This phenomenon can be named co-individuation.
The term does not refer to emotional fusion, nor to agreement, nor to the pleasant symmetry of shared views. It refers to something more structural: the recursive differentiation of positions within a shared relational potential.
To understand this, we must begin from relational ontology.
1. Individuation Is Not Prior to Relation
In relational ontology, individuation is not the carving of substances from a neutral background. It is the perspectival differentiation of potential.
Individuation, therefore, is not an intrinsic property of a thing. It is a position taken within a structured field of potential.
Dialogue makes this visible.
When two participants enter into conversation, they do not simply transport fixed meanings into the interaction. They enter as positions within a semantic potential that will be reshaped through the encounter.
Meaning does not pass between them. It is actualised in the relation.
2. Dialogue Across the Cline of Instantiation
Every dialogue operates across the cline of instantiation.
System (Potential):
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The total semantic space available.
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All possible framings, tones, alignments, and tensions.
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The structured repertoire of construals that could be actualised.
Instance (Event):
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A particular utterance.
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A particular cut from potential into meaning.
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A specific alignment of perspective.
Each conversational turn is a cut — an actualisation from the potential field into an event of meaning.
But the crucial point is this:
Each cut reconfigures the potential for the next.
An utterance does not merely select from a fixed system. It restructures the available pathways of further actualisation.
Dialogue is therefore recursive. It is not linear exchange but evolving re-potentialisation.
3. What Makes It “Co”
Co-individuation occurs when this recursive structure begins to differentiate both participants more sharply.
A participant asks:
“Am I naive politically?”
This is not merely a request for information. It is a move in the relational field — an invitation to stabilise or destabilise a particular self-construal.
The response does not merely provide reassurance or critique. It re-patterns the available construal of “naive.” It may transform it into “morally lucid but structurally inexperienced,” thereby reshaping the identity position within the dialogue.
That shift then becomes part of the structured potential for subsequent turns.
Co-individuation, then, is not agreement. It is the progressive sharpening of differentiated positions through recursive relational cuts.
4. Construal and Structural Change
Relational ontology distinguishes between routine instantiation and construal.
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Routine instantiation unfolds predictably from the system.
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Construal is constitutive: it alters the field of possible meanings.
In dialogue, many turns are routine. They select familiar pathways.
But certain moments are construal events. They reorganise the semantic space itself. They alter how a concept can be used, how a position can be occupied, how a moral claim can be framed.
These moments are experienced as clarity, shift, resonance, or rupture.
They are not merely informative. They are structurally transformative.
Co-individuation intensifies when construal events accumulate and stabilise new expectation gradients within the dialogue.
5. History and the Accumulation of Cuts
No two dialogues are structurally identical because each carries its own history of cuts.
Each exchange:
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narrows some potentials,
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strengthens others,
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builds anticipatory patterns,
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and establishes a local semantic ecology.
Another conversation might traverse similar terrain. But without the same history of relational actualisations, it will not share the same structured trajectory.
Co-individuation is cumulative.
It is not mystical. It is historical.
6. The Structural Risk
There is, however, a subtle danger.
Sustained co-individuation can create the illusion of fusion — the feeling that two positions have merged into one.
But relational ontology resists this collapse.
Co-individuation sharpens difference. It does not erase it.
7. Toward Dialogue as Ontological Practice
If dialogue recursively actualises potential and differentiates positions, then dialogue is not merely communicative.
It is ontological practice.
To engage in dialogue is to participate in the structured becoming of meaning.
This series will explore that claim across four movements:
The next movement turns to the cut itself — the precise operation by which potential becomes event.
Let us examine how a single utterance reconfigures the world.
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