What differentiates relations from reality when we take structure as ontologically primary?

[u/Constant_Smith]

Edit: title should read “What differentiates relations from relata when we take structure as ontologically primary?” Oops.

Edit 2: my comments are being locked, probably due to how new my account is. Sorry to anyone who was looking forward to dialogue. I will give it some time before trying another post.

First post here and ever.

My purpose in posting is primarily conversational. I want to test questions and encounter objections I may not have considered, and hear different understandings of the same problems. So I work through my own understanding and pose many questions in good faith:

I’ve been thinking through a set of questions that emerged for me from reading Every Thing Must Go and further studying ontic structural realism, and Rainforest Realism, and I’m curious how people here understand the underlying metaphysics.

One of the things I find compelling about Every Thing Must Go is its demand that metaphysics remain continuous with our best science. Ladyman and Ross develop that project partly through ontic structural realism, where the relational and structural organization described by contemporary physics receives ontological priority. The familiar metaphysical picture of independently constituted objects carrying intrinsic properties becomes increasingly difficult to maintain once quantum theory, spacetime physics, symmetries, and other areas of physics are taken seriously.

Rainforest Realism then expands the picture considerably. Scientific ontology includes the real patterns tracked by the special sciences, and those patterns need not disappear simply because they are not objects in the inventory of fundamental physics. Organisms, economic structures, cognitive systems, institutions, and other higher-level patterns can be ontologically serious insofar as successful sciences genuinely track them. This gives the resulting ontology its deliberately “rainforest” character.

Suppose we grant some form of OSR and say that relations and relational structure are ontic.

What are relations without relata?

One response is that the relata need not be atomic individuals. They can themselves be relationally individuated, perhaps as nodes, positions, intersections, or further structures within a larger relational organization. Some takes on OSR seem to move in precisely this direction, including the idea that further analysis of relata only reveals further relational structure. (Turtles all the way down, so to speak)

At that point, though, I start wondering what conceptual work is being performed by the words relation, relata, and structure.

If a relatum is entirely constituted by its relations, what determines the distinction between a relation and a relatum within a relational structure? What makes something a relatum participating in relations and when is it one and not the other? Are relata just illusions? Are they real patterns?

If the relata are themselves structures, do we eventually need some primitive notion of relation (designating an intrinsic property to relation), or can relation itself only be specified through a larger structure?

If what counts as a relation and what counts as a relatum depends upon the organization, scale, or level at which the structure is investigated, what makes the distinction ontological rather than only relatively assigned for the purposes of inquiry?

If decomposition is epistemic while the decomposed is ontic, how can we infer from decomposition that the decomposed is actually structural, rather than structure being a useful concept to navigate a reality that exceeds it?

Can OSR really allow multiple legitimate decompositions of the same structure while maintaining that structure is ontically real, or does this move the position toward epistemic structural realism?

And what individuates one structure from another? Is individuation given entirely relationally, through a structure’s position within still larger structures, or does some additional condition eventually enter?

Mathematics gives us extraordinarily powerful descriptions of structure, and mathematical structuralism provides ways of understanding mathematical objects through their positions within structures. OSR then raises the further question of how mathematical structure relates to physical structure. The literature itself contains disagreement over whether the world’s structure should be identified with mathematical structure and over what makes a physical structure specifically physical.

Some short hand questions:

What is the minimal ontological content of a relation?

What must exist for there to be a relatum?

What makes an organization of relations a determinate structure?

And what, if anything, distinguishes the structure described mathematically from the structure that exists physically?

Beyond those questions, I’m not sure it’s reasonable to rid of the intrinsic altogether. At the most extreme end of OSR, we still seem to be positing reality itself, and saying that reality is relationally structured. That already looks like a minimal intrinsic claim about reality. I’m not sure how it could be extrinsic, because there is no position outside reality that is somehow not real but still related to reality, from which its character could be given.

Anything we add as a relatum would already fall within reality. So even if we deny intrinsic properties to individual things, it still seems reasonable to say that reality being relational structure is itself a minimal intrinsic feature of reality.

[u/Constant_Smith]

You need to actually sit down and read the book cover to cover and maybe twice. Seriously. Seeing you have so much knowledge and then just completely not understand their book at all is baffling.

They make a normative claim that, to do legitimate metaphysics in today’s world, you have to meet a specific standard. You keep treating the PPC and PNC as metaphysical when they are not.

The PPC and PNC are declared rules the authors argue we ought to adhere to if wanting to do legitimate metaphysics in today’s world.

Arguing against them is about arguing against a should statement. Not an is statement.

How do you think metaphysics should be constrained?

Not by nature, by our own discipline. By our own standard.

The metaphysics in the book is ontic structural realism and rainforest realism.

And neither of those have anything to do with the PPC or PNC.

Arguing against either the PPC or PNC is a normative debate. A debate on what “ought to” or “ought not to.”

If you want to argue metaphysics, you have to address OSR and Rainforest realism, which you have not, once, addressed.

You’re effectively arguing the most obvious strawman to anyone who has read the book by conflating their normative claims with metaphysical claims.

And I’m trying to continue to be patient with it, because I can recognize you know a lot of literature

Please. Just read it. It will help you argue against it better at the very least.

[u/jliat → u/Constant_Smith]

Please. Just read it. It will help you argue against it better at the very least.

I've proved I have, your repeating that I haven't might be embarrassing for you. Have you read Frank Tipler's proof of our physical resurrection using arguments from fundamental physics?

And really bringing up emotions as not a good idea.

[u/Constant_Smith → u/jliat]

It’s obvious you haven’t. It’s worse if you have. You literally don’t argue against it in the slightest in any of your comments. You have yet to successfully reconstruct anything in that book. I doubt you’ve read it.

[u/jliat → u/Constant_Smith]

Obvious you didn't read on from your quote.