A thing is a pattern of relations that has achieved sufficient stability and coherence to be treated as a discrete unit of reference. The appearance of independence is an artifact of that stability, not a primary ontological feature.
In conventional ontology, things are treated as primary: they have qualities, they stand in relations, they exist independently. In the relational framework developed here, this order is reversed. Relations are ontologically prior. What appears as a thing — a stone, a person, a concept — is what arises when a pattern of relations is stable enough across enough contexts to be consistently picked out by name.
This reversal has consequences for how we understand qualities. A thing does not have qualities as intrinsic properties; its qualities are what emerge from its relations to other things. Redness is a relation between the tomato, light, and a perceiving system. Hardness is a pattern of interaction between the stone and objects that might deform it.
Things in the Interactive Semioverse
In the formal architecture of the Interactive Semioverse, Things (capitalized) have a technical meaning: they are external handles — typed identifiers that allow the semioverse to refer to entities outside itself. A Thing is a stable reference to an external entity, one that can be updated, revoked, or invalidated when the entity changes or disappears.
This technical concept makes precise the informal account above: a thing is the stable relational structure that makes consistent reference possible.
Related terms
- quality — what becomes observable about a thing through its relations
- observing — the act of stabilizing a relation with a thing into a quality
- relationality — the framework within which things are understood as relational configurations