Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Is relationality a fundamental feature of reality? Are relations reducible to monadic properties? I argue that these two questions are different, that the answer to both is "no", and that there is no tension between these two claims. Even though relational predications are indispensable, for both logical and metaphysical reasons, their truthmakers are structural, not relational facts. Relations -- qualitative entities that have a direction and order their particulars

-- are not, and cannot be, fundamental. At the fundamental level of reality we do not find relations, but pure, irreducible and nonrelational structure.