What is a phenomenon?
In relational ontology, a phenomenon is not a thing that exists prior to observation. Nor is it a neutral event waiting to be described. A phenomenon is a construed occurrence — a first-order meaning. It is what appears when a system is inflected into an instance.
To put it starkly: there are no unconstrued phenomena. There is no access to a world outside of meaning, because it is meaning itself that cuts the world into view.
Phenomenon as Construal
A phenomenon is constituted not by raw data, but by a pattern of construal. It emerges as something because it is oriented in a particular way, made salient through the interplay of systemic potential and perspectival actualisation.
This construal is not passive. It is material–semiotic: a cut through matter that instantiates a semantic possibility. What shows up as “a tree,” “a conversation,” or “an experiment” is already shaped by the systems we inhabit, the categories we live through, and the histories we carry.
To encounter a phenomenon is to engage in an act of worlding.
Meaning as the First Layer of the Real
First-order meaning does not lie beneath reality as a scaffolding. Nor does it float above it as a conceptual overlay. It is reality — but a reality that is always construed, never final, and always open to being inflected otherwise.
This is not idealism. It is not the claim that reality is only in our minds. It is the stronger claim that what counts as real is a function of meaning — and that meaning itself is material, social, historical, and emergent.
The Cut That Makes a World
Every phenomenon is a cut, a decision within a field of possibility. And yet it is not simply a choice. It is an event of significance, shaped by the systems it draws from and reshaping those very systems in turn.
This is why the world is never fully given, nor fully made. It is always in the making — always coming into view through the inflected lens of meaning.
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