DocWatts

I can respect this position. For what it's worth, coherence is never total - it's always limited, partial, and incomplete. The world would be a far less interesting place without Zarathustras to pull down our totems of coherence, and tell us that the holy idols we've invested ourselves in are frauds. I'd just counter to Zarathustra that the whole point of deconstructing our myths of coherence is to build something more truthful, flexible, and inclusive in their place. Not as a 'final' totem - nothing is ever final - but as a stopgap for the next iconoclast to come along and remind us that our reconstructed idols have their own cracks. Just like evolution doesn't have an 'end point', there's a dialectic here that's non-teleological. In other words, I think there's a good amount of productive tension between coherence and rupture. When I claim that all views are localized, limited, and incomplete, I'm not making a special exception for my own pluralistic viewpoint. I'd be disappointed if there were an end point to this process.

I thought I might share a write up on perspective-taking for my philosophy book, which is part of a chapter about how All Perspectives Are Partial. In this chapter, I explore the limitations of both Relativism and Absolutism, while offering Pluralism as a more productive alternative for navigating ambiguity without getting lost in it. (If you found this write-up useful / interesting, you might also like this earlier article on Perspectives And Purposes) https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/108568-perspectives-and-purposes/ _____________________________ Perspectives - Localized, Limited, And Incomplete This article is part of an ongoing series about how all perspectives are partial. 'Partial' means localized, limited, and incomplete - inevitable consequences of having a perspective at all, rather than a God's-eye view. The pivotal insight we'll be exploring is that our assessments are never neutral or purpose-free. Instead, they have everything to do with where we stand in relation to the world. Relativism - Freedom Without Direction When our cherished certainties hit a dead-end, how do we find our way to a more promising trail? Road-weary from trusting in failed certainties, we might be tempted to forsake paths altogether and veer off into the meandering forest of relativism. The thicket beckons to us because buried within lies a genuine insight. The revelation? Our viewpoints aren’t straightforward snapshots of Reality - they’re interpretive lenses that reveal and distort. Much like the fovea is to the human eye, our interpretive lenses have a focal point which brings certain selective elements into sharp clarity - and a periphery where everything else recedes into a blurry, indistinct background. The crucial insight? These focal points aren’t universal or arbitrary - they’re intimately tied to a horizon of significance that we negotiate with our culture. Negotiate, because our individual viewpoint is always situated within a social landscape that serves as our starting point for sensemaking. We can adapt, refine, and push back against this inherited framework - but we can never step outside of it entirely. To state it more simply: what we see depends on what we’ve been taught to look for - and what’s important to us. To see this in action, consider two archetypal lenses with very different focal points - the view of a scientist, and the gaze of a mystic. One directs their attention towards aspects of Reality that can be modeled through precise, mechanistic investigation. The other turns their perception to the ineffable horizons of our lived experience. What’s in sharp focus for one viewpoint is an indistinct blur for the other, yet both are attending to different aspects of the same shared Reality. Crucially, neither of these contrasting lenses is worn by a detached observer - their adoption is an outgrowth of our concernful involvement in the world. And each is drawing from a shared pool of human experience, namely an appreciation for wonder and the joy of discovery. In the end, what separates these viewpoints is not the Reality they inhabit, but which aspects of it direct their gaze. Relativism too emerges from our entanglement with the world. The emotional impetus? To not be fooled by false certainties - and to prevent ourselves from being weighed down by the baggage that accompanies them. Following relativism into the brambles, aspirations towards a ‘view from nowhere’ are unmasked as a naive pipe dream. Certainty? A bedtime story for children, not the currency of serious thinkers. With an unapologetic smirk, relativism is the irreverent iconoclast to our holier-than-thou pretensions. Emerging from the forest of equivocation, it takes a flattening steamroller to our patronizing dismissal of rival perspectives. In the midst of a shouting match between ‘obviously correct’ viewpoints, relativism announces that the referee is a fraud, and the rulebook is full of holes. And instead of offering up a replacement, it insists that the rules are made up and the points don’t matter. If throwing out the epistemic scorecards sounds like a cop-out, consider the host of everyday situations where we have no trouble applying it. When we see two paintings of a sunset hanging next to one another in a gallery, we don’t hem and haw over which one is the ‘correct’ interpretation. And the fun of arguing that chocolate is objectively superior to vanilla stems from the obvious absurdity of the question. What relativism forces us to confront is that this interpretive dimension reaches beyond the trivial into domains with tangible stakes. Scientific paradigms, ethical frameworks, political ideologies - all are to some degree conditioned preferences without a universal measuring stick to determine which is ultimately ‘correct’. When confronted with the smug assertion that ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’, relativism responds with cool confidence that ‘there’s no such thing as an uninterpreted fact.’ Make no mistake: the truths of relativism are partial. Masterful at tearing down self-supposed ‘certainties’ long past their shelf life. And conspicuously absent when the time comes to build something better in its place. When we’ve been suffocating under stifling absolutism, relativism’s insights can be a revelatory breath of fresh air. But just as we wouldn’t want to spend the rest of our days in the oxygen tent that saved our life, relativism serves us better as a waystation than a final destination. Liberating as it feels on first arrival, we soon discover that the trackless forest isn’t a long-term home. While “it depends” can be a valid response in some situations, it’s of little guidance when the world pushes us to pick a lane. The equivocating compass of relativism proves itself a poor tool for distinguishing promising directions from those that lead nowhere - and those that would send us tumbling off a cliff. Beyond mere impracticality for real-world decision making, there’s a sunless valley within Relativism’s domain that attracts predators. While a ‘live and let live’ policy to perspectives may sound benign, in practice it can be a Trojan horse for dangerous bullshit. One where opportunists emerge from the shadows to offer us ‘alternative perspectives’ on established facts about everything from vaccines to the Holocaust. Its liberating potential isn’t just for the genuinely marginalized - it’s also a boon for charlatans and extremists. Meander long enough through the trackless forest and sooner or later you’ll catch sight of a stray Nazi. The Path Of Pluralism - Calibrating Perspectives With Purposes So where does this leave us? Fortunately, a Sisyphean trudge over the same dead-end path - or wandering aimlessly through the woods, for that matter - are not our only options. If we adjust our focus from the obvious to the overlooked, we may notice a road less traveled - the path of Pluralism. Less traveled because it demands more from us - more humility than the rigid certainty of absolutism, and more discernment than the equivocation of relativism. Offering neither the false comfort of the former nor the illusory freedom of the latter, the Path of Pluralism provides its practical dividends for those who are willing to put in the work. This is because pluralism is a practice - not something you believe in, but something you do. Why seek out this more demanding trail? Because the utility it provides is worth the trouble. In a world where control is an illusion and detachment from outcomes is a tall-order for most, pluralism gives us needed tools for navigating ambiguity without getting lost in it. The essence of its pragmatic wisdom? Pick a lane - but know where the offramps are. Stated simply, there are usually multiple valid vantage points for approaching a given situation. Yet this openness comes paired with the astute recognition that there are often very good reasons to reject some approaches out-of-hand. In a messy Reality where control is an illusion and complete information is a pipe dream, it’s attunement rather than perfection that’s sublime. Attunement means calibrating our perspectives with our purposes. The key lies not in finding the perfect setting, but in adaptive adjustment. Like balancing on a bicycle, it’s a continual process of minute course corrections in response to ever-shifting conditions. Our initial vantage point doesn’t have to be perfect - it just needs to be a reasonable first-approximation that’s receptive to the changing terrain it traverses. ‘Receptive’ means structured to evolve methodically rather than haphazardly in response to situational feedback, with clear criteria for where it applies and where it doesn’t. And crucially, this entails being capable of abandoning our approach if it’s no longer serving us. Or, to put it plainly: while there are multiple ways to crack an egg, that doesn't mean that the edge of a bowl and a sledgehammer are equally effective methods for making an omelet. Pluralism acknowledges a diversity of viewpoints while recognizing that some of these serve our purposes, while others leave us with a mess.

I'll confess I'm not well versed in Lacan, but your shift in emphasis from an outside-in to an inside-out framework for meaning-making makes a lot of intuitive sense. We might not even have a disagreement so much as we do adjacent perspectives - which is great, since I'd get less out of these interactions our viewpoints were too similar or divergent. In other areas of my work, I've emphasized our connection to the Life-World - that shared, experiential world which serves as our primary ‘Reality’, long before we start theorizing about it. I strongly resonate with your point that this primordial ground - our first contact with this shared, experiential world - resists symbolic consolidation. 'We know more than we can tell", as Michael Polanyi put it. Something is always lost when we try to capture our ineffable connection to this visceral ground through concepts. Abstractions about what's ultimately 'real' are our attempts to uncover intelligible patterns within this visceral Reality that are relevant to our needs and concerns. Returning to my color example, we can try analogizing the color 'red' to other senses, give a mechanistic breakdown of how visible light interacts with rods and cones in our eyes and is converted into electrical signals that travel through our nervous system, but in the end color has to be experienced to be understood. Likewise, hermeneutic barriers can be bridged but not fully closed (No matter how much I try to put myself in the shoes of another, there's only so much I can do grok another subjective viewpoint. In practice though, intelligibility doesn't need to be perfect, just 'good enough' for our shared purposes). I'd differ in emphasis slightly with your inside-out framing, in favor of a co-constitutive approach to meaning. The world itself (or your relationship to it at any rate) is constitutive of your 'in-here'. That's not to say 'you are the whole universe', just that the boundaries between the outer and inner realms are porous, and constant exchange is the norm. The way I've analogized it is that mind and world are two sides of the same coin - just as hot and cold are two poles of a unified phenomena we call temperature. Meaning, then, isn't subjective or subjective, it's relational and emergent. Just as a concert emerges from the resonance of performer, venue, and audience, meaning emerges from the dynamic interplay of mind, body, and world.

I actually resonate with more of your thoughtful critique than you might realize, and I %100 agree with this point in particular. Beautifully said. (And yes, the shadow of Heideggar looms large over my body of work). I'd contend that purposes are primarily value driven. Values, then, are emotionally intuitive starting points that resonate with us because of our life experiences. Just as something about a color like 'red' remains stubbornly ineffable when trying to describe it to someone without eyesight, values have a requisite horizon of experience to be significant for us. Lived realities, rather than choices on a menu. That said, even though values are driven by emotion and survial rather than intellect, they are open to reflection and refinement (human beings can and do develop, after all). While there's no universal cipher that can tell us which values to adopt in an a-perspectival and a-situational way, in practice human beings can and do arrive at shared forms of meaning and purpose. The situations we navigate are bounded by shared biological, material, and existential constraints. We aren't just situated as individuals - we're situated together, as families, as communities, as a human species, as one link in the community of life. Not 'one big, happy family' - conflict is unavoidable, survival exacts a sharp price - but concentric circles of shared concern that radiate outwards from the individual, overlapping with the circles of others in more or less partial ways.

Hard agree there - it's akin to picking up 'The Selfish Gene' and coming up with a spurious interpretation of the book based on the title alone. When the book itself is an account of how 'selfish' genes give rise to altruistic behavior.

I would say that theory selection is intuition driven, with our intellect largely serving as post-hoc rationalizations of these emotionally grounded starting points. The values that guide our theory choice are a reflection of our life experiences. Moreover, they're grounded in a broader human evolutionary context, and patterned in non-arbitrary ways by the various social and cultural contexts that we're embedded in. That said, these ingrained responses aren’t set in stone - they can be recognized, examined, and gradually reshaped through deliberate reflection and receptivity to the world. I'd frame that this is something of a middle path between the perennial and constructivist camps - the former sees human nature as fixed and universal, and the latter sees human nature as fluid and malleable. I'd contend that our dispositions are neither wholly immutable nor infinitely plastic - they're responsive to experience, but not unanchored. We have influence but not control over the dispositions that shape theory choice.

I'll tackle the first question for now, since there's a lot that could be said on the subject, depending on how deep in the weeds we want to get. My broad 'take' on theory selection is rooted in pragmatic efficacy and ontological pluralism rather than a correspondence model tied to an inferred mind-independent Reality. Under this purview, a predictive theory is better than its alternatives when it's: A qualitative improvement in our problem solving capabilities - the newer theory solves problems that the older theory couldn't. For instance, GPS systems designed solely on Newtonian mechanics would fail to track our position with precision, since the satellites operate under conditions where relativistic time dilation becomes significant. Accounting for this requires the theoretical framework of general relativity. It should extend the scope of phenomena that can be mechanistically investigated. Our everyday lives are lived on the mesoscale - that comfortable, human-sized spatial and temporal scale that our perceptual systems are evolutionarily adapted to. A more powerful theory can show us how things that are invisible to us from our everyday vantage point can nonetheless affect us at the mesoscale. Germ theory being the classic example. Can predict and explain persistent anomalies that plagued earlier theories. For instance, Ptolemaic gravitation had to be modified in increasingly convoluted ways when observational evidence repeatedly failed to align with theoretical predictions. Can offer a better economy of assumptions and theoretical constructs in relation to what it's trying to explain. 19th centuries of light posited a theoretical construct called the Luminiferous Ether, out of the assumption that light was a wave and thus needed a medium to propagate through. When Michelson and Morley tried and failed to detect this medium in their famous experiment, physicists began modifying the properties of the ether in increasingly contrived ways. Eventually, Einstein's theory of relativity made the Luminiferous Ether obsolete, replacing a web of convoluted assumptions with a simpler and more productive framework. Theories are akin to gestalts which structure phenomena into a meaningful whole. Two people can look at the same observational evidence and 'see' different things from the same set of environmental stimuli, depending on their interpretative lenses. Gestalts are how a set of isolated elements coalesce into meaningful patterns that we can make sense of. Fruitfulness - a better theory should generate new research questions, suggest novel experiments, and lead to further discoveries. A theory that stagnates or closes off the path of inquiry is less appealing. It's not just about solving existing problems, but expanding the scope of problems that we can discover. Consistency - we want our theories be internally coherent and externally compatible with other well-established scientific theories. This is why a scientific theory that contradicts the 2nd law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy) is a non-starter. A better theory recognizes that the territory they're trying to map will always carry some degree of indeterminacy. The paradoxes of quantum mechanics - like waveform collapse and uncertainty - arise from trying to force macroscopic concepts from classical mechanics onto a domain they weren’t designed for. Theories that remain clear-eyed about these kinds of framing limitations are preferable. Rather than denying indeterminacy, they acknowledge where their conceptual tools strain or break down. Theories that display meta-theoretical self-awareness are preferable - in short, they don't mistake the map for the territory. Meaning they don't reify their theoretical constructs into fixed features of a mind-independent Reality. A meta-theoretically reflective view of physics, for instance, holds that physics isn’t an objective inventory of “what is,” but an iterative model of how reality behaves, which reflects our practical interests (e.g., building functional machines, predicting motion, manipulating our environment)

Karl Popper's been on my reading list for some time now - both for his philosophy of science and his sociological takes. I thought Kuhn did a pretty thorough job of demonstrating that theories aren't falsified so much as they are abandoned for a another theory with better pragmatic efficacy. Evidence always underdetermines theory, because there's no such thing as an uninterpreted fact. A theory that's out of step with observational evidence can always be modified in increasingly ad-hoc ways to 'save' a theory. The history of science shows that the old guard is often recalcitrant to change their views just because of pesky evidence - plenty of folks tried to 'save' the luminiferous ether, or objective space and time. The intuitions that theory selection is grounded in has a ton of inertia behind it. Eventually the cost for doing so becomes enough high enough that it gets outcompeted by a newer theory that predicts and explains a wider range of phenomena while generating fewer anomalies - which is how we can still have 'progress' within a Kuhnian model of science.

Cards on the table: I've probably read more Thomas Pychon than I have postmodern academic philosophy. Derrida is the type of philosopher I've learned about through osmosis rather than a deep dive of their work - ditto for Focault, Butler, etc. Postmodernism has just never excited me like phenomenology and more metamodern oriented philosophy has. Here's a list of philosophers that I've been influenced by, which my work is to some degree an attempt to synthesize and make more accessible: Fransisco Varella Evan Thompson Eleanor Rosche George Lakoff Mark Johnson Martin Heidegger Maurice Merleau-Ponty Hubert Dreyfus Ken Wilber Alfred North Whitehead Jonathan Haidt Thomas Kuhn Julia Galef John Verveake Thomas Nagel Charles Taylor I'd say the largest influence on my own work is a book called 'The Embodied Mind' by the first three authors on that list - with B&T-era Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Thomas Kuhn being close seconds. (The philosophy of science is near and dear to my heart).

Thanks! I'll chalk that up to the good 10-20 hours a week I've been spending on my book for the last two years - would be a bummer if I hadn't gotten any better at writing during that time!

I'd say what Leo is really, really good at is taking advanced epistemic, ontological, and sociological insights and stating them in accessible language. Thar said, probably the best thing I've done for my own epistemic development is branch away from Leo's work, and put a lot of time and effort into developing my own ideas (which often overlap with Leo's, but also branch off in some significant ways - and this is a good thing!)

Thanks, appreciate it! When I was reading through 'Being and Time' and 'The Phenomenology Of Perception', I remember thinking that there's got to be a more accessible way of conveying these insights. Grounding abstract concepts in tangible everyday metaphors and familiar examples, and writing in (what I hope is a more) engaging writing style are my tactics to that effect.

Howdy, I thought I might share another write up from my philosophy book. This one is an in-depth exploration of the coping mechanisms we adopt in the face of uncertainty - their underlying emotional purpose, and how authoritarian regimes exploit the psychology behind these defense mechanisms. I also outline a healthier alternative - attunement - a process-oriented stance where we treat our views as works-in-progress that we fine-tune in response to pushback from the world. ______________________________________________________________________________________________ The rise of authoritarianism worldwide isn't just a political crisis - it's also an epistemic one, rooted in how we respond to uncertainty in a complex world. How We Handle Not Knowing: Attunement And Its Alternatives Just as you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, you can’t develop an adequate picture of the world without breaking a few cherished certainties along the way. This is easier said than done, however, since we don’t hold onto our mental models in a disinterested way. When the world refuses to be squeezed down into a familiar box of our preferred dimensions, we’re faced with a choice: attune our views to better align with reality, or adopt a coping strategy to maintain our comfortable illusions. Attunement means treating our viewpoints as works-in-progress that require ongoing maintenance and receptivity to pushback from the world. Its antithesis is withdrawal into coping strategies - ploys for denying aspects of Reality that challenge our preferred narratives. We’ll be focusing on three such evasive maneuvers, prevalent responses to uncertainty that we’re likely to have encountered in daily life: 1) Fearful entrenchment, 2) Fatigued surrender, and 3) Confused compromise. For the most part, these maneuvers aren’t a deliberate choice - they’re habits we slide into when our emotional needs override our epistemic ones. When our viewpoints become enmeshed with our identity, safety, or sense of belonging, our resistance to changing course can take the form of fearful entrenchment - where we double down on our established views to avoid the discomfort of course-correcting. Fearful entrenchment is a classic sunk-cost fallacy - where we cling to a position despite mounting evidence that it’s untenable, because changing our mind carries unacceptable opportunity costs. This could be a blow to our ego, our social clout, or our wallet. Conspiracy theories are a telling illustration. When a vaccine skeptic is presented with data that shows a precipitous drop in cases of some debilitating disease in inverse proportion to vaccination rates, selective epistemic rigor becomes a common fallback. The skeptic may accuse public health officials of colluding with vaccine manufacturers to fabricate evidence - while applying no comparable scrutiny to their ‘alternate sources’ which challenge established facts. What’s important to realize is that inconsistency isn’t an accidental byproduct of this evasive strategy - it’s a defense mechanism for deeper emotional investments. The opportunity costs of abandoning one’s conspiracism aren’t trivial. It means abandoning the power-fantasy that we have special knowledge that’s unavailable to the deceived masses. And it may entail leaving a community we’ve been using to meet our identity and belonging needs. So that’s fearful entrenchment. But what of its oppositional counterpart? If the debris of collapsed-certainties has left a strong impression on us, we might withdraw into fatigued surrender - where we give up any hope of arriving at substantive truth. In this stance, we settle upon an attitude that ‘truth’ is little more than a label for personal preferences and socially agreed upon conventions. A person who’s been burnt by a political ideology might land upon the thought-terminating cliche that ‘all politicians are corrupt’. And if this gives them a convenient excuse to stay home on election day, so much the better - why put in the effort to navigate an imperfect system when you have a ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ card at the ready? And if we haven’t given a particular issue much thought or attention, we may default to confused compromise - a cobbled together hybrid that attempts to split the difference. This might lead us to commit to the fallacy of the middle ground. “Climate change is real, sure, but I don’t think it will be as catastrophic as the alarmists are claiming. We should try to curb emissions, but not at the expense of the economy. Plus, I already drive an electric car, so I’m doing my part.” Or else, our position might resemble an incoherent horseshoe, where we arbitrarily pick and choose from incompatible viewpoints. “The common man is being kept down by a cabal of wealthy elites within the deep state, who funnel our hard earned tax dollars to people that are here illegally. We need a strong leader that will put working families first by running the government like a business.” So that’s the trilogy of evasion. To bring the emotional underpinnings of these evasive maneuvers into sharper relief, let's return to our cooking allegory. Picture a bustling kitchen where a row of cooks are busy making omelets - each working from the same set of ingredients but with contrasting styles. The Kitchen Of Uncertainty: Four Chefs, Three Failures Notice the absolutist, who maintains a white-knuckled grip on their one perfect egg, petrified of how they’ll feel about themselves and look to others if it slips from their grasp. This is the absolutist’s solace - when the ambiguity of the world gnaws at us, we can at least take comfort that a definitive answer is out there. Accessible to us in principle, if only we can perfect our methods, purge our biases, and apply the correct form of reasoning. When we ask what’s driving the male loneliness epidemic or why home ownership has become an impossible dream for so many, we don’t want to be placated with a “it depends on your perspective”. Nor do we appreciate “what does it mean to you?” therapy-speak when we have pressing questions that demand answers. When institutions that are meant to serve as trustworthy curators can’t coalesce around an emotionally satisfying explanation, our shared epistemic foundation begins to crumble. Now observe the relativist, who stands paralyzed amidst the rows of egg cartons, dissatisfied with the recipe book but unwilling to put their own culinary convictions on the chopping block. We’re likely to drift into this evasive maneuver when established authorities have let us down, repeatedly proving themselves fallible or compromised by conflicts of interest. Or else, we find that the answers they offer repeatedly fail to align with our lived experience. This erosion of trust leaves us isolated in our sensemaking. Before we know it, we’re adrift in a sea of competing claims without a clear anchor to steady us. With no surefire method for which experts to trust, we’re at last thrown to our own resources to “do our own research.” On the surface this sounds reasonable. In practice, it can become an exhausting non-answer that sends us to the dark corners of the internet, where we become easy prey for charlatans who promise easy answers to life’s problems. And occupying the awkward space between our dueling chefs is the confused compromiser, whose dubious hodgepodge of mismatched ingredients is a result of deviating from the menu in an unpracticed way. This approach sometimes emerges out of simple laziness, when we can’t be bothered to pick a lane - but don’t have the confidence to just admit that we either don’t know or don’t care. Or it may result from apathy and exhaustion after swinging like a pendulum from one failed ‘certainty’ to the next. Unlike the relativist who abandons the search for truth altogether, the compromiser still craves the comfort of having answers, just without the rigor required to make them coherent. What our confused compromiser is left with is a patchwork of convenience that offers neither the stability of honestly-held absolutism nor the consistency of thoughtful relativism. Contrast these problematic stances with the more process oriented approach of the pluralist - who doesn’t fret about making the perfect omelet, because their aim is to become a better cook. After all, if today’s omelet doesn’t meet our expectations, we can learn from our mistakes and try again tomorrow. The pluralist’s flexible approach is rooted in a fundamentally different mode of relating to the unknown, in comparison to our other chefs. Rather than denying ambiguity or surrendering to it, the pluralist seeks to cultivate attentive responsiveness to its eddying currents. It’s a mindset that seeks to demystify without oversimplifying. To acknowledge nuance without surrendering to paralysis. To strive for coherence without forcing false compromises for convenience’s sake. The larger contrast points to the deeper emotional stakes of our epistemic stances. When we’re at a crossroads, it’s not intellect but intuition that gives us that initial push in one direction or another. Our life experiences predispose us to an instinctive posture towards a lack of epistemic closure. Beliefs, then, largely serve as post-hoc rationalizations of these foundational intuitions. Yet these ingrained responses aren’t set in stone - they can be recognized, examined, and gradually reshaped through deliberate practice. Because Pluralism is an ongoing practice rather than a set of beliefs, the buy-in is ongoing engagement rather than mere intellectual assent. It offers no fixed answers for how certain is ‘certain enough’, because certainty is a moving goalpost that shifts with the situation. On one level this is intuitive - we all know that picking a restaurant for a special occasion carries lower stakes than policy decisions that will affect millions of lives. Yet between the trivial and the profound lies a no man’s land of consequential everyday choices, where we need to be able to pick a lane while working from incomplete information. A Pact With Certainty: Authoritarianism's Faustian Bargain The epistemic ecosystem where these three evasive maneuvers operate has contributed to and sustained a more sinister development. Absolutism, relativism, and confused compromise exist within a complex feedback loop with other societal forces, which bad actors have been all too happy to exploit. 21st century authoritarianism has found its niche within the cracks of this fragmented epistemic ecosystem. Like a weed that will choke off the surrounding vegetation and eventually fracture our driveway if left unattended, these ideologies suffocate truthful viewpoints and demolish our capacity to have productive disagreements. Rooted in the frustrated desire for the comfort and security that comes with certainty and fertilized by the disillusionment when these hopes are repeatedly dashed, modern authoritarianism offers a seductive bargain. The authoritarian bargain - from Nazism to Maoism to MAGA - is the emotional comfort of certainty without the burden of truth-seeking. It’s the epistemic version of having your cake and eating it too. Emotional validation without introspection, certainty without responsibility, belonging without accountability - what’s not to like? Too bad, then, that the cake is poisoned and the person selling it knows it. Even worse, most of the people eating it know it too, but have convinced themselves that the poison is an acceptable trade-off for the intoxicating feelings it provides. So how do we resist the allure of these dangerous oversimplifications, without falling into decision paralysis or noncommittal compromise between extremes that should be rejected? The key to navigating this murky terrain lies not in arriving at the perfect solution, but in learning how to attune our methods to the situation we’re embedded in, in accordance with our values. A value is an emotionally intuitive starting point that orients our decision making, grounded in what we authentically care about. In contrast to the normative frameworks that grow out of these foundational orientations, values can usually be expressed in just a few words: curiosity, equity, fairness, justice, purity, recognition, reciprocity, self-reliance, and mutual respect are some examples. Becoming clear on what our values are is an indispensable part of how we use pluralism to navigate the panoply of perspectives. With a clear understanding of our values and pluralistic rigor as the two halves of our compass, we can begin to get a sense of how we become embedded in our various perspectives - and what to do about it. To that end, we need a sense of which viewpoints we’ve come to on our terms, which we’ve slid into out of apathy or coercion, and which are unavoidable outgrowths of the contexts we’re embedded in. When authoritarians feed upon our collective exhaustion at the panoply of competing claims about the world, the antidote lies not in clinging to an inflexible certainty, or bowing out of the truth-game altogether - but in the courageous practice of attunement: messy, demanding, and essential for a civil society that can sustain democracy.

Greetings! If you're tackling an expanded fundamental ontology, you're in good company. And if you managed to grok Heideggar at 22, I'm impressed. Back at the ripe old age of 30, 'Being and Time' was among the most difficult (but ultimately worthwhile) books I've ever read. My own project pulls from Heideggar alongside Merleau-Ponty, Hubert Dreyfus, Ken Wilber, Fransisco Varella, George Lakoff and others. 'World disclosure for dummies' might not be a bad description, since I'm writing for a non-academic audience that may be ready for more advanced insights -- but doesn't speak phenomenological jargon as a second language. Look forward to seeing you on the Forums!

I'd consider Hanzi Frienacht's approach to metamodernism and Ken Wilber's Integral Theory to be the gold standards. But just like any theory (meta or otherwise), there are higher and lower quality applications of both. Each is useful for seeing how the partial truths of the perspectives that these TOEs (Theories Of Everything) map can be slipped into and out of in a purposeful way - and for giving useful heuristics for when and where these mental models are applicable. With any meta-theory, there's always that temptation towards epistemic bypassing - since metatheory isn't a replacement for domain-specific expertise. My take on these metatheories is that they're more useful if you've already got a firm epistemic and sociological foundation under your belt.

For the record, I think our epistemic intuitions are largely aligned (the first subsection of the chapter I'm writing is called 'perspectives and purposes'). In the above scenario, when we can't agree on shared norms or goals or validation criteria then I'd say we've run headfirst into an incommenserability problem - one that's potentially unbridgeable unless somebody is willing to meet the other party part way on at least one of these pillars. What makes this potentially really challenging is that our foundational criteria are largely intuition driven - with our intellectual frameworks to some extent serving as post-hoc rationalizations of these emotionally grounded starting points. Just like the color red remains stubbornly ineffable if we're trying to explain it to someone without vision, certain intuitions can be stubbornly ineffable without the requisite life experience that makes it significant. Sometimes the best we can do in these types of scenarios is make sure the disagreement doesn't turn ugly. To that end, it can be beneficial to cultivate relationships with people that we disagree with, so that there's a reasonable benefit of the doubt that we're at least disagreeing in good faith.

I would argue that all forms of normative realism fall prey to an epistemic, ontological, and existential framing problem. The epistemic mistake, as I see it, is thinking that there's a single, transcendental way that all the puzzle pieces fit together, and that our perspectives are correct or incorrect to the degree that they're approximations of this god's-eye-perspective (ie, 'correspondence' theories of truth). Perspectives are always situated within a lived context. By definition, this means that they're inherently localized, partial, and incomplete. This isn't a problem for us in practice, however. When we leave the realm of the abstract and take a look at how actual human-beings use knowledge to guide our decision-making, we routinely make decisions based upon necessarily imperfect information. Reliable knowledge doesn't require absolute certainty - we just need a threshold of certainty that's well-calibrated for what we're trying to accomplish. What constitutes 'certain enough' isn't a fixed metric, but a moving goalpost that shifts with the situation we're trying to navigate. The ontological mistake is reifying our constructed abstractions as inherent, mind-independent features of Reality. Reality doesn't consist of 'things' as such - because 'things' are constructed abstractions that have no underlying substance without a someone or something that's doing the discerning. They're how our minds slice an undifferentiated reality into manageable chunks that we can more readily understand. Things, then are 'real', but not in the observer-independent way that transcendental frameworks would have us believe - they're instead interactionally real. There's also a deeper existential misunderstanding here as well - thinking that our lived perspective within Reality is a puzzle to be solved, rather than a mystery to be unraveled and experienced. Our expectation that there an ultimate or final perspective is as misguided as thinking that there's a full proof set of rules that can tell us when we should kiss a potential romantic partner for the first time. The problem isn't that no one's been able to crack the code- it's that there's no code to be cracked, because the task itself is a quixotic misunderstanding of our situation with Reality. In a Reality where control is an illusion and complete information is a pipe dream, it’s attunement rather than perfection that’s sublime. Attunement means calibrating our epistemic heuristics with our purposes. The key lies not in finding the perfect setting, but in adaptive adjustment. Like balancing on a bicycle, it’s a continual process of minute course corrections in response to ever-shifting conditions.

Very true! But the rub is that there are also multiple valid meta-perspectives for integrating the same territory. Pluralism might not necessarily go all the way down (agnostic on this point), but it does run quite deep.

Because it starts from where we actually are — rather than taking the end-product of a long chain of abstractions and treating that as our starting point. Think of it like this: color vision isn't a 1:1 representation of the electromagnetic spectrum in its raw form. This would be overwhelming and largely useless to us. Instead, human perception evolved to use just a narrow slice of that spectrum — the part most relevant to our survival needs as living beings. Likewise, we don't reside within a raw, undifferentiated Reality - this too would be overwhelming and largely useless to us. Instead, our minds enact a curated version of Reality — one that’s intelligible, livable, and scaled to our cognitive and existential capacities. My term for this human-sized slice of our shared Reality is the Life-World: that shared, experiential world that serves as our primary ‘Reality’, long before we start theorizing about it. Because we can't completely step outside of our human perspective within Reality, any generalizations we have about capital 'R' Reality will contain the fingerprints of this situated starting point. Mind you, that doesn't invalidate the conclusions we draw - it just means that any inferences we draw about The Absolute will necessarily reflect our own relationship to it. Just like physics is still valid despite the fact that it's not exhaustive of Reality, when we talk about The Absolute what we're necessarily talking about is our relationship to the Absolute. The Absolute may be what-is, but our relationship to what-is is always partial. That's my working thesis, anyways. True to the spirit of Pluralism, there are usually multiple vantage points we can approach an issue from that are each valid without being exhaustive. Being-As-Absolute and Being-As-Understanding are no exceptions to that.

I've appreciated the constructive criticism. Half of the fun of doing philosophy are these types of dialogues, where a domain of shared interest is approached through a complimentary set of lenses, each attuned to a different focal point. Very much in keeping with the type of Perspectival Pluralism that I'm encouraging. Your point about bracketing metaphysical questions is a fair one. You don't have to look further than scientific realism to see how it can give rise to Performative Contradictions - where ontological commitments are smuggled in under the guise of neutrality, while denying any metaphysical framing. I'd also argue that just because bracketing can be done poorly, doesn't negate its role as a useful tool when wielded skillfully. The type of bracketing I'm doing is a form of phenomenological metaphysics - agnostic toward certain metaphysical claims that fall outside the scope of the inquiry, rather than dismissive of metaphysics as a whole. Traditional metaphysics, from Plato to Hegel to Whitehead, takes an 'outside-in' approach to ontology. Where you start from the Absolute (or some fixed metaphysical ground), and try to work your way backwards to our situated, everyday position within Reality. It treats ontology as a study of what fundamentally is. What I'm doing is taking an 'inside-out' approach to metaphysics, which starts from our situated, everyday experience - and tracing how that experience gives rise to categories, distinctions, and ontological inferences. From this vantage point, ontology becomes a kind of reverse engineering - not in order to deny capital 'R' Reality, but to understand how our access to it is structured. The divergence between these two approaches is rooted in a deeper disagreement over what ontology is for. On one view, ontology aims to describe Reality as it is in itself — timeless, essential, absolute. On the other, it aims to understand how Reality is experienced — how we carve meaning out of the undifferentiated.

Your use of 'Being' refers to the Absolute - the metaphysical ground of all that is (Being-As-Absolute) What I'm attempting to do is shift the question from what Reality is to how we experience Reality (Being-As-Understanding). Reality itself may be an undifferentiated whole, but it's always accessed from a situated position - a vantage-point rather than an everything-point. Being-As-Absolute might be what-is, but Being-As-Understanding is how what-is becomes intelligible. The former contains the latter, but the latter is more salient to our human condition within the Absolute. When we say that something is a type of thing, we’re already in the realm of Being-as-Understanding. Reality itself doesn’t consist of ‘things’ as such — ‘things’ emerge from the act of differentiation, of drawing distinctions within the undifferentiated.

Counter Claim: Ontology is always situated, because being (whether we're talking about the 'being' of entities or capital B 'Being') isn't metaphysical. It's instead a form of understanding for a particular someone, which we reify as a metaphysical substance or field due to a category error. In short, it's the most basic and primordial way that people, places, and things are first disclosed to us as people, places, and things.

As far as action steps, the first thing I would advise everyone to do is to find a local, in-person pro-democracy group to organize with. Indivisible is the one I joined - it's a nationwide broad-tent pro-democracy movement that has local chapters in every state and most major metropolitan areas (https://indivisible.org/). My local group has in person meetings every month where we share intel about what's happening in our state and the country, and coordinate actions like protests. The two founders of Indivisible have a nationwide 'What's The Plan Call' that anyone can join. (In addition to Indivisible, there's also no shortage of other pro-democracy groups to join that organize around specific issues, such as immigration, climate change, workers rights, etc). In addition to finding your local group, you can grab the 5calls app and make weekly calls to your Senators and Representatives about specific issues. The only way that our politicians are going to do what we want is if there's a sustained public pressure campaign telling them to vote NO on Trump's policies and cabinet appointments. Don't assume that just because your local Rep is a Democrat that they'll do the right thing without public pressure. And don't assume that just because your Rep is a Republican that they can't be pressured on specific issues, especially if they're in a competitive seat. We also need be willing to have difficult conversations with friends and family members who've tuned out of politics since the election. While the trying to reach the MAGA Cult is likely a lost cause, there are plenty of people who aren't hostile to the pro-democracy movement, but aren't aware of the danger we're in because they haven't been paying attention. They might not know that ICE is kidnapping people off the streets like the fucking gestapo, and that Americans are being illegally renditioned to a foreign concentration camp. They might not be aware of that Trump is in the process of collapsing our supply chains, and that he's doing this intentionally to consolidate power. Don't assume people know things that are blindingly obvious to you. In sum - we need to be spending less time on the internet and more time in-person building the pro-democracy movement within our own communities. Authoritarian regimes want us to feel isolated, afraid, and powerless. Unless we have the platform of a Leo or a Destiny, there's not much we can do to fight this as individuals. We fight this by building a resilient network of communities that can come together to pursue a shared strategy.

If you happen to live in the United States and you're looking for something tangible you can do to push back against Trump's authoritarian regime, a huge nationwide protest in being planned for Sat, June 14th. On June 14th (which also happens to be Flag Day), Trump will be spending $90 million of our taxpayer dollars on a lavish North Korean-style military parade for his birthday, where tanks will be rolling down the streets of Washington DC. Indivisible and 50501, along with a broad network of grassroots pro-democracy groups, will be hosting nationwide protests throughout every part of the country - except for Washington DC. The aim is to draw the media and the public's attention away from Trump's gaudy dictatorial parade and towards the growing pro-democracy movement in the United States - and put the screws to the Big Lie that Trump has a mandate with the American people. The only way that our politicians and organizations like colleges are going to stand-up to Trump's destruction of our Constitution and the Rule of Law is if there's a sustained public pressure campaign for them to do so. In the April 5th and April 19th 'Hands Off Protests', 9 million people took to the streets in nonviolent protest against Trump's fascist agenda, with across thousands of demonstrations taking place in every state. These protests will be a great way to dip your toes into the pro-democracy movement - and they'll be happening literally everywhere in the country, from big cities like Las Vegas to small towns in ruby red districts. You can find more information on the No Kings protests here: https://www.nokings.org/ https://indivisible.org/ https://www.fiftyfifty.one/

Appreciate it! Your constructive criticism is very welcome. Mind and world are two aspects of a unified phenomena we call Reality, but that doesn't mean we have access to 'everything, everywhere, across all time' - our limitations matter. Good epistemology (in my view) uses our situated position within Reality as a starting point for making useful discernments from unavoidably incomplete information. I'm of course open to the possibility that there a levels beyond the epistemic territory I'm exploring - but if that's indeed the case, no sense moving on until the approach I'm articulating has been more fully mined for its partial insights.