Generative Relational Economics: Chapter 4 - The Ontological View of Generative Relational Theory

This chapter develops the ontological architecture underlying Generative Relational Theory (GR) and Generative Relational Economics (GRE). It distinguishes three interconnected registers: ontological reality, relational reality, and manifestational reality. Relational reality refers to objects that emerge within generative-relational systems, persist with sufficient stability across a relevant spacetime domain, and exercise causal efficacy within those systems, without requiring a prior commitment concerning their ultimate ontological status. Manifestational reality concerns the heterogeneous conditions through which realities become perceptible, articulable, measurable, classifiable, symbolized, or otherwise available. The chapter treats these registers as a recursively connected graph rather than a sequential hierarchy. Relational realities may precede perception and symbolization, while manifestations and representations can subsequently mediate, stabilize, transform, or dissolve relational realities. This architecture supports analyses of subjects, value, meaning, institutions, social facts, processes, events, scale-relative reality, and multiple realization while preserving ontological suspension. Category-theoretic representations and other formal resources are introduced as methodological instruments whose analytical usefulness does not entail metaphysical identity. The chapter concludes by specifying the limits and revisability of GRE's ontological claims and by reframing epistemology as the problem of reconstructing reality through situated manifestations, representations, and historically formed epistemic relations.