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I recently came across a concept where we sometimes associate notions about object with the object itself or if we associate them with relation to something or someone.

E.g.: A house is big. The big house. Until we conceive it as bricks laying on top of each either. Their relation to each other. We may conceive the bricks to be brown. Until we conceive their relation to light, and to our eyes. A person may think a recipe should always be done this way. Until he realises, it was his experience or taste that made him believe, this was the only viable option.

It seems like everything we conceive can be broken down into relations, until we come done to quarks.

It's like, every time we say something is, it's actually things do. And there's a lot of confusion about this with humans. A typical example would be some person arguing for something and then saying "But that's just my opinion". Is there some kind of terminology of capturing this concept?

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  • The thought that being is nothing else than what links, or an expression of a relation, is known since Kantian logics. It is most prominently expressed in Hegel's Science of Logic, where the copula in a logical analysis is what is the ontological important part (or - in their terms - being). In their understanding, it actually is one and the same thought, just termed differently. Two sides of the same coin. That is the reason for Kant's claim that being is not a property of something as well, as properties are linked relationally to objects through the copula or being. – Philip Klöcking♦ Mar 17 '17 at 0:50
  • I find a lot of arguments are over semantics rather than whatever the people think they are arguing about. There seems to be a huge issue with disagreement on the meaning of words. Could the word "semantics" be applied to your question? – takintoolong Mar 17 '17 at 1:59
  • Hi. I didn't understand the relevance of the last part, with "but that's just my opinion". How is this part related to relations and quarks? – Ram Tobolski Apr 17 '17 at 21:35
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What about phenomenology?

In recent philosophy of mind, the term “phenomenology” is often restricted to the characterization of sensory qualities of seeing, hearing, etc.: what it is like to have sensations of various kinds. However, our experience is normally much richer in content than mere sensation. Accordingly, in the phenomenological tradition, phenomenology is given a much wider range, addressing the meaning things have in our experience, notably, the significance of objects, events, tools, the flow of time, the self, and others, as these things arise and are experienced in our “life-world”. – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Or something like structural realism:

A crude statement of ESR is the claim that all we know is the structure of the relations between things and not the things themselves, and a corresponding crude statement of OSR is the claim that there are no ‘things’ and that structure is all there is (this is called ‘radical structuralism’ by van Fraassen 2006). – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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