Distinction Ontology: From the Undistinguished to the Generator
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Distinction Ontology asks how determinate structures can arise without presupposing objects, subjects, relations, spaces, or rules as already given. It begins from the undistinguished, understood not as nothingness or chaos but as the absence of operative distinctions, and follows one minimal unfolding initiated by a bare distinction. The resulting movement is reconstructed through a recurring contour: distinction, repetition, exhaustion, elementary state, radical distinction, and restructuring. Along this line, homogeneous multiplicity becomes internally differentiated; relations acquire modes and direction; invariant contours become forms; and self-preserving forms develop into localities whose encounters can return upon the organization of their own boundaries. From locality arise developed possibilities of choice, consciousness, knowledge, trace, history, and symbol. Information is consequently treated not as a primitive substance but as retained difference available for further distinction. The Generator names the recurring generative work visible across these transformations. It is neither an entity nor a final stage, and its contour does not prescribe the positive form of what follows an exhausted organization. The proposed ontology is therefore neither a literal chronology of the universe nor a closed metaphysical system. It is a reflexive and revisable reconstruction of how apparently given forms may arise, stabilize, conceal their histories, reach their limits, and become available for reorganization.
Author: Khorobrykh, Aleksandr
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7203943909
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