologically.

No villains are required.

1. From Ontology to Politics

Ontologies do political work.

They determine what kinds of things are taken to exist, where causes are located, and what forms of change appear possible or impossible. Once these commitments are in place, downstream interpretations follow with remarkable consistency.

Evolutionary psychology commits itself to:

inner traits as explanatory units,
ancestral history as primary cause,
behavioural regularities as evidence of necessity.

These commitments do not dictate a political stance. But they structure the space in which political interpretations become natural.

2. The Naturalisation of Hierarchy

When behavioural differences are explained as evolved traits, hierarchies acquire a distinctive gloss: they appear natural.

Differences in status, power, gendered roles, or social outcomes are no longer primarily questions of institutional design or relational organisation. They become expressions of biological endowment shaped by selection.

This move does not require anyone to endorse inequality. It simply renders inequality intelligible as expected.

What is naturalised becomes resistant to critique.

3. The Individualisation of Responsibility

At the same time, evolutionary psychology individualises explanation.

If behaviour flows from inner dispositions, responsibility attaches to persons rather than relations. Structural conditions fade into background constraint. Institutions become stage-setting rather than constitutive.

Social outcomes are thus framed as:

the aggregation of individual tendencies,
the playing-out of evolved preferences,
the result of differential traits.

This framing quietly aligns with political narratives that emphasise personal responsibility while minimising structural accountability.

Again, no intention is required.

4. Stability Masquerading as Truth

Because evolutionary explanations reach far into the past, they lend present arrangements a sense of inevitability.

If things are this way because they evolved this way, then radical change appears naïve at best, dangerous at worst. The future is framed as constrained repetition rather than open possibility.

This does not mandate conservatism. But it privileges stability over transformation, adjustment over reconfiguration.

Ontology does the work ideology need not.

5. Why Motives Miss the Point

Focusing on the personal politics of evolutionary psychologists—whether they are progressive, conservative, or apolitical—misses the structural issue.

Ideology is not primarily a matter of belief. It is a matter of what explanations make easy, and what they make hard.

Evolutionary psychology makes it easy to explain behaviour without interrogating relations, institutions, or meanings. It makes it hard to imagine alternatives that are not already constrained by an inherited nature.

That asymmetry has political consequences regardless of motive.

Conclusion: Ideology as Effect, Not Intent

The ideological impact of evolutionary psychology does not arise from bad actors or hidden agendas. It arises from the cumulative effect of its ontological commitments.

By naturalising hierarchy, individualising responsibility, and privileging stability, it quietly aligns with conservative outcomes—even when its practitioners explicitly reject them.

From a relational perspective:

Politics enters not through intention, but through ontology.

In the final post of this series, we will turn away from critique and ask what a genuinely relational orientation to explanation would make possible instead.

Against Evolutionary Psychology: 6 Over-Closure and the End of Inquiry

Introduction: When Explanation Stops Thinking

At this point in the series, a pattern has emerged with some clarity. Evolutionary psychology does not merely offer explanations that are contestable; it offers explanations that end inquiry.

This post names that pattern directly. Its focus is not a single concept—blank slates, EEAs, human nature—but a deeper methodological disposition: adaptationism as premature closure.

The central claim is this:

By answering “why” questions too quickly, evolutionary psychology forecloses the relational investigation through which meaning actually becomes intelligible.

Its explanations feel satisfying precisely because they stop the questions that matter most.

1. Adaptationism and the Illusion of Depth

Adaptationist explanation follows a familiar rhythm:

Identify a behavioural pattern.
Propose an ancestral problem it might have solved.
Infer a trait or disposition shaped by selection.

Once this story is told, explanation appears complete. The phenomenon is said to be “accounted for”.

But what has actually happened?

The behaviour has been displaced from its present relational conditions and relocated to a speculative past. The explanation feels deep because it reaches far back in time, but it does so at the cost of explanatory traction now.

Depth here is temporal, not ontological.

2. Why Questions Asked Too Soon

From a relational perspective, “why” questions must be asked carefully. There is a crucial difference between:

Why does this phenomenon make sense here?
Why might something like this ever have existed?

Evolutionary psychology habitually answers the second question while pretending to address the first.

In doing so, it short-circuits inquiry. Once an adaptive story is offered, further investigation into meaning, normativity, and situational intelligibility appears redundant.

The explanation closes the space in which explanation should operate.

3. The Loss of Present-Oriented Explanation

Meaning-bearing phenomena are constituted in the present: in relations among agents, symbols, institutions, and contexts.

Evolutionary explanations, however, are not present-oriented. They trade intelligibility for ancestry.

As a result, they offer no account of:

how a reason functions as a reason now,
how a norm binds in this situation,
how an intention is recognised and responded to here.

What is lost is not historical truth, but explanatory relevance.

4. Systems as Theories of Possible Instances

A relational ontology offers a different conception of explanation altogether.

Systems are not repositories of hidden causes. They are theories of possible instances: structured fields of potential that specify what can count as an intelligible phenomenon.

Explanation, on this view, does not terminate inquiry. It orients it.

To explain a phenomenon is to show:

what relations make it possible,
what distinctions it presupposes,
what alternatives it excludes.

This kind of explanation opens space rather than closing it.

5. Why Over-Closure Feels Like Understanding

Over-closure is attractive because it offers relief. Complexity is reduced. Contingency is domesticated. Uncertainty is replaced with narrative.

Adaptationist stories are especially effective at producing this feeling. They combine scientific authority with mythic coherence: this is how it came to be.

But feeling understood is not the same as understanding.

Where inquiry ends too soon, meaning has been bypassed rather than explained.

Conclusion: Explanation That Makes Room

The problem with evolutionary psychology is not that it asks evolutionary questions. It is that it lets those questions do work they cannot do.

By treating adaptationist stories as answers rather than prompts, it closes inquiry precisely where relational explanation should begin.

From a relational perspective:

An explanation that cannot be re-entered is not an explanation of meaning.

In the final post of this series, we will draw these threads together and ask what a genuinely relational alternative to evolutionary psychology might look like—not as a replacement theory, but as a different orientation to explanation itself.

Against Evolutionary Psychology: 5 Human Nature Revisited: From Stabilised Relations to Reified Traits

Introduction: The Return of Essence

When evolutionary psychology runs up against the limits of its explanatory resources—when history can no longer account for meaning, and biology can no longer explain normativity—it reaches for a familiar refuge: human nature.

Invoked carefully, the term appears modest and commonsensical. Surely there must be something stable about humans, something shared, something enduring.

But in evolutionary psychology, “human nature” performs a far more ambitious role. It becomes an inner explanatory essence: a set of traits, dispositions, or modules that are said to produce behaviour across contexts.

From a relational-ontological perspective, this move marks another decisive error: the conversion of stabilised relational regularities into reified inner properties.

1. From Populations to Persons

Evolutionary psychology draws heavily on population-level patterns. Statistical regularities are identified across groups, cultures, or experimental conditions, and these regularities are then attributed to features of human nature.

This step is rarely scrutinised.

But population statistics are not ontological facts about individuals. They are abstractions over distributions of behaviour under particular conditions.

To move from:

many people often behave in this way under these circumstances

to:

humans have a trait that causes this behaviour

is not inference but reification.

From a relational perspective, individuals do not instantiate population averages. They actualise possibilities within specific relational configurations.

2. Regularity Is Not Necessity

Stability in behaviour is often treated as evidence of necessity. If a pattern recurs, it is taken to reveal an underlying essence.

But regularity does not imply inevitability.

A behaviour may be:

statistically frequent,
culturally widespread,
historically persistent,

without being necessary, universal, or internally specified.

Relational systems stabilise. Practices sediment. Institutions endure.

These stabilisations generate regularities without invoking inner essences. Evolutionary psychology, however, routinely treats regularity as proof of necessity.

This mistake makes the world appear more fixed than it is.

3. The Appeal of Reification

Reification feels explanatory because it simplifies.

Once a pattern is located inside the individual—as a trait, module, or disposition—it appears to travel with the person across contexts. Complexity is reduced to transportable cause.

But this explanatory feeling is illusory.

What has been explained is not the phenomenon, but our discomfort with contingency.

By relocating explanation inward, evolutionary psychology avoids the harder task of tracing how behaviour is constituted across relations, contexts, and meanings.

4. Human Nature as Sedimented Relation

From a relational ontology, what is called “human nature” is better understood as sedimented regularity of relation.

Humans are born into:

social structures,
symbolic systems,
institutional arrangements,
biological constraints.

Over time, certain ways of acting, valuing, and relating stabilise. They recur not because they are written inside us, but because the relations that support them persist.

To call this sedimentation “nature” is to mistake durability for essence.

5. Why the Error Matters

Reifying stabilised relations into traits has predictable consequences:

it individualises what is relational,
it naturalises what is contingent,
it limits what can be imagined as otherwise.

Once labelled “human nature”, a pattern becomes resistant to critique. What might have been examined as institutional, cultural, or symbolic is instead treated as inevitable.

The move does not explain behaviour. It insulates it.

Conclusion: Essence Without Ontology

Evolutionary psychology’s appeal to human nature is not the discovery of a deep truth, but the reappearance of an old metaphysical habit.

Faced with complex, stabilised patterns of relation, it posits inner essences to hold them together.

From a relational perspective:

what appears as human nature is a history of relations that has forgotten itself.

In the next post, we will examine how this reification feeds directly into a final problem: the premature closure of inquiry, and the sense that explanation has already been delivered.

Against Evolutionary Psychology: 4 Meaning Without Meaning: Why Evolutionary Psychology Cannot Explain Reasons

Introduction: Explaining What Is Not There

By this point in the series, the pattern should be visible. Evolutionary psychology does not merely appeal to biology; it repeatedly assigns biology an explanatory role it cannot bear.

Nowhere is this more consequential than in its treatment of meaning‑bearing phenomena: intentions, reasons, norms, preferences, values.

This post advances a simple but decisive claim:

Evolutionary psychology attempts to explain meaning using resources that are not themselves meaningful.

The result is not illumination but erasure.

1. Selection Pressures Are Not Meanings

Evolutionary explanations appeal to selection pressures, fitness payoffs, and adaptive advantages. These are theoretical abstractions used to describe population‑level regularities over time.

They are not, and cannot be:

reasons for acting,
sources of obligation,
objects of intention,
or contents of experience.

No agent chooses because of a selection pressure.

No norm binds because it maximises fitness.

No preference is felt because it solved an ancestral problem.

Selection pressures are descriptions of constraint, not constituents of meaning.

When evolutionary psychology treats them as explanatory of intention or normativity, it mistakes why something was possible for why something makes sense.

2. Causal History Versus Normative Force

Meaning‑bearing phenomena are not merely caused; they are answerable.

A reason is something that can be given, challenged, defended, or revised. A norm is something that can be upheld or violated. A preference is something that can be reflected upon.

Evolutionary psychology offers causal histories in place of normative force. It tells us how a disposition may have arisen, not why it counts as a reason now.

This substitution evacuates normativity.

To say that a behaviour evolved does not tell us:

whether it is justified,
whether it ought to be followed,
whether it is appropriate in context.

Explanation without normativity is not explanation of meaning.

3. The Disappearance of Intelligibility

From a relational ontology, intelligibility is primary. A phenomenon is what it is only insofar as it is intelligible as something in relation.

Evolutionary psychology bypasses this level entirely.

By relocating explanation to ancestral history, it skips over the relational work through which actions become intelligible to agents and others. Meaning is treated as a surface gloss atop a biological mechanism.

But meaning is not an overlay. It is constitutive.

To explain behaviour without explaining its intelligibility is to explain the wrong thing.

4. Norms Without Normativity

Consider the evolutionary treatment of norms. Norms are often described as evolved strategies for coordination or cooperation.

Whatever the merits of such descriptions at the level of constraint, they fail to account for what makes a norm a norm:

its binding force,
its susceptibility to criticism,
its role in accountability.

A norm is not simply a regularity. It is a relation between agents that oughts in a particular way.

Evolutionary psychology has no resources for this.

Fitness does not obligate.

Selection does not justify.

History does not command.

5. Reasons Are Relational Phenomena

From a relational ontology, reasons do not reside inside individuals as biological outputs. They emerge in structured relations:

linguistic,
social,
institutional,
symbolic.

A reason exists only insofar as it can be recognised, invoked, and responded to within a shared space of meaning.

Evolutionary psychology treats reasons as if they were internal dispositions waiting to be expressed. In doing so, it mistakes capacity for constitution.

Biology may constrain what reasons can be taken up. It does not produce reasons.

Conclusion: When Explanation Explains Away

The failure of evolutionary psychology to explain meaning is not incidental. It follows directly from its ontological commitments.

By attempting to explain intentions, norms, and preferences using non‑semiotic resources, it collapses explanation into erasure. What makes action intelligible is replaced by a story about how behaviour might have come to exist.

From a relational perspective:

Any account that cannot explain normativity cannot explain meaning.

In the next post, we will turn to a familiar refuge when this problem becomes visible: the appeal to “human nature”, and the reification of stabilised relations into inner traits.

Against Evolutionary Psychology: 3 The EEA and the Myth of Explanatory History

Introduction: A History That Explains Too Much

Evolutionary psychology leans heavily on a deceptively simple idea: that many features of the modern human mind can be explained by reference to an ancestral Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA). Behaviours, preferences, and cognitive patterns are said to make sense once we see them as adaptations to problems faced by our Pleistocene ancestors.

At first glance, this looks like a perfectly reasonable scientific move. History, after all, matters.

But from a relational-ontological perspective, the EEA plays a far more problematic role. It does not merely contextualise explanation; it stands in for it.

This post argues that the EEA functions as a speculative placeholder that masquerades as causal explanation — and in doing so, prematurely closes inquiry into how present phenomena are actually constituted.

1. The EEA Is Reconstructed, Not Discovered

The first thing to note about the EEA is that it is not an empirical object in the ordinary sense. No one observes an EEA. No one measures it directly. No one encounters it as a phenomenon.

Instead, EEAs are reconstructed retrospectively.

Researchers begin with present-day behaviours or traits, assume these are adaptations, and then infer a plausible ancestral environment in which those traits would have been advantageous. The environment is tailored to the trait, not the other way around.

This reverses the usual direction of explanation.

What is presented as historical discovery is, in fact, theoretical backfilling.

2. The Elasticity of Ancestral Environments

One reason the EEA remains so attractive is its extraordinary flexibility.

Because ancestral environments are only loosely specified, they can be adjusted to accommodate almost any behavioural regularity. Aggression? Scarcity and competition. Cooperation? Kin selection and reciprocal altruism. Risk aversion? Variable resources. Risk seeking? High-reward uncertainty.

The EEA stretches to fit the story.

This elasticity gives evolutionary explanations a distinctive rhetorical power: they appear deep, naturalistic, and unavoidable. But scientifically, it signals a lack of constraint.

An explanation that can account for everything in principle explains very little in practice.

3. Post Hoc Adaptation Stories

Once the EEA is in place, adaptationist narratives follow easily. Traits are reverse‑engineered as solutions to ancestral problems, regardless of whether alternative explanations have been exhausted.

From a relational perspective, this is not explanation but retrospective sense‑making.

The story is built backward from the phenomenon, not outward from its present constitution. Historical plausibility substitutes for ontological clarity.

The question quietly shifts from:

How is this behaviour presently produced and understood?

to:

What past problem could this behaviour have solved?

The former opens inquiry. The latter closes it.

4. History Versus Intelligibility

Relational ontology draws a sharp distinction between historical condition and present intelligibility.

History may constrain what is possible. It does not, by itself, render anything intelligible.

To understand a phenomenon is not merely to trace its lineage, but to grasp how it is constituted now: in relation, in context, in meaning.

The EEA trades on a confusion between these levels. It treats historical conjecture as if it were a sufficient account of present sense‑making.

But no agent acts in an EEA.

No norm binds in an EEA.

No preference is felt in an EEA.

These are all present, relational phenomena.

5. The Closure Effect

Perhaps the most damaging feature of the EEA is not its speculative nature, but its closure effect.

Once a behaviour is assigned to an ancestral environment, further questions appear unnecessary. Social, cultural, symbolic, and institutional analyses are relegated to surface variation.

Explanation has already been delivered — in the deep past.

From a relational standpoint, this is precisely backwards. Explanation should move toward the relations that constitute a phenomenon, not retreat into conjectural history.

Conclusion: History Is Not an Answer

The problem with the EEA is not that it appeals to history, but that it treats history as if it were explanatory in itself.

Evolutionary psychology repeatedly substitutes reconstructed ancestral environments for present‑oriented analysis. In doing so, it replaces the hard work of understanding relational constitution with the comfort of origin stories.

From a relational ontology:

History constrains the space of possibility; it does not explain the actuality of meaning.

In the next post, we will turn to the most consequential consequence of this move: the attempt to explain reasons, norms, and intentions using resources that are not themselves meaningful.

Against Evolutionary Psychology: 2 Mislocated Ontology: When Constraints Are Treated as Causes

Introduction: A Subtle but Fatal Mistake

In the previous post, we saw how evolutionary psychology secures its footing by defining itself against a caricature of the blank slate. That manoeuvre clears rhetorical space for biology to enter the scene as an explanatory authority.

But the deeper problem with evolutionary psychology is not rhetorical. It is ontological.

This post identifies the core error that quietly structures almost every evolutionary-psychological explanation:

the treatment of constraints as if they were causes, and of causes as if they constituted phenomena.

From a relational perspective, this is not a minor confusion. It is a category mistake that propagates through the entire framework.

1. Constraint Is Not Constitution

All serious theories of human behaviour accept constraint. Bodies constrain what can be done. Histories constrain what is likely. Evolution constrains what is possible.

What is at issue is not whether constraints exist, but what explanatory role they are allowed to play.

Evolutionary psychology repeatedly moves from the uncontroversial claim:

human behaviour is constrained by biological history,

to the much stronger and usually unargued claim:

human behaviour is constituted by biological history.

This slide is decisive.

A constraint limits the space of possible actualisations. A constitution specifies what something is.

Confusing the two produces an explanation that feels powerful while doing remarkably little work.

2. Selection History Is Not a Phenomenon

Evolutionary explanations appeal to selection histories: traits are said to exist because they were adaptive in ancestral environments.

From a relational ontology, such histories have a very specific status. They are theoretical reconstructions, not present phenomena.

They are:

abstract,
population-level,
historically conjectural.

Crucially, they are not experienced, enacted, or meaningful in the present.

Yet evolutionary psychology regularly treats selection history as if it were an operative psychological force—something that produces intentions, preferences, or norms here and now.

This is a mistake of ontological placement.

Selection history may describe the conditions under which certain capacities became possible. It does not, by itself, explain how any present phenomenon is constituted.

3. The Non‑Phenomenality of Evolutionary Causes

From a relational standpoint, a phenomenon is not simply something that exists. It is something that exists as construed.

There is no behaviour, intention, preference, or value that exists independently of the relations in which it is actualised.

Evolutionary history fails this test.

No agent encounters:

a selection pressure,
a fitness payoff,
or an ancestral adaptive problem

as a lived or meaningful phenomenon.

These belong to explanatory theory, not to experience.

When evolutionary psychology treats such abstractions as causes of present action, it substitutes a non-phenomenal explanation for a phenomenal one.

4. Why Nothing Exists Prior to Its Relational Actualisation

Relational ontology begins from a simple but demanding commitment:

there is no phenomenon prior to its actualisation in relation.

Systems are not containers of behaviour. They are theories of possible instances.

Instantiation is not a temporal pipeline from past to present. It is a perspectival cut—an act of construal that brings a phenomenon into being as what it is.

Evolutionary psychology inverts this logic. It treats past selection as if it were already the phenomenon, waiting to be expressed.

What this misses is precisely the present:

the social relations,
the symbolic structures,
the institutional contexts

through which any behaviour becomes intelligible at all.

5. How the Error Propagates

Once constraints are mistaken for constitutive causes, several things follow automatically:

present relations are downgraded to mere triggers,
social and symbolic systems become secondary overlays,
explanation runs backward rather than outward.

Behaviour is no longer something to be understood in context, but something to be traced back to an origin story.

The result is an account that explains behaviour everywhere except where it occurs.

Conclusion: Putting Explanation Back Where It Belongs

This critique does not deny biology. It repositions it.

Biology constrains what can be actualised. It does not constitute what is actualised.

Evolutionary psychology collapses this distinction, granting historical abstraction the ontological role of present explanation.

From a relational perspective, that move is illegitimate.

Until constraint and constitution are cleanly distinguished, evolutionary explanations will continue to feel intuitively satisfying while remaining ontologically misplaced.

In the next post, we will examine the most prominent device through which this misplacement is sustained: the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness and the myth of explanatory history.

Against Evolutionary Psychology: 1 The Strawman Factory: Why Evolutionary Psychology Needs the Blank Slate

Introduction: An Argument That Refuses to Die

Few ideas in contemporary psychology are as energetically denounced as the “blank slate”. It is invoked as a grave theoretical error, a political temptation, even a moral danger. We are told—repeatedly—that humans are not infinitely malleable, that biology matters, that culture cannot write anything it pleases upon an empty mind.

And yet, something curious is going on. The blank slate is attacked with an intensity wildly disproportionate to its actual presence in contemporary theory. It is dismantled again and again, long after it has ceased to function as a serious position in psychology, anthropology, or philosophy of mind.

This post asks a simple question:

Why does evolutionary psychology need the blank slate so badly?

The answer is not empirical. It is ontological.

1. The Blank Slate That Nobody Holds

In its classical form, the blank slate is a seventeenth‑century metaphor. Whatever its historical merits, it is not the position of modern social science. Few, if any, contemporary theorists believe that humans are born without constraints, tendencies, or capacities.

Yet in evolutionary psychology—and in popular defences of it—the blank slate persists as a foil. It is routinely characterised as the belief that:

all behaviour is socially constructed,
culture can shape humans without limit,
biology is irrelevant to psychology.

This caricature performs important rhetorical work. It creates a stark opposition:

Either the mind is blank, or biology must explain behaviour.

Once framed this way, evolutionary psychology appears not as one theory among others, but as the only scientifically respectable alternative.

The first thing to notice, then, is that the blank slate functions less as a theory and more as a stabilising contrast.

2. From “Not Blank” to “Biologically Written”

Steven Pinker’s arguments against the blank slate are, in themselves, largely uncontroversial. Humans are not infinitely plastic. Development is constrained. History matters.

The problem arises in what follows.

Pinker’s critique quietly slides from:

the rejection of infinite malleability,

into:

the assumption that whatever structure exists must be biologically evolved and internally specified.

This slide is rarely argued for. It is treated as obvious.

But ontologically, it is anything but.

To reject the blank slate is not to endorse evolutionary psychology. It is merely to acknowledge constraint. And constraint alone explains nothing.

3. The Missing Middle: Relation

What disappears in the blank‑slate versus EP framing is the possibility that structure is neither absent nor pre‑written, but relationally constituted.

From a relational ontology:

systems are theories of possible instances,
instantiation is a perspectival cut,
phenomena do not exist prior to their construal.

On this view, human capacities are not inscriptions waiting to be read, nor absences waiting to be filled. They are potentials actualised in relation.

The blank slate denies constraint.

Evolutionary psychology denies relation.

They are mirror‑image errors.

4. Why Evolutionary Psychology Needs the Strawman

Evolutionary psychology requires the blank slate for three reasons.

a) To License Biology as Constitution

By positioning the blank slate as the only alternative, EP is able to treat biological history not as a constraint on meaning, but as its source.

Selection pressures are quietly promoted from background condition to explanatory primitive.

b) To Over‑Close Explanation

Once a behaviour is labelled an adaptation, inquiry stops. The question of how that behaviour is presently constituted—socially, symbolically, institutionally—drops out of view.

The blank slate makes this closure feel responsible rather than premature.

c) To Stabilise Ontology Without Arguing for It

The stark contrast allows EP to inherit ontological authority by default. No alternative needs to be articulated, because the only alternative on offer has already been discredited.

5. Boundary‑Policing Disguised as Science

The persistence of the blank slate tells us something important: the argument is not primarily about evidence. It is about containing a perceived threat.

That threat is not error, but excess:

excessive social engineering,
excessive plasticity,
excessive responsibility placed on institutions rather than individuals.

The blank slate names that anxiety. Evolutionary psychology calms it.

Conclusion: Clearing the Ground

This series does not defend the blank slate. It rejects it.

But it rejects it for a different reason.

The blank slate fails because it misunderstands constraint.

Evolutionary psychology fails because it misunderstands constitution.

Both errors arise from the same mistake: treating relation as secondary.

Until that mistake is corrected, the blank slate will keep returning—not because it is true, but because evolutionary psychology needs something to push against.

In the next post, we will turn to the core ontological error itself: what happens when constraints are mistaken for causes.

Readiness and the Shape of Relation: Coda: Over-Closure, Readiness, and the Relational Lens

One Lens Across Domains

Across the explorations of mathematical metaphysics, Cartesian dualism, semiotic systems, and complex systems, a recurring structural pattern emerges:

Inclination persists while ability collapses
- In mathematics: formal coherence drives divergence where horizon (readiness) is exhausted.
- In physics: singularities appear when the formal system demands continuation beyond relational room.
- In language and cognition: grammatical or conceptual tendencies outpace the capacity for interpretation.
- In social and ecological systems: rigid institutions or brittle infrastructures maintain patterns after relational capacity is lost.
Over-closure masquerades as mystery or necessity
- Infinity, collapse, hard problems, and phase transitions are epistemic signals, not ontological absolutes.
Mislocated ontology compounds the problem
- Problems are attributed to systems, substances, or forms rather than to exhausted horizons or collapsed readiness.

Readiness as the Unifying Concept

Foregrounding readiness — the horizon-sensitive relational capacity for further actualisation — allows us to:

Diagnose over-closure systematically.
Distinguish inclination (encoded tendencies) from ability (capacity for actualisation).
Understand breakdowns not as metaphysical crises, but as structural phenomena.

Across all domains, readiness turns what once appeared mysterious into accountable, horizon-aware insight.

Relation Restored

Relational ontology reframes:

Mathematics as construal, not being.
Dualism as exile of relational capacity rather than fundamental separation.
Semiotic systems as fragile, readiness-sensitive practices.
Complex systems as adaptive, horizon-limited networks rather than mystical emergent regimes.

In each case, relation is ontologically primary, and the pathologies of over-closure vanish when we track readiness and manage horizons responsibly.

Toward a Unified Practice

The three arcs together suggest a disciplined approach to modelling, thinking, and acting:

Always check readiness — don’t assume potential will suffice.
Monitor horizon exhaustion — treat limits as epistemic signals, not metaphysical failures.
Shift construals when necessary — preserve differentiability and relational room.
Use relational diagnosis across domains — physics, mathematics, semiotics, cognition, complex systems, ethics, AI, and culture all benefit.

Forward Gesture

Relational thinking offers a meta-practice:

It preserves generativity without metaphysical imposition.
It restores coherence where over-closure once reigned.
It guides responsible modelling, interpretation, and intervention across all structured systems.

In short: wherever systems have horizons, inclination, and ability, relational ontology provides a transparent, accountable, and unifying lens.

The journey from mathematics to dualism, from semiotics to complex systems, converges here: relation, readiness, and horizon-awareness are the keys to understanding, modelling, and acting responsibly in any domain.

Readiness and the Shape of Relation: 7 Forward Gesture: Relational Futures

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

Models and algorithms can be designed to monitor readiness explicitly.
Horizon awareness prevents overfitting, spurious extrapolation, and brittle behaviour.
Relational constraints guide adaptive learning: AI maintains flexibility without enforcing dogmatic inference.

Ethics and Decision-Making

Ethical systems are reframed as horizon-aware practices, balancing inclination (norms, tendencies) with ability (capacity to act relationally).
Relational ontology avoids absolutist moral prescriptions by foregrounding actualisable possibilities and the relational room for future choices.

Cultural Theory and Semiotics

Cultural practices and language emerge through construals within relational horizons.
Readiness-sensitive analysis illuminates how traditions, symbols, and narratives preserve or collapse relational potential.
Over-closure explains dogma, ideological rigidity, and systemic miscommunication.

Science and Complex Systems

Models track relational capacity explicitly, diagnosing horizon exhaustion rather than postulating unseen forces.
Criticality, resilience, and adaptation are understood as readiness phenomena, not ontological absolutes.
Innovation is guided by horizon-aware stewardship, not formalist compulsion.

The Payoff

Relational ontology:

Preserves generativity: Systems remain capable of new construals.
Prevents metaphysical smuggling: Models and theories remain accountable and transparent.
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.