Several contemporary process‑relational thinkers directly or implicitly take up questions about facts, events, and how they show up in descriptions or discourse. They often do this under headings like “events,” “propositions,” “symbolic reference,” “narrative,” or “discourse,” rather than using the classic analytic vocabulary of “facts and descriptions.”

Here are some helpful entry points:

• Catherine Keller (process theology and political theology) treats “facts” as stabilized aspects of deeply interwoven processes, and reads descriptions as participatory, symbolic interventions in those processes, especially in works like “Face of the Deep” and “Cloud of the Impossible.”

• Isabelle Stengers develops a Whiteheadian, process‑relational account of scientific practice, where facts are “constructed” through experimental practices that nevertheless answer to what resists us; descriptions are part of the practices that compose and stabilize those facts (e.g., in “Thinking with Whitehead” or “Cosmopolitics”).

• Bruno Latour, while not a classic Whiteheadian, is often read as process‑relational; his notion of “factish” objects and laboratory practice makes facts into the outcome of relational processes, with inscriptions, graphs, and accounts (descriptions) as integral components of their stabilization.

• Steven Shaviro, especially in “Without Criteria” and “The Universe of Things,” reads Whitehead through Deleuze; he discusses how actual occasions and propositions function so that what you would call a “fact” always arrives already inflected by modes of feeling, valuation, and expression.

• David Ray Griffin and Michel Weber, within more strictly Whiteheadian metaphysics, analyze propositions and symbolic reference: propositions are ways in which the world can be felt and expressed by actual occasions, so the “fact” and its “description” are two roles played by one process of prehension and articulation.

If you want authors who explicitly bridge process‑relational metaphysics with issues of discourse, representation, or description, focusing on Stengers, Latour, Keller, and Shaviro is likely to bring you closest to your question about how facts “survive into” descriptions and help constitute them.

how do these thinkers see the symbolic

Each of the process‑relational thinkers you mentioned treats “the symbolic” as an active, world‑involving process rather than a detached layer of signs that merely mirror an independent reality. In different ways, they all resist the idea that symbols are arbitrary labels stuck onto a finished world of facts.

Here is a very compressed map, in your idiom of facts/descriptions:

• Whitehead (as background for all of them): symbols and propositions are ways actual occasions “feel” and re‑present aspects of other occasions; symbolic reference is how a current event integrates past events into its own becoming, so symbols are modes of causal/experiential inheritance, not free‑floating codes.

• Catherine Keller: the symbolic is a dense, mythic–poetic field where cosmology, theology, and politics are knotted together; symbols are sites where material processes, power relations, and divine/abyssal possibilities cross, so that playing with symbols is a way of reconfiguring real relations rather than just “interpreting texts.”​

• Isabelle Stengers: “facts” are stabilized through experimental and discursive practices, and the symbolic is part of these practices—forms of articulation, naming, and narration that participate in making phenomena articulate themselves, while still being answerable to what resists us.

• Bruno Latour: inscriptions (graphs, maps, papers) are symbolic artifacts that help compose “facts” by making them mobile, combinable, and contestable; the symbolic is material and operative, a crucial mediating layer in the chains that transform local events into accepted facts.

• Steven Shaviro: drawing on Whitehead and Deleuze, symbols and images are modes in which processes appear and are taken up; the symbolic is one way reality “expresses” itself, so the gap between fact and symbol is more of a difference in role within process than a gulf between two orders.

Very roughly: for all of them, the symbolic is a vector along which processes fold back on themselves—facts “survive into” symbols because symbols are one important way processes inherit, select, and reconfigure earlier processes.