Relationality is a research project developed by emsenn, a Lakota land steward and independent researcher. Its central claim: relations are ontologically prior to entities. Things are constituted through their relations, not the other way around.
This claim is grounded in Lakota epistemologies — specifically in Lakota cosmogeny, which describes the coming-into-being of reality in terms that settler-colonial traditions have rarely engaged with on their own terms. Relationality began as an attempt to express that cosmogeny in formal language that neither reduces it to familiar Western categories nor abandons its mathematical precision.
The formal development starts from a single primitive: Differentiate. To claim that any thing exists is to claim there is a thing, a not-thing, and a way to tell them apart. From that act, a logic, calculus, geometry, and physics unfold necessarily. The resulting formal structure — the Semiotic Universe — is a complete Heyting algebra with modal closure, extended with typed lambda calculus and three closure operators whose composite yields a least fixed point: the initial semiotic structure.
Applied as a way of attending to the world, this framework goes by the name relational dynamics: a way of analyzing how things hold together through their relations and remain coherent under pressure.
Texts
Formal structure
The formal architecture lives in the mathematics module:
Related disciplines
- Cosmology — applying relational dynamics to physical cosmology
- Philosophy — philosophical analysis and critique
- Mathematics — formal foundations