The Readability of Reality: From Knowability to Sign: A Metaphysical Inquiry into Meaning, Āyāt, and Their Grounds

Why can reality be known? The problem appears under many headings: the intelligibility of nature, the success of science, the applicability of mathematics, realism, representation, information, consciousness, and meaning. This monograph argues that these discussions intersect around a broader phenomenon that deserves explicit analysis. Reality is not merely orderly; it is repeatedly available for disciplined discovery. Human beings and other epistemic systems can encounter patterns, construct representations, expose them to correction, predict novel results, and accumulate knowledge across persons and generations. The study calls this phenomenon readability. Readability is defined as the objective availability of reality to constrained, corrigible, and progressively integrative inquiry. The concept is distinguished from order, intelligibility, information, meaning, and signification. Naturalism, physicalism, structural realism, informational and mathematical ontologies, and classical theism are compared without assuming that scientific success deductively proves any one of them. The final movement studies the Qurʾānic concept of āyāt as a framework in which revelation, nature, history, and the human self can function as domains of indication. The conclusion is deliberately qualified: the Qurʾānic theistic framework possesses distinctive resources for unifying objective order, the possibility of knowers, epistemic normativity, and signification, though the inference remains open to philosophical criticism.