Complementarity is often treated as a peculiarity of modern physics.
Through the work of Niels Bohr, the term came to designate the apparently paradoxical relation between wave and particle descriptions in quantum mechanics. Two accounts, each empirically warranted, could not be simultaneously actualised within a single experimental arrangement. The phenomenon seemed to demand mutually exclusive perspectives.
It was radical.
But it was also contained — quarantined within the strange micro-world of quantum events.
What if that containment was misplaced?
1. The Misleading Aura of Exoticism
Quantum complementarity appears extraordinary because it disrupts classical expectations:
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A thing cannot be both wave and particle.
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Observation affects what is observed.
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Description depends on experimental arrangement.
These features are treated as counterintuitive exceptions to the normal order of things.
But the deeper structure is not exotic at all.
What quantum theory exposes is that:
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The form of what is actualised depends on the conditions of construal.
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No single description exhausts the structured potential of the phenomenon.
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Perspectives are mutually constraining without being mutually reducible.
This is not a microphysical anomaly.
It is a general feature of structured potential actualised under constraint.
2. From Incompatibility to Directionality
The usual reading of complementarity emphasises incompatibility: two descriptions that cannot be jointly actualised.
But incompatibility is not the heart of the matter.
The heart of the matter is directionality.
Every act of construal positions itself relative to a structured field of potential. From that position, certain actualisations become available and others recede. Shift the position, and the pattern of availability shifts.
This is precisely what the cline of instantiation formalises:
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From one direction, a construal functions as instance.
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From another, it functions as structured constraint.
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No position escapes dual legibility.
Complementarity is not the coexistence of contradictions.
It is the inevitability of perspectival constraint.
3. Complementarity in Ordinary Theory
Once freed from quantum metaphor, complementarity becomes visible everywhere.
In linguistics:
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A pattern abstracted from recurrent events functions as theory of further events.
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The same pattern, viewed from a broader system, functions as instance of that system.
In science:
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A “law” is sedimented recurrence.
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The same law becomes data within a higher-order theoretical framework.
In mathematics:
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An axiom is treated as foundational constraint.
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The same axiom is historically the outcome of prior generalisation.
In each case, what appears as metalevel from one direction appears as instance from another.
There is no absolute plateau.
There is only repositioning along a structured gradient.
4. The Illusion of the Exceptional Case
Quantum theory startled philosophy because it appeared to violate classical realism. But the shock may have arisen not from physics itself, but from an inherited assumption: that complementarity is abnormal.
If complementarity is instead universal, then quantum mechanics is not an exception to common sense.
It is a highly explicit manifestation of the same structural condition that governs all construal.
The micro-world did not introduce complementarity.
It exposed it.
5. The Reconstruction of “Metalevel”
This wider view reconstrues what is meant by a metalevel.
A metalevel is not an ontologically superior domain.
It is the same relational field viewed from the pole of potential.
When a description is treated as explanatory, it has simply been positioned directionally. When it is treated as data, the direction has shifted.
No construal is immune from repositioning.
The metalevel is reversible.
6. The Deeper Claim
Complementarity is not:
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A quirk of physics.
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A symptom of epistemic limitation.
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A failure of classical logic.
It is the structural condition of any theory that construes structured potential actualised as event.
Wave/particle is one expression of it.
Data/theory is another.
Instance/system is another.
Event/law is another.
The same relational grammar repeats across domains.
If complementarity is universal, then the project of theory changes character. The aim can no longer be to escape complementarity by discovering the ultimate level of description. The aim becomes to understand how construal positions itself along structured potential — and what becomes visible from each direction.
In the next post, we turn directly to the opposition that most stubbornly resists this reconstrual: data and theory.
If complementarity is structural, then “data” has never been theory-free.
And theory has never been more than patterned actualisation viewed from another direction.
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