Scientific Registers and Ontologies

The Real in Register: Scientific Method as Mythos

Science presents itself as the pursuit of objective truth. Yet when viewed through a relational ontology, science emerges not as a detached description of the world but as an ongoing symbolic practice—one whose very language shapes the reality it seeks to understand. This is not a critique, but a deeper insight into science’s role in the unfolding cosmos: not as neutral observer, but as co-creator of the real through its registers of meaning.

Science as Registered Meaning-Making

Every scientific field speaks in a distinct register—a patterned way of construing experience through specialised language, models, and methodologies. These registers do not simply report on an external reality; they constitute ways of being and becoming. The lexicogrammar of physics, the symbolic systems of biology, the ecological metaphors of interdependence—each shapes what can be known, and what can be imagined.

In Systemic Functional Linguistics, register refers to a configuration of meaning potential specific to a type of context of situation. In science, registers evolve around particular fields of inquiry, governed by the constraints and symbolic logics of their objects of study. The register of quantum physics differs fundamentally from that of evolutionary biology, because each construes its domain through a different set of relations and assumptions.

From Description to Ontogenesis

Relational ontology invites a shift from science as description to science as ontogenesis. In this view, scientific statements do not mirror a pre-given reality—they participate in actualising that reality. The regularities and distinctions science brings forth are not simply found; they are constituted in relation to the symbolic systems that instantiate them.

To model a physical process mathematically is not to uncover its essence but to enact a particular form of symbolic relation that foregrounds certain aspects while excluding others. The register constrains the ontology: what can be spoken of, what counts as valid knowledge, and what kinds of relations are foregrounded in the unfolding of inquiry.

Fields of Science, Fields of Meaning

Each scientific field enacts its own ontology through its register:

• Physics privileges abstraction, seeking invariant laws through symbolic compression. It speaks a language of equations, symmetries, and conservation—enacting a cosmos of predictable order beneath phenomenal variation.

• Biology speaks in terms of function and adaptation, invoking systems and subsystems, feedback and regulation. It enacts a world of living organisms as complex, layered actualisations of relational structure.

• Ecology foregrounds interdependence and dynamic networks, enacting a cosmos of co-constitution. Its register construes meaning not in terms of parts, but of wholes in mutual transformation.

These are not merely epistemological differences; they are ontological enactments. Each register makes a different cosmos intelligible, and in doing so, helps bring that cosmos into being.

Mythos in the Method

Just as myth once told the story of the gods and the world, science tells symbolic stories through models and mechanisms. These stories are not literal, but neither are they arbitrary. They are structured symbolic engagements with the unknown, and they serve a cosmological function: orienting human consciousness within the greater unfolding of reality.

In this sense, scientific method functions mythically—not in the sense of fiction, but in the sense of mythos: patterned symbolic action that organises experience and guides participation. Science is a ritual of inquiry, a communal practice of meaning-making that, like myth, mediates between chaos and order.

The Meta-Register of Science

Above and across its subfields, science also has a meta-register: the symbolic logic that governs what science is. This includes values of objectivity, replicability, and control. These are not neutral commitments; they are cultural inscriptions—mythic in their own right—that shape how science relates to the world.

A relational view doesn’t discard these values but asks how they function as constraints on what science can become. Just as mythology evolves to reflect shifts in collective consciousness, so too must the register of science evolve if it is to remain a living, meaning-making system.

Conclusion: Worlds Spoken Into Being

Science is not outside the world it studies. Its language is part of the world’s unfolding—a recursive symbol system through which the cosmos becomes intelligible to itself. To study science is not merely to decode facts, but to understand the symbolic orders through which meaning is formed.

Different registers enact different ontologies. The story of science is not a single truth but a multiplicity of symbolically organised realities. And like all myths, its power lies not in its certainty, but in its ability to open new possibilities of becoming.