Over the course of the recent work, the relational ontology has passed through a phase of intensive exploration. Concepts were forced into contact, distinctions were stressed, and several inherited pictures of meaning were deliberately dismantled. What emerges on the other side is not a provisional sketch awaiting further defence, but a stable orientation: a way of cutting the world that now holds.
This piece is therefore not an argument, a summary, or an invitation to debate familiar positions once more. It is a manifesto in the literal sense: a making‑public of where the work now stands, what it commits to, what it excludes, and what questions remain genuinely open.
No domain theory is presupposed here. Nothing that follows depends on language, culture, cognition, or social organisation in particular. The claims are ontological in scope.
1. Commitments
The relational ontology now proceeds from the following commitments. They are not conclusions still awaiting justification; they are the ground from which further work begins.
1.1 System as theory of possible instances
A system is a structured specification of what could count as an instance. It is not an inventory, container, or aggregate of elements. To describe a system is to articulate a theory: a space of constrained possibilities.
Instances are not members of a system. They are events that satisfy, locally and contingently, the conditions the system specifies. A system is therefore productive rather than merely classificatory, and novelty is always possible within it.
1.2 Instantiation as perspectival cut
Instantiation is not a temporal or causal process by which potential becomes actual. It is a perspectival cut through a system.
From one orientation, a system is apprehended as structured potential. From another, an event is apprehended as an instance of that system. Nothing moves from one state to the other. Potential and instance are co‑present descriptions under different cuts.
1.3 Construal as constitutive
There is no unconstrued phenomenon.
What counts as a phenomenon is already the outcome of construal: a first‑order meaning locally actualised under a particular cut. Meaning does not represent a more basic reality, nor is it layered on top of one. Phenomena are the basic units of intelligibility.
1.4 Meaning as relational, not representational
Meaning does not stand between subject and world as a mediating copy. It is not transmitted, stored, or mirrored. Meaning is the relational actualisation of possibility under constraint.
This commitment rejects both naïve realism and correlationalism without replacing them with idealism. Constraint remains real, but it operates within meaning‑making rather than prior to it.
1.5 Distinction between meaning and value
Meaning is semiotic. Value is coordinative.
Biological, social, and institutional systems of value condition construal by shaping attention, reward, and stability. They do not constitute meaning itself. Meaning remains symbolic and relational, not reducible to utility, power, or adaptation.
2. Exclusions
These commitments draw clear exclusion lines. The ontology does not attempt to accommodate the following pictures, nor to arbitrate within them.
2.1 No representational pipeline
There is no pipeline from world to meaning, no sequence in which reality is first given and then represented. Any account that presupposes such a pipeline has already left the terrain of this ontology.
2.2 No instantiation as mechanism
Instantiation is not a mechanism, transition, or causal operation. Questions about how potential “turns into” actuality do not arise here, because they presuppose a picture already abandoned.
2.3 No unconstrued meaning
There is no meaning prior to construal and no appeal to meanings that exist independently of their local actualisation. Error, disagreement, and distortion are all intelligible without invoking a hidden store of true meanings.
2.4 No collapse of meaning into value
Normativity, power, coordination, and evaluation are not semantic primitives. They may shape meaning, but they are not meaning. Any account that treats social or biological value systems as constitutive of meaning is excluded.
3. What is now stable
Several questions that once demanded repeated clarification no longer do so, because the commitments above have rendered them non‑problematic.
The relation between system and instance is no longer mysterious once instantiation is understood as a cut rather than a process.
The status of phenomena is no longer contested once construal is treated as constitutive.
The threat of relativism dissipates once constraint is located within relational actualisation rather than outside meaning altogether.
These points are not resolved by clever argument but by a shift in ontological orientation. The work here is done.
4. Questions that are no longer live
Some questions fall away entirely, not because they were answered decisively, but because they presuppose a picture that no longer holds.
How does meaning get from one mind to another?
Where exactly does potential become actual?
What level of reality do meanings really belong to?
Are meanings objective or subjective?
Within the present ontology, these are misframed questions. Continuing to debate them would require re‑entering commitments that have been explicitly set aside.
5. What remains genuinely open
Stability does not imply closure. What remains open are not the foundations, but the consequences.
Among the live questions are:
How do systems of possibility evolve over time without teleology?
How do new cuts stabilise, proliferate, or collapse?
How should dialogue be understood as a site of co‑individuation rather than exchange?
How can histories of meaning be told without recourse to progress narratives?
These questions concern the dynamics of possibility, not the nature of meaning itself. They mark the next phase of the work.
6. Closing
This manifesto is not an endpoint. It is a declaration of ground.
From here on, the task is no longer to secure the ontology, but to see what it makes thinkable. Some extensions will succeed, others will fail. What will not change are the commitments stated above. They are the cuts on which the work now stands.
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