Structural Constraints on Ontological Unification

Abstract

The assumption that reality is ontologically homogeneous—that is, reducible to a single fundamental structure—underlies much of contemporary metaphysics, including variants of physicalism, monism, and structural realism. Persistent difficulties concerning cross-domain identity, structural preservation across levels, and ontological dependence, however, suggest intrinsic limits to unifying approaches.

This paper develops a formal model in which reality is represented as a system of multiple ontological domains that are locally coherent and globally irreducible, characterized by partial transitions and invariant-preserving relations.

From minimal structural conditions—ontological heterogeneity, compositional loss, local invariance, and metastructural dependence—it follows that invariant preservation is not stable under composition and that no global system can guarantee structural coherence across domains. Consequently, no ontological reduction function can preserve invariants globally.

Metastructural consequence

The model introduces Φ as a metastructural condition that cannot be fully defined within any ontological domain. Its exteriority is formal rather than spatial: Φ does not belong to the system it regulates, yet grounds the possibility of coherent relations between domains. The paper deliberately leaves the ultimate interpretation of this ground open. Its result is more restrained, but consequential: a reality that cannot account internally for the conditions of its own coherence no longer requires the hypothesis of a transcendent ground to be excluded in advance. Readers may then consider whether the role described by Φ makes the God hypothesis philosophically available.

Keywords

• formal ontology
• ontological pluralism
• ontological domains
• metastructural ground
• God hypothesis
• category theory
• invariants
• structure

How to cite

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BibTeX

@misc{patriota2026structural,
  author = {Patriota, Eduardo},
  title = {Structural Constraints on Ontological Unification: A Formal Model of Multiple Domains},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.21813173},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21813173}
}