“What feels obvious is not therefore coherent.”
Everyday realism is rarely argued for.
It is presupposed.
The world exists independently of us. Objects possess their properties regardless of observation. Meaning attaches to what is already there. Truth consists in matching description to an independent reality.
This stance functions. It stabilises action. It coordinates expectation.
But when examined philosophically, it does not merely show strain.
It becomes internally unstable.
What follows is not a refutation. It is an exposure of structural necessity.
I. The Impossibility of the Unconstrued
Everyday realism depends upon the notion of a world wholly independent of relation.
Yet this notion cannot be articulated without entering relation.
To speak of “the world as it is in itself” is already to construe it as such. The claim is meaningful only within discourse, only within a structured field of articulation.
One may insist that reality exists beyond construal.
But the moment this insistence takes form, it becomes part of construal.
The “unconstrued” cannot be specified without ceasing to be unconstrued.
This is not a rhetorical difficulty.
It is a logical one.
The concept of a wholly relation-free phenomenon is unusable in practice and incoherent in theory.
II. The Collapse of Projection
Everyday realism treats meaning as secondary — projected onto a neutral substrate.
But projection cannot explain stability.
If meaning were merely added, there would be no principled constraint on articulation. Any interpretation would be as viable as any other.
Yet meaning exhibits patterned regularity. Articulations are structured, constrained, and systemically organised.
To account for this, realism must appeal to underlying systems — linguistic, biological, social — that shape possible construal.
But once such structured potential is acknowledged, meaning is no longer an optional overlay.
It is constitutive of how phenomena appear at all.
Projection collapses into relation.
III. The Necessity of Structured Potential
Everyday realism presumes a fully determinate world.
Novelty, on this account, is either discovery or correction.
Yet genuine articulation produces distinctions that were not previously operative. New categories, new forms of coordination, new modes of life emerge.
To explain this, realism must posit unrealised possibilities — potentials not yet actualised.
But a fully determinate ontology has no room for structured potential.
Either everything is fixed, or possibility is real.
If possibility is real, the world is not a static inventory of objects but a structured field of potential actualisations.
And that is already a relational account.
IV. The Irreducibility of Perspective
Everyday realism treats perspective as distortion layered over objectivity.
But perspective does not merely distort.
It organises.
Different standpoints generate systematically different articulations of the world. These are not random deviations but coherent configurations.
If perspective were merely error, convergence would eliminate difference.
Instead, difference persists because relation persists.
The world does not appear from nowhere.
It appears from somewhere.
And that “somewhere” is not accidental. It is structural.
What Follows
Under scrutiny, everyday realism repeatedly reintroduces what it officially excludes:
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relation,
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construal,
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structured potential,
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perspective.
It requires them to function.
But if relation is required at every decisive point, then independence is no longer fundamental.
Relation is.
This is not a rejection of reality.
It is a clarification of its conditions.
Everyday realism is not defeated by relational ontology.
It is subsumed by it.
It is what relational ontology looks like when its own conditions are left unexamined.
Aphorism:“Independence is imagined; relation is unavoidable.”
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