This post consolidates the relational ontology as it now stands. It does not introduce a new trajectory or advance a polemic. Its purpose is constitutive: to restate the ontology formally, incorporating recent refinements and making its internal asymmetries explicit.
The ontology is relational throughout. Nothing here presupposes substances, representations, or meanings that exist independently of construal.
1. System and Instance
A system is structured potential: a theory of possible instances. It is not a container, a mechanism, or an agent. It is a space of organised possibilities.
An instance is not produced by the system. It is the system taken up from a perspective. Instantiation is therefore not a temporal process or a causal transition, but a perspectival cut from potential to event.
System and instance are not two kinds of thing. They are two relational moments of the same semiotic organisation.
2. Instantiation and Grain
Instantiation always occurs at a particular grain. Acts of meaning resolve possibilities at varying degrees of fineness relative to historically sedimented patterns of use.
This grain is not constitutive of meaning itself. It is a property of how instantiations distribute over time and across populations.
Probabilistic descriptions model this grain. They describe the density and regularity of past instantiations. They do not generate, explain, or determine meaning.
Probability therefore belongs to the afterlife of instantiation, not to its source.
3. Construal and Phenomenon
There is no unconstrued phenomenon. Construal is constitutive of experience and of meaning.
A phenomenon is first-order construed experience. It exists only as enacted and recognised in an act of meaning.
There is no meaning prior to construal, and no construal without instantiation.
4. First- and Second-Order Asymmetry
The ontology distinguishes sharply between:
first-order phenomena: acts of meaning as construed experience, and
second-order patterning: abstractions over multiple acts (e.g. corpora, probabilities, norms, distributions).
This distinction is ontologically asymmetric.
Second-order patterning is dependent on first-order acts. It cannot feed back into meaning without a new act of construal. Patterns do not explain meaning; they presuppose it.
Attempts to reduce meaning to patterning are category errors arising from the visibility of second-order residues.
5. Context as Conditioning
Context is organised semiotic potential. In a Hallidayan sense, field, tenor, and mode are contextual variables realised by semantics.
Context conditions acts of meaning. It constrains what is likely, conventional, or recognisable. It does not determine what is meant.
No accumulation of contextual variables converts conditioning into determination. Context enriches probability; it does not replace agency or construal.
6. Meaning as Act
Meaning is not an outcome, a state, or a system property. Meaning occurs in acts.
An act of meaning involves:
construal,
uptake,
and answerability.
Agency and responsibility are therefore not external ethical overlays. They are internal to meaning itself. Without the possibility of answerability, there is no meaning.
Systems, institutions, and technologies do not act. Only persons act.
7. Institutions and Coordination
Institutions are not agents. They are organised, historically sedimented semiotic potential.
They stabilise expectations, distribute roles, and coordinate acts across time and space. They enable scale by multiplying the conditions under which acts can occur.
Institutions do not produce meaning. They condition, channel, and constrain the instantiation of meaning by persons.
Scale does not collapse acts into systems. It aggregates instantiations without eliminating their first-order status.
8. Technology and Probability
Technologies that operate over language — including statistical and machine-learning systems — operate exclusively at the level of second-order patterning.
They model distributions of past acts and reproduce their grain with great efficiency. They do not construe, act, or mean.
Their outputs acquire meaning only when taken up in new acts of construal by persons.
9. Boundary Conditions and Stability
The ontology maintains its stability by enforcing a set of non-negotiable asymmetries:
system / instance,
potential / event,
first-order / second-order,
conditioning / determination,
coordination / agency.
These distinctions are relational, not ontic partitions. They explain both the power of probabilistic and systemic descriptions and the limits beyond which they fail.
The ontology therefore predicts its own misreadings and explains its resistance to collapse.
10. Closing
Meaning happens. It is enacted, situated, answerable, and irreducibly first-order.
Everything else — probability, context, institutions, coordination, technology — describes, conditions, or stabilises the conditions of its occurrence.
Nothing replaces the act.
This is the relational ontology as it now stands.