Wholeness Contextuality as a Foundational Principle of the Renormalization Group

The renormalization group (RG) is commonly presented as a technical framework involving scale transformations, parameter flows, and the elimination of microscopic degrees of freedom. In this paper, we propose a complementary interpretation: the RG, in its original formulation by Kenneth Wilson, can be understood as a manifestation of a more fundamental methodological principle, which we call wholeness contextuality. According to this principle, physical description proceeds not from elementary components to the whole, but from the specification of the whole—understood as a context—to the identification of which properties of its elements are relevant, universal, or negligible. We argue that Wilson’s RG implicitly relies on the primacy of the whole over its constituents, even though this principle was never explicitly formulated as such. We further show that this viewpoint naturally connects with a recently proposed analytical approach to probability theory in quantum mechanics, where joint structures are derived from global probabilistic constraints rather than assumed as primitive. The proposed interpretation does not modify the technical content of RG or quantum theory, but offers a unifying conceptual framework applicable beyond specific probabilistic or field-theoretic calculations.