The short answer is that this way of seeing did not begin as philosophy at all. It emerged from a sustained attempt to take systemic functional linguistics (SFL) seriously — and then to apply its core commitments well outside their usual domain.
What follows is not a technical derivation, but a sketch of how an ontological shift gradually became unavoidable.
From Things to Processes
One of SFL’s most distinctive commitments is its treatment of meaning. In transitivity theory, the basic unit is not the thing (the noun), but the figure: a configuration of processes, participants, and their relations in sequences (clause complexes). Participants are not substances with properties; they are roles within unfolding processes.
This has quiet but profound consequences. If meaning is construed through processes, then “things” are no longer ontological primitives. They are stabilisations — patterns that persist across relational activity.
Taken seriously, this already unsettles most common-sense metaphysics. But the real pressure emerged when this process-first view was applied beyond language.
Relativity and the Collapse of Things
When this transitivity-based lens is brought to relativity theory, a familiar discomfort sharpens into something decisive.
Relativity does not permit a privileged frame from which “the thing itself” can be identified independently of relations. Events, durations, and spatial configurations all vary with perspective. What remains invariant are not objects as such, but relations between processes across frames.
At this point, the foundational unit quietly shifts: not things, not even processes, but relations themselves.
From Actuality to Potential
A second, independent pressure came from another SFL concept: instantiation.
In SFL, a system is not a thing in the world; it is a theory of possible instances. An instance is not caused by the system in time — it is a perspectival cut from structured potential. The system and the instance are complementary views, not sequential stages.
When this idea is brought to quantum mechanics, the resonance is unmistakable. The wavefunction behaves not like a hidden object, but like a structured space of possibilities. Measurement does not reveal a pre-existing property; it actualises one instance among many potentials.
This makes it difficult to maintain the idea that reality is exhausted by what is actual. Actuality appears instead as one side of a deeper complementarity: potential and actual, neither reducible to the other.
Integration: Relations and Potential Together
What matters is that these two paths — transitivity/relativity and instantiation/quantum mechanics — converged independently, yet pointed to the same conclusion.
Taken together, they yield a very different ontological picture:
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Relations are foundational, not derivative.
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“Things” are stabilised patterns within relational dynamics.
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Actuality is perspectival, not exhaustive.
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Potential is not vague possibility, but structured — a theory of instances.
Reality, on this view, is not a collection of objects waiting to be represented, but relationally structured potential, perspectivally actualised as phenomena.
Why This Matters
Seen from here, many persistent philosophical problems take on a different character. Questions about whether time, consciousness, the self, or free will “really exist” turn out not to be deep mysteries awaiting answers, but artefacts of trying to force a thing-based, representational ontology onto phenomena that are neither thing-like nor representationally structured.
The aim is not to replace one metaphysics with another, but to show how a different starting point — one grounded in how meaning and physics actually behave — changes what can sensibly be asked at all.
That, in the end, is what the Bad Questions series was diagnosing.
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