Relationial Ontology
Relational ontologies are philosophical viewpoints asserting that relations are more fundamental than the individual entities they connect. This perspective contrasts with substantivist ontologies, which prioritize substances or individual things as the primary building blocks of reality. Relational ontologies are applied across various fields, including philosophy, theology, and social sciences, to understand how concepts like community, agency, and even environmental governance are fundamentally shaped by interconnectedness.
Key principles
- Relations over substance: The core idea is that what makes an entity what it is comes from its relationships with other entities, rather than from any inherent, isolated qualities.
- Interdependence: This perspective emphasizes that entities and concepts exist in a web of interdependence, and their meaning is derived from their place within that web.
- Contrast with traditional views: It offers a different framework from more traditional ontologies, where individual objects are seen as the primary “things” and relations are a secondary characteristic that can be added or removed.
Applications in different fields
- Philosophy: Relational ontologies are explored through thinkers like Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, and are used to re-examine concepts of community, intimacy, and the self.
- Theology: This approach has been used in the theology-science dialogue to focus on personhood, relationship, and communion as the modality of existence.
- Social and childhood studies: Relational ontologies are used to analyze how human and more-than-human relationships, such as those between a child and the environment, shape development and agency.
- Information science: Systems like the RML ontology use relational principles to map data from relational databases to other formats like RDF, as explained on Springer (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-47243-5_9).
Examples of how it is applied
- Instead of viewing a person as a self-contained unit, a relational ontology would view their identity as fundamentally constituted by their relationships with family, friends, society, and the world around them.
- In environmental studies, a relational perspective might look at how a forest is not just a collection of trees, but an interconnected system of plants, animals, and soil, where each component influences the others.
- Educational theories can use this perspective to understand how the relationships between teachers, students, and subject matter form the foundation of the learning experience, as seen (https://www.amazon.com/Relational-Ontologies-Counterpoints-Barbara-Thayer-Bacon/dp/1433132222).
AI responses may include mistakes.
[1] https://people.bu.edu/wwildman/media/docs/Wildman_2009_Relational_Ontology.pdf
[2] https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2050/epinon_paper_3.pdf
[3] https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/Towards-a-Relational-Ontology
[6] http://makecommoningwork.fed.wiki/view/welcome-visitors/view/relational-ontology
[7] https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/abstract/document/obo-9780199791231/obo-9780199791231-0260.xml
[8] https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-1-4020-8265-8_847
[9] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-47243-5_9
[10] https://www.amazon.com/Relational-Ontologies-Counterpoints-Barbara-Thayer-Bacon/dp/1433132222