How Context and Dependence Both Shape Reality Without Collapsing Into Hierarchy

Buchler's ordinal naturalism holds that any entity — or "natural complex" — possesses whatever properties it exhibits in its various relational contexts, and that no context is metaphysically privileged. Applied to the classic train-tracks case, the tracks are genuinely parallel (in relation to the ground) and genuinely convergent (in relation to binocular vision). Contextualism dissolves the apparent contradiction by distributing the properties across distinct orders of relation. So far, so good.

Cahoone's intervention is to argue that this symmetric pluralism, while correct as far as it goes, is incomplete once Emergence enters the picture. The parallelism is a property of material objects in stable physical configuration. The convergence is an emergent property arising only within the biological order — it requires a perceiving organism with a specific visual apparatus. The convergence ontologically depends on the parallelism; the reverse does not hold. This asymmetric dependence is not a claim about degrees of reality. Both properties remain equally real. But they are not symmetrically constituted.

The broader philosophical payoff is a layered ontology that preserves pluralism while acknowledging hierarchical constitution. Physics applies to more of the universe than biology, and biology to more than psychology — not because physics is epistemically superior, but because higher-order complexes are constituted by lower-order ones. The natural sciences enjoy a priority of scope and constitution, not of truth-value or explanatory privilege. Cahoone thus threads a needle between reductive physicalism, which collapses the hierarchy into identity, and flat-footed relativism, which refuses to recognize any ordering among contexts at all.