As the series closes, it is worth noting a historical and cultural resonance: the work of James Burke, particularly his television series The Day the Universe Changed, shares a deep, intuitive kinship with the perspective advanced here.
Burke’s insight
Burke’s series did not merely recount discoveries or inventions. It showed how knowledge, technology, and culture mutually reconfigure each other. A single scientific insight could ripple outward, changing the questions people asked, the tools they used, and the ways they understood the world.
He illuminated science as relational, transformative, and contingent — a web of effects rather than a linear march toward truth.
Echoes in relational ontology
Science After Representation formalises these intuitions in a relational ontology:
Objects are perspectival actualisations, not primitives.
Experiments are cuts that stabilise regions of possibility.
Systems cannot close, so possibility continually evolves.
Science produces operational myths that orient communities without relying on representational fidelity.
Burke anticipated the shape of this argument. Where his narrative dazzled, the series systematises.
From intuition to formalisation
Burke’s work helps us recognise that the phenomena of science are inseparable from the patterns they produce in human thought, society, and perception. Science After Representation takes that observation and renders it philosophically precise:
what Burke presents as narrative transformation, the series frames as relational instantiation,
what Burke illustrates as changing contexts, the series describes as evolving possibility,
what Burke dramatises as the unexpected consequences of knowledge, the series formalises as ontology-in-practice.
The final Burke demonstration
Interestingly, Burke concluded his series by showing explicitly that science itself is a cut: contrasting it with Buddhism as another cut, and with the very different possibilities that enabled witch trials. This aligns perfectly with the relational ontology: each framework stabilises its own structured space of possibility, producing phenomena and orientation specific to its cut.
This insight anticipates many of the points developed systematically in this series.
The value of resonance
Acknowledging Burke is not about reducing the series to his work. It is about recognising that some intuitions about science’s relational power pre-existed formal articulation.
The series stands on its own theoretical legs, but Burke’s vision reminds us that intuition, storytelling, and philosophical formalisation are not opposed — they can co-inspire, one making visible what the other renders precise.
A final thought
In this light, Science After Representation can be read both as a philosophical intervention and as part of a broader cultural project: understanding science not as a mirror, but as a practice that transforms the space of what can be thought, acted upon, and experienced. Burke showed the power of this perspective narratively; the series formalises it, systematically, for readers willing to follow the cuts, the systems, and the evolution of possibility itself.
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