Substance-Relation Identity and Causal Relationality: Suggestions from the Philosophy of Physics

Philosophers, as well as sociologists and scientists, have always been perturbed about the intrinsic meaning of relations and they have tried to understand it through both theoretical and empirical analysis. Speaking at the broadest metaphysical level, the notion of relationality applied to ontological investigation provides an extremely interesting pattern to work with, especially when counterposed to its alternative: substantialism. What I would like to undertake in this paper is a focused analysis on the concept of relationality adopting the viewpoint of my specific academic field, the philosophy of physics, on the background of social network analysis. I will mainly focus on the attempt of showing the inconsistency of the metaphysical question concerning the ontological primacy between substances and relations, analyzing the notion of relationality emerging from theoretical physics, in particular classic space-time theories and quantum mechanics. I believe that the case of classical physics represents a good instantiation of the juxtaposition of substantialist and relational views, but it does not really allow to look at the problem of the connection between entities and relations under a new light; the danger of regression would in fact be reiterated, maintaining ontological priority at the core of the quest. The metaphysical implication of the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, what I shall call “substance-relation identity”, represents instead the radical change in the paradigm ‘substance-relation’ able to break the counterposition loop and create symmetry between the system components, in a way that the one can be perfectly reduced to the other. In the final section of the paper I will rephrase the problem of substancerelation under the light of causality, a frame of reference in which reinterpreting the notion of relationality with a weaker ontological commitment than the one entailed by substance-relation identity, but still able to interrupt the “fundamentality” recursiveness.