Not What Is, But How: Rethinking Ontology as Relational Articulation

We have reached the precipice of a difficult but necessary rethinking.

• If there are no fundamental things that pre-exist their distinctions…

• If both subject and object emerge from a relational cut…

• If even time, space, and measurement are perspectival articulations…

Then what remains of ontology?

What does it mean to ask: what is there?

This post proposes a shift from ontology as the inventory of being, to ontology as the logic of articulation. Not what exists, but how existence is construed and enacted — through relation, cut, and construal.

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1. Traditional Ontology and Its Commitments

Classical ontology — from Aristotle to modern metaphysics — rests on a set of implicit commitments:

• The world is made of things with properties.

• Things are logically prior to relations.

• Properties inhere in things.

• Knowledge describes what is, from outside.

These assumptions yield a picture of a world that is, and is then known — with ontology preceding epistemology, and things grounding relations.

But we have already seen that:

• Relations are not secondary.

• Perspective is constitutive.

• Distinction is generative.

• There is no external knower.

This means the classical project collapses — not because it’s false, but because it is misposed.

It seeks the foundation of being where no such foundation exists.

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2. Being as a Function of Relation

In a relational ontology, “being” is not a primitive. It is not a status to be discovered or attributed.

Instead:

Being is a function of relation.

To be is to be articulated — within, by, and for a system of distinctions.

This does not mean nothing exists.

It means that existence is not pre-cut.

Each articulation — each cut — brings forth a perspective in which something can be said to be.

• An electron is not a thing, but a construct of potential constrained by perspective.

• A person is not an essence, but an ongoing articulation within biological, social, and semiotic systems.

• A measurement is not a report on the real, but a construal enacted through systemic affordances.

Ontology becomes:

The theory of how meaning potentials are cut into actualities.

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3. From Being to Articulation

This reframing has radical implications.

We are no longer asking: What exists?

We are now asking:

• What systems of potential are at play?

• What cuts are enacted within them?

• How are actualities constrained by these relational logics?

In this model:

Classical Ontology	Relational Ontology
What is?	How is being articulated?
What exists?	What is actualised from where?
Substance	System
Property	Construal
Entity	Perspective
Identity	Recurrence across cuts

This does not flatten the world into mere language or perception.

Rather, it restores accountability to the act of cutting — and acknowledges that every ontology is already a positioning.

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4. Ontology as Meta-Semiosis

Within the semiotic model, we can go further.

If semiosis is the process by which meaning is construed,

then ontology is its second-order articulation — a meta-semiotic act.

Ontology, then, is not a neutral inquiry into what is.

It is a systemic construal of how construal itself is possible.

In this sense:

• Ontological categories are not categories of “being”.

• They are categories of articulation — patterns by which systems distinguish themselves, their environments, and their internal structure.

To ask what is being?

Is to ask:

How do systems distinguish? What are the logics of their cuts?

And so ontology becomes the theory of the theory of instances — a recursive framework for mapping how construals arise, from what potentials, in what systems.

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5. There Was Never a Ground

The deepest intuition of relational ontology is this:

There was never a ground.

There is only grounding — through systems, cuts, and construals.

We never begin with Being.

We begin always from within.

From the inside of a perspective,

from the articulation of a system,

from the entanglement of meaning and potential.

Being is not the backdrop.

It is the effect of systemic articulation —

and the condition for further articulation.

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Closing

This is not the abandonment of ontology.

It is its reinvention.

Not as the theory of things,

but as the logic of articulation.

Not as a map of what is,

but as a generative grammar of how meaning, actuality, and distinction arise within systems.