This brief FAQ is not an attempt to settle debates, but to head off predictable misreadings. Most of the resistance this work encounters is not disagreement so much as category error. The questions below are the ones that reliably arise at that fault line.
“So are you saying nothing is real?”
No. What is being rejected is not reality, but a thing-based picture of reality.
On this view, phenomena are fully real — but they are actualisations of relational potential, not manifestations of self-subsisting objects with intrinsic properties. Reality is not diminished by losing objects; it is re-described in terms better matched to how meaning and physics actually behave.
“Is this just anti‑realism in disguise?”
No — and this is a crucial distinction.
Anti‑realism typically treats reality as dependent on representation, belief, or language. What is proposed here is stronger and stranger: construal is constitutive, not representational. Phenomena are not mental projections onto a neutral substrate; they are perspectivally actualised cuts from structured potential.
This is not the denial of reality, but the rejection of representational mediation as its foundation.
“If everything is perspectival, isn’t it all relative?”
Only if one assumes that perspectival means arbitrary.
Perspectival actualisation is constrained — by relational structure, by systemic potential, by invariances across perspectives. Relativity theory already shows that perspectival dependence does not imply epistemic collapse. What changes is what counts as invariant.
“Where is the observer in all this?”
There is no privileged observer standing outside the system.
Observers are themselves phenomena within relational fields, participating in actualisation rather than overseeing it. This removes a great deal of philosophical anxiety, at the cost of abandoning the fantasy of a view from nowhere.
“Isn’t this just philosophy imported into physics (or linguistics)?”
No. The direction of travel is the reverse.
The ontology emerged from taking the internal commitments of existing theories seriously — especially systemic functional linguistics, quantum mechanics, and relativity — and asking what picture of reality must already be in place for those theories to make sense as they stand.
“So what do we gain by this shift?”
Primarily, traction.
Problems that appear intractable within thing‑based ontologies — time, consciousness, selfhood, free will — stop presenting as mysteries in need of metaphysical rescue, and start presenting as artefacts of misplaced questions.
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