In scientific discourse, objectivity is often equated with detachment — the capacity to observe and describe the world without influence or bias. This ideal, inherited from classical metaphysics, positions the observer as neutral, passive, and external: a “view from nowhere” capable of accessing reality as it is.
Quantum mechanics famously troubles this picture. Observers affect the systems they measure; results depend on context. Still, many cling to the notion that objectivity must mean removing the observer from the frame.
A relational ontology offers a different view. Objectivity is not the absence of relation, but the patterned regularity of relational participation — a kind of coherence that emerges across constraints, not outside them.
1. Classical Objectivity: The Myth of the View from Nowhere
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Classical physics posits a world of independent entities with intrinsic properties,
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Observers are imagined as idealised standpoints — free from entanglement, context, or effect,
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The “objective” is what holds regardless of perspective — a metaphysical invariant.
But this presumes the very separation that quantum theory and relationality dissolve.
2. The Collapse of Detachment
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In quantum mechanics, different measurement setups yield different outcomes,
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There is no single, observer-independent account of what “is” — only configurations that stabilise under specific constraints,
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This does not destroy objectivity, but reveals its contextual and enacted nature.
3. Objectivity as Relational Coherence
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From a relational standpoint, objectivity is not what exists beyond relation,
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It is what remains coherent across transformations of relation — a regularity that persists through systemic participation,
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The more a phenomenon can be actualised across multiple configurations without contradiction, the more “objective” it is.
4. Stability Through Constraint
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Objectivity arises when different observers, positioned differently within the system, still actualise compatible outcomes,
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This is not because they access the same truth, but because the field constrains actualisation in a consistent way,
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Patterns of mutual constraint give rise to shared intelligibility.
5. A New Criterion
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Objectivity is not detachment, but shared construal under condition of systemic coherence,
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It is not about eliminating the observer, but recognising the structural role of observation in constituting the intelligible,
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In this light, science is not peeling back layers of illusion to reach a final truth — it is stabilising regularities in the face of entangled participation.
Closing
The objectivity of physics is real — but it is not the kind found in a metaphysical God’s-eye view. It is the coherence of actualisation across entangled constraints — the kind of objectivity that emerges when multiple participants in a relational field find stable ways of coordinating meaning.
In the next post, we will turn to the notion of law in physics — not as an external commandment governing particles, but as an emergent regularity of constrained actualisation.
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