Relational Realism

Relational Realism

There has long been a skeptical attitude towards material objects. People have doubted that they exist—from idealist philosophers, to phenomenalists, to free-thinking physicists. Some have regarded them as mental entities not material; others have identified matter with mind; others have jettisoned them in favor of energy or some such. Thus, we get anti-realism about material objects; there are no such things in reality. Much the same has been said about space and time. But we don’t hear the same anti-realism about relations between these putative objects: they are not taken to be unreal. Even if ordinary objects are unreal—mere appearances—their relations are not, particularly spatial and temporal relations. Even if we are brains in vats, there are real relations between the non-existent objects we seem to see. One thing is still next to another or far away, bigger or smaller, moving away or towards. This is what I mean by relational realism. It is compatible with object anti-realism. When we think of relations we think of real things, as opposed to thoughts about objects; we can’t think relations away. If everything is a dream, then no material objects exist, but our dream objects still stand in relations to each other, whatever they may be ontologically. In Berkeley’s universe relations exist between objects—though not material objects. Put generally, it doesn’t matter what kinds of objects exist in a possible world, they will always stand in real relations. Objects of whatever kind stand in relations; these relations cannot be non-existent.

The same applies to the world of number: no matter what numbers are, they stand in relations to each other. This is true whether you are a Platonist, a formalist, or an intuitionist. Anti-realism about numbers does not entail anti-realism about relations between numbers (e.g., the successor relation). The same is true of the mind: anti-realism about mind (e.g., behaviorism) doesn’t entail anti-realism about mental relations, say precedence in time or causal relations. Anti-realism about a given subject matter does not imply anti-realism about the relations holding between items in that subject matter. Even subjective points in a visual field stand in objective relations to each other. This is an ontological point, but it has an epistemological corollary: not knowing whether certain things exist doesn’t imply not knowing the relations between them. Even hallucinated objects can be next to each other; we don’t hallucinate that. And we can know this, even if we can’t know the objects exist. The relation is invulnerable to skepticism. You can be an agnostic about whether a certain pair of objects exists without being an agnostic about their relations to each other. You can be an agnostic about the existence of God and the devil but not an agnostic about their relative goodness. Relations are more knowable than things, in short. So, relations are both real (ontology) and transparent (epistemology). Substances, by contrast, are open to anti-realist challenge and knowledge of them to skeptical challenge. Relations are on a more solid footing than substances (objects), ontologically and epistemologically. They should figure more prominently in philosophical discussions. Matter doesn’t exist in Berkeley’s idealist world but relations do; and relations are more immune to Cartesian skeptical challenge than substances. Relations are known existences—whereas material things can be questioned at both levels. They are the constants of our conceptual scheme.

Causal relations require special mention. There has been a tendency to deem them less real and less knowable than material substances, but this is wrong. Causal relations are everywhere in reality and we can know them. What is less knowable are causal relata and the ground of causal necessity. We know the causal structure of the world, but not so much the nature of the world and the nature of causation itself. The nature of physical things is open for debate, but it is not debatable that the world runs on causation—whatever precisely that is. Causal structure is more indubitable than matter. We can have causal knowledge without having knowledge of objects, i.e., their real essence. If the universe reduces to quantum reality in which conventional matter has no place, it will still be subject to causal (and other) relations. To put it crudely, God invented relations before he invented anything else; then he chose what kind of stuff to put into the world. This is relations-first metaphysics not substances-first. It is also relations-first epistemology—not sense-data or material things. The next step is to make relations basic in semantics, and indeed we know semantic relations prior to individual meanings: that is, we know that one word entails another without knowing what meaning is. Semantic structure is more fundamental than semantic substance, i.e., what constitutes meaning. Entailment, synonymy, and antonymy are the semantic givens. So long as these come out right, our theory of meaning is on the right track; the rest is speculative. And language depicts relations above all; what exactly these relations are between is a secondary matter. You don’t need to know—really know—what persons are in order to use proper names of persons, but you had better know what kind of entailments names have and how persons are related to each other. Linguistic knowledge isn’t metaphysical (or scientific) knowledge.

You might be wondering about shape and color: these don’t appear to be relations but they certainly figure in the ontology and epistemology of the physical world. But aren’t they actually relational in their own way? Colors are really relations to perceivers, as renaissance thinkers taught us: that is their underlying ontology. And what are shapes but relations between points (or edges)? A circle is defined by reference to a center and a circumference, etc. We see these relations when we look at an ordinary object. Perception is shot through with relational data. The whole visual field is constituted by relations of adjacency and other geometric relations. If you couldn’t perceive relations, you couldn’t perceive anything. Reality is relational and so is knowledge of reality. Of course, there is also some sort of stuff out there, but all structure comes courtesy of relations over this stuff. What this stuff intrinsically consists in is pretty incidental; what matters is how it is related to itself. All the action comes from the relations. This is why in metaphysics you can vary the stuff and leave everything else unchanged—it could be inert matter or a form of mind or God himself. The type of substance is irrelevant. Relations are what make the world go round. Not particulars, not even universals in the manner of Plato, but the whole pattern of relations. To be is to be related to something. Not a substance ontology or an event ontology or a property ontology but a relations ontology. In its most austere form this is an ontology of nothing but relations.[1]

[1] The type of underlying stuff has always been a metaphysical headache; dispensing with it is perennially attractive, though suspiciously anti-mysterian. Relations are the most unmysterious of things (pace some idealists of Hegelian persuasion). The idea of a totally relational reality certainly has metaphysical bite to it; we would like it to be true. It upends centuries of tormented thought.