Joni Fat

Contemporary physics and philosophy offer no shortage of positions on the status of time — as illusory, as thermodynamically derived, as recovered from a timeless canonical equation, or as ontologically fundamental — yet each addresses whether time is real or basic rather than when, and under what conditions, any system comes to interpret change as temporally ordered. This gap persists even within research programmes that already treat relational structure, rather than substance or a background temporal parameter, as fundamental. The present paper addresses this gap by introducing the Inferential Time Theory (ITT), a foundational theory specifying the conditions under which relational organization — the joint, context-relative description of a configuration’s coherent and excited character established by the Theory of Relational Change (TRC), itself built upon the ontology of Relational Change (RC) — becomes available to a further system as a temporal interpretation. ITT does not modify RC’s ontology or TRC’s explanatory vocabulary; it begins exactly where TRC’s own explanatory task ends. Employing conceptual theory construction, axiomatic dependency analysis, and comparative theoretical analysis rather than empirical methods, the paper develops ITT’s architecture as a sequential, non-optional chain — Relational Change, Relational Organization, Referential System, Inferential System, Temporal Interpretation, and Temporal Experience — in which each stage supplies a condition the next presupposes. Within the conceptual framework of ITT, Referential Admissibility Conditions and Inferential Admissibility Conditions are introduced as jointly necessary and sufficient conditions for temporal interpretation, with temporal experience specified as the narrower case in which interpretation feeds back into an interpreting system’s own ongoing organization. ITT is positioned relative to relativity, the thermal time hypothesis, emergent-time programmes in quantum gravity, block-universe ontologies, active inference, predictive processing, relational quantum mechanics, measurement theory, and chronobiology, and is shown to be conceptually orthogonal to, rather than competing with, each. The paper’s contribution is architectural and conceptual: an explanatory framework for temporal inference, not an empirical theory, a mathematical formalism, or a reinterpretation of existing physics.

Contemporary metaphysics and theoretical physics have independently converged on the view that neither static substance nor static structure alone can furnish an adequate ontological foundation for physical and philosophical inquiry. Process ontology has argued that change, rather than enduring substance, may serve as ontologically basic; relational ontology has argued, independently, that relational structure, rather than the objects it relates, may be ontologically primary. These two literatures have developed largely in parallel, and neither, on its own, specifies how a primitive that is both dynamic and relational might be structured. This paper introduces the Theory of Relational Change (TRC), a scientific explanatory framework built upon the ontological foundations established in a companion work on Relational Change (RC). TRC proposes that Relational Change is the intrinsic relational manifestation of Change, where Change is the sole primitive ontological category whose intrinsic relationality is structured through the duality of coherence and excitation, with excitation necessarily defined through contextual relations. Rather than defending or reconstructing this ontology, the paper undertakes a systematic, conceptually oriented literature review that situates each of TRC's constitutive commitments within its corresponding scientific and philosophical literature, arguing that these commitments are individually well established even though their specific combination has not, to the best of our knowledge, been previously articulated. The paper's contribution is accordingly conceptual and integrative rather than empirical: it positions TRC as a disciplined synthesis of existing, validated ideas into an architecture not previously proposed, with implications for how relational and processual approaches to ontology might be jointly developed in future work.

Physical theories are commonly constructed by taking matter, space, and time as ontological primitives. Even when these categories are questioned or modified, they are often retained implicitly as the background conditions of description. This work examines whether such primitives are conceptually necessary at the most basic level of ontological articulation. An axiomatic framework is developed in which change is taken as a primitive notion, while substrative carriers, absolute states, and independent spatiotemporal structure are explicitly excluded. Relationality is treated as intrinsic rather than derived. Within this framework, matter, space, and time are not assumed as starting points but appear only as co-emergent structural aspects associated with excitation. From the axioms, several formal consequences are derived, including a structural no-go result excluding absolute ontological primitives. These results are non-empirical and do not describe physical processes. Their role is to restrict what can be coherently assumed once certain ontological commitments are suspended. A minimal toy model is introduced to demonstrate internal consistency and non-triviality, without representational or empirical intent. The framework is pre-physical and pre-spatiotemporal. It does not propose a new physical theory, reinterpret existing formalisms, or resolve empirical problems. Its contribution is clarificatory. It offers a disciplined way to reconsider foundational questions by shifting attention from inherited primitives to minimal ontological constraints. Some familiar ways of posing foundational questions are therefore no longer available within this ontology. Whether the framework can be extended toward physical theory remains an open question.