Relational Emergence Ontology: The Philosophical Foundations and Scientific Programme of Quantum Relational Emergence

Things are ordinarily explained by what they are; this paper asks what makes them determinate enough to be anything at all. Relational Emergence Ontology (REO) defends a positive but revisable claim: at least some physical individuals acquire and maintain determinate identities through organized, objectively constrained relations rather than through the persistence of wholly self-sufficient bearers. To keep that claim from collapsing into a familiar one, the paper separates operational equivalence, physical kind, numerical identity, persistence, and metaphysical constitution, and builds a defeasible case for relational constitution from independently warranted individuation criteria, counterfactual comparisons, and specified conditions of failure. The argument is then placed in dialogue with ontic and modal structural realism, process metaphysics, emergent materialism, agential realism, and competing accounts of quantum factuality. Against the strongest structural-realist rival the dividing line is drawn precisely, and here sharpened into a condition. The co-individuation condition (CI) requires that the identity conditions of an individual and the physical admissibility of the relations sustaining it be fixed jointly, by one and the same process, rather than in two steps; what it excludes is not substance metaphysics but the construction of individuals from an antecedently given structure. CI is offered as a constraint on constitutive explanations rather than as a further thesis, and three routes by which it can fail are specified; none is closed here. The associated Quantum Relational Emergence (QRE) programme connects these questions to proposed reconstructions of quantum operations, factual records, spacetime, matter, strong gravity, and cosmology. These investigations have unequal evidential standing: many results remain conditional and model-specific, they are documented in unrefereed preprints or unpublished manuscripts, and none establishes an independently verified unified physical derivation. Decoherence and stable records, in particular, do not by themselves derive a unique actual outcome, and CI does not supply one. What is offered is therefore a philosophical position with a specified scientific route rather than a new physical prediction: an account of constituted individuality, an analysis of the burdens that separate mathematical reconstruction from ontological warrant, and a statement of the conditions under which future physical research could support, constrain, or revise it.