Potential has been one of the most carefully explored, refined, and at times contested notions within our work. Its history is not linear; it is a series of perspectival moves, each clarifying what potential is — and is not — within the relational ontology.
From Readiness to Relational Structure
Early explorations treated potential as a form of readiness, a way of capturing what a system or phenomenon was “prepared” to do. In this framing, readiness had two aspects: inclination, the tendency to instantiate along certain pathways, and ability, the competence or structural capacity to realise particular instances. This view was appealing for its immediacy: it captured the intuition that not all possibilities are equal. Some were easier, more open, more poised to appear.
Yet readiness carried hidden metaphors of time and causality: it suggested that potential waits, that it can be triggered, or that it “sits inside” a system waiting to become actual. Over time, it became clear that these images were misleading. Potential could not be conceived as something stored, latent, or mechanistic without distorting the relational principles of the ontology.
Potential as Structured Possibility
The next step reframed potential as a space of constrained possibilities, shedding temporal and dispositional connotations. Potential was no longer something to be “activated” but a structured set of possibilities articulated by a system. This move highlighted that potential is formal and relational: it exists only insofar as the system specifies what counts as intelligible instances.
Still, treating this space metaphorically as something “there” to move through or occupy risked ontological inflation. Potential must not be seen as prior to the system; it is, in fact, the system understood as a theory of instances.
The System-as-Theory Cut
By articulating potential as system, the ontology resolved several ambiguities. A system is not a container of potential; it is potential, in the sense that to specify the system is to specify what can possibly occur. Instances are contingent events that satisfy the system’s constraints, but they are not “members” of the system. This view preserves novelty: the system generates potential without fixing every outcome.
Perspective: Potential vs. Instance
The decisive refinement came with the perspectival cut. Potential and instance are not stages in a process, nor are they temporally ordered. They are poles of description. From one cut, the system is apprehended as potential; from another, the same phenomena are apprehended as instances. There is no “movement” from potential to actualisation. By framing the distinction perspectivally, the ontology avoids the illusion of becoming while maintaining explanatory power.
Sub-potentials and Local Constraints
Within systems, it is often necessary to articulate sub-potentials: restricted sets of possibilities that describe local regularities without creating new ontological layers. Sub-potentials make patterned variation intelligible. They allow us to talk about constrained regions of possibility while remaining entirely consistent with the relational and perspectival nature of potential.
Horizon: The Edge of Possibility
The notion of the horizon provides a way to articulate forward-facing potential: the boundary of what is possible as experienced under a particular cut. Horizons are relational: they shift as actualisations occur and construals change. They allow us to speak of novelty, emergence, and creativity without slipping back into readiness or latent content. Horizons operationalise potential’s openness at its edge, not the system as a whole.
Evolution of Potential
Finally, potential itself can evolve historically. Its shape is conditioned by prior actualisations, stabilisations, and collapses. This strand treats potential as dynamic and context-sensitive, yet non-teleological. The evolution of potential underpins the development of new systems of possibility and supports non-progressive histories of symbolic and semiotic change. Importantly, this is still fully relational: evolution does not imply inherent goals or drives, only patterns of differentiation and emergence.
Explicitly Rejected Conceptions
Alongside these refinements, several approaches were consciously abandoned:
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Potential as causal power or force.
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Potential as latent content waiting to be triggered.
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Potential as value-laden (biological, social, institutional).
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Potential as pre-meaning substrate.
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Potential as a probability distribution.
Each of these was rejected because they would violate the relational, perspectival, or non-representational commitments of the ontology.
Deep Continuity
Across all cuts, the core insight remains: potential is structured, relational, and perspectival. It is intelligible only under a cut; it is realised through instances, but not dependent on them in any mechanistic sense. It can be nested, edged, and historically reshaped, but it is never a latent substance, an internal readiness, or a repository of pre-formed meanings.
From readiness to horizon to evolutionary shaping, potential has been clarified, constrained, and liberated — giving the ontology both stability and generativity.
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