The previous post argued that scientific systems cannot close without ceasing to function as systems of possibility. Their openness is not an imperfection, but a structural necessity.
This post takes the next step.
If scientific systems cannot close, then science cannot be understood merely as operating within a fixed space of possibility. It must be understood as something that changes that space itself.
Beyond discovery
Science is often described as discovering what was already there.
New entities are found. New laws are uncovered. New facts are added to an expanding stock of knowledge.
This picture treats possibility as static. The world contains what it contains; science merely brings more of it to light.
But this picture cannot account for one of the most striking features of scientific change: that entire classes of questions, distinctions, and explanations come into existence only after certain scientific developments occur.
Science does not merely answer questions.
It makes new questions thinkable.
When questions become possible
Consider what it means for a question to be thinkable at all.
A question presupposes:
a way of individuating phenomena,
a field of relevant distinctions,
a sense of what would count as an answer,
and a background of constraints that render the question non-arbitrary.
Before those conditions are in place, a question is not unanswered.
It is unaskable.
Scientific change often consists precisely in the creation of these conditions.
Conceptual shifts as ontological shifts
When science introduces new concepts, it is tempting to treat them as improved descriptions of the same underlying reality.
But many scientific concepts do something stronger. They reorganise the space of possibility.
They establish new ways of carving systems:
new forms of individuation,
new kinds of regularity,
new relations that matter.
Once such concepts are in play, phenomena can appear that could not previously have appeared — not because the world has changed, but because the conditions of appearance have.
Scientific revolutions are therefore not merely epistemic events. They are ontological reconfigurations.
Possibility is not a backdrop
On a representational picture, possibility is treated as a neutral backdrop: a fixed set of ways the world could be, waiting to be correctly mapped.
From within a relational ontology, this picture collapses.
Possibility is not given in advance. It is structured.
And that structure can change.
Scientific practice — through systems, experiments, models, and laws — participates in this structuring. It does not merely explore possibility; it reshapes it.
Why this is not relativism
To say that science changes what can be thought is often taken to imply that reality itself is unstable, or that truth is merely a matter of perspective.
Neither follows.
What changes is not reality, but the space of actualisable relations through which reality can be meaningfully engaged.
Scientific constraints are not arbitrary. They are hard-won, disciplined, and resistant to wishful thinking. They bind as much as they enable.
That is precisely why their reconfiguration matters.
Knowledge as transformation
If science changes the space of possibility, then knowledge cannot be understood as simple accumulation.
Scientific change is not primarily a matter of adding more true statements to a growing archive.
It is a matter of transforming the conditions under which statements can mean at all.
Some distinctions disappear. Others become central. New forms of explanation become possible. Old ones lose their grip.
This is not progress toward a final picture.
It is the ongoing reorganisation of what can count as a picture.
The hinge
At this point, the cumulative argument of the series forces a reorientation.
If science:
is not primarily representational,
does not begin with objects,
cannot close its systems,
and actively reshapes possibility,
then science must be understood as a practice that participates in the evolution of possibility itself.
The next post names this directly.
It asks what it means for possibility to evolve — and how science functions within that evolution.
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