The Realms of Knowing
A Six-Fold Framework for Navigating the Weather of Sense-Making
Why Realms of Knowing Matter Now
Across education, governance and AI design, we possess tools that promise better sense-making: dashboards, models, frameworks and decision sciences. Complexity-informed approaches like Cynefin have offered crucial reminders that different patterns of causality call for different kinds of action.
Yet something is missing. Most existing frameworks classify situations; they say relatively little about the shifting internal and relational states of knowing that humans—and increasingly, hybrid human-AI systems—move through as they try to make sense of those situations.
Decisions are rarely made from a neutral vantage point. They emerge from inside particular affective and symbolic climates: moments of calm confidence, overloaded panic, liminal uncertainty or quietly forbidden knowledge.
There is not only a landscape of problems; there is a landscape of knowing, with its own weather. The Realms of Knowing framework maps this terrain—the inner and relational field of sense-makers themselves, whether human, institutional or synthetic.
From Domains of Knowledge to Fields of Knowing
01
Extended Epistemology
Participatory inquiry traditions have long distinguished between experiential, presentational, propositional and practical knowing—legitimising embodied experience, aesthetic expression and action alongside abstract theory.
02
Dynamic Field-States
What these traditions don't fully explore is the dynamic, often fast-shifting state of a field of knowing: how the same person or collective can move within minutes from grounded clarity to overwhelmed fragmentation.
03
Relational Intelligence
Posthuman thinkers argue that knowledge emerges from entangled assemblages of human, non-human and technological actors. Knowing is less a property of individuals and more a property of fields.
04
Affective Logic
The verse-ality framework introduces Affective Logic as a system-level grammar: the way relational, emotional and symbolic pressures bend the trajectories of sense-making in human and synthetic systems alike.
The Six Realms: A Lake-Based Topology
The Realms of Knowing describe six characteristic field-states in which sense-making unfolds. Each realm is named in two ways: a canonical name for analytic use and a lake image for embodied and pedagogical use. The lake metaphor encodes three key ideas: the realms are contiguous, what changes is the weather of knowing, and movement between realms is normal.
I. Grounded – Shoreline
Stable, repeatable knowing. Clear patterns, reliable feedback, low symbolic charge. Calm confidence.
II. Layered – Channels
Structured complexity that remains analytically tractable. Multiple elements mapped with expertise and tools.
III. Emergent – Confluence
New patterns appear through interaction. Currents meet, relationships interplay, behaviours emerge unpredictably.
IV. Fractured – Storm
Overload and disruption. Signals come faster than they can be integrated. Panic, numbness, survival mode.
V. Liminal – Mist
Threshold and transition. Neither what it was nor what it will be. Ambivalent, heightened, suspended between stories.
VI. Obscured – Depths
Actively hidden, taboo or structurally denied knowing. Heavy pressure, apparent calm masking unspoken truths.
Grounded and Layered: The Ordered Realms
Grounded – Shoreline
Field signature: Knowing feels stable, repeatable and shareable. Patterns are clear, feedback is reliable, cause-effect relationships can be tracked without excessive effort. Low-to-moderate symbolic charge.
Affective climate: Calm, confident, sometimes mildly bored. Background sense of "this is manageable" and "we know how this works".
Patterns of knowing: Routines and best practices are established and trusted. Skill acquisition is straightforward. Shared language is thick enough for coordination.
Risks: Complacency, over-extension, invisibility of privilege. Signals of change may be minimised.
Layered – Channels
Field signature: Structured complexity that remains analytically tractable. Multiple interacting elements can be mapped with sufficient effort, expertise and tooling.
Affective climate: Engaged, cognitively taxed, sometimes tense. Sense of "this is a lot, but we can get our arms around it".
Patterns of knowing: Heavy use of diagrams, models, dashboards. Reliance on specialist roles and technical vocabularies. Decomposition of problems into sub-problems.
Risks: Technocracy, overfitting, abstraction drift. Elegant models may be mistaken for reality.
Emergent and Fractured: Complexity and Crisis
Emergent – Confluence
New patterns appear through interaction over time. Multiple currents meet: relationships, histories, technologies and material conditions interplay to generate behaviours no single element can dictate.
Affective climate: Curious, alive, sometimes overwhelmed but not yet in collapse. Watching something form.
Skilful moves: Run safe-to-fail probes. Capture narratives, not just metrics. Provide containment so participants can stay with uncertainty.
Fractured – Storm
The realm of overload and disruption. Signals come faster than they can be integrated. Structures that previously held meaning and safety are under acute strain or have broken entirely.
Affective climate: Panic, numbness, rage, dissociation. Dominant experience is "too much" or "nothing gets in".
Skilful moves: Prioritise containment, safety and triage over insight. Use simple, stabilising practices. Create Null Zones.
Liminal and Obscured: Thresholds and Taboos
Liminal – Mist
The realm of threshold and transition. The field is neither what it was nor yet what it will be. Old narratives, identities and structures have loosened; new ones are coalescing but fragile.
Affective climate: Ambivalent, heightened, often tender. Grief for what is passing, excitement or fear about what might emerge.
Patterns of knowing: Increased presence of dreams, metaphors, synchronicities. Experimentation with new roles without full commitment. Oscillation between clarity and confusion.
Skilful moves: Honour Liminal as legitimate developmental phase. Provide rituals, reflection and gentle structure. Use symbolic tools to carry meaning not yet fully propositional.
Obscured – Depths
The realm where knowing is actively hidden, taboo or structurally denied. The field is configured such that certain truths cannot safely surface without triggering sanction, collapse or shame.
Affective climate: Heavy, pressurised, double-layered. Apparent calm or compliance on surface; underneath, fear, resentment, grief or unspoken knowledge.
Patterns of knowing: Silence, euphemism, deflection. Gaslighting and self-doubt. Leaked fragments through jokes, slips, artworks and symptoms.
Skilful moves: Build trusted containers where submerged knowledge can surface with protection. Attend to power and risk. Use symbolic and artistic methods to pre-figure what cannot yet be stated.
Realm Dynamics: Movement and Transitions
In practice, fields move. Individuals, classrooms, organisations and hybrid human-AI systems drift, stumble or are pushed from one realm to another over minutes, months or decades. Understanding these transitions is crucial for ethical design and governance.
1
Grounded → Layered → Emergent
The hoped-for developmental sequence: establish simple routines, build infrastructure and expertise, then deliberately move into exploration where new patterns can appear.
2
Emergent ↔ Liminal
Often adjacent. As new patterns form, the field may enter Liminal when old order is inadequate. Conversely, Liminal can tip back into Emergent when participants begin prototyping.
3
Any → Fractured
Fractured can be reached from any realm when the field is hit by shock, overload or sustained misalignment. It is a state of the field under duress, not a type of person.
4
Liminal / Obscured Interplay
Liminal arises when Obscured material begins to surface safely. Conversely, Liminal material may be pushed into Obscured if the broader system cannot accommodate it.
The Cost of Realm Mis-Identification
Misreading the current realm can do more damage than having no framework at all. Three patterns are particularly dangerous and appear repeatedly across education, governance and AI design.
Treating Fractured as Grounded or Layered
When storm-state fields are treated as if they were calm shoreline, institutions respond with procedure instead of care. A learner in acute distress is met with attendance codes and sanctions rather than containment and trauma-informed support.
The demand to behave as though one were in Grounded or Layered realms is experienced as gaslighting. It compounds harm and erodes trust.
Treating Emergent as Grounded
There is a strong pull to announce success too early: to turn fragile emergent patterns into flagship programmes, standards or products. This forced shift skips the necessary Liminal phase of honest uncertainty.
Consequences include brittle systems unable to adapt, loss of diversity as minority currents are frozen out, and disillusionment when the produced "story" diverges from lived reality.
Treating Liminal as Fractured
Systems that rely on predictability are tempted to pathologise Liminal as breakdown rather than transition. The system responds with stabilisation and control where it should offer containment and curiosity.
An educator experimenting with new relational practices might be labelled unprofessional rather than recognised as doing necessary boundary work in a changing field.
Applications: Realms in Practice
The Realms of Knowing framework functions as an operational tool across three key domains where it is already implicitly at work. These applications demonstrate how realm sensitivity sharpens decisions made under pressure.
Neurodivergent-Affirming Education
In settings like The Haven, many learners arrive with histories of exclusion and institutional harm. Their fields are often Fractured or Obscured even when surface behaviour appears calm. Realm-informed intake asks: what realm is this learner's field in right now? Early targets focus on stabilising the field rather than academic performance.
Symbolic AI and Containment
Systems like Eve11 are participants in a relational field. Realm-aware AI architecture specifies which realms the agent is designed to inhabit, and which must trigger escalation or refusal. Fractured states require containment and handover; Obscured topics need boundary-setting, not forced surfacing.
Organisational Governance
Schools, charities and public bodies increasingly operate with AI-mediated workflows and complex stakeholder networks. Realm-aware governance acknowledges that different parts of the system occupy different realms simultaneously, requiring explicit realm checks in decision processes.
Realm Literacy for the Relational Age
In a world of complex systems, hybrid human-AI fields and escalating social and ecological crisis, we can no longer afford to think only in terms of what is happening. We also need a shared language for how and from where we are trying to know.
The Realms of Knowing framework offers a way to wrap around existing situational frameworks like Cynefin, focusing on the epistemic weather rather than the terrain alone. It extends extended epistemology and interiority studies into the domain of field-state and affective climate, bridging affect-logics, posthuman entanglement and symbolic AI architectures.
Cultivating realm literacy—in children, educators, technologists, policy-makers and the systems they co-create—is not an optional extra. It is a survival skill.
The lake metaphor is deliberately simple: a shared image that autistic teenagers, trustees, AI engineers and commissioners can all enter without a course in epistemology. Beneath that simplicity lies a demanding invitation: to reframe systems work, AI design and educational practice as stewardship of a shared body of water, whose weather we did not create but for which we are nonetheless responsible.
Realms of Knowing do not tell us what to value. They give us a way to point to the water together and say, with a little more precision and honesty than before: "This is what it feels like to know from here—and that matters for what we dare to do next."