Pluralism, Not Relativism

[DocWatts]

18 hours ago, aurum said:

My point is that bracketing the question of The Absolute and metaphysics risks shaping how you understand experience in ways that may go unnoticed.

Understanding of the two, what reality is and how we experience reality, cannot be cleanly separated.

Again, this is just my critique. If you feel your approach is more valuable for what you're exploring, then by all means pursue it.

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.

Edited Wednesday at 10:17 PM by DocWatts

[aurum]

2 hours ago, DocWatts said:

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.

But are these claims outside the scope of inquiry?

I understand that you are bracketing metaphysics for pragmatic purposes rather than denying it.

At the same time, you are tackling fundamental questions about experience. And I have a hard time seeing how that can be accomplished without either introducing more metaphysics or deeply limiting the analysis.

Either choice will have tradeoffs, but I tend to favor a holistic approach when possible.

2 hours ago, DocWatts said:

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.

How does one understand accessing capital 'R' Reality without understanding what is capital 'R' reality?"

Also, why is an "inside-out" approach more effective in this case?

Edited Thursday at 12:10 AM by aurum

[DocWatts]

13 hours ago, aurum said:

How does one understand accessing capital 'R' Reality without understanding what is capital 'R' reality?"

Also, why is an "inside-out" approach more effective in this case?

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.

Edited Thursday at 01:12 PM by DocWatts

[aurum]

9 hours ago, DocWatts said:

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.

This is a false assumption.

Claim: the Everything-point is actually possible. And if you did experience the Everything-point, it would radically recontexualize Life-World in a way that cannot be comprehended strictly from a Life-World perspective.

9 hours ago, DocWatts said:

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.

Disagree.

The Absolute can be understood on its own terms, not through relationship.

9 hours ago, DocWatts said:

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.

Multiple approaches can definitely have value.

The masterstroke, in my opinion, is integrating them all together.

Edited Thursday at 09:16 PM by aurum

[DocWatts]

1 hour ago, aurum said:

Multiple approaches can definitely have value.

The masterstroke, in my opinion, is integrating them all together.

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.

[aurum]

3 hours ago, DocWatts said:

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.

I respect your agnosticism on this. Good sense-making means knowing what you know and what you don't know.

What would be examples of valid meta-perspectives?

 

[zurew]

On 2025. 05. 14. at 9:27 PM, aurum said:

They could make that exact same move. But if their metaphysics relies on assumptions, partiality or finitude, it will be internal incoherent and should be discarded.

For instance, I could design a metaphysics where unicorns are God. But this is contradictory because unicorns are finite and therefore cannot be God.

What this all leads to is that there can only be one correct metaphysics, which is the Absolute. And the Absolute is revealed with awakening, not merely deduced with logic.

If the claim is that their version of metaphysics would be necessarily internally incoherent, there are ways to prove that in principle, I just doubt that it will be ever established by anyone. 

Some presups claim kind of similar that the Christian God is logically necessary and therefore all other views necessary entail a contradiction in them - but of course, none of them could defend such a claim.

 

I take when you say "there can only be one correct metaphysics" to mean there is no other view that can account for all the facts. I dont think thats true.

Like I can grant that the Absolute is true, but even in that context , you can tackle and change certain properties of the Absolute presumably , because not all parts are logically necessary - this is similar to the idea "okay the Christian God created the world, but him creating the world is compatible with a God who has a slight preference for Eve to not eat the apple and also compatible with a God who is indifferent whether Eve eats the apple or not.

 

Like just going with any God model where God has these two properties (all knowing, and all powerful) - you can suddenly explain all the facts of the world and there is no contradiction in such a God creating a world like this - but such a God could have a variety of other properties and preferences and desires - so you can have a million different versions of a such a God (each slightly different from the other, but all sharing the all powerful and all knowing property). Asking the question of "which one is logically necessary from the 1 million?" would be a bad question because none of them would entail a contradiction even though each is slightly different from the other.

 

 

 

On 2025. 05. 14. at 9:27 PM, aurum said:

How do you know (epistemology) what reality is? Through direct experience, or Being (ontology). To know is to be, and to be is to know.

I think thats one way of knowing and it has its own limitations, just as other ways of knowing.

 

 

 

[zurew]

On 2025. 05. 15. at 11:14 PM, aurum said:

Multiple approaches can definitely have value.

The masterstroke, in my opinion, is integrating them all together.

Integration doesn't get you anywhere though, unless you can lay down the "right" way how to integrate things.

Unless you can establish normative realism (there are objective standards for what constitutes justified belief, knowledge, or rationality, and these standards are not simply products of human conventions or subjective preferences)  - all you have is puzzle pieces that you can put together in multiple ways and nothing tells you which one is the "right" way.

Appealing to a subjective preference (like your preferred way of knowing or your preferred epistemic norm) won't solve this ,especially when the paradigms are mutually exclusive.

 

Like if I ask questions like  - which meta perspective should be considered valid? The "validity" there will be grounded in a subjective preference or pragmatism or If I ask the question which meta perspective should I choose from the many? The answer to that will be grounded in subjective preference or pragmatism as well.

And if someone disagrees when it comes to your answer to any of those questions, you cant appeal to anything that could solve the disagreement (again unless, you can establish normative realism or if we share a same subjective normative ground).

 

 

And pragmatism doesn't solve this either - because, yes, if we choose a given norm like "efficiency" we can suddenly hierarchically rank things, but nothing objectively tells you that you ought to rank things based on efficiency.

And this goes to the human flourishing aspect as well - we can define and pick a norm or multiple norms to track and to measure human flourishing and then to rank political action and other things based on that, but nothing tells you that you should or you ought to rank things based on that variable/aspect - you just chose it, because you care about it.

Edited 12 hours ago by zurew

[DocWatts]

4 hours ago, zurew said:

Integration doesn't get you anywhere though, unless you can lay down the "right" way how to integrate things.

Unless you can establish normative realism (there are objective standards for what constitutes justified belief, knowledge, or rationality, and these standards are not simply products of human conventions or subjective preferences)  - all you have is puzzle pieces that you can put together in multiple ways and nothing tells you which one is the "right" way.

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.

 

Edited 8 hours ago by DocWatts

[zurew]

Yeah personally I don't think normative realism makes sense, I don't know what it would even mean for something to be the correct or right independent of a goal or context.

I think the same goes for relevance as well  - goal independent relevance doesn't make any sense, and I don't know what it would mean to say x is relevant independent of context and goal.

56 minutes ago, DocWatts said:

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.

 

If we introduce  goals to that situation, then we can have actual code to crack.

So If we introduce a set of goals attached to the 'kissing of the romantic partner for the first time' - there will be answers that are better when it comes how and when the first kiss should be done ('better'- ness in this case would be defined by how much we progress toward those attached goals). 

In principle, we could lay down a set of rules that would outline with 100% clarity whats the best approach (with respect to the goals we have) in that situation, its just that in practice it cant be done , because of a bunch of limitations (cognitive , resource, time , ill-defined, lack of info etc). 

That doesn't necessarily mean that there is only one answer, but clearly there is a hierarchy of answers (after we attach our goals to the situation)

 

 

Do you have an answer to the questions I gave to aurum? Because it seems to me that if two people disagree on the answers (when it comes to these two questions or questions as such) , there is no way to solve their disagreement, because they cant appeal to anything.

Quote

which meta perspective should be considered valid?

which meta perspective should I choose from the many?

 

Edited 7 hours ago by zurew

[zurew]

Also (even though I agree) that after we specify a goal  there will be ways to progress toward that goal better than in other ways, the exact same problem (about unshared metanorms) is applicable there as well. The only reason why we can agree on whats a better way or even whats the best way to progress toward that given goal (or even on whats relevant) is because we agree on some epistemic norms that help us to make sense of the world.

To check how much we progress or digress from the goal we need to know facts about the world , but what if we disagree on the facts? Well we appeal to some norms that can generate those facts, okay, but what if we disagree on those? Then we will eventually end up in a sitation where we cant agree on what make us progress or digress from the goal.

I don't know in what possible way one could reconcile fundemental disagreement there. 

 

Like imagine some silly scenario where one guy has some weird epistemology where he appeals to the problem of induction (where he says there is no guarantee that laws of physics will hold up 1 second from now and that the regularities of nature can change at any moment) and this guy says that staring at the sun for 24 hours is whats necessary to crack an egg and you hitting that egg with a sledgehammer wont crack the egg

[DocWatts]

42 minutes ago, zurew said:

 

To check how much we progress or digress from the goal we need to know facts about the world , but what if we disagree on the facts? Well we appeal to some norms that can generate those facts, okay, but what if we disagree on those? Then we will eventually end up in a sitation where we cant agree on what make us progress or digress from the goal.

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.

Edited 6 hours ago by DocWatts

[zurew]

28 minutes ago, DocWatts said:

What makes this potentially really challenging is that our base level norms and criteria are largely intuition driven - with our intellectual frameworks to some extent serving as post-hoc rationalizations of these emotionally grounded starting points.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. 

Even when we lay down axiomatically our epistemic framework, when it comes to the application of it and when it comes to the question of "okay given this x situation what makes y contextualization reasonable and z contextualization unreasonable) most of the time, it will be very unclear how to give a clear definitve answer to those questions.

 

It also doesn't help that I take it that discovering/realizing facts requires different norms than the contextualization of those facts (this is why we can agree on all the facts, but take different perspectives, because we don't share the same norms when it comes how and what kind of perspective should be taken given a set of facts)

 

28 minutes ago, DocWatts said:

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.

Yeah, I take it that most of those intuitions are grounded in the subsconscious and the content of our subconscious is largely informed by our lived experience, therefore if we largely differ when it comes to lived experience, we will have a hard time understanding each other (unless we are exceptionally good at explicating our norms and beliefs and we have a habit of reflecting on them a lot).

28 minutes ago, DocWatts said:

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').

I think this is true.

This is one reason why i am not completely blackpilled when it comes to 'solving' disagreements (because in principle a lot of the disagreement can be reconciled), its just that in practice in a completely fked up media environment, this is close to impossible.

Edited 5 hours ago by zurew

[zurew]

41 minutes ago, DocWatts said:

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.

Makes sense.

I think when it comes to these pragmatic (how to live peacefully together and how to solve disagreements )  questions - philosophers would be better off researching conflict resolution tools, than spending time trying to establish objective morality and normative realism.

One reason is because (even if they were actually right and they would successfully pull that off) most of the population wouldn't be motivated by that (I think I would include myself there as well). 

The reason why I brought this up is because I see so many times this problem of conflict resolution brought up to people like us (who reject normative realism and objective morality) as if it would be unqiue to us and as if it would be suddenly resolved by affirming realism.

Edited 5 hours ago by zurew

[DocWatts]

On 5/15/2025 at 9:50 PM, aurum said:

I respect your agnosticism on this. Good sense-making means knowing what you know and what you don't know.

What would be examples of valid meta-perspectives?

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.

Edited 5 hours ago by DocWatts