Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>This paper develops a structural and transcendental ontology of data under conditions of symbolic mediation. Against approaches that understand data as either given elements of reality, purely differential informational units, or merely technical artifacts, it argues that data emerge through structured symbolic stabilization rather than as ontological primitives. Through successive symbolic projections, differential configurations become identifiable, reproducible, and operationally available within symbolic and technical regimes. Drawing on Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms, and on Simondon's and Stiegler's accounts of individuation and technical exteriorization, the paper argues that objectivity is not grounded in unmediated access to a pre-symbolic reality but in symbolic structures that organize experience into historically situated domains of intelligibility. Symbolic stabilization is both form-dependent and historically variable: different symbolic and epistemic regimes organize successive projections differently and therefore constitute distinct fields of operationally relevant differences, while technical systems carry within them the sedimented constraints of prior epistemic regimes. The paper thereby shifts the philosophical analysis of data away from semantic content alone toward the transcendental conditions under which differences become stabilizable as data. This reorientation carries consequences beyond ontology: questions of algorithmic bias, data governance, and epistemic justice emerge, on this account, as disputes over competing regimes of stabilization rather than merely technical problems of information management.</p>