Tuesday, 31 March 2026

The Fiction of Scientific Objectivity: 2 Models Without Innocence

If the purity of science is a myth, then its central product must be reconsidered.

Not the laboratory.
Not the institution.
But the model.

Models are typically treated as the point at which science touches reality:

  • representations of underlying structures
  • approximations of how the world is
  • tools for prediction and explanation

Even when acknowledged as imperfect, they are still assumed to aim at something beyond themselves.

This assumption now has to go.

1. Against the mirror

The dominant image is simple:

the world exists independently, and models reflect it—more or less accurately.

But this image depends on a separation that cannot be sustained:

  • a world “as it is”
  • and a model that represents it

From the perspective already established, there is no access to an unconstrued world.

There are only:

phenomena actualised through construal.

A model does not stand apart from what it describes.

It participates in bringing it forth.

2. Construal, not representation

This is the decisive shift.

A scientific model is not:

  • a picture of reality
  • a symbolic proxy
  • a passive mapping

It is a semiotic operation:

  • selecting distinctions
  • organising relations
  • stabilising patterns
  • enabling certain phenomena to appear

Different models do not represent the same thing differently.

They actualise different phenomena.

3. The discipline of constraint

This does not mean anything goes.

Scientific models are not arbitrary.

They are:

disciplined construals under constraint.

Constraints include:

  • prior models and theoretical commitments
  • experimental setups
  • mathematical formalisms
  • institutional expectations

These do not ensure truth.

They ensure stability and reproducibility of construal.

4. Precision without innocence

Scientific models are often extraordinarily precise.

They:

  • predict outcomes
  • generate technologies
  • coordinate large-scale action

This precision is frequently taken as evidence that they must be:

tracking an underlying reality.

But precision does not imply innocence.

It indicates:

that the construal is highly stabilised under constraint.

The model works—not because it mirrors the world,
but because it reliably produces the same phenomena under specified conditions.

5. Multiplicity without contradiction

Once representation is set aside, a familiar problem dissolves.

How can multiple, incompatible models coexist?

  • wave vs particle descriptions
  • competing formalisms in different domains
  • alternative modelling frameworks within the same field

From a representational view, this is a crisis.

From a construal view, it is expected.

Different models do not compete to describe the same reality.

They operate within different conditions of actualisation.

6. The role of mathematics

Mathematics is often taken as the guarantor of objectivity:

  • abstract
  • formal
  • independent of context

But within this framework, mathematics is:

a resource for construal.

It provides:

  • structured ways of drawing distinctions
  • stable relations that can be iterated
  • constraints that discipline variation

It does not anchor models to reality.

It stabilises how phenomena are brought forth.

7. From truth to viability

If models do not represent, what are they evaluated for?

Not truth in the correspondence sense.

But:

  • viability
  • stability
  • reproducibility
  • scope of application

A model is successful if it:

  • holds under specified constraints
  • coordinates practice effectively
  • continues to generate usable phenomena

Truth becomes a retrospective label
for successful, stabilised construal.

8. The illusion of discovery

Scientific practice is often described as discovery:

  • uncovering what was already there
  • revealing hidden structures
  • finding the laws of nature

But if phenomena are actualised through construal, this language misleads.

Science does not uncover a pre-given world.

It extends the range of what can be brought forth as phenomenon.

What is discovered is not “out there,” waiting.

It is made available
through disciplined semiotic work.

9. The coupling reappears

At this point, the earlier analysis returns.

Because models do not operate alone.

They are always embedded within:

  • practices
  • institutions
  • norms of validation

Which means:

their stability depends on value coordination.

The model construes.
The system coordinates.
Their coupling is misrecognised as objective knowledge.

10. No retreat to relativism

This position will again invite a familiar misreading:

“If models don’t represent reality, then anything is as good as anything else.”

No.

Because construal is always under constraint.

Not all models stabilise.

Not all generate reproducible phenomena.

Not all coordinate practice effectively.

The difference is not between truth and error.

It is between:

  • viable and non-viable construals.

11. The cost of clarity

What is lost here is comforting:

  • the idea that science tells us how the world really is
  • the sense of standing on solid ontological ground

What is gained is sharper:

  • an account of what models actually do
  • an understanding of their limits and power
  • a way to analyse scientific practice without illusion

12. The next step

If models are disciplined construals, and their stability depends on coordination,

then the next question is unavoidable:

What kind of system maintains this coordination while denying that it exists?

Next: Post 3 — Practice Without Neutrality

Where the everyday machinery of science is re-read
as a value system that stabilises the appearance of objectivity.

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The Fiction of Scientific Objectivity: 1 The Myth of Purity

Science presents itself with a remarkable claim.

Not always explicitly.
Not always philosophically defended.
But enacted, institutionalised, and widely assumed:

that it produces meaning purified of value.

1. The inheritance of purity

Where religion fused meaning and value, science appears to separate them.

  • religion: meaning grounds value
  • science: meaning is independent of value

On this view:

  • scientific knowledge represents the world as it is
  • values enter only afterward—ethics, application, policy

This is the myth.

Not because science fails to achieve purity,
but because purity is not a coherent possibility to begin with.

2. Meaning is never neutral

From the perspective already established, scientific knowledge is not:

  • a mirror of reality
  • a transparent representation
  • a passive recording of what is “out there”

It is semiotic construal.

  • models are constructed
  • distinctions are drawn
  • phenomena are actualised under specific conditions

There is no access to an unconstrued world.

Only different ways of bringing phenomena forth.

This is not a limitation.

It is the condition of meaning itself.

3. The disavowal of value

At the same time, science insists—often implicitly—that:

  • its procedures are neutral
  • its standards are objective
  • its practices are governed by reason alone

Value is displaced:

  • into ethics committees
  • into funding decisions
  • into “external” social considerations

What remains, supposedly, is pure meaning.

But this separation does not hold.

Because what appears as neutral procedure is already:

structured coordination.

4. Practice as coordination

Consider the mundane realities of scientific work:

  • experimental protocols
  • peer review
  • replication standards
  • citation practices
  • disciplinary boundaries

These are not meanings.

They are patterns of coordinated action:

  • who can speak
  • what counts as evidence
  • how results must be produced
  • when claims are accepted or rejected

They stabilise expectation.

They regulate participation.

They enforce alignment.

In other words:

they are value systems.

5. The illusion of separation

So we have:

  • semiotic construal (models, theories, descriptions)
  • value coordination (protocols, norms, institutions)

And once again:

no shared ground.

Yet science appears uniquely capable of keeping them apart.

Why?

Because the coupling is:

  • tightly regulated
  • highly institutionalised
  • constantly reinforced

And crucially:

systematically denied.

6. Purity as misrecognition

The claim of purity is not a property of science.

It is a misrecognition of the coupling.

  • coordination is redescribed as method
  • constraint is redescribed as logic
  • alignment is redescribed as objectivity

What is in fact a relation between systems
is reconstrued as a property of knowledge itself.

7. The work of maintenance

This misrecognition does not sustain itself automatically.

It requires continuous labour:

  • training scientists to see method, not coordination
  • framing disagreement as error, not misalignment
  • excluding alternative articulations as “unscientific”

Institutions play a central role:

not in producing truth,
but in stabilising the appearance of purity.

8. When purity cracks

As with religion, the structure becomes visible under strain:

  • persistent disagreement between fields
  • shifting standards of evidence
  • controversies that cannot be resolved by data alone
  • replication crises

These are often treated as failures.

But they are better understood as:

moments when the coupling can no longer sustain the illusion of separation.

9. Not a critique of science

At this point, a familiar defensive reaction appears:

“Are you saying science is just politics? Just belief? Just power?”

No.

This would repeat the very reduction we have already rejected.

Science is not reducible to value.

Just as religion is not reducible to meaning.

The claim is sharper:

science, like religion, is a coupled system without ground, misrecognised as unified—
in this case, as pure meaning.

10. The inversion

Religion says:

meaning and value are one.

Science says:

meaning is free of value.

Both are structurally impossible.

What exists in both cases is:

  • semiotic construal
  • value coordination
  • their coupling
  • their misrecognition

Only the narrative differs.

11. The consequence

Once the myth of purity is withdrawn, science does not collapse.

It becomes visible.

  • models are seen as construals
  • practices as coordination
  • objectivity as stabilised relation

Not weakened.

But clarified.

12. The next step

With purity removed, a more precise question emerges:

If scientific meaning is not neutral representation,
what kind of construal is it?

Next: Post 2 — Models Without Innocence

Where scientific models are treated not as mirrors of reality,
but as disciplined acts of semiotic actualisation.

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Religion Without Unity: 7 After Religion

By this point, “religion” has lost its footing.

Not because it has been refuted.
Not because belief has declined.
Not because modernity has displaced it.

But because the object itself has dissolved.

1. What has been removed

Across the series, a sequence of assumptions has been withdrawn:

  • that belief names a coherent mental state
  • that religion is a unified system
  • that myth binds communities
  • that ritual expresses meaning
  • that meaning and value share a ground
  • that the human is the site where they converge

What remains is not a revised definition of religion.

It is the absence of one.

2. Religion as misrecognised relation

At most, “religion” can now be named as:

a historically stabilised coupling between semiotic systems and value systems, misrecognised as a unified domain.

This is not an essence.

It is a configuration.

And like all configurations without ground, it is:

  • contingent
  • variable
  • subject to drift and reconfiguration

3. Nothing uniquely religious

Once seen this way, a further consequence follows:

there is nothing uniquely religious about the structure we have been analysing.

The same dynamics appear wherever:

  • meanings are construed
  • actions are coordinated
  • and the relation between them is stabilised and naturalised

Consider:

  • political ideologies
  • national identities
  • institutional cultures
  • even certain formations of scientific practice

In each case:

  • narratives, models, or frameworks construe a world
  • patterns of action coordinate participation
  • their coupling is presented as necessary, natural, or true

And again:

  • variation in meaning is constrained
  • coordination is stabilised
  • the relation is misrecognised as unity

4. The persistence of the structure

If religion dissolves, the structure does not.

It persists:

  • without the name
  • without the overt appeal to belief
  • without explicit reference to the sacred

Which is why “secularisation” so often disappoints its own expectations.

What disappears is not the coupling.

Only one of its historical forms.

5. After belief

In this light, the so-called “decline of belief” looks different.

It is not that:

  • people cease to hold propositions about gods

It is that:

  • the coupling between meaning and value becomes less tightly regulated
  • alternative articulations proliferate
  • institutional maintenance weakens

Meaning continues.
Value continues.
Their relation shifts.

6. After unity

Without the stabilising force of religious institutions, the illicit unity becomes harder to sustain.

We begin to see:

  • meanings circulating without binding force
  • practices persisting without shared justification
  • individuals navigating multiple, incompatible articulations

What once appeared as a coherent domain fragments.

Not into chaos.

But into visible multiplicity.

7. New couplings

This does not leave a void.

It opens a field.

New couplings emerge:

  • some fleeting
  • some durable
  • some tightly regulated
  • some loosely aligned

None are grounded.

All are contingent.

The difference is not structural.

It is one of degree, visibility, and maintenance.

8. The analytic shift completed

At this point, “religion” is no longer required as a category.

Not because it was false.

But because it was:

a name for a relation we can now analyse directly.

We no longer need to ask:

  • What is religion?
  • Why do people believe?

We ask:

  • What meanings are being construed?
  • What value relations are being coordinated?
  • How are they being coupled, stabilised, or transformed?

Across any domain.

9. The cost of clarity

This shift is not without consequence.

Something is lost:

  • the sense of coherence
  • the comfort of unity
  • the explanatory ease of “belief” and “culture”

In their place:

  • fragmentation
  • contingency
  • relation without ground

But also:

  • precision
  • analytic clarity
  • the ability to see structures where previously there were only names

10. No final ground

If there is a final claim to be made, it is this:

There is no domain—religious or otherwise—in which meaning and value are naturally one.

Where they appear unified,
a coupling has been stabilised.

Where that unity seems necessary,
a misrecognition has taken hold.

And where it begins to fracture,
analysis becomes possible.

11. After religion

So what comes after religion?

Not atheism.
Not secularism.
Not disenchantment.

But a shift in what can be seen.

Religion does not end.

It ceases to be a special case.

What remains is the general condition:

systems of meaning and systems of value,
intersecting without ground,
coupled without necessity,
stabilised without unity.

And with that, the object dissolves.

Not into nothing.

But into a field we can finally begin to analyse
without illusion.

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Religion Without Unity: 6 The Human as Intersection

Up to this point, the analysis has been directed outward.

Religion has been cut apart.
Belief dissolved.
Myth and ritual separated.
Their coupling exposed as contingent and unstable.

And throughout, one assumption has remained largely intact:

that there is a subject in whom all this takes place.

A human who:

  • believes
  • interprets
  • participates
  • commits

A point of unity beneath the fractured systems.

This assumption now has to go.

1. The last refuge of unity

Even after dismantling religion as a unified system,
unity quietly retreats inward.

If meaning and value do not belong together “out there,”
perhaps they are joined in here:

  • in consciousness
  • in intention
  • in belief (now quietly reintroduced)
  • in the subject as integrating centre

But this is the same move, displaced.

The illicit unity has not been removed.

It has been internalised.

2. The subject as explanatory shortcut

The human subject is typically invoked as that which:

  • holds meanings
  • adopts values
  • aligns belief and practice

It is the presumed site where:

construal and coordination finally come together.

But notice what this does.

It avoids the problem of relation
by positing a container in which the relation is already resolved.

Instead of asking how meaning and value are coupled,
we say: the person believes and acts.

And the question disappears.

3. Re-cutting the human

If we take the prior analysis seriously, this position is untenable.

There is no reason to assume that:

  • semiotic construal
  • value coordination

suddenly become unified
simply because we are now speaking of a human.

So we cut again.

The human is not a unified subject.
It is an intersection of heterogeneous systems.

Not a container.
Not a ground.
Not an origin.

An intersection.

4. Meaning does not reside “inside”

From the perspective of meaning:

  • the human does not contain meanings
  • it participates in semiotic processes of construal

What appears as “having a belief” is:

  • the activation of certain construals
  • within a broader semiotic potential
  • under specific conditions

There is no internal repository of meanings.

Only participation in their actualisation.

5. Value does not originate “inside”

From the perspective of value:

  • the human does not generate norms or commitments
  • it is positioned within systems of coordination

What appears as “choosing to act” is:

  • alignment with patterns of expectation
  • shaped by repetition, sanction, and role

There is no internal source of obligation.

Only participation in coordinated structures.

6. No point of convergence

Crucially, these do not meet.

Not in the brain.
Not in consciousness.
Not in intention.

There is no privileged site where meaning and value are unified.

What we call “a person” is simply where:

  • semiotic processes
  • and value coordinations

intersect in practice.

7. The production of interiority

So why does unity feel so immediate?

Why does it seem obvious that:

  • I believe this
  • I choose that
  • I act because I think

Because the intersection is retrospectively reconstrued as an interior.

  • coordination is redescribed as intention
  • construal is redescribed as representation
  • their coupling is redescribed as belief

The subject is the narrative we tell about the intersection.

Not its ground.

8. Cracks in the subject

Once seen, familiar phenomena take on a different shape:

  • saying one thing, doing another
  • acting without understanding
  • holding incompatible “beliefs”
  • shifting identities across contexts

These are not failures of a unified subject.

They are normal effects of intersecting systems that do not converge.

9. Responsibility without unity?

At this point, an objection presses in:

If the subject dissolves, what happens to:

  • responsibility
  • agency
  • accountability

The answer is not to restore unity.

But to recognise that these, too, belong to value systems.

They are:

  • modes of coordination
  • ways of stabilising expectation
  • mechanisms for regulating behaviour

Not properties of an underlying subject.

10. The analytic consequence

The human is no longer the starting point.

It becomes an effect of relation.

We do not begin with:

  • individuals who believe and act

We begin with:

  • systems of meaning
  • systems of value

And examine how their intersection produces
what is retrospectively named the person.

11. The final displacement

With this, the last refuge of unity collapses.

  • not in religion
  • not in belief
  • not in myth or ritual
  • not even in the human

What remains is more austere:

a field of heterogeneous systems,
intersecting without ground,
coupled without unity,
stabilised through repetition and misrecognition.

And religion?

It was never the centre of this analysis.

Only the most visible case.

Next: Post 7 — After Religion

Where the category itself falls away,
and what remains is traced across domains that no longer call themselves religious.

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Religion Without Unity: 5 Schism, Heresy, and the Dynamics of Misalignment

If religion were a unified system, conflict within it would be straightforward:

a disagreement in belief,
a divergence in doctrine,
an error to be corrected.

But the unity has already been withdrawn.

And with it, the explanatory comfort of “difference in belief.”

1. The misdescription of conflict

Religious conflict is almost always narrated in semiotic terms:

  • competing interpretations
  • doctrinal disputes
  • heretical propositions

From this perspective, schism appears as a failure of agreement in meaning.

But this misdescribes the phenomenon.

Because meaning systems, as we have seen, tolerate variation.

They proliferate.
They contradict.
They coexist.

Left to themselves, they do not require resolution into a single, stable form.

Meaning does not generate schism.
It generates variation.

2. Where conflict actually bites

Conflict becomes acute only when variation intersects with value coordination.

  • when different construals demand incompatible practices
  • when authority is redistributed
  • when participation is restructured
  • when boundaries of inclusion and exclusion shift

At this point, the issue is no longer what is true.

It is what must be done, and who must do it.

Schism is not the breakdown of shared belief.

It is the destabilisation of a coordinated order.

3. Heresy as a relational category

“Heresy” is typically treated as a property of propositions:

  • a false doctrine
  • a deviation from truth

But this treats meaning as primary.

Re-cut through the distinction, heresy looks different:

Heresy is a designation applied to meanings that disrupt an existing value coordination.

The same construal, in a different configuration of value, may not be heretical at all.

It may be:

  • tolerated
  • ignored
  • or even central

Heresy is not located in meaning itself.

It is produced at the point where meaning threatens coordination.

4. Authority and alignment

At the centre of this dynamic lies authority.

Not as an abstract principle,
but as a mechanism for stabilising the coupling.

  • who can interpret
  • who can prescribe
  • who can sanction deviation

Authority operates across both systems:

  • constraining meaning (acceptable interpretations)
  • enforcing value (acceptable practices)

When authority is contested, the coupling loosens.

And what appears as doctrinal disagreement intensifies into structural conflict.

5. The inevitability of divergence

Because the coupling has no ground, it cannot be perfectly stabilised.

Over time:

  • meanings drift
  • practices shift
  • new articulations emerge
  • old alignments weaken

This produces divergence.

Not as anomaly, but as condition.

Schism, then, is not an exceptional rupture.

It is a reconfiguration of the relation between systems.

6. Forms of reconfiguration

When misalignment becomes unsustainable, several trajectories appear:

(a) Suppression

Deviation is contained:

  • meanings are policed
  • practices are enforced
  • authority is centralised

The existing coupling is preserved—at a cost.

(b) Reform

One side is adjusted:

  • reinterpretation to align meaning with practice
  • modification of practice to accommodate meaning

The coupling is repaired.

(c) Schism

The coupling splits:

  • divergent articulations stabilise independently
  • separate value systems emerge
  • distinct meaning systems consolidate around them

Unity is not restored.

It is replicated in parallel.

7. The illusion persists

Even after schism, the fiction of unity reasserts itself.

Each resulting formation presents itself as:

  • coherent
  • grounded
  • internally consistent

The underlying structure is forgotten.

Again.

8. Reading conflict differently

Once the mechanism is understood, religious conflict can be re-read:

Not as:

  • clashes of belief
  • failures of understanding

But as:

  • instabilities in coordination
  • contests over authority
  • divergences in how meaning and value are coupled

The analytic object shifts.

From propositions
to relations.

9. Beyond pathology

This reframing removes the sense that schism is a failure to be explained away.

Instead, it becomes:

an expected outcome of coupling without ground.

Wherever meaning varies and value must stabilise,
misalignment will emerge.

Where misalignment emerges,
reconfiguration follows.

10. The broader implication

And once again, religion proves diagnostic.

Because the same dynamics can be observed wherever:

  • symbolic systems proliferate
  • coordinated action must be maintained

Political movements fracture.
Ideologies split.
Institutions divide.

Not because “beliefs differ,”
but because relations cannot hold.

11. The final turn

Which leaves us with a final question.

If religion is not unified,
if belief is a fiction,
if myth does not bind,
if ritual does not require meaning,
if coupling is contingent and unstable—

Then what, exactly, is the human in all this?

Next: Post 6 — The Human as Intersection

Where the illusion of a unified subject is brought into the same field of analysis,
and begins to dissolve under the same cut.

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