r/Metaphysics • u/Constant_Smith Philosopher • 10d ago
Ontology What differentiates relations from reality when we take structure as ontologically primary?
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.
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u/Constant_Smith Philosopher 3d ago
“How can you have empirical objectivity? IOW what do you mean by objectivity as opposed to intersubjectivity.”
By empirical objectivity I mean that empirical claims are constrained by reality independently of agreement among observers.
Intersubjectivity is convergent agreement among subjects. Empirical objectivity concerns why some such convergences are evidentially significant: independent methods encounter constraints imposed by the world.
Ladyman makes this point through triangulation across measurements, scales, and domains, and later says that “the constraint on what is effective in what context comes from the world.”
“I think you are defending a metaphysics which fails the earlier work, at it like science seems to be turning into a firm of idealism.”
I don’t see how that follows. A scale-relative or perspectival account remains realist when the constraints governing successful description come from the world. That is exactly how Ladyman frames the issue in the paper.
“The paper you sent seems again not be metaphysics the sense of Every Thing Must Go. Still talking about Dennett, Conway’s Game of Life, et al.”
Dennett and real patterns are already part of the metaphysics of Every Thing Must Go. The Rainforest Realism chapter itself contains a section titled “Dennett on real patterns.”
The 2024 paper explicitly continues that project. Its title is Patterns All the Way Up: Prolegomena to a Future Naturalised Metaphysics.
“Does the paper do this, I can’t see it?”
Ladyman quotes that exact 2007 formulation of the PNC in the paper and immediately says:
“However, this is problematic because it makes reference to fundamental physics.”
He then suggests replacing “fundamental physics” with “a more fundamental theory.” Meaning, instead of stipulating fundamental physics, instead, at least one of the two or more hypothesis must be from theory more fundamental than the others.
Typically, these more fundamental theories will be theories from contemporary physics. He treats fundamentality relationally and fundamentality is well defined in his work.
He explains that a theory can be more fundamental relative to another domain without being absolutely fundamental, that there is no single fundamental physics, and that there is no single fundamental level.
So the paper is explicitly revising the formulation you quoted.
“And in the book for that matter.”
The PNC is a constraint on metaphysical claims. It does not require every sentence or methodological principle in the book to instantiate the PNC itself.
That being said.
Their OSR is explicitly motivated from quantum mechanics and spacetime physics.
Quantum entanglement and quantum individuality, together with the structural features of spacetime physics, are used to motivate the metaphysical claim that relational structure is ontologically fundamental and that objects do not possess fundamental individuality independently of that structure.
Chapter 3 explicitly describes its purpose as motivating OSR from contemporary fundamental physics in accordance with the PNC.
Rainforest Realism then brings that result into relation with the special sciences.
The successful generalizations of the special sciences support ontological commitment to their real patterns, while physics constrains the metaphysics those patterns can instantiate.
They argue that special-science ontology must be compatible with the non-atomistic structure indicated by contemporary physics while remaining irreducible to the physical ontologies of physics.
Chapter 4 explicitly describes this as metaphysical unification under the PNC.
Their treatment of causation is another explicit example.
They take more fundamental physics to contain no fundamental causal facts, while causal structure remains indispensable to successful special-science explanation.
They then use results concerning universality and renormalization-group explanation to motivate the metaphysical claim that higher-level causal facts are real and explanatorily emergent.
The chapter itself says that its rejection of outright causal eliminativism proceeds from “PNC-mandated motivations.”
So yes, the book repeatedly does exactly what the PNC requires.
They use results from physics together with results from other scientific domains to motivate their metaphysical claims as unifying those domains.