“Machine code for the universe”

– how the action of signs

pervades everything
ARLYN CULWICK

13 MARCH 2019

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

FIRST DELIVERED (IN SOMEWHAT CONTRACTED FORM) AS A LECTURE FOR THE DEPARTMENTAL SEMINAR,

PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT, UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN

Abstract
The thread of the study of signs can be traced from Augustine through the formation of indigenous European
philosophical thought, to the scholastic controversies over nominalism and Scotism, and the enduring difficulty
of accounting for categorial relation under an Aristotelian system. It continues through the perennial modern
“problem of the external world,” the semiotic explorations of Charles Peirce, and the intelligent realism of Ralph
Austin Powell. The thread is a broken one, and only partially recovered, yet it is unlikely that a more significant
rediscovery awaits us than Powell’s, in 1986, i that the causality proper to signs was definitively identified in
1632 by the great Iberian scholastic, John Poinsot. It is a discovery and a synthesis foundational to the
understanding of sign action, as it equips philosophers with a tool both to recognise the pervasive presence of
signs and to identify the teleology implicit in their action, while distinguishing this from final causation.

This paper explores the implications of Poinsot’s and Powell’s work, and with a minimum of technical
terminology, introduces the notion of sign action as the fundamental and pervasive constituent of a universe
(notably, the real one). By way of literature review, the account will first introduce key concepts historically,
focusing briefly on key figures and discursive turning points. The second part of this paper will sketch my
positive account of the nature and action of signs as functioning like “machine code” for the universe. That is,
just as machine code is what is directly executed by a computer, sign action can be empirically verified to be
the “native tongue” of a universe, its fundamental currency.

Autobiographical note
Arlyn Culwick is an independent researcher in analytical and scholastic philosophy. His principal object of
study is sign action or “semiosis,” the mechanism by which anything observable or thought-of comes to be in
relation to anything else. Research interests include the ontology of relations, the nature of experience,
teleology, and their implications for the nature of being. Drawing principally upon the work of John Poinsot,
Charles Peirce, John Deely, and Ralph Austin Powell, Arlyn is developing an empirically falsifiable
metaphysical theory of how things come to be and continue to have being.

i This discovery is attributed to Powell by John Deely (The Grand Vision 1994, 380).

1
Introduction
I have boldly subtitled this paper “how the action of signs pervades everything,” but in fact I have expressed
myself too conservatively, as my actual view is even bolder: I believe that sign action implies a fully general,
nonreductive theory about the nature of the universe, and I will use this section to elaborate on the boldness
of this claim in ways that I expect will initially inspire incredulity in the reader. To inspire incredulity is, no
doubt, a rhetorical shortcoming, but I feel that the theory demands frank disclosure of its aims, and in any
case, I am quite happily saddled with the burden of defending it. Specifically, my contention is that sign action
entails a theory that “explains everything” in the sense that it is the fundamental pattern or logic of the
universe, including mind-dependent being. Moreover, it is empirically testable in principle: what I will
introduce as “ontological relations” are likely the only thing we directly experience, and signs, the particular
form in which ontological relations are actual, are the direct objects of all scientific knowledge.

Now, so-called “theories of everything” are often regarded with scepticism, and for good reason, so as a scene-
setting exercise, I will preface this paper with a contrast between its approach and common problematic
approaches. One approach is to offer a “most general theory” that aims to subsume all particular theories
under it, accommodating and systematising them (for example, George Ellis and Nancy Murphy’s On the
Moral Nature of the Universe 1). On the face of it, though, it is hard to see how such a theory could have
scientific value unless it were to function like a “particular” theory, that is, offering a positive, testable
explanation or prediction of phenomena. But as a mere systematisation of the current body of scientific theory,
the most general theory would fall upon the horns of a dilemma: it would either lack falsifiable content or
predictive value about the universe, and so it would be merely speculative, or it would be falsifiable in terms
of how well it systematises particular theories, and predictive in terms of how well it reveals that particular
theories are inaccurate or flawed on grounds of their failure to be well-systematisable by the most general
theory. But on the first horn of this dilemma, it is not a scientific theory, since it is not falsifiable, and on the
second horn, it is not really a theory of everything, but just a theory about the current set of theories. In
contrast, I offer a theory that both describes the most basic constitution of particular things and is fully
general.

Moreover, a typical “most general theory” can be expected to be unsatisfyingly inconclusive, because it is not
obvious that any given “most general theory” would necessarily be the only successful systematisation of the
entire body of particular theory. We see this sort of undecidability in many fields where discourse extends
beyond the field’s empirical limits, for example, in quantum mechanics, there is the Copenhagen
interpretation, the many worlds theory, and the de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory. In fact, in fields where it
is the norm to extend discourse beyond the field’s empirical limits, this potential for the multiplication of
hypotheses modifies the function of theories. In empirically rich fields, regular, empirically testable
(falsifiable) theories serve as stable building blocks in a body of knowledge, but in fields where the empirical
data is thin, like evolutionary anthropology or physical cosmology, any one theory is not typically committed
to, but rather functions to refine discourse in the field, so as to give rise to alternative theories, on a more-or-
less continuous basis. This makes the action of theory-formation the principal task in the field, in contrast to
more richly empirical fields, which also undergo theory-formation, but which are predominantly occupied with
the task of testing theories, and in which it is the norm to harmonise theories or build upon a previous theory,
instead of replacing it. Put differently, fields with a rich empirical dataset can become committed to the
(scientific) truth of matters, whereas fields with a thin empirical dataset cannot easily move far beyond
speculation. Since a typical “most general theory” approach has a thin empirical dataset, it is not reasonable
to expect it to attain the truth of the matter, and so it cannot offer a satisfying answer, even if its discourse
might be richly stimulating.

An alternative approach, a reductive theory of everything, is untenable on empirical grounds. A reductive

theory of everything, of the kind sought after in fundamental physics, is an attempt to describe the behaviour
of phenomena at the very smallest scale of the universe, beyond which, logically, there would be nothing else
to explain. The sense in which this is a “theory of everything” draws from the notion that the behaviour of
phenomena at all other scales reduces to behaviour at this fundamental scale, and so if one were able to
compute behaviour at the fundamental scale, then, assuming infinite computational power, one could predict
behaviour at all other scales. However, this notion has turned out to be untenable upon the observation of
many scenarios that are either not reductive or not computable (not even theoretically). To give an incomplete
list, there exists (1) the presumed true randomness of Brownian motion and some quantum phenomena, like
the decoherence of a quantum system when measured. (2) The observed emergence of larger scale order from

2
smaller-scale chaos (or perhaps occasionally true randomness). For example, the laws governing the field of
chemistry emerge from quantum decoherence, which is modelled as being truly random. As one might expect,
then, there exists no reductive explanation for the laws governing the field of chemistry on the basis of the
behaviour of particles, even though probabilistic quantum-mechanical predictions of particle behaviour are
extraordinarily accurate. The role of any given particle in the emergence of laws of chemistry is not
computable, and so there is insufficient support for the formation of a reductionistic unified explanation: on
a reductionistic model, nature passes through a truly “dark” interaction. (3) The potential, in dynamical
systems theory, for intrinsically unlimited complexity, which would render many such systems incomputable,
either in principle, i or on thermodynamic calculations of the maximum possible computing power of the entire
universe. (4) The common occurrence of top-town causation at many scales, which directly invalidates any
bottom-up reductionistic theory, since in such cases, the emergence of ordered phenomena amenable to some
field of study depend not on some “fundamental” interactions at a smaller scale, but on at least some at a
larger scale. (5) Finally, the phenomenon of “strange loops,” 2 essential to cognitive science, evident in Gödel’s
incompleteness theorem, and in DNA replication. A strange loop is not simply a combination of top-down and
bottom-up causality, but rather an interaction generative of further phenomena, themselves indifferent to
scale, between parts of systems at different scales, which can play a defining role in systems at one or several
scales. The leading idea is that scale simply turns out not to be an important notion in questions of causal
dependence. Strange loops thus problematise the very impulse to arrange explanations hierarchically,
problematising in general reductive explanations as characterised above.

In contrast to the two approaches above, this paper aims to establish that sign action implies a theory of
everything that is (a) nonreductive, and (b) informative and testable in the mode of regular “particular
theories.” Like the reductive approach, it aims to provide a fundamental “logic” or pattern of interaction both
between and constitutive of entities – though unlike the reductive approach, it offers it at every scale and
between objects at any scale. This immunises it from the problems in the preceding paragraph, though of
course it does not aim to restore computability or predictability to our understanding of the universe. Although
it is its opposite in reducibility, it shares with the reductionistic approach a basic impulse, which is to model
the most fundamental behaviour of things in the universe.

In contrast to the “most general theory” approach, it is a theory directly applied to phenomena, not just to
theories, since sign action is directly experienceable in every phenomenon, which provides grounds for the
theory’s falsifiability, and, provided it is correct, it is novel and informative about the real nature of things.
Despite these differences, it shares an attribute common to the “most general theory” approach, which is that
it purports to describe the form of being and action that has the highest possible generality of application.
However, this shared attribute is novel to sign action in two respects: firstly, its generality is of a degree that
permits its application not only to the objects of all particular fields, but to theories about them too – and
indeed all “unreal being” in the classical sense. Secondly, it applies to all objects – and all fields – not only as
a systematising scheme, but as a constitutive scheme too. That is, the theory affirms that when an entity is
properly described or “modelled” at a fundamental level, signs constitute the entity’s being.

That said, the claimed ability of sign action to transcend the two previous approaches to a theory of everything
does not imply that it “explains everything” in every possible way: there will remain an indefinite number of
alternative ways of seeing things. But this is no weakness to the theory; its truth rests upon the claim that
we have the potential to distinguish, directly in experience, the real relations claimed to constitute a given
object from alternative, unreal explanations of their nature. As a result, I expect the theory to provide grounds
for distinguishing its reality from the unreality of rival theories, and that these rival theories will turn out
ultimately to reduce to some model constructed in the terms of my theory.

Neither is the theory, in itself, the whole truth about the universe, since it leaves to empirical investigation
the matter of discovering just how every object is woven exclusively from signs, and just which specific signs
constitute them. Nonetheless, it would follow that if we were, on an infinite timescale, to arrive at the whole
truth of the universe, it would be composed exclusively of signs. (This is itself a novel and informative claim.)

As a final point pertaining to the generality of this theory, note that although “semiosic models” – explanations
of things employing the action of signs – are amenable to scientific verification, their empirical nature does
not diminish the generality of the theory: it is a metaphysical theory – a theory about the fundamental nature

i For example, (Ringel and Kovrizhin 2017).

3
of reality. I grant that an empirically verifiable metaphysics is a startling concept, but I believe that such a
thing is attainable through consideration of certain developments in the long tradition of Western philosophy,
to which I will shortly turn.

To recap: signs are not like fundamental particles, which exist at a specific scale; nor are they like Newton’s
laws, which only concern specific interactions between bodies. Signs operate at (and between) every scale, and
sign action is the de facto fundamental interaction in the universe. In the historical overview to follow, we
will see also that signs eventually appear to be the most general type of thing, both in terms of their categorial
nature and in terms of their causality. This amounts to three claims: first, that nothing can be of a more
general type, since nothing can exist that does not fall under signs’ categories. Secondly, nothing can affect
anything else without employing their basic causal mode. Thirdly, nothing has being i without being
constituted entirely by signs. Hence a suitable metaphor for signs is that they are “machine code for the
universe.” Machine code is what can be directly executed by a computer's CPU. That is, is does not need to be
compiled down (“translated”) into anything else in order to affect the CPU. It is the base-level code, or “native
tongue,” of a computer. The metaphor is flawed, however, in that a CPU is not itself machine code, whereas
a universe simply is whatever total things are relating, and so for the metaphor to be perfect, the computer
would have to be a “virtual machine” in a particular sense, that is, one that reduces to only machine code, and
not also hardware. Anyhow, the purpose of this paper is to give a theoretical account, for the purposes of later
testing it, of why sign action is the “native tongue” of a universe, that is, the activity by which things directly
and most fundamentally have being and undergo change. The form the paper will take is to introduce the
basics of signs in a historical overview, the implications of which are developed into a systematic theory about
the nature of reality.

Synopsis of doctrinal sources

To give a brief synopsis of this theory’s doctrinal sources, the account of sign action adequate to the task here
is an extension of mine upon the work of John Deely on so-called “physiosemiosis,” which is itself an ambitious
extension of Sebeok’s “biosemiosis,” which, in turn, extends semiology or “semiotics” in the linguistic,
anthropocentric sense of the term. In turn, this 20th century theoretical backdrop draws heavily but not
systematically upon the work of Charles Peirce (in the late 19th century). However, the more recent discovery
by John Deely and Ralph Austin Powell, in the years between approximately 1977 and 1985, of the
revolutionary potential in John Poinsot’s treatise on signs (1632) has provided the field with a systematic
ontology of signs of extreme terminological precision. What is of interest to me in Poinsot, who I shall rely
upon principally, is technical and rather narrow in scope. I depend on Poinsot’s understanding of the causality
operative in signs, and of the parts and interrelations in a sign, though with a notion of the “interpretant”
taken from Peirce and generalising Poinsot’s “knowing power.”

Since the causality and the ontology of relations are pivotal matters here, and since Poinsot’s philosophy is of
the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, our historical overview begins with Aristotle’s trouble capturing the
nature of relations.

Aristotle’s difficulties with the category of relation

The Aristotelian categories are a way of dividing supposed mind-independent being into the most general
kinds of predicates, and each category is – to quote Poinsot – “a series or arrangement of superior and inferior
predicates, starting with a supreme genus which is predicated of every [one of its] inferior[s], and ending with
the individual [existing thing], which is subject to every superior.” 3 To elaborate, categories are concerned
with things that are both linguistic predicates of subjects and really exist in a subject. Secondly, they are
concerned with mapping the generality of predicates to their inherence in real individual things. 4

There are ten categories: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, possession, doing, and
undergoing. John Deely, the late philosopher-historian of semiotics, notes that fully half of the categories were
eventually seen to follow upon the category of relation, 5 stating that “not until late in the Latin Age was
clarity on the matter of relation fully reached.” 6

i “Being” in this usage divides into three modes, as will be seen: actually existing things, things that could potentially exist, and “virtual
things, that is, things currently unreal yet engendered by causes determining how things will be, all else being equal (e.g. Newton’s second
law).

4
 Figure 1: Aristotle's categories as understood by the Latins
(note that fully half of them fall under relation)

Now Aristotle is generally supposed to have had difficulties with the category of relation: scholars today are
unsure whether to understand relatives as a linguistic category, a relational way of speaking about accidents
(these are known traditionally as “transcendental relations”) or, as the classical medieval definition runs, a

5
purely relative entity, that is, something wholly toward another, i and formally distinct from the subject it
depends on for existence. Assuming – as claimed in this paper – that the Latins were correct about the nature
of relation, the most charitable reading of Aristotle would be their interpretation.

But there is a far more important difficulty with relation: after Avicenna’s writings introduced to Latin
philosophical discourse the idea of a relation of reason, the awareness gradually grew that these shared the
same essence with categorial relation. This troubled Aristotle’s conceptual scheme, and finally came to
prominence with Aquinas. 7 Deely expresses it as follows:

if there are relations in the world as well as in thought, then relations in thought are
unique among mind-dependent beings in having as their positive essence exactly the same
positive structure as their mind-independent counterparts. 8

Let me concretise this in an example: if I am your brother, this is a real relation concerning our provenance.
Now if I were to die, you no longer have a brother, yet you would continue – entirely legitimately – to refer to
me as your brother. The real relation has fallen away, but a mind-dependent relation to a memory and a
knowledge of our common provenance remains. Moreover, both relations are founded in the same provenance,
both are relations of brotherhood, and both terminate (at least formally) at you. Finally and most centrally,
both are most correctly expressed as the relation “…is brother of…,” ii which is wholly a “being toward
another,” thus fulfilling the criteria of a categorial relation, without both relations being categorial.

It was not until Cajetan in the 16th century that an explicit typology of relations accommodating this fact
would emerge, and, in the 17th century for the implication, in Poinsot, that the typology was a more general
category than Aristotle’s. This was partially borne out in a term the Latins had acquired from Boethius in the
6th century – a word common to both mind-dependent and real relation: relatio secundum esse, or “relation

Figure 2: Latin relational types after Avicenna

i Deely phrases it thus: “those whose whole being consists in a reference or being toward another” translating “sunt illa, quorum totum
suum esse se habet ad aliud” (Deely, Four Ages of Understanding 2001, 228). I understand from Marmo (The Semiotics of John Poinsot
1987) that this definition originates as Aristotle’s second definition of relatives (Categories c.335-322 BCE (1963), 8a), and that the specific
formulation quoted is Suarez’s (Disputationes Metaphysicae 1597 (1861), Opera Omnia, XXVI, p. 806).
ii The ellipses in this expression are intended, here and for the rest of this paper, to serve as placeholders for terms. This is in order to
express diagrammatically the fact that true or “ontological” relations, as a being “wholly toward another,” are in abstraction from their
terms.

6
according to the way it has being,” that is, true relations in general. This phrase draws out the defining
attribute of relation, common to relations in both mind-independent and mind-dependent contexts: that it is
a being wholly toward another, with no absolute (that is, nonrelative) aspect. In contrast, relatio secundum
dici is a relation taken as an attribute of a subject. When these are graphed, as above, it immediately suggests
an impending upset to the traditional substance-oriented approach of Aristotle and of Latin Aristotelianism.
Both Aristotle’s categorial relation, and relatio rationis, are relatio secundum esse, or relations with no
absolute aspect. But this surprising indifference of relation secundum esse – today termed “ontological”
relations in English – to modality makes the mind-independence of categorial relation a mere accident, not
something essential to relations. Now Aristotelian categories are categories of real things, and it is required
that they classify things univocally (that is, in the same sense wherever they are employed). However, from
an Aristotelian perspective, relatio secundum esse cannot be a univocal term, because it applies both to real
(categorial) relations and to unreal relations of reason. This, in Aristotelianism, could not be a more extreme
form of unlikeness: a predicate cannot apply to a thing and a non-thing in the same sense, for example, a
marble and an imagined marble do not both have weight, because imagined things do not really weigh
anything, even though we might imagine their weight. This is to say that unreal things are modelled on the
pattern of the real, and so are like the real (analogical in some sense), without actually being real. Hence,
ontological relation makes the Aristotelian category of relation a nominalism, since it could not apply to both
relatio realis and relatio rationis in the same sense, yet is required to by the fact that both are ontological
relation in the same sense.

We shall soon see that the resolution of these difficulties requires a new perspective, but this is already
suggested in the above graph, both on the above grounds, and because the absolute categories are expressible
as relations: the categories of substance and inherent accidents are placed under “transcendental relations,”
since these are simply relations expressed so as to include their subjects. 9 The import of this is that relation
is not only more general than the categories, but also more general than mind-dependence and mind-
independence too.

The nominalists and the “problem of universals”

In the preceding section, I have assumed that there is such a thing as real relations, in order to introduce the
notion. But if their reality is to be established, it is necessary to confront the doctrines of nominalism before
we proceed further. Nominalism is inimical to signs and to real relations, eliminatively reducing them to
transcendental relations or relations of reason by excluding real ontological relations. There have been three
periods in Western philosophical history in which nominalism has arisen, and the first was in the 11th century.
It arose over difficulties with universals, centred around the questions formulated in Porpyhry’s Praeteritio
(c. AD271), namely:

whether genera or species exist in themselves or reside purely and solely in things
understood; whether, if they exist, they are corporeal or incorporeal; and whether they
exist apart or within sense objects and in dependence upon them. 10

We infer from St. Anselm that the nominalist Jean Roscelin “taught that universal terms such as genus,
species, and the like have no proper signification of their own,” and we owe to him an indelible expression to
describe universals, flatus vocis, or “fart of the voice” – more-or-less “brain fart” in today’s terms. Only
individual beings exist, to Roscelin; all else are mere names, that is, “nomina.” 11

By the time the second wave of nominalism hit, with William of Ockham in the 14th century, it was
significantly subtler and more persuasive. Ockham did not deny the existence of real relations, he denied that
real relations are distinct from the things they relate, and thus he denied that real relations are a (mind-
independent) category. 12 By implication, Ockham is thus compelled to diverge from what I have previously
termed the classical Latin definition of relation as a “being wholly toward another.” He holds rather that
relations inhere in their fundamental subjects – they are merely “transcendental relations,” and, like all
accidents, serve only the individuality of the subject. They never terminate in a remote object, which implies
that they cannot really (that is, mind-independently) relate to some other object. To put it conversely, relations
are merely intrinsic – they cannot relate extrinsically to the subject of which they are an attribute.

The third wave of nominalism is the modern period, a 400-year avalanche of nominalism, inspired principally
through the work of Francisco Suarez, whose Metaphysical Disputations (1597) was a comparatively short,

7
handy volume purporting to present exhaustively the doctrines of the great Latin Age authors. Deely tells us
that Suarez, along with Pedro Fonseca and the Conimbricenses, “became nearly the sole channel by which
Latin philosophical doctrines influenced the shaping of the modern philosophical mind.” 13 Suarez of course
denied real relation, and although he held that signs do signify, in his hands it is only the mind that relates
to the object signified; it is a mind-dependent affair only. Unfortunately, Suarez’s text does not present the
views of Aquinas accurately, 14 nor does it do justice to Poinsot, a near-contemporary of his who argues in
considerable detail against Suarez’s position. As a result, modernity was simply not exposed to countervailing
views. The effect is profound:

without real relations, …it springs out like a lion to its prey that there can be no real
communication, no intersubjectivity at all beyond the “brute force” of subjective
interactions, as when a meteor crashes to earth, a panther eats a lamb, etc. 15

Above and beyond the theoretical ramifications of nominalism, it has had significant cultural import. As such,
the ways it has become enculturated can be expected to shape our intuitions in discussions about nominalism,
and so to reduce the possibility of being misguided by intuition, it will be fruitful to contrast briefly a richly
culturally-embedded perspective shaped by realism with one shaped by nominalism. The modern period, an
“avalanche” of nominalism, has been marked by scepticism, unresolvable epistemological concerns, the death
of Christendom (traditionally a realist project), and a kind of rolling dismemberment for both philosophical
ethics and philosophy of science. It appears to me that a nominalistic perspective tends ultimately to
undermine experiences of enchantment, embodiment, and a sense of the reality of interpersonal relating. Now
while it is not easy to find a contrasting realist perspective beneath the modern avalanche, I believe one can
be found in Orthodox Christianity, which, at least in the pen of thinkers like Fr. Alexander Schmemann, has
not lost hold of Christianity’s pre-medieval grasp of real relating. Schmemann, in his celebrated book of
sacramental theology, For the Life of the World, articulates the following perspective celebrating the embodied
relatedness of all things:

The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the
world and unifies it in his act of… both receiving the world from God and offering it to
God – and by filling the world with this eucharist, he transforms his life, the one that he
receives from the world, into life in… communion with [God]. The world was created as
the “matter,” the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the
priest of this cosmic sacrament. 16

As you can observe, Schmemann’s vision is of a universe continually transformed from being merely “in itself”
to being ordered to God. It becomes caught up in a “being toward” another, rather than merely being itself.
The perspective to be gained from this contrast is, I think, illuminating: the “matter” that Schmemann refers
to consists, under a modern rationale, exclusively of things with a mere intrinsic nature, which can be nothing
but themselves. Under an Orthodox perspective, though, things embody God and in principle anything at all.
It is a universe of embodiment and participation, grounded upon relating. At odds with this notion is – if you’d
permit a sweeping generalisation – the philosophically modern era. Perhaps the nominalistic central thread
of this era is not embodiment but a quest – so far a hapless one – for some kind of absolute ground for reality
and experience, something non-mediated, non-relative, but simply itself. But the modern philosophical project
is as atomised as its objects of study become under its hand: after 450 years, there is not even rough consensus
on central questions of epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, or philosophy of science. Perhaps Alasdair McIntyre
is right in remarking that our choice is either “Nietzsche or Aristotle” – that is, either there is a world, or no
world at all. 17

Introducing Poinsot
To my mind, the failure of the modern project, let alone its apocalyptic social consequences, places some
measure of importance on the prospect of recovering a workable defence of ontological relation, for which I
will turn to John Poinsot. Traditionally known as John of St. Thomas, Poinsot was a moderate realist, who
lived and wrote in Iberia at the pinnacle of the Latin Age, by then a thousand-year old development of
indigenous Western thought. His writing systematically and indefatigably presents the tradition with quite
extraordinary technical sophistication, and while he is held today to be the originator of a revolutionary
advancement in the understanding of signs, he seems to have gone to some lengths to avoid attracting the
attention of authorities to any controversial ideas. In 1634 he suppressed the publication of his second volume

8
of Natural Philosophy, on astronomy, 18 quite possibly out of fear he’d suffer a fate similar to Galileo’s. The
revolutionary work in question today, the Tractatus de Signis, or Treatise on Signs, was originally published
in 1632 as part of an enormous volume, the Ars Logica, which preserves the traditional order of exposition
and refrains from developing explicitly the implications of the Treatise, which its 20th century translators and
editors have established as demanding a reorganisation of the entire Aristotelian-Thomistic system under the
new perspective it suggests. Yet Poinsot does signal the novelty of perspective that the Treatise takes in his
Word to the Reader and elsewhere, but this proved not to be enough, and the Tractatus was lost to the modern
era. It was only in 1932, exactly 300 years following the publication of the Tractatus, that Jacques Maritain
began to rediscover it, the first fruits of which may be seen in Distinguish to Unite, Or, The Degrees of
Knowledge. 19 i Yet Maritain toiled in the darkness of Neothomism, and it was left to his student, Ralph Austin
Powell, to rediscover the true significance of Poinsot’s work. 20

Real relations: taller-than-ness

In my experience, Poinsot’s writing has no match in terminological precision, and neither does any period of
philosophical discourse rival the scale and complexity of second scholasticism. This presents something of a
problem for a brief exposition! To ease the introduction, I will make use of several thought experiments,
moving from the topic of real relation to its modes, Poinsot’s answer to the problem of universals, and finally
to the action of signs. This method of exposition unavoidably merges my work with Poinsot’s, and so it will be
necessary to point out in advance the specific matters upon which I rely upon him: I rely upon Poinsot on the
defence of ontological relation, on the problem of universals, and on his understanding of the causality
operative in signs.

Consider two things, one of which is taller than the other. It is not necessary for anyone to be aware of this
fact for it to be the case. If there was a universe with only one spatial dimension (“height”) and only two things
in it of different height, neither of which have minds, then one thing would be taller than another thing.
Evidently, taller-than-ness is a mind-independently existing relation, since no mind is present in this
scenario, yet one thing has greater height than the other. This relation is not material. It is not a “thing”. Yet
it is real. It is experienceable empirically. And it is purely relative.

Relations, parsimony, and reality

Now the case of taller-than-ness may suggest the mind-independence of relative being, but to a nominalist it
would leave much to be desired. Firstly, such relations neither add to nor take away anything from their
subjects. Secondly, they are not material; how then do they acquire reality? Thirdly, it seems that if one were
to take taller-than-ness as real, then indefinitely many other relations would have to be taken as equally real
– but would one be comfortable with affirming the reality of a relation like “to the left of the first thing,
tomorrow, unless I forget to go to the shops”? Probably not.

Let us then consider a second thought experiment: a rock breaks free from a cliff and falls downward. On the
way down it dashes itself upon the cliff-face, marking it. Now it just so happens that the mark looks precisely
like the letter “R”, so that it would found a relation of R-ness with a person who could recognise it as an “R”.
However it also forms relations of other kinds:

- The falling rock unearths minerals previously beneath the surface of the cliff-face that are food for
bacteria, whence arises the relation “…is food to…”
- The mark alters the reflection and absorption of light falling on it, changing the energy levels of the
photons in the air in front of the mark, heating the air molecules slightly. This actualises the relation
“…heats up…”
- The mark could also cause someone to receive the message “God says go to Russia,” thus forming the
relation “…is a sign from God that…”

i Deely notes that “The definitive final edition of this work, OC IV 257–1110, was based on the 7th French ed. of 1963” (Purely Objective
Reality 2009, 195).

9
Becoming actual: a filter upon being
Recognised R-ness as an actually existing relation
Unlike the case of taller-than-ness, these relations appear to be unproblematically real, and even canonically
so, since they are here-and-now interactions between physically existing things, and the reality of these
relations is confirmed by the fact that they cause modifications of the physical things.

Yet, like taller-than-ness, it still appears that there may be no end of further relations of this sort, invoking
a problem of parsimony for my conceptual scheme. For the objects of everyday experience, they would form,
in infinite number, with everything in the universe, the instant something comes to be. However, within this
infinite uberty 21 there is a clear difference between a relation arising when an actual person recognises the
mark as the letter R, and the relation whereby the mark simply is the shape of an “R,” without anyone
recognising it. When the mark is currently being recognised as an “R”, a currently existing R-ness relation is
actualised between a person and the mark (this is an ontological relation, by the way). However, when it is
not currently being recognised, this sort of relation does not exist. This suggests a “filtering” effect upon
relations, which, I will shortly argue, reveals three modalities and permits a well-managed and parsimonious
system.

Unrecognised R-ness as a mind-independent attribute

An unrecognised “R” does not, however, entail that it has no other relations of R-ness. For the fact remains
that the letter R has, by nature, a certain shape, and that the mark has, mind-independently, this shape. So
the mark, even when unrecognised, has the attribute of R-ness even though it is not currently supporting a
further relation of R-ness with a perceiver. This “attribute” is, in Poinsot’s terminology, called a
transcendental relation. 22 i

Abstraction layers
This distinction between a thing having an attribute, and that attribute founding a further relation between
itself and another attribute (in this case a person’s ability to read), deserves some mention. It pertains to the
distinction between the letter “R” as a physical shape and “R” as a letter with a function in a language. The
function depends upon the shape in order for it to be recognised; however the function is logically or, in
scholastic terms, formally independent of the shape, since one could, by convention, simply replace the shape
of “R” with some other shape, and have it serve the same purpose. I propose to use the concept of an
“abstraction layer” 23 (borrowed from computer science) in order to articulate the difference between the two.
An example of an abstraction layer is that when you use your mobile phone, you don’t enter lines of code; you
just press buttons on the screen. This is the result of base-level code being interpreted in terms of an intended
function or “purpose,” which, in turn, determines the higher-level screen-tapping. That is, not only does
screen-tapping utilise the base-level code, but it also orders it toward some purpose. In the same way, the “R”
function in language operates at a layer of abstraction above that of the “R” mark, ordering mere physical
marks toward the purpose of communication.

Infinite possibility and attributes: transcendental relations

In these cases, the physical mark is not functioning as itself; rather, it is functioning to signify other things.
That is, it is “interpreted” ii according to purposes external to itself, and thus operates and is acted-upon at a
layer of abstraction higher than its underlying intrinsic nature.

With this distinction in mind, let us focus upon the “lower” layer of abstraction, that is, upon underlying real
attributes of things. In the current thought experiment, the physical mark really has attributes, such as
having a certain shape, being composed of certain minerals, and being certain distances from other things.
These attributes are physical, or mind-independently real (though not always material). Yet it might appear
that they must also be indefinite (or perhaps truly infinite) in number, since it is not clear how one may avoid
counting among the attributes exotic relations like, for example, “half the size of Mars when added to Mercury

i “To memorialise Aristotle’s unwelcome realisation that even those types of being which are not [pure] relations [pure relations being those
whose whole being consists in a reference or being-toward another, e.g. taller-than-ness]… are yet relative [both] in their existence and in
their possibilities for being explained, the medievals after Boethius circulated a distinct name, relation secundum dici, “relation according
to the requirements of discourse about being”. There is then a profound sense of relativity in medieval discourse which applies to every
category of accident as a subjective characteristic and to substance itself as the subject of existence… [T]hey later also called this sense of
relation, which applies to the explanation of the whole of nature, relatio transcendentalis (transcendental relation), after the qualification
“transcendental” became the accepted medieval term for any notion that applies to more than one category.” – (Deely, Four Ages of
Understanding 2001, 228-9).
ii I wish to avoid the reader taking this term in any anthropomorphic sense, and will develop its universal sense shortly.

10
minus x billion tons.” To put the point more generally, it appears that any attributes sufficient to found any
mind-independent relation – including those not necessarily founding an actual relation at the current
moment – must be counted among the real, provided they are physical states of affairs, that is, existing
regardless of whether anyone or anything recognises, makes use of, or in general forms any higher-level
relation with them. The size of this set reduces to the potential for some entity, at any point in time, to
interpret attributes, or compounds of attributes, as signifying something; thus, the set is most likely infinite.

Yet I believe that their reality can be salvaged from this unlimited affront to parsimony in two steps: firstly,
by distinguishing between real possibilities and real actualities, and secondly, by employing the Latin-age
distinction between transcendental and ontological relations.

What is real and what is mind-dependent about attributes?

Attributes are not ontological relations like “taller-than-ness,” since they are attributes of a subject, and a
subject is a thing taken absolutely, not relatively. Hence, attributes are mere transcendental relations, that
is, relations with an absolute aspect (the subject) as well as a relative aspect; for example, the mark’s brown
colour. They have being by their capacity to be respected by some interpreting entity (for example, a person,
or bacteria, or photons). Thus interpreted, they function as something separated (abstracted) from its subject,
regardless of whether they happen to be an intrinsic part of its subject. If one assumes (as the Latins do) that,
in the real, subjects are unified and singular, not abstracted, this would make the case for the mind-
dependence of attributes, except for the fact that photons and bacteria do not have minds! Nonetheless,
attributes evidently only obtain relative to an interpreting entity, and are not necessarily intrinsic to the
thing. For example, the mark’s attribute of being food to bacteria functions, to the bacteria, as “…food to…”
without it being necessary for “food” to be an intrinsic aspect of the mark's being. As such, being food is only
a real attribute of the mark relative to the bacteria, not to the mark taken in itself. But paradoxically, the
evident reality of this attribute obtains in exactly the same way that being an “R” obtains relative to a literate
human, and since humans have minds, the attribute is mind-dependent, which is a canonical reason for
considering R-ness unreal! Yet in both cases, thus abstracted, attributes function to signify to the interpreting
entity some object; as such, the subject becomes relative to something else.

Given this perplexity concerning whether to describe attributes as real or unreal, is it not the action of
“interpreting” that abstracts an attribute from a subject? Is it not that the subject itself is distinct from this
abstraction-process and can be studied and understood absolutely, not relatively? We will shortly see that the
nature of the situation cannot support such an absolute approach. Firstly though, for the sake of clarity about
my use of the term “interpret,” this discussion warrants a term to express that it is not necessary specifically
for thinking or perceiving to occur for an attribute to be actualised. For example, bacteria do not think, and
yet they actualise the attribute of “…being-food-to…” in the mark. Air molecules do not think, and yet they
actualise the attribute of “…heats up…” in the mark. A tree fifty metres away from the mark possesses the
attribute of “…is-fifty-metres-away from…” with no perceiver involved. As such, I will follow Charles Peirce
in terming interpreting entities “interpretants” 24 henceforth, to get away from the suggestion that
interpreting entities are minds.

From the examples given above, it appears that interpretants are no less real than subjects or their attributes.
Moreover, this is no less the case if the interpretant is the mind of a human being, since the mind would be
no less determined by the subject and may respect it no less really than a bacterium or an air molecule. This
remains true even if one grants the unreality of mind-dependent objects, as is granted in the traditional
terminological distinction between “real” (existing mind-independently) and “unreal” (merely mind-
dependent), since even if a mental object (e.g. the idea or visual experience of the mark) is unreal, the mind’s
act of interpreting really causes a person to experience the subject as having an attribute. For example, the
action of recognising the letter “R” in the mark may involve the letter under the rationale of a merely mental
(unreal) object (for example, a concept), yet the person nonetheless actually recognises a letter, and so (s)he
really relates to the mark. Furthermore, the experience is determined by real attributes of the mark (its
physical shape). Hence, the attribute is real even if it signifies an unreal object; it is just that attributes are
not absolute properties of subjects, but rather accrue to subjects relative to some interpretant. It is the real
act of “interpreting” in which attributes' reality resides; evidently, the presence of a real interpretant is
sufficient for subjects to signify.

11
Attributes, though real, are relations, not intrinsic properties
Pace Ockham, in all these cases it is not necessary for the actualising of attributes to alter or add to the
intrinsic nature of the subject taken at the aforementioned “lower” layer of abstraction. For example, in the
case of the mark causing air molecules in front of it to heat up, the mark physically reflects photons, and in
this respect it undergoes physical modification, but this physical modification is not an intrinsic part of the
relation to the molecules; rather, it is an intrinsic part of the mark, and its relation to the molecules is merely
an attribute of the mark “to” the heating-up molecules considered as a system; that is, “…heats up…” is not
an attribute of the mark absolutely taken, but relative to the air molecules.

To express this in terms of abstraction layers, the act of “interpreting” (however automatic it may be) consists
in both a real relation between the (lower-layer) subject and the interpretant, and either a real or unreal
relation to whatever it signifies (that is, its “object” in Peirce’s terms). Regardless of the reality or unreality
of the object, the object is always signified at a higher layer than that of the “lower” layer subject, and so
might be said to be unreal at the lower layer. i This appears generalisable to all such cases, since under this
analysis, an attribute is not an intrinsic property of a subject, but a relation; hence, when an attribute is
attributed to a subject, it cannot be said to be intrinsic, but is rather constructed by the action of the
interpretant, and so is “unreal” on the lower layer. Yet it is real on the higher layer, because to an interpretant,
the subject has the attribute independent of the interpretant, is causally efficacious upon the interpretant
and is really relatable-to. For example, to the bacteria, the mark really functions as food; to a person, the
mark really has the shape of the letter “R,” and to the photons, the mark really heats them up.

We may now introduce a definition of an “attribute”: an attribute is a triadic relation between interpretant,
subject, and object, where the term “attribute” denotes the subject and the relation, implies the interpretant,
and signifies the object.

Uninterpreted attributes
There remains a further sense in which something defensibly describable as an “attribute” may be both real
and not in any relation to anything else. For example, an attribute of …is-taller-than… would not cause any
relation to arise unless both some other entity with height and some height-checker were present, yet if the
height-checker were absent, one entity would still have the attribute of being taller than the other; it would
just not have any effect on either subject, or upon anything else. Here the attribute is evidently a physical
state of affairs, yet it does not appear to be a real relation, since the two entities (and anything else in this
universe) do not relate to each other in terms of the attribute. In short, merely potential relations seem to be
real attributes in some sense of the term “attribute.”

It is these uninterpreted attributes that generate the infinities noted on the preceding page, and thus
engender a troubling lack of parsimony. Now the Latins went to some lengths to address conceptual schemes
that lack parsimony (and as a general habit, when they spotted an infinity, it smelled to them of mere mind-
dependent unreality). To address the problem of parsimony in my system, I will quote Poinsot on the topic of
universals, which is an overlapping question. Poinsot holds that universals are both real and one (that is, not
several), yet he appears to face a double conundrum: firstly, universals are merely conceptually one, and are
instantiated only in their species, where they appear to be multiplied, rather than one (for example, the
universal “man” contracts to many existing men). Secondly, universals appear to be real only when multiplied,
but, as concepts, remain unreal. How then can the term “universal,” said of the same thing in the same sense,
signify something both real and one – and, moreover, how can “universal” refer to a single thing, rather than
many things? Here is his answer (note especially his employment of a distinction between “material” and
“formal”):

The objective concept [of the universal, e.g. “man,”] is one, not according to a real unity,
but according to a unity of reason and abstraction. [Yet…] what is described as one is
something real if it is understood materially as subject of unity; but it is not something
real if it is understood formally as the very unity of abstraction and the relation of
universality. Thus, although it does not exist in the real in this state of abstract unity, the
nature does exist [in the real] in another state [that is, in its quiddity – p. 99]. This is a

i It will shortly be seen that attributes – these intrasubjective relations between subjects – are in fact what subjects reduce to without
remainder. Reality, upon empirical investigation, turns out to be nothing over and above a web of real relations.

12
 sufficient ground for [the universal] to be called a real being capable of existence
absolutely and in itself, though not in every state. 25

In other words, universals are transcendental relations 26 between a concept and real things. This relation
terminates in real attributes of things and is founded in the mental concept of these attributes. The concept
is one, and the attribute is real. Now the relation between them simply is i the universal. Furthermore, since
the relation is transcendental, it includes the relevant attribute in the terminating subjects (well, technically
their “quiddities” rather than the interpretant-relative attribute that denotes the quiddities), and so it follows
that the universal includes both the reality of its terminus and the oneness of its fundament. Therefore, it is
false to deny that universals, understood as transcendental relations, are both one and real.

Now the relational structure of universals is common to attributes: like universals, attributes are real only as
understood “materially,” that is, as really accruing to a subject on the lower layer, in virtue of some quiddity.
However, when understood “formally,” that is, as they are to some affected subject interpreting it (which could
perhaps be a human perceiver), they are not singular but general, because attributes do not necessarily inhere
in this particular subject (after all, something else could have the same attribute), and are not “real” in the
sense that the attribute is not an intrinsic feature of the affecting subject, but only arises in relation to the
affected subject. As such, attributes have being “formally” in relation to the subjectivity (nature) of the affected
subject at a higher layer, and have being “materially” in the intrinsic nature of the affecting subject at a lower
layer. ii

From this it clear that, in the “real”, that is, in the intrinsic natures of affecting subjects, attributes are not
forms but are instead the quiddity of real beings, to which forms (relations) merely correlate. It is in this sense
– as the quiddity of real beings – that our problematically infinite “uninterpreted attributes” are real.

Taking stock of this modal scheme

Let us now take stock of the scale of the parsimony of this system, in order to finally resolve the problem of
its parsimony.

To begin with, I must note a distinction between Poinsot’s system and mine. Poinsot’s treatment of universals
above offers parsimony in the sense that it filters out an infinity of attributes on the merely “formal”
(traditionally mind-dependent) side of the relation, leaving only the “material subjects” of the relations in the
real. In contrast, I assert the reality of the “formal” attributes insofar as they are real relations, which
considerably multiplies the objects in my scheme, even though it excludes, of course, those forms which are
merely mind-dependent unrealities, like concepts. Additionally though, I have pointed out that the quiddities,
as uninterpreted attributes, multiply to infinity in their own way, as in the case of taller-than-ness with no
height-checker present.

Now I believe that parsimony can be adequately preserved and that this system is well-managed, provided a
distinction is introduced between real actualities and real possibilities. I propose firstly that (logically
speaking) “before” any attribute is actualised in a subject, that there is a pure, infinite array of potential

i More on this needs saying, though in a different paper. My expression is imperfect: “form” is relative to the interpretant, and merely
correlates to the quiddity of the object, which is not formal in itself; hence, the “is” employed in the statement “the relation between [concept
and thing] simply is the universal” is not the simple “is” of identity, because one term of the relation is formal and the other is quidditative.
Now I do not believe that we have a general term denoting both a form and its quidditative correlate, but such a term would be appropriate
here. For present purposes, it will suffice to note that relation must, on these grounds, be more general than the form/matter distinction.
Alternatively, we must assert that things in their mind-dependent being have form, and propose a further distinction between “form” in
its general guise as abstracted from particular subjects, and “form” in its quidditative guise as part of the intrinsic nature of subjects. A
third possibility remains, which is that mental being and real being are essentially the same thing, in which case the distinction would not
be necessary. Yet even if this is the case, it would still be true that a functional distinction between form as a relation to some subject, and
form as the correlate terminating the relation in the subject, would be required.
ii Note here that I am employing strictly the traditional sense of “real” as “having a nature independently of being thought,” which is
traditionally contrasted with “unreal,” that is, merely mind-dependent. But because I have expanded from the notion of a human
experiencer to an “interpretant,” that is, anything at all that can be affected by something, “real” can no longer be used in its traditional
way, or else I would be forced to state that because the “formal” being of attributes is relative to some interpreting subject, it is not real
strictly speaking as formal; rather, its reality would reside purely in the “material” quiddity of the object. Yet when interpretants are mind-
independent, the affected object is no longer a (traditionally-unreal) mind, and so the relation is between two mind-independently existing
terms, about which no one would contemplate using “unreal.” Hence, this investigation calls for a qualification of the traditional term
“real.” I propose that “real” denotes what it has always denoted (defined above), but that this be divorced from its traditional relativity to
a human interpreter. In its place, the terms “subjectively relative” and “objectively relative” will suffice to replace “real” and “unreal” when
employed with reference to an interpretant. The attribute affecting the interpretant is “subjectively relative” to the object signified, since
it is part of the intrinsic nature (the subjectivity) of the object; the way the attribute is to the interpretant is “objectively relative,” since it
is the way the subject becomes an object to the interpretant. In other words, subjective relativity is a state of the object that grounds a
relation to the interpretant, whereas objective relativity is how that state appears to the interpretant (specifically, as the terminus of a
sign relation).

13
attributes that things could have, provided that this possibility excludes mere figments of the imagination,
and is instead limited to whatever may potentially be actualised as relations to quiddities. Secondly, I
distinguish “attribute” from “quiddity” henceforth (and later will reduce the latter to the former, in a manner
that secures parsimony by eliminating these problematically-infinite uninterpreted attributes from my
scheme altogether). I use the term “potential” to imply the same physical sense imparted by the term
“potential energy.” For example, a rock perched on the crest of a hill has a measurable potential energy, which
corresponds to its mass and the height of the hill; this suffices for a new attribute – the momentum it can
acquire – to be realisable with a certain definite and real “potentiality” (same sense) latent in the physical
system.

Limiting the term “potential” only to whatever may be actualised as relations to quiddities appears reasonable
to me, because outside of this lie the (unreal) possibilities of mere imagination, and also all (perhaps
unimagined) possibilities that just do not happen to be really relatable to any quiddity. The scheme is thus
limited to the physical world’s actual relatability.

Taken this way, potential attributes are still almost any property at all, in the sense that they have being as
part of the total combinatorial potentiality of all interactions in the universe. They are distinct from quiddities
(which are in some real affecting subject) in that their being is on the side of whichever interpretant either
may experience them (if human) or actualise them in some real affected subject possessing the requisite
quiddities.

The sense in which potential attributes contrast with actual attributes is that the former are to be conceived
in abstraction from any act in which they happen to be “picked out” in some subject, which would make them
actual. In other words, attributes that do not currently sustain an actual relation to a quiddity are merely
potential attributes (which is the same thing as describing them as only potentially attributes). Nonetheless,
potentialities are still “real” in the same sense in which people typically believe that there really are
possibilities: i they define what latent physical potential the universe has to change state.

Onto the actualisation of an attribute: there are two respects required for actualisation. It appears, firstly,
that in order for an attribute to be actualised there needs to be some quiddity that can support a relation. I
will use the term “determining” for this role. Secondly, there must be some interpretant that relates to the
subject in the requisite respect (for example, a person noticing that a tree is the requisite distance away from
the mark for the attribute “50-metres-away” to obtain). From this, it is once again clear that attributes are
not intrinsically in the subject signified, but instead are a (transcendental) relation to an interpretant and to
a subject.

Concerning our progress on the question of parsimony, at this intermediate point in its exposition, my scheme
would still result in an indefinite number of potential attributes. The number might even be infinite, but it is
not the same grade of infinity present in the pure possibility of imagination or of the possibilities
ungroundable in any quiddities. That is, it is limited – infinitely – by the specific circumstances of the universe
(i.e. an object’s spatiality, temporality, gravity, and so forth), that is, whatever actually obtains as quiddities.
Moreover, as noted, I doubt that anyone has a problem with the idea that there really are possibilities, or that
these might be infinite. Secondly, in order to become actual, it is required that an attribute comes to signify
something to some actual interpretant. It is only at this point that the relation has an actual effect; this is the
defining feature for the actuality of relations. This would rule out all exotic-sounding attributes like “half the
size of Mars when added to Mercury minus x billion tons,” except in cases where they are actualised, in which
case we would surely want our theory to treat them as real.

The modes: actuality, potentiality, and virtuality

Let us now bring into view a third modality at play here. Perhaps surprisingly, relations have three
modalities, rather than expected pair of “potential” and “actual.” When these three modalities are understood,
they can be seen to function together as a filter upon being, with which the plenitude of relations might no
longer be quite so bothersome to those accustomed to “desert landscapes.” 27 ii

i As per a prior footnote, note that this usage of “real” conflicts with the traditional sense of “real” when the interpretant is a human mind,
but it does not when it is some physical thing, interaction, or function which could actualise them.
ii It might also help that parsimony is traditionally not a moral virtue but a vice. It is at least conceivable that the contemporary philosophical
taste for “desert landscapes”, as Quine puts it, is more a speculative or even an aesthetic concern than an empirically-minded one. I am

14
To recap, potentialities are uninterpreted attributes, that is, whatever relations that may be determined by
the quiddities of subjects. They are infinite in number and, as a set, inexpressible and beyond the experience
of humankind or anything that could exist in the universe. They are not in real relations with some
interpretant and some subject.

Then there are actual attributes of a real subject. These are actualised by whatever circumstance in the
universe satisfies the specific respect under which a real relation would obtain between quiddity, object, and
interpretant. As such they are real, and they are in principle observable (though not necessarily observed).

Thirdly, however, attributes may be understood as “virtual” in a certain respect. When considered simply as
possible relations to quiddities, they are unreal. But this is to take them as they are in themselves, when in
fact it is exceedingly common that something unreal signifies actually. The example, given on page 6, of one’s
dead brother, is a typical case of virtuality. For a further example, consider again the case of taller-than-ness,
with a height-checker present, but instead of there being two things with height, imagine that there is only
one thing. Imagine, also, that the height checker is a typically simple device with the sort of obsessive habit
exhibited by most sensors, where if no second thing is present to it, it simply compares a thing’s height with
the zero-height of the ground. In such a case, the interpretant really relates to the thing and to the ground,
and these latter two taken together as “subject” really found a relation to the object, that is, they really signify
taller-than-ness. However, the object is unreal, because the ground does not have height (it is rather a
reference point for measuring height), and so it would be false to assert that it has tallness, and thus false
that the thing is taller than the ground. Now the definition of “virtual” is to not be some thing, yet to have the
actual efficacy of that thing, 28 and this is precisely the case here: the sign’s object is unreal, and so there can
be no real relation to its object, because there is no real taller-than-ness on the side of the quiddity of the
subject; yet, to the height-checker, taller-than-ness is actually signified.

As such, taller-than-ness is not a real attribute of the subject considered in isolation from any interpretant.
Additionally, there is no real relation of taller-than-ness. Yet it also cannot simply be an unreal attribute,
because it is actually “picked out” by the interpretant, and so functions as an actual attribute to the
interpretant. Therefore, it is a virtual attribute.

Such cases are common in real life: histories of real things no longer existing, fiction, misapprehensions, lies,
unbuilt designs, and new ideas are all virtual signs, due to the absence of a real relation to their objects.

From the above it appears that there are three modalities for relations: virtual, potential, and actual. Together
they comprise the “real.” As confirmation, it can be seen that the three modes stem directly from sign action:
actual signs have a fundament, material terminus and interpretant, while potential signs have no
interpretant, and virtual signs have no material terminus. When considered in terms of how things change,
or how things come to be, they function as a modal filter, which I show in the graph that follows. The number
of elements in the system begins with an infinite plenitude of merely virtual relations to any imaginary or
otherwise unreal terminus. This number is then reduced to the latent physical potentialities that are
unactualized but terminate at real things. Finally, they are again filtered, leaving only real relations – that
is, interpreted relations to some material terminus. Being is thus filtered by acts of coming to be in relation.

I graph the modalities below. Circled letters are attributes, rectangles are subjects, and arrows signify what
a given interpretant takes a subject to signify. Interpretants (not shown) function to bring attributes from the
blue circle into the domain circumscribed by the orange-brown circle, if not the green circle. As one can see,
attributes are naturally filtered until they are reduced, in actuality, to the relatively sober plenitude to which
we are accustomed, and not some unparsimonious magnitude. And in any case, when the magnitude is
colossal, it is a mere possibility, which I think is unproblematic.

concerned that the notion lacks sufficient richness by which one might discern where it is applicable and where it might not be warranted.
And in the case of real, empirically verifiable relations, the case is clear: we simply have no choice but to accept the stupendous plenitude
that the universe impresses upon us.

15
 Figure 3: modalities of attributes, and the filtering effect of relations

Passive and active aspects of filtering

Let us look more closely at the filtering effect of relations upon attributes, for their mechanism is highly
specific, which equips my theory both with tools for correctly analysing signs, and with grounds for
constructing falsifiable hypotheses for testing the truth of this theory.

First off, any process by which something comes either to be or, if it exists already, to be relative to something
else, necessarily involves this filtering of attributes from the potential to the actual – very often through
becoming virtual.

In each relation, there are two aspects of filtering, which are correlated
to one another. Their end result is to produce the actual out of an array
of possibilities.

The first mode of filtering, known as determining, 29 stems from the way
the nature of a terminus delimits the scope of possible ways it may be
related to. Termini determine their fundaments by having a certain
nature, which cannot be what it is not, and thus cannot support a
Figure 4: a relation of determining
fundament that is unable to relate to its attributes. For example, a stop
sign cannot terminate the thought that it is rectangular, since it is
octagonal. For the sake of precision, note that a terminus’s delimiting function does not, on its own, amount
to determining, because there may be no actual fundament to determine; that is, “determining” requires both
delimiting and an actual fundament.

16
The second mode of filtering is known as representing, 30 and it runs in
the opposite causal direction to determining. Fundaments represent
their termini by having attributes that are taken – by some interpretant
– to signify a terminus due to the terminus being taken to possess those
attributes. For example, when you see a stop sign, your ability to perceive
shape respects the octagonally-shaped stop sign – and thus you are
guided to recognise that it is a stop sign.

Now both representing and determining are cases of one thing Figure 5: a relation of representing
respecting 31 another, but this term traditionally does not denote a
situation in which both aspects correlate in one relation, it merely denotes either aspect on its own. In order
to express their correlation in a relation, I will employ the term founding. “Founding” appears suitable to me
because, like Poinsot’s technical use of “fundamentally,” it carries the implication that the terms involved are
not merely constructions internal to a relation, but have a nature extrinsic to and independent of the relation.
To give an example, your visual experience of a stop sign includes the attribute of its octagonality, and on the
side of the stop sign’s quiddity, it is physically octagonal; here, both representing and determining occur, and
so your experience does not merely represent a stop sign, but is also “founded” in terms of real octagonality.

For the sake of precision, note that “founding” abstracts the function of an interpretant, while “representing”
is necessarily to some interpretant. This usage is faithful to the traditional treatment of a fundament, which
founds a relation to a terminus, and which was not characterised as necessarily involving an interpretant.

In virtual signs, no real relation to the terminating object is present, and so no determining can occur, thus
making them a case of representation alone, not one of founding.

In potential signs, no real relation to the interpretant is present, and so no signification at all occurs. These
are merely physical scenarios that have the resources to support a sign, should the right interpretant come
along.

Signs a la Poinsot
With this, we are at last ready to introduce signs proper. In the 4th century, Augustine inadvertently ushered
the sign into Western discourse as a general notion for the first time, with the definition, “anything perceived
which makes something beside itself come into our awareness.” 32 Deely speculates that this would not have
happened had he applied himself to learning Greek, since the term is employed in Greek in a restricted sense.
Either way, Augustine is responsible for bringing into the world essentially the usage we enjoy today. Indeed,
by 1632 it had barely changed – Poinsot’s definition is “that which represents something other than itself to
a knowing power.” 33

Either nominalism or interpretants

What follows in a very brief intuitive introduction to some of the properties of signs. i Most foundationally,
relations are between terms. For example, if I am taller than you, then the relation “taller-than-ness” has
your and my height as terms. What follows from this is that if one of the terms were to fall away then the
relation would not obtain: if I ceased to exist then there would be no term by which you could be taller than
me. Consequentially, termini are known immediately, that is, without further inference, 34 since the
experience of a real relation immediately implies a term. Another consequence is that terms are
distinguishable from each other by what I will call their polarity: in scholastic parlance, whichever person is
taller is the fundament of the relation and the other correlate its terminus. If the relation were characterised
as “shorter-than-ness” then the terms’ polarity would swap. But what should determine whether the relation
is characterised as shorter-than-ness or taller-than-ness? Physically speaking, it would appear that both
relations coincide or are in fact always the same thing in reality. This is to ask the question of the significance
of a relation: who or what entity does the relation affect? For example, if someone is checking height
differences, it makes an intelligible difference which way the poles are arranged, but in the absence of some
height-checker (which, as noted above, is termed an interpretant 35 of a relation) it is not obvious whether
there is any reality to the relation at all, since polarity obviously has no being independently of an
interpretant. Given this though, is a relation not just a mere thought about the terms? After all, polarity

i For a fully elaborated introduction to sign action, see (Culwick, How Sign Action Really Works 2018).

17
neither adds to nor takes anything away from its terms’ quiddity, and clearly has no material nature. To be
sure, the relation’s physical basis – namely, things of differing height – is indifferent to and supportive of
either polarity equally. This both demonstrates the unreality of polarity as far as the terms' intrinsic natures
are concerned, and also makes clear that a physical difference in height is real with or without an interpretant.
As such, might we not think – with Ockham – that real relations are eliminable, and that the situation is
resolvable by simply accruing attributes to individual things? Also in support of relational nominalism is the
fact that, without an interpretant, its polarity's real basis remains undefined: it supplies no answer to the
question, “on what principle is a relation physical?” since without polarity, the relation becomes unintelligible.

Now compare all this to if a person or machine comparing height were to come along and be affected by the
physical difference in height. The relation now includes an interpretant, the height-measurer. The
interpretant is either mental or material. In the case that it is material, then, plainly, the relation is real,
because the effect on the interpretant is real, and the effect is a direct consequence of comparing physical
heights, not of the heights as individual physical properties. That is, to compare heights is to put them in
relation to one another, and since, in this case, the entity doing the comparing is nonmental (e.g. perhaps it
is purely mechanical), the relation is a real form (e.g. a pattern or a state) in the physical process of comparing
heights. Furthermore, this relation is not a mere side-effect, but rather the very thing that directly determines
the height-checker’s function as a height-checker. As such, I see no remaining grounds for relational
nominalism.

What signs imply about the nature of real relations

Hence, each sign is a single real relation between three terms: an interpretant, a fundament, and a terminus.
One may prescind the parts and functions within a sign from each other, as we have been doing, but in reality,
relations always actualise as signs (or else they would not be real). The relation between interpretant and
fundament, and between fundament and terminus, is one of founding. The relation between all three terms
is one of signification.

Some further distinctions are necessary. Imagine a driver who notes a stop sign and stops her car. Here, the
driver is an interpretant, the stop sign a fundament, and the stopping of the car is the terminus of the relation.
Now the stop sign has many attributes that do not contribute to its function of signifying the command to
stop, for example, it is made of metal, it is 8 feet high, etc. The attributes that directly function to signify the
terminus are the proximate fundament, while the remote fundament is the object to which the attributes
belong. The terminus also has two aspects: one intrinsic to the relation and one extrinsic to it. The physical
stopping of the car is the material terminus, while the purely formal respect in which stopping correlates to
a command to stop is the formal terminus. Finally, the remote interpretant is the driver, and the proximate
interpretant is the attribute(s) of the driver that function to interpret the stop sign.

Figure 6: signification in simple terms

18
Since it is important to remove doubt that sign action has no necessarily mind-dependent aspects, consider a
scenario where one billiard ball hits another accidentally and with no observer. i At the moment at which they
collide – that is, when they physically affect the properties of one another – a real relation between them
exists. Insofar as the relation is one of compression, when put in terms of the effect upon any one ball, the
formal terminus is the “compressor,” the proximate interpretant is the “compressed,” and the fundament is
the impulse (impulse is the integral of force applied over a given period of time) by which the second ball (the
material terminus) compresses the first ball (the remote fundament and remote interpretant). Plainly the
relation is mind-independent since all its terms are mind-independent functions or states of the balls.

Teleology and specificative extrinsic formal causation

Given the foregoing talk about the “purpose” or “function” of a height-checker, and the seemingly teleological
nature of interpretants, the specific character of sign-action’s goal-directedness is of principal importance to
understanding it as a mind-independent and causal phenomenon. It turns out that a sign relation does not
involve teleology internally, yet signs are the very mechanism by which teleology comes into being. To
illustrate this, when the R-mark in a previous thought experiment caused the energy levels of the photons in
its vicinity to increase, no purpose or goal was invoked. What is in operation is in fact not final causality but
formal causality. In second Scholasticism, when developing a theory of experience, the Latins developed upon
the Aristotelian causal system a few novel causal modes. The cause operational in sign action is known as
specificative extrinsic formal causation. 36 This is to say that something causes a change of form, not matter,
in an interpretant, that it has being externally to the interpretant, and that it causes purely specification, by
which I mean it functions to identify, delineate, or otherwise specify. (This was opposed to “exemplification,”
which imparts existence both formally and finally, e.g. a blueprint. 37) Now the definition of “determining”
given above is clearly a description of extrinsic formal specification: when something determines, it does so
by (a) delimiting and (b) by actually correlating to another term. From (b) its causal mode is formal, because
to correlate is a relational property, and relations are forms; from (a) it functions to specify, since to delimit
is to permit only certain relations of founding and not others, which is an act of specification. Lastly, from (a)
it also follows that it causes extrinsically, because in order to actually delimit, a thing must have an intrinsic
nature, or else it would not possess any positive character in its own right that could serve to filter being, and
instead would terminate a relation merely formally, that is, merely intrinsically to the relation.

The causality of fundaments upon interpretants

Now specificative extrinsic formal causation is primarily identified with the material terminus, ii for example,
the physical nature of a stop sign, including its octagonality, determines our ability to recognise it. But if the
stop sign were then to signify to a driver that her car must be stopped, then it now functions not as a terminus
but as a fundament, as in figure 6 above. (The act of recognising the sign to be a stop sign would precede this
as a separate stage.) And while functioning as a fundament, the stop sign determines its interpretant in
another way, that is, by functioning to signify the object, and so specificative extrinsic formal causation is in
operation in fundaments too. The reason for this is that fundaments, by definition, are not absolute terms
knowable in themselves, but rather found a relation to some terminus, and so when they signify a terminus
they do not function as termini themselves, yet they still specify extrinsically and formally. Hence,
fundaments specify interpretants extrinsically and formally. Moreover, in the case of virtual signs, they are
the only term in a sign relation that specifies extrinsically and formally, since the object is unreal.

The difference between fundaments and termini

Now although the causality of a fundament is the same as that of a terminus, fundaments are quite unlike
termini, and exist at a higher layer of abstraction. To illustrate, if a terminus is brought into relation with an
interpretant via a fundament, the terminus is not a mediator or vicegerent of anything (at least not within

i This scenario is imperfectly mind-independent in that the objects involved in the interaction are objects of human experience, and in this
respect are still relative to minds. A perfect example would be put in terms of the mind-independent natures of the objects – but of course
we do not have direct knowledge of the intrinsic natures of objects. However, this mind-dependent aspect of the example does not render
the interaction between the balls mind-dependent, it only renders our view on their intrinsic natures mind-dependent. And fortunately,
their intrinsic natures are not required in order to demonstrate extrinsic formal specification, and so the example suffices.
ii In Question 4, Book 1 of (Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis 1985 (1632)) in which the pivotal discussion of extrinsic formal specification takes
place, the identification of this causal mode with objects is aided by a distinction between terminative and stimulus objects – a distinction
which would require me to confine my simplified terminology of fundament and terminus to a lower layer, and to introduce further terms
for the same material subjects on higher layers. To ease the reader’s introduction to this complex field I have omitted this complexity,
though a faithful extension of Poinsot’s tradition would demand it. Moreover, I am not convinced that this extra complexity is warranted,
because the additional terminology is not fully general, but rather models objects in a manner foreign to semiosis.

19
this specific sign relation), but the fundament serves as vicegerent to the terminus. This entails that the
“proximate fundament” – the attribute that represents the terminus – is not a simple attribute of the remote
fundament taken in isolation, but is necessarily some higher-order attribute by which it also relates to the
terminus.

Mediation and embodiment

It would be equivalent to say that the way the fundament relates to the terminus is what determines the
interpretant, though this expression is imperfect in that it lacks the ability to bear out the ubiquitous
experience of signs as things that embody their objects. For example, we experience the material stop sign
embodying the command to stop; we do not experience this command as embodied in the relation of the stop
sign to the future stopping of the car, even though this is how the sign is functioning. In other words, we have
what one might call a psychological commitment to experiencing signs as transcendental relations embodied
in their remote fundaments, not as comparatively ghostly ontological relations. Yet even if we tend to
experience signs as things, it is plain to see that we do not experience these things as they are in themselves,
but rather in terms of the role they are playing for us.

How teleology emerges

Things may play a role for us, and we certainly have goals and intentions, but this is not obviously the case
for, say, the billiard ball example above, which lacks goals and intentions. As such, one might be inclined to
conclude that sign action exhibits extrinsic formal specification, not final causation. However, since its
primary effect is to create significance, something is always “at stake,” so to speak. Specifically, whenever
something signifies, this is necessarily a state in which something becomes significant to something, prior to
which its meaning simply did not have the reality it now enjoys. Thus in every case, value, or normativity,
arises from sign action. And this is of course final causality of a minimal sort, since fundaments, as signifying
termini, are always ordered to their interpretants. i

Redefining “real”
With the modes and the ontology of signs established thus, the materials are available for a much-needed
redefinition of the term “real,” as intimated on page 11. I have so far employed the term in the traditional
sense that Poinsot and Powell employ, which denotes something with a nature independently of anyone’s
thinking about it – or, more rigorously, that its nature does not entirely reduce to mind-dependent being. 38
The opposing term “unreal” denotes something that reduces entirely to mind-dependent being. Now alongside
this traditional definition is a traditional practice of distinguishing particular things from merely interpreted
relations between them, for the reason that general entities are usually thought to be unreal products of the
mind. However, this usage runs into an inconsistency in the context of real relations, since they are both real
and non-particular (in the sense of being rather between particulars). To make matters worse for the
traditional definition, I will argue later that all objects are in fact parts in relation, from which it would follow
that no things are real. To make matters worse still, from what I have just argued, this would imply that the
being of anything is merely relative to some interpretant, and is not so fundamentally at the lower layer of
the quiddities of subject and object. This would make all being unreal on the traditional interpretation.

It is necessary, therefore, to redefine “real” in a manner befitting sign action. Such a redefinition, however, is
not only required by the nature of signs, but also by what might be the most common process evident in the
growth of scientific knowledge: some object of study, observed to have an intrinsic nature and thus to be made
of some “stuff,” always turns out, upon deeper investigation, to reduce to parts in relation (a point upon which
I shall elaborate shortly). Under such a transformation of perspective, the traditional usage of “real” would
require that the object’s initially material guise become known to be merely mind-dependent, and can be
distinguished from the reality of its parts. Yet I showed in the introduction that this is unsupportable, because
reductive theories of everything cannot account for strange loops and other phenomena. Since a mechanistic,
reductive usage such as this is unsupportable by both a scientific and a semiosic understanding of the world,
a redefinition is sorely needed.

On these grounds, a hasty redefinition might simply scrap the distinction between real and unreal altogether,
especially because, from a semiosic perspective, all real relating is formally analogous to a human act of
interpretation in the sense that signs are “about” their objects rather than being objects themselves. But such

i I have written specifically on this subject in (Culwick, How Morality Comes to Be 2017)

20
a move would not deliver us from fiction, lies, and misperceptions, which surely do demand some workable
distinction.

My strategy is to preserve the spirit of the traditional definition at the expense of the traditional practice. If
“real” was best defined as that which does not entirely reduce to mind-dependent being, and if this paper
succeeds in showing that being at its most basic is sign action, then the traditional definition of “real” may be
translated into the following:

a term of a sign with a nature that does not reduce entirely to its role in the sign.

In detail: if a sign has a material terminus, then its quiddity transcends whichever attributes determine the
sign, and so the terminus is “real.” Similarly, every sign has a remote fundament, whose quiddity also
transcends whichever attributes found the sign, and so all fundaments are “real.” Lastly, despite the fact that
whatever is signified is “subjective” to the remote interpretant, this does not, on its own, render the sign
unreal. To the contrary, if its terminus has a material aspect, this serves precisely to make the sign a sign,
without which it would merely be a virtual sign, thus not actual. Yet even as a virtual sign, it would still
really signify. Put in terms of my new definition, this amounts to there being some real effect upon the remote
interpretant, and, as shown above, a real effect realises a relation. As for the reality of the proximate
interpretant, this is a more complex matter. At the layer of abstraction at which signification occurs, the
proximate interpretant of course reduces to its role in the sign, because it is wholly a correlate of the
fundament and terminus, thus internal to the relation and unreal by my definition. However, as an effect, it
is also something in its own right, amenable to being caught up into other relations at any layer. For example,
once the falling rock leaves its mark upon the cliff-face, the mark then comes to signify to humans, bacteria,
and photons. As such, the effect – modelled within a sign relation as a proximate interpretant – is “materially”
instantiated in the remote interpretant and has the potential to be caught up into further relations, and so at
least potentially transcends the sign in this respect. Hence, not only are material termini, remote
interpretants, and remote fundaments real, but proximate interpretants also do not necessarily reduce
entirely to their role in a sign. Insofar as they come to function in other signs, proximate interpretants are
real.

However, the above definition of “real” does not work for signs themselves, since it is only concerned with
signs’ component parts. Neither would it do to simply add “and signs” to the definition, because potential and
virtual signs are unreal. Signs’ reality is not a function of just any of their terms being real: signs always have
a real fundament, and have either a real terminus (in the case of actual signs), an unreal terminus (for virtual
signs), or an unreal interpretant (for potential signs). Yet we already have the resources to formulate a
workable definition. Over the course of this paper there has been extended discussion about the reality of
relations, which finds the following:

In order to be real, relations:

- occur between quiddities, which converts quiddities into attributes (pp. 10–14), or transcendental
relations (p. 12),
- one of which functions as a formal terminus (p. 18),
- which inheres in a material terminus (p.18),
- which determines (p. 16), or extrinsically and formally specifies, some fundament (pp. 19–20),
- which signifies the terminus to some proximate interpretant (p. 18),
- and which thus has an effect on the remote interpretant (p. 18)

As such, we may append to the above definition the following:

or signs themselves, provided they have no terms that reduce entirely to their role in it.

This definition implies the following: only signs are real relations, but not all signs are real relations.

Now in a later section, I will argue that the terms of relations are always yet more signs, from which it will
follow that terms are just further signs at a different abstraction layer (p. 10) from the current sign. In other
words, “term” reduces eliminatively to “sign.” This permits the definition of “real” to be flattened: to be real is
to be:

a sign with no terms that reduce entirely to their role in it.

21
Virtual signs and culture
This new definition allows additional clarity on the nature of virtual signs – specifically an ambiguity
concerning their material termini. Fiction, for example, is of course modellable as a mere representation in
the manner sketched in the preceding section on virtuality. This manner of modelling is, moreover, useful
enough for either capturing the unreality of the terminus, as is the case with fiction, or for modelling scenarios
in which something is being created, so that the terminus may be unreal initially, but becomes real as it is
guided by the representation, as is the case with blueprints. But to model only in this way would be to miss a
central facet of fiction, which is that it is known to be unreal and enjoyed precisely because of this. In other
words, it would be more correct to define the termini operating in fiction by both the unreality of their termini
simply speaking, and their reality relative to discourse or cultural lebenswelt. For example, does a unicorn
exist? Of course not. But, in a story about unicorns, does the terminus of “unicorn” have another material
aspect? Arguably yes: relative to a given culture in which speaking of well-known unrealities like unicorns is
only possible due to the stable interpretive basis afforded by the shared culture, it appears to me that the
“material” terminus in most signs is this culture. Like any sign, this culture will be unreal at the level of its
lower-layer subjects and objects, but real to its interpretants. Moreover, it is typical for people to signify
fictions in ways that reflect an awareness of this double nature, like, for example, when people talk about
attributes of a unicorn after previously affirming the nonexistence of unicorns. This suggests, to me, that the
termini of these sorts of signs are virtual in one sense, and actual in another, since the attributes being
signified simultaneously terminate both actually at the shared understanding of fictional unicorns, and
virtually (i.e. merely formally) at their nonexistence.

Now culture would fail to be “real” on the traditional definition, since a culture is simply how a group of people
construct their world, and this lebenswelt need not be especially faithful to the nature of lower layers upon
which our existence depends. For example, no culture need necessarily understand particle physics. On the
traditional definition of real, if their understanding reduces to mind-dependent being, then it is unreal. Yet a
culture is real on my new definition, because a culture clearly has a nature that transcends its role in a given
sign. Such is the case with language, which at no point has fundamental reality as language outside of its
interpretation by human minds, yet, because it is real intersubjective communication, its being consists in
real relations between human minds, in stable customary linguistic forms which do not reduce to any one
instance of signification, and so by my definition is clearly real. i

This suffices to resolve the problem for a general theory of sign action, and, I will shortly show, for theories of
realism seeking to be faithful to scientifically informed intuitions about mind-independent natures.

Powell: direct experience and empirical verification

With the meaning of “real” clarified, the question arises how one might establish in experience whether a
given sign – and most pertinently its material terminus – is real. To be experimentally verifiable in principle
is a point of central significance to this theory of sign action, since it is what distinguishes it from merely
speculative philosophy. Now signs are indeed amenable to experimental verification, and this verifiability is
a consequence of signs’ direct knowability, by which I mean that signs – that is, all real relations as well as
virtual signs – are experienced directly. We have Ralph Austin Powell to thank for this contribution, and in
Freely Chosen Reality 39 he conducts an extensive historical survey culminating in the astonishing inductive
result that “philosophers as diverse as Kant, Russell, and Merleau-Ponty… a Process philosopher such as
Whitehead, Phenomenalists such as Hume and Ayer, [and] an Objective Idealist such as Lachelier” all hold
or would be committed to hold that “direct experience of real relations is the first known mind-independent
reality” 40 (provided they were to employ the term “real relation” in Powell’s sense, that is). Now there is hardly
time to summarise an extensive historical survey, but in two later papers, Powell gives what jointly amounts
to an abductive argument for the direct experience of real relations from the history of scientific discovery:

Real relations are the principal object of scientific study

In a 1989 paper, Powell observes that, on the historical evidence, real relations of a specific sort are the
principal object of scientific study. 41

i See also Poinsot’s work on “customary signs,” for example, (Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis 1985 (1632), 280/26-43 (Book 2, Question 6)).

22
 Scientific method never reveals the intrinsic nature of things: the effect predicted by
physical theories is typically of the [nonmaterial, purely formal] nature of a specification
of velocity, position, etc. in future on the basis of data of a present state; but a future state
such as this …lacks an intrinsic formal cause [and] any intrinsic nature. Hence, temporal
relations have only got extrinsic formal specification.

Powell then elaborates on how real relations exhibiting extrinsic formal specification function in the growth
of scientific knowledge: 42

it is precisely the function of extrinsic formal causality to displace the agent and final
causes by a more elementary cause. …Thus the solar system is explained as a mechanism
specified by extrinsic formal causes without needing any explanation by agent causes (let
alone by final causes which have not been recognized by science since the 17th century).
For, Einstein's general relativity precisely eliminated gravitational forces [under the
rationale of an agent cause] from explanation of the solar system, by substituting the
curvature of space-time for gravitational forces. 43 Now gravitational forces are agent
causes, whereas the curved space-time that governs the path of the earth around the sun
is an excellent example of extrinsic formal causality.

In other words, scientific investigation involves a process where the agent causality of “material” bodies in an
earlier theory is surpassed by a later theory employing extrinsic formal causes, on grounds that the latter is
knowable and testable, while the former constructs the same object of experience along the lines of an
unknowable intrinsic nature. As such, the employment of extrinsic formal causes permits the growth of
scientific knowledge.

Real relations are directly experienced

In terms of the subjective foundation of our ability to make scientific observations of mind-independent
realities, this would not be possible unless we are physically affected by real external things, and are thus
passive to them. Powell observes that to be passively affected is to be in a causal relation of agent to patient,
from which it follows that we directly and immediately experience these relations. 44

To give an example, consider a glass of water in front of you. Pick it up, drink from it, use it. Your experience
of the glass is not the immediate knowledge of things attributed to God, but rather one mediated by your
senses. It is scientifically theorised that attributes of the glass – say, its reflection of light in various
frequencies – serve to stimulate your visual system, the resulting electrochemical signals from which serve
as grounds for you to perceive and cognitively identify the glass. That is, one is in relation to the glass. More
significantly, it is the relation that you directly experience, whereas you do not directly experience the
intrinsic nature of the glass itself (nor the theorised intermediate steps: the electrochemical signals and light
frequencies). These can merely be inferred from what is implied by directly-experienced relations. That is,
experience of some relations is direct, whereas experience of the object requires the mediation of relations.

Real relations can embody their objects

This is a salient point at which to contrast this theory with nominalistic approaches typical of philosophical
modernity – again for the purpose of providing perspective on the explanatory possibilities available to these
systems.

Directly experiencing your relation to the glass embodies the glass, for you. We do not typically draw our
attention to the mediating steps; instead, we just use the glass, and so our experience is typically of the glass
itself, not of mediating processes. Now this mediate experience of the glass is (a) your only and total experience
of the glass, and (b) a stable semiosis that has matured to the point of accurately modelling the object's nature
for your purposes and thus accurately presenting it to you. Because of (b), your semiosis is a good model (for
the purposes you have) of the glass in itself. Because of (a), there is nothing to alienate your semiosis from
your understanding of the glass in itself. But for (a) and (b) to obtain is just what it means for a sign to
participate in the nature of its object. After all, the sign really does present real properties of its object to you.
Thus, its nature is what the object's nature (partially) is. Therefore, to the extent that a sign shares the nature
of its object, it embodies its object. And it does so by functioning as a mediator between the object and your
interpretants.

23
In contrast to a theory that establishes real relation’s role in supporting the experience of embodiment, it is
unsurprising that philosophical modernity, an “avalanche of nominalism,” typically lacks a means of
capturing the reality of embodied experiences, if not actively undermining traditional views formed by
experiences of embodiment, enchantment, or interpersonal relating, since the nominalism of modernity denies
the reality of relations.

The function of scientific tests is to distinguish real and unreal relations

Powell goes significantly further than observing the central role of real relation in scientific discovery: he
builds upon the direct experience of real relations a framework that may be exploited for the empirical
verification of the nature of signs. This is a complex, book-length argument, which cannot be reproduced here,
but its essence is intimately familiar to scientists: first, a hypothesis must be drawn that can in principle be
falsified by observation. Second, a test must be devised that permits the confirmation or falsification of the
hypothesis. Third, the test must produce a direct private experience for the experimenter. Fourth, the scientific
community must be aware of the experimenter’s potential responses to this private experience; in other words,
the possible responses must be known public objects. Fifth, members of the public must be capable of having
private experiences of the public object of the experimenter’s response, so as to verify the response and thus
learn what it implies.

The purpose of all of this is of course to gain knowledge. Now the way that scientific experimentation gains
knowledge is by this private experiencing permitting the experience of a new distinction between real and
unreal relations. Powell gives an example: people hold differing views about real relations in society, like those
“about relations of management and labour, or rich and poor, and of the well educated and the poorly
educated.” 45 Some of the differing views Powell cites are that for one group, loyalists, “these real relations,
sanctioned by our legal system, are seen as inequalities inevitably resulting from the functioning of a free
society.” 46 However, another group, deviationists, hold that

at least a good part of these relations till now sanctioned by American law and taken for
granted in American life should no longer be tolerated. Real relations long identified with
legal order they now declare to be devoid of true legality. [That is, the] existing system of
real relations is seen [to have merely] spurious and unreal legality. 47

From this it can be seen that the two groups’ differing views hold for the same underlying real relations of
wealth inequality, education, and so forth. But in the absence of the deviationists, it would not be possible to
establish as public objects, and distinguish, the real relations from the mere views or unreal relations of the
loyalists, because without contrasting views, the revealed difference between real structures and unreal views
would not be experienceable. 48 Yet in the presence of these contrasting views, each view can now be seen to
be identified with the real relation, for example, to the deviationists, spurious laws maintain real structural
inequalities in society. The deviationists’ activism consists precisely in differentiating real structural
inequalities from unreal views codified in law. Moreover, this identification and differentiation makes it
possible to experience them as distinct objects for the first time. And they are clearly public objects. Hence,
we immediately experience public objects distinguished by their reality and unreality. 49

All that remains is for Powell’s framework to be turned upon my theory of signs in order to establish conditions
for its falsifiability, thus its scientific legitimacy. This is clearly achievable for the theory presented here, since
signs are real relations themselves, and so they are amenable to direct observation, making each facet of this
theory falsifiable in principle by direct observation, once attention is turned to identifying circumstances
which would produce a result either confirming or disconfirming this theory’s claims. Moreover, since the
theory is a general theory of signs, any sign serves equally as subject of observation, permitting maximal scope
for its testing, thus giving it the potential to become an especially well-tested theory.

What signs imply about the universe

Matter as epiphenomenon
Cultural belief in “stuff”
With the nature of signs sufficiently elaborated upon, we can now proceed to the second part of this paper,
which is the metaphysical system that the nature of signs implies, that is, what they imply about objects in
general. It is in this section that I reduce quiddities to attributes and matter to form, allowing signs to function

24
as a total explanation instead of a mere epiphenomenon beneath which real individuals exist. I will begin by
returning once again to the nature of matter.

There is a deep Western cultural belief that the universe is made of “stuff.” It is also commonplace enough to
extend this hypothesis and suppose that the universe is fundamentally made of “stuff.” Such has been the
broad course of a lot of Western philosophical history, if not under the guise of “matter” then under a
matter/form hylomorphism. 50 In the twentieth century, the physical sciences challenged this notion to some
extent with the assertion that energy is physically fundamental, with field theory, waves, and fundamental
“particles” that are anything but material in the normal sense of the word. However, this has not generally
displaced the deep-seated intuition that in order for there to be something, it does not suffice to just be a bare
attribute, or a mere relation, or an abstraction or form. No, such things are thought to depend on “stuff” under
some rationale – that is, attributes need subjects, relations depend on their terms’ existence, and abstractions
require the objects from which they’re abstracted. In every case, the former entities depend for their existence
or instantiation upon “matter,” broadly construed.

The progressive erosion of “matter” by advances in physics

Yet there are now strong reasons to believe that the universe is not composed of “stuff,” and that matter is
rather a kind of epiphenomenon. For example, the physical sciences experienced a profound advance when
Isaac Newton proposed a theory that specified only rules of interaction between bodies in space, rather than
anything directly concerning their materiality. As noted above Powell observes 51 that, under an Aristotelian-
Thomistic perspective, Newton’s laws specify only formal causes of a particular type, that of extrinsic formal
specification, rather than causes associated with materiality like agent or efficient causality. Extrinsic formal
causality later proves empirically useful for Einstein, when, in his theory of general relativity, he substitutes
gravitation – an agent cause – with space-time curvature, an extrinsic formal cause. 52 These two cases are
examples of an often-unrecognised, but crushingly total, triumph of science on behalf of philosophical realism
over nominalism. It is a matter of mind-independent physical relations, not substances, turning out to be (a)
what are available to empirical observation and expressible in theoretical discourse, and (b) turning out to be
what the physical world is constituted by. And, as I have tried to show above, all real relations are signs.

Now the following regress seems to occur in physical sciences, which reduces “matter” to relations pervasively:

1) A theory – say, gas laws – explains (and predicts the behaviour of) an object or system of objects in
terms of relations between aspects, components, or attributes it has (in the case of gas laws,
molecules).
2) Since relations necessarily have terms, the objects or systems embodying these terms are then
empirically investigated, resulting in a theory that describes their internal relations. For example,
molecules are in fact atoms or ions interacting.
3) These new relations’ terms (i.e. the atoms) are investigated, resulting, of course, in a further theory
that describes the behaviour and constitution of the object in question in terms of further relations
between new terms, ad infinitum.
4) Thus, gases are relations between molecules, which are relations between atoms, which are relations
between electrons, protons, and/or neutrons, which are relations between quarks, leptons, and
bosons.

The latter are called “fundamental” particles not because they are known to be indivisible “building blocks”
of reality, but merely because it is unknown whether they have parts in relation. It is possible that at smaller
scales there are no further parts or “particles” (that is entities identifiable by spin, energy level, etc.), but this
is not to say that there would be nothing; at the most fundamental layer, there would be something – perhaps
simply a vague fuzz of relations between relations, with no term having intrinsic specification (an intrinsic
nature) of any kind. Such a scenario is theorised under the name “quantum foam” to be interspersed by
particles (and their complimentary antiparticles) momentarily popping into existence and then annihilating
themselves, giving spacetime a granular texture that otherwise would be “smooth”, that is to say, having
nothing to cause enough disturbance to quantise out a particle. This scenario suggests a thoroughgoing
fundamental relationality at scales smaller than fundamental particles, where the universe lacks the stability
to sustain a mechanism to produce “stuff” reliably.

Thus, the picture suggested by the progress of physics is of a world both fundamentally and pervasively
relational, with each term (or object) turning out to be simply another set of relations. It would be relations
“all the way down,” to a point where no mechanism is present to cause discrete entities to exist. At this point,

25
there would of course be neither relations nor “stuff,” since relations necessarily do not obtain if their terms
do not. Contemplating the further existence of relations beyond this point, the very principle of the universe
(as defined) would break down, as it would imply that there would be relations but no “stuff,” which is plainly
impossible since relations necessarily must have terms, or else there would be nothing to relate. This point,
logically implied by my thought experiment, would be a limit case for the possibility of objects, and the lower
bound of the universe itself.

Distinguishing objects in general from matter and particles

Now this sketch appears to generate a vicious regress, but before I tackle it, some preparatory clarifications
are in order, the first of which concerns “objects.” The body of scientific theory implies that any given object
reduces to relations all the way down. But in the actual universe, at tiny scales there might be no “particles”,
but logically there will always be terms of relations, even if their intrinsic nature is revealed to be just more
relations functioning as terms. So although material “objects” may not always be present, “objecthood”, that
is, whatever functions as a term of a relation, logically cannot be absent from any physical situation. This is
independent of scale.

Some epistemological qualifications

This latter point – that the universe appears to be constituted by relations – needs qualification. I do not
suppose that all mind-independently existing things are constituted by relations, since this would be to go
beyond the bounds of what is both empirically observable and theoretically describable (namely, extrinsic
formal specification). In other words, there may be other aspects of the world that we cannot know about, and
so it would be naïve to suppose that empirical investigation yields the whole picture. However, this is not to
cast doubt on the truth of scientific discoveries or the principal role of extrinsic formal specification. It is just
to be aware that truth and the whole truth are distinct. The totality of what is physical – that is, mind-
independently existing – may turn out to extend beyond the universe, but the universe is the totality of what
is related to by anything, and thus what is knowable in principle, and so it defines the scope of this theory.

Neither do I suppose that it is necessary to explain relative being under an Aristotelian-Thomistic rationale;
what is important here is the nature of what is described, not the terminology or model used. In fact, that
extrinsic formal specification, a minor and peripheral scholastic causal mode originally intended to explain
mind-dependent action, turns out to be this significant in the history of scientific theory may well suggest a
rewriting of causal schemes along non-Thomistic lines.

A vicious regress
We are faced with some perplexity concerning matter. Firstly, there is an apparent regress: on the one hand,
it appears as if “matter” dissolves into purely relative being, as just shown. On the other hand, relations
require terms, or else there would be nothing being related, thus no relation. As result, the terms of relations
turn out to be constituted by yet more relations between other terms, all the way down. This, taken on its
own, would regress viciously with “no completeness of the series,” as Kant justly pointed out in an analogous
case. 53 i

Now I implied above that the regress, upon empirical investigation, may halt: at the current “bottom” – that
is, at the smallest observable scales – the “terms” appear to degenerate into a vague fuzz, and so must their
relations, leaving only a sort of potential relationality. Moreover, such a scenario – that is, a truly vague “fuzz”
– is unobservable in principle, since nothing in particular would exist, and so nothing could be picked out as
being anything. But this, to my mind, is not yet an adequate explanation, since it is not clear how objects in
our everyday world could depend upon “fundamental fuzz” for their constitution, or how the scientifically
known world of extrinsic formal causes could be founded upon terms that are constituted by nothing (or at
least nothing in particular) at the bottom.

Being something to something else

To resolve this conundrum, I take one horn of the dilemma, pursuing an answer according to the core
perspective imparted by sign-action itself, which is that to be a sign is to signify something to something else.

i Namely, the third and fourth antinomies, where it is argued that infinite causal regresses (e.g. of cause and effect) are incomplete since
the entire series lacks a sufficient cause.

26
What if things in general are only something if they are something to something else? I will begin with a
thought experiment:

Imagine a collection of objects, none of which can have any kind of relation to each other. In order to construct
this experiment correctly, do not attempt, in one breath, to visualise a collection of objects that can have no
relation to each other. Rather, by a simple process of abstraction begin to consider such a scenario, and as
soon as you think of any respect in which the objects might be related, rule it out. Are they related in space?
No. Do they both have shape? They could not. Do they both have a surface? No. And so forth.

Now in what respect could these objects comprise a system? – in no respect, since there is no means (not even
spatiality) by which the objects can be related. There would be nothing over and above their existence by
which they could comprise a system.

Universes necessarily are systems

Now a universe is necessarily a system, however scantily related its components might be, or else there would
be nothing to make it an entity in its own right over and above its components. If one were to argue the
contrary, the only basis by which a universe could be anything would be by force of describing it as such in
language or in thought. As such, however, it would be a mere nominalism. Without a mind-independent basis
intrinsic to the universe in question, here would be no way in which a universe could be anything in its own
right.

Therefore from the perspective of being a universe and not just a relationless “heap”i there is no difference
between there being no objects at all and each object being nothing to any other object: in either case the
outcome is identical: since a universe requires some way of relating – some “principle of unity” – there would
be no way to be a universe. Therefore a universe does not arise if objects can have no relation to each other.

Objects necessarily are systems too

Let us now turn our focus onto the objects themselves in the thought experiment. For anything to be an object,
it would have to be a system of interactions in its own right. If you are in any doubt about this, it appears to
be the case for the actual universe, as per my example above about gas laws. Since the above scenario is one
in which there are no relations, it follows that it could contain no objects, since being an object requires having
parts in relation. Therefore, this scenario can feature neither objects nor a universe. In other words, the
scenario contains “nothing” at all.

It follows directly from this that the concept of quiddity reduces eliminatively to the concept of actual
attributes, because, for a universe, no object in it has any being outside of its relations with other objects (if
not between its constitutive parts too). As such, there is nothing denoted by the term “quiddity” when it is
used to denote an intrinsic nonrelational property of an object. Instead, there is only a semiosic web of actual
attributes, that is, the real relations between the parts of objects, and their parts’ parts, and their relations
to other objects too. There are no uninterpreted attributes in a universe, only potential, virtual, and actual
attributes. From the perspective of real relations, quiddities are exactly as epiphenomenal as matter.

Relative nothing and absolute nothing

It must be clarified that although I denote a very high grade of nothingness here by the term “nothing”, I do
not mean nothing absolutely. After all, it is perfectly conceivable that something exists beyond the human
capacity to experience or even imagine its being, involving in itself neither relation nor matter, nor a universe.
However, to us, such an entity would not have parts; it would not have attributes; it would not be an object;
it would not be a relation. There is no content of any kind by which one might even think of such an entity,
other than purely negatively, that is, by abstracting all content from it, including the very way we experience
objects (that is, as subjects with attributes), leaving only the bare property of hypothetical existence.

There are, of course no grounds to rule out the existence of such an entity, only grounds to rule out being able
to experience it. Therefore, my thought experiment only reveals that there can be “nothing” in terms of the
capacity for human thought to experience and imagine things, rather than nothing absolutely. However, this
“relative nothing” is the most basic content to the term “nothing” that can be employed concerning the
universe, since it cannot be ascertained whether absolute nothingness obtains – it is a merely speculative

i It is a linguistic and mental fact that by thinking of things as being a “heap” they are thereby related in thought. However, this is to be
taken strictly as an artefact of thought, with no bearing on the scenario itself.

27
artefact generated by the experience of the causal dependency of relations upon their terms. As such, “relative
nothing” is an acceptable grade of nothingness to address the question of why there is something (that is, a
universe) at all.

Being undetermined: order, chaos, and change

Randomness as a species of order
However, this is a distinction between there being interactions and no interactions (that is, “nothingness”),
not of there being determinate interactions and indeterminate interactions, the latter of which is what is
meant by true randomness. A case of indeterminate interactions is one where interactions are possible, yet in
one or more respect are minimally determined or undetermined. For example, fluctuations in the quantum
vacuum, and some properties (e.g. spin) of entangled particles, are thought to be truly random. 54, i Yet in a
relational universe, even true randomness is a species of order, since its possibility is defined by systems that
are otherwise more determinate and which serve to delimit a space of indeterminate interactions. For
example, in the case an entangled particles passing through a detector, when the multiple possible amplitudes
of its wave function ii coincide to generate a perfectly random spin measurement, there is (a) no physical
precedent determining which spin it takes, making the outcome truly random, but (b) this randomness is only
possible due to the determination of the system of amplitudes in the wave function, making the possibility of
randomness a nonrandomly determined phenomenon. Hence, randomness is a species of order, albeit an exotic
one.

It appears that there is nothing to prevent the existence or even the prevalence of true randomness in a
universe, and to model this in relational terms, I will first clarify the difference between identity and
relatedness.

A limit case of relatedness: identity, or total relatedness

The distinction between identity and relatedness is defined by whether there are any respects in which things
are unrelated. It is one thing to be related in some respect, it is quite another thing to be related in every
respect. In the latter case, the two things would
simply be one thing, because there could be
nothing to individuate them from each other. As
such, an object’s distinctness from another
object is modelled as there being at least one
respect in which they are not related.

Now if things are not related in every respect,

then there is at least one respect in which they
do not determine each other. And if they do not
determine each other in a given respect, then,
contrary to the common view that order equates
to determinism and thereby rules out the
possibility of freedom, their relations in this
respect are “free” or “accidental”. This is to say
that their interactions in this specific respect Figure 7: Identicality modelled in relational terms
would be truly random. iii

Determinacy and freedom

The fact of limited determinacy between objects thus defines the nature of randomness or chaos (of either the
deterministic or absolute sort). Since a universe has, as its fundamental organising principle, that things are
only something if they are something to something else, then necessarily every entity in the universe must
participate in this organising principle. Such a principle is the minimal order required to be (in) a universe.
But this entails that universes (and all their parts) fundamentally have order. Therefore, for a universe, order

i An insightful plain-English introduction to the relation between entanglement and randomness is available at
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/quantum-randomness.
ii For an introductory explanation of probability amplitudes, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_amplitude.
iii I do not mean to suggest this as a solution to the problem of “free will”, even though it is often sought for as if it would solve the problem.
After all, to be undetermined is to have no reason to act, thus undermining what it means to will. Therefore if human will is free, it would
necessarily be in a different sense, such as that of being able to do what one wants to do.

28
is more fundamental than chaos. Chaos is, at most, no more universal than the set of respects in which bodies
in a system to not determine each other.

Grades of indeterminacy
The possibility of indeterminacy creates considerable scope for change to occur in an ordered universe, since
any respect in which an object is currently undetermined could become determined if a new relation were to
arise, which would thus constitute change. In fact, the potential for change could (theoretically) be measured
or mapped using “grades of indeterminacy” or freedom: the more respects in which things do not determine
each other, the higher the grades of freedom they have from each other. For example, an asteroid moving in
space does not determine the direction or velocity of another asteroid (excluding, for the sake of argument,
their tiny gravitational attraction), which is why it is acceptable to say that they can collide by “accident”;
their motions are largely determined freely of each other (until they collide, of course). Moreover, other of the
asteroids’ attributes are entirely undetermined by each other’s, like, say, their colour and the type of rock
they are made of. Thus, even in a fully determinate Newtonian system, bodies are not determined in every
respect but have freedom from each other.

Figure 8: indeterminate (free) motion in a determinate Newtonian system

This freedom can become very great, as in the case of Brownian motion, in which no detectable pattern of
behaviour obtains. The marvel of it, though, is that each moment of interaction follows deterministic
principles of ballistics, 55 yet the rich interplay between a particle and the medium it is in results in random
motion. This behaviour even turns out to be easy to simulate. i Thus, on empirical grounds, determinate
systems that do not determine every respect in which objects have being, leave these objects partly
undetermined and thus potentially able to support new relations, making “space” for change to occur –
sometimes to such an extent that randomness can manifest.

The fundamental primacy of relations over objecthood

To return to our conundrum about matter, this scenario can shed light on the question of the physical
fundamentality of relations. To recap, I hold for both the existential dependence of relations upon their terms,
and that terms, whenever they are physical objects, are always yet more parts in relation. However, this does

i E.g. http://www.phytools.org/eqg/Exercise_4.1/

29
not make relations and objecthood, or form and matter, hylomorphic or jointly fundamental. On the contrary,
it establishes relations as physically fundamental, for the scenario implies two things:

Firstly, relation is the defining feature of what it is to be a universe. By definition a universe is a kind of
whole, a unity of parts; therefore, what defines a universe it not its parts, nor the sum of its parts, but the
fact of its parts being related. And if objects are parts in relation too, then a universe just is relations.
Therefore relation is fundamental to the universe in the sense of it being the principle or form of universehood.

Secondly, since physical objects are always constituted by relations, objecthood is always a kind of construct
or composite. In contrast, relations are truly simple entities: they are purely formal and have no intrinsic
nature. (As Poinsot phrases it, relations have “minimal entitative character” 56). To illustrate with an example:
a relation between two physical objects, say, that of “…is-to-the-left-of…,” is a physical attribute of the
universe with no component parts; it is a bare formal specification of relative spatial relation and is not made
up of anything else. A traditional way to express this is to invoke the formal:material distinction: relations
are not formally constituted by their terms, but they are “materially” dependent in the sense that the
fundament of a relation is a term, and so relations are dependent for their existence upon terms, because if a
term ceases to exist, the relation no longer arises. But when relations are considered entirely in abstraction
from their terms and thus purely “in themselves,” what remains is the purely formal attribute of relating in
some respect. Hence, relations are purely relative, purely formal, and simple.

In contrast, objects are always composites of relations, since, in a universe, to be an object is to have parts in
relation. This can be seen in the thought experiment above, in which there is no way to experience an object
that is not a relation between parts. Hence, in terms of the constitution of things, real relations, by their
simplicity, are more physically fundamental than objects, which are composite.

Now in opposition to my view are theories of objecthood that hold for the simplicity or particularity of objects
as they are in themselves, independently of how they relate to other things. However, this sort of theory leads
to the making of empirically unfalsifiable claims, as explained above: an object with no relations cannot be
experienced, nor can it be part of a universe. As such, we are in a position to discard Aristotelian-Thomistic
notions of simple, particular quiddative objects with natures independent of interpretants, alongside Kantian
“things in themselves.” Both paths lead ultimately to the intractable scepticism of the modern period by virtue
of their empirical unverifiability, and are philosophical (and scientific) dead-ends.

Redefining matter
In this light, matter takes on a doubly subordinate status, far from the hylomorphism of Aristotle or the
atomism of (most) modern science. It is first fundamentally subordinate to form (specifically, to relation), and
furthermore is empirically only one of several conditions of objecthood, since at tiny scales the everyday sense
of the term “matter” is lost when applied to even fundamental particles – never mind to waves, fields, or
energy.

Under the perspective developed here then, matter contracts to the state of “objecthood,” that is, to being the
term of a relation, regardless of the scale or fundamentality of the relation. And since all (real) terms turn
out, upon empirical investigation, to consist of parts in relation, matter is thus simply how a given relation is
constructed or signified when functioning as the term of another relation. As such, matter is an entirely
relative phenomenon: it is relations functioning as a term of further relations, which function to specify the
former as an object. i

Moreover, the account of change offered in the previous section has, I believe, an advantage over Aristotle’s
in that the latter relies on matter reducing to “prime matter,” which really is just potentiality. Now
potentiality is not a “thing,” it is a concept, yet Aristotle intends this in a materialised sense, so as to designate
the potency of objects to undergo change, such that matter is defined as whatever subsists through change.
Unfortunately though, this leaves nothing positively identifiable as matter, since mere potentiality is not a
thing, it is just possibility; yet Aristotle relies upon this “nothing” being physical and amenable to being
informed. In contrast, this paper supplies a positive account of matter, in that “prime matter” is quiddity or

i Note, however, that although objecthood is simply being the term of a relation, this does not mean that the relation is merely extrinsic to
the object and thus that objects do not have intrinsic natures. On the contrary, the intrinsic natures of objects are yet more relations.

30
“potential attributes,” that is, physical states of affairs amenable to being determined by extrinsic formal
specification and thus being caught up into the universe.

A non-reductionistic universe: resolution to the regressive

“conundrum” about being
With the fact that entities can relate in limited respects, rather than determining each other in every respect,
and with the implications of this on the primacy of relation over matter or, generally speaking, objecthood, I
can now offer fully my way out of the “conundrum” I sketched earlier, in which relations between parts depend
upon other relations between parts, all the way down to a sub-quantum “fuzz” – a fuzz which does not appear
to be the sort of thing that could ground a causal regress.

As previously noted, under a reductive model, there is insufficient “completeness of the series.” However, what
is empirically clear about the “fuzz” is what I have referred to as its relationality, that is, its propensity to
become something in particular, and thus to be relatable to. For example, the quantum vacuum is filled with
apparently spontaneous perturbations, which in quantum field theory cause so-called virtual electron-
positron pairs to pop spontaneously in and out of existence – the phenomenon known as “virtual particles.”
In fact, quantum field theory holds that interactions between ordinary particles are described in terms of
exchanges of virtual particles. 57 This counterintuitive idea, moreover, is extraordinarily well-supported
empirically. As such, one of most well-verified facts in human experience is that virtual electrons, virtual
quarks, gluons, and so forth, emerge out of the quantum vacuum, a state with the lowest energy, that is, the
closest observable thing to nothing. 58, i Now this is an excellent real-world approximation of my concept of
“relative nothing,” since it is the observed lower bound of the universe – a serious contender for “the bottom,” ii
and it exhibits the properties ascribed to “relative nothing,” specifically, its vague “fuzziness” and its eminent
relatability. The spontaneous existence of virtual particles demonstrates that quantum vacuums are not
absolutely nothing, they are instead “nothing in particular” – just a vague absence of objecthood, that is, until
something relates to the fuzz in such a way as to quantise out a particle.

Now I do not intend to terminate a causal regress absolutely – and neither do I have the theoretical resources
to. That would be a merely speculative approach. Rather, I aim to terminate a causal regress at the lower
bound of the universe, thus “relatively,” so to speak. At this lower bound, if one were to try to extend into
nothingness and probe what might be beyond the bound, the act of probing would itself be a determinate object,
which can thus only function to determine further relations to itself. As such, this probing would not lie
outside the bound, at best it would define the bound, because at best it would pick up whatever is relatable
out there, and whatever isn’t relatable would remain “nothing” to the universe.

In this light, there will necessarily be a regressive dependence of relations upon some term, but the term
sought for cannot, by nature, lie outside the universe. Rather, what defines objects are their relations, which
are therefore necessarily inside the universe. Therefore, to avoid being merely speculative, the causal regress
cannot be “reductionistic” in the usual sense implying that objects depend for their existence and their
constitution upon some absolute bedrock at the smallest scale. Rather, objects have their being due to
whatever relations they actually enjoy, at any scale, internally and externally, and the really is nothing in
particular beyond them. These may be reductionistic bottom-up causation, or the top-down causation of
“strange loops.” But for whichever particles are truly fundamental, any further reductionistic explanation
would necessarily be merely speculative. Hence, insofar as can be experienced, “fundamental” particles can
only admit of top-down causation. The most that may be said is that the “relatability” of the “fuzz” of “nothing
in particular” is amenable to objects at larger scales affecting it, in a top-down, nonreductive way, which would
thus cause a new object – a particle – to come into existence out of “nothing.”

i For an accessible introduction, see https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-say-they-ve-managed-to-manipulate-pure-nothingness

ii My claim about the nature of “relative nothing” does not depend necessarily upon the correctness of our current understanding of quantum
vacuums; neither does it depend necessarily on quantum vacuums at all. It is a logical correlate of my model, which interprets the quantum
vacuum well, but is likely to do the same for any physical scenario that admits of vagueness – and there are as many of these as there are
undetermined domains in the universe, for example, the interface between quantum mechanics and chemistry. In short, there may be a
deeper layer of objecthood in the universe, which we may one day measure, and beneath it will be another vague “fuzz” that will inevitably
not be absolutely nothing, just nothing in particular.

31
This, moreover, is only possible because already-existing objects are not determined in every respect, and so
they have freedom to form new relations with other things.

If this paper gives the limits, or boundary conditions of the universe, then the question remains how anything
at all came to exist in the beginning. How is there a universe in the first place? This question, however, lies
in the domain of speculation, since – as discussed above – a first cause would not be an object, it would not
have attributes, and so forth, and it would not be experienced. That said, I believe the cosmological argument
does not lie far into the domain of speculation, since it simply relies upon extending the formal terminus of
the relation “…causes… to exist” and noting the circumstance that could terminate the resulting regress. In
other words, while it pursues the logical implications of experience beyond the domain of experience, it does
not wholly invent an explanation. I find this the most appealing approach to solving the problem in an
“absolute” sense; but inside the domain of experience, I think the “relative” solution is successful.

Thus ends my argument for why signs are “machine code” for the universe. The universe, and its objects, are
pervasively and fundamentally relational; all actual relations are signs, and sign action is the pattern of
things’ being and changing; indeterminacy is the result of an absence of relation, where change and
randomness thrive; being and becoming are processes of relations forming or falling away; and the sputtering
out of the ability to sustain relations defines the bounds of the universe, where it fades into a vague fuzz.

32
References
Aristotle. 1994-2009 (350 BCE). Metaphysics. Translated by W. D. Ross. Accessed 07 18, 2014.
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.9.ix.html.

Culwick, Arlyn. 2017. “How Morality Comes to Be.” Academia.edu. 22 07. Accessed 06 24, 2019.
https://academia.edu.

—. 2018. “How Sign Action Really Works.” Academia.edu. 06 09. Accessed 09 06, 2018.
https://www.academia.edu/37353759/How_Sign_Action_Really_Works.

Deely, John. 2001. Four Ages of Understanding. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

—. 2009. Purely Objective Reality. Edited by Paul Cobley. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Deely, John. 1994. “The Grand Vision.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 371-400.

Deely, John. 2012. “Toward a Postmodern Recovery of "Person".” Espíritu: cuadernos del Instituto Filosófico
de Balmesiana (Instituto Filosófico de Balmesiana) 61 (143): 146-165. Accessed 03 12, 2019.
https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/4102375.pdf.

Hawking, Stephen. 1988. A Brief History of Time: from the Big Bang to Black Holes. New York: Bantam Books.

Hofstadter, Douglas. 2007. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books.

Huang, Rongxin, Isaac Chavez, Katja M. Taute, Branimir Lukić, Sylvia Jeney, Mark G. Raizen, and Ernst-
Ludwig Florin. 2011. “Direct Observation of the full transition from ballistic to diffusive Brownian
motion in a liquid.” Nature Physics 7: 576-580. Accessed 07 14, 2018.
http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v7/n7/full/nphys1953.html.

Kant, Immanuel. 1998 (1781). Critique of Pure Reason. Edited by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge,
United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre
Dame Press.

Maritain, Jacques. 1932. Distinguish to Unite, Or, The Degrees of Knowledge. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.

Ockham, William of. c.1320-1328. Summa Logicae. Edited by Philotheus Boeher. St. Bonaventure, NY:
Franciscan Institute.

Peirce, Charles. 1866. Lowell Lectures on The Logic of Science; or Induction and Hypothesis: Lecture VII.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. 2012. "Uberty". Edited by Mats Bergman and S Paavola. 10 12. Accessed 03 26, 2019.
http://www.commens.org/dictionary/entry/quote-letters-f-woods.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1994 (1958-1966). The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Electronic
Edition. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, MA: InteLex Corp. Accessed 09
06, 2018.

Peskin, M. E., and D. V. Schroeder. 1995. An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory. Westview Press.

Poinsot, John. 1955. The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas: Basic Treatises. Edited by John J. Glanville,
G. Donald Hollenhorst Yves R. Simon. Translated by John J. Glanville, G. Donald Hollenhorst Yves
R. Simon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

—. 1985 (1632). Tractatus de Signis. Edited by John Deely and Ralph Austin Powell. Berkeley: University of
California Press.

Porphyry. 271. Praeteritio.

Powell, Ralph Austin. 1989. “Epistemology's Minimal Cause as Basis of Science.” Edited by Terry Prewitt,
John Deely and Haworth Karen. Semiotics 1988. New York: University Press of America. 180 - 188.

—. 1983. Freely Chosen Reality. Washington D.C.: University Press of America.

33
Powell, Ralph Austin. 1986. “From semiotic of scientific mechanism to semiotic of teleology in nature.”
Semiotics 296-305.

Quine, Willard van Orman. 1948. “On What There Is.” Review of Metaphysics (Philosophy Education Society
Inc.) 2 (5): 21-38.

Riek, C., P. Sulzer, M. Seeger, A. S. Moskalenko, G. Burkard, D. V. Seletskiy, and A. Leitenstorfer. 2017.
“Subcycle Quantum Electrodynamics.” Nature 541: 376-379. Accessed 03 17, 2018.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21024.

Ringel, Zohar, and Dmitry L. Kovrizhin. 2017. “Quantized gravitational responses, the sign problem, and
quantum complexity.” Science Advances 3 (9). Accessed 03 17, 2019. doi:10.1126/sciadv.1701758.

Schmemann, Alexander. 1973. For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy. New York: St Vladimir's
Seminary Press.

The Computer Language Company Inc. 1981-2013. "abstraction layer". Accessed 07 13, 2014.
http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/abstraction+layer.

34
Endnotes
1 (Ellis and Murphy 1996)
2 (Hofstadter 2007)
3 (Poinsot, The Material Logic 1955, 184)
4 (Poinsot, The Material Logic 1955, 141, 142)
5 (Deely, Four Ages of Understanding 2001, 76)
6 (Deely, Four Ages of Understanding 2001, 73)
7 (Deely, Four Ages of Understanding 2001, 229-230)
8 (Deely, Four Ages of Understanding 2001, 230)
9 (Deely, Four Ages of Understanding 2001, 231)
10 (Porphyry 271, 27-8)
11 (Deely, Four Ages of Understanding 2001, 244)
12 (Powell, Freely Chosen Reality 1983, 84), interpreting (Ockham c.1320-1328, cap.26, p.103)
13 (Deely, Four Ages of Understanding 2001, 500)
14 (Deely, Four Ages of Understanding 2001, 209, 501)
15 (Deely, Toward a Postmodern Recovery of "Person" 2012, 154)
16 (Schmemann 1973, 15)
17 (MacIntyre 1981)
18 (Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis 1985 (1632), 5)
19 (Maritain 1932)
20 (Deely, Toward a Postmodern Recovery of "Person" 2012, 152-4)
21 (C. S. Peirce, "Uberty" 2012)
22 (Deely, Four Ages of Understanding 2001, 228-229)
23 (The Computer Language Company Inc. 1981-2013)
24 (C. Peirce 1866, W 1:464-465)
25 (Poinsot, The Material Logic 1955, 101)
26 (Poinsot, The Material Logic 1955, 123-130) – Article 5 on the universal
27 (Quine 1948, 23)
28 (C. S. Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Electronic Edition. 1994 (1958-1966), 6.372). See also
http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/virtual
29 (Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis 1985 (1632), 166-192 (Book 1, Question 4))
30 (Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis 1985 (1632), 26 (Summulae, Chapter 2))
31 (Tractatus de Signis 1985 (1632), 153)
32 (Deely, Four Ages of Understanding 2001, 212-221)
33 (Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis 1985 (1632), 25)
34 (Powell, Freely Chosen Reality 1983, 90-91)
35 (C. Peirce 1866, W 1:464-465)
36 (Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis 1985 (1632), 166-192; Book 1, Question 4)
37 (Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis 1985 (1632), Book 1, Question 4, esp. p. 169) and exemplification, p. 167 l20.
38 (Powell, Freely Chosen Reality 1983, 62, 79)
39 (Powell, Freely Chosen Reality 1983)
40 (Powell, Freely Chosen Reality 1983, 44)
41 (Powell, Epistemology's Minimal Cause as Basis of Science 1989, 182-183)
42 (Powell, Epistemology's Minimal Cause as Basis of Science 1989, 186)
43 (Hawking 1988, 29-30) in (Powell, Epistemology's Minimal Cause as Basis of Science 1989)
44 (Powell, From semiotic of scientific mechanism to semiotic of teleology in nature 1986, 299-300)
45 (Powell, Freely Chosen Reality 1983, 92-93)
46 (Powell, Freely Chosen Reality 1983, 93)
47 (Powell, Freely Chosen Reality 1983, 93)
48 (Powell, Freely Chosen Reality 1983, 93)
49 (Powell, Freely Chosen Reality 1983, 93)
50 (Aristotle 1994-2009 (350 BCE))
51 (Powell, Epistemology's Minimal Cause as Basis of Science 1989, 186)
52 (Powell, Epistemology's Minimal Cause as Basis of Science 1989, 186)
53 (Kant 1998 (1781))
54 A empirical proof of the randomness of properties of entangled photon pairs has been obtained by (Pironio, et al. 2010).
55 (Huang, et al. 2011)
56 (Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis 1985 (1632), 89) - Second Preamble, Article Two, [577b44-578b5 in the Reiser edition of the Ars Logica]
57 (Peskin and Schroeder 1995, 80)
58 (Riek, et al. 2017)

35