The Grammar of Reality: Science as a Mode of Meaning

Science as Symbolic System

“Every equation is a metaphor. Every measurement is a construal. Science is not outside the world—it is one of its languages.”

Science is often treated as if it speaks in the voice of the Real.

Objective. Neutral. Impersonal.

But in truth, science is a symbolic register—a mode of meaning-making that, like poetry or myth, gives form to the formless, structure to the swirl of becoming.

Its grammar is mathematical.

Its metaphors are models.

Its rituals are experiments.

Its authority rests on symbolic consistency across relational instances.

And once we recognise this, something profound happens:

Science joins the mythic lineage—not as its opposite, but as its inheritor.

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Science as Symbolic Language

Every scientific act—be it modelling an ecosystem, collapsing a wavefunction, or calculating gravitational curvature—is an act of symbolic selection.

We choose what to measure, how to model, and which constraints to recognise.

This is not a failure of objectivity.

It is the nature of symbolic systems:

• Equations are symbolic instantiations of relational potential.

• Models are metaphors: they bring certain features of a system into view by abstracting away others.

• Laws are patterns we retroactively stabilise through repeated construal.

Science is not discovering the world as it is “in itself”—a notion that collapses under relational ontology—but unfolding a world in which certain meanings can be symbolically shared, constrained, and repeated.

Science means, and what it means depends on how it construes.

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The Register of Science

Just as myth has its stock characters and motifs, so too does science have its symbolic structures:

• The isolated variable mirrors the archetype of the heroic agent.

• The controlled experiment is the sacred space in which the symbolic drama unfolds.

• The peer-reviewed article functions as scripture—canonical and constrained by register.

• The ideal observer is the invisible god of the method—omniscient, disembodied, and impartial.

These structures aren’t flaws.

They are the grammar of a register—one that enacts a particular worldview:

A world that is decomposable, measurable, and mathematically legible.

But just like any register, science can be expanded, subverted, or deepened by attending to what it excludes.

And in a relational ontology, what it often excludes is the self, the sacred, and the semiotic—all of which are necessary to the very act of meaning-making.

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Myth and Science: Divergence and Convergence

So how does science differ from myth? And how do they converge?

Feature	Science	Myth
Symbolic Form	Equations, models, experiments	Archetypes, narratives, rituals
Epistemic Stance	Repetition, constraint, falsifiability	Resonance, coherence, transformation
Temporality	Linear, progressive	Cyclical, recursive
Authority	Communal verification	Cultural resonance
Function	Predictive power, instrumental action	Identity, meaning, symbolic transformation

But here’s the relational turn:

These are not hard oppositions.

They are symbolic configurations, enacted by the meaner.

Science becomes myth when it narrates the human place in the cosmos.

Myth becomes science when it constellates symbolic pattern into reproducible structure.

Both are recursive.

Both are world-making.

Both are symbolic grammars of becoming.

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The Symbolic Function of Science

The more we treat science as neutral, the more we conceal its symbolic agency.

• When we treat the Big Bang as origin story, we invoke cosmic myth.

• When we reduce life to information, we import cultural metaphors.

• When we frame knowledge as conquest or decoding, we echo colonial grammars.

Relational ontology reframes science as a recursive dialogue:

• With matter

• With metaphor

• With meaning

It’s not about rejecting scientific knowledge, but reading it more deeply—as a register of symbolic expression embedded in a web of meanings.

Science is not the opposite of story.

It is a story told in a particular symbolic key—one that can be harmonised with other ways of knowing if we attend to its grammar.

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From Grammar to Cosmos

In this reframing:

• Science is not outside the world—it is one of its symbolic forms.

• Equations are rituals of relational constraint.

• Models are myths in miniature: they distil potential into legible form.

• Knowledge is not extraction, but participation in meaning’s unfolding.

This returns us, again, to the spiral.

To the dance between potential and instance.

To the cosmos as recursive grammar, always becoming intelligible through the forms we use to mean it.