When Reality Refuses to Hold Still: A Critical Integrative Review of Ontological Instability, Fluctuational Metaphysics, Epistemology and Ethics

What follows if instability is not merely a deficiency in our descriptions of reality but an important feature of the realities described? This critical integrative review reconstructs a connected research programme encompassing Ontological Instability, Fluctuational Metaphysics, Fluctuational Epistemology and Fluctuational Ethics. Taking Kwan Hong Tan's 2025–2026 theses and research papers as its primary corpus, the review situates their proposals in process philosophy, pragmatism, feminist epistemology, practice-based ontology, complexity studies and moral uncertainty. It argues that a defensible fluctuational philosophy requires a crucial distinction among three claims: entities may change, knowledge claims may require revision, and ethical obligations may nonetheless retain normative force. Failure to distinguish these claims risks an invalid inference from uncertainty to indeterminacy, and from contextual sensitivity to moral relativism. The article develops a constraint-sensitive fluctuational framework built around provisional identity, situated warrant, asymmetric vulnerability and accountable revisability. It advances five conditional propositions, a comparative appraisal of rival traditions, two illustrative applications and a research agenda with explicit conditions of possible failure. The resulting contribution is not a claim that metaphysical instability has been experimentally proven or that earlier process theories have been superseded. It is a carefully delimited synthesis: stability can be understood as a produced and revisable achievement while truth claims remain answerable to evidence and practical responses remain answerable to those who bear their consequences.