How Scientific Methods Subtract Most of Reality Before They Begin

Process relational philosophy, as articulated by Bonnitta Roy, holds that reality bottoms out not in matter or information but in experience and relation. The key move is distinguishing what something is made *of* from what it is made *with*. Pizza is made of dough, but dough is made with the Agricultural Revolution, which is made with human evolution, which is made with the Cosmos. The Agricultural Revolution cannot be located inside the pizza, yet the pizza is unintelligible without it. Apply the same logic to the atom: it is made with the Scientific Revolution, with the institutional and cultural infrastructure that sustains particle physics. This does not diminish the atom's reality — it reveals that conventional descriptions subtract roughly 90% of what the atom actually is by stripping away its verb-like, process-relational dimensions.

Roy names this systematic removal 'substracting' — a portmanteau of subtracting and abstracting — to highlight how certain scientific methodologies structurally privilege noun-like, enduring entities over relational processes. David Graeber's archaeological critique runs parallel: the historical record is biased toward what was built to last, rendering basket weaving, pedagogy, and tenderness permanently invisible. The glue of reality — the withness — falls outside the method's aperture.

Roy extends this reasoning speculatively to dark matter and dark energy, proposing that the 97% of the universe physicists cannot locate may be precisely what object-oriented methodologies are constitutively unable to detect. The deeper epistemological point is not anti-scientific skepticism but a recognition that completeness within a partial frame remains partiality. Interrogating what it means to be 100% true inside an extremely partial context is itself the philosophical work.