Pluralism, Not Relativism

[aurum]

6 hours ago, DocWatts said:

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!)

True. Doing your own thinking is important.

Best of luck with your work, I'll keep reading.

[zurew]

14 hours ago, aurum said:

What you have to ultimately reground your epistemology in then is not relativism, but the Absolute itself. Which is infinity.

I can grant that - I just dont see how that solves the epistemic anarchy problem. It almost feels like a backwards pragmatic approach to philosophy, where you ask the question of 'what view could justify itself with 100% certainty' and try to construct something that satisfies that.

Even under the context, where the existence of the Absolute is granted:

1) To me it seems that multiple people can agree on the Absolute being 'real' or 'existing', but still make different interpretations and inferences about it.

2) There are multiple different ways to arrive at the same conclusion about the Absolute (its not constrained to one way of knowing)

 

This goes back to the problem of collapsing epistemology and ontology.

We can agree that the Absolute is real or that it exists, but I fail to see how that claim makes any inherent epistemic claim about a 'right' way of knowing or how that makes any claim about epistemology at all.

Like - I don't see how you would possibly derive from the Absolute existing that 'being is the right/correct way of knowing'.  The Absolute doesn't seem to have any epistemic norms embedded in it.

 

 

14 hours ago, aurum said:

Without that higher authority, suddenly you may feel like you are sliding into total epistemic chaos.

Kind of - but I wouldn't frame this as something where you either have 100% certainty vs you have no certainty at all - there are varying degrees of certainty.

 

I have to mention again that I see a lot of parallels in reasoning with the presups (and I think similar errors are made on this forum as well). Their idea is to ground everything in the all knowing Christian God, where God can deliver epistemic and metaphysical insights through revelation. This is a move, where they attempt to try to get rid of all the fallible and limited human aspects, so that finally we can have the "correct" take about metaphysics epistemology ethics etc with 100% certainty , where there is no more room to be wrong anymore. 

At the end of the day, if God is all knowing - that means that he can tell us all truths, right? The answer is yes, but the issue is establishing that the all knowing Christian God exists without presupposing that he exists. Presups reply to this problem by saying that there are certain transcendental categories that are necessary when it comes to any knowledge claim (for example logic, intelligibility , meaning) - in other words, the idea is that you cant make any knowledge claim without pressuposing those transcendental categories. They also say that you need to ground those transcendental categories and  in order to ground them ,  you need the Christian God and nothing else could satisfy being the ground.

Essentially they end up saying that the existence of the Christian God is logically necessary (all other worldviews are incoherent and they have a contradiction in them), but if you press them on it, they just keep repeating catchphrases like (Im right, due to the impossibility to the contrary'), but they never demonstrate how all other views necessarily contain a contradiction in them, they just assert that to be the case.

So in a nutshell - they answer "how do you know that" question in 2 ways - one is claiming that only their view is coherent and two is saying that they gathered this insight through revelation from God , where they cant be wrong about revelation.

 

 

The parallels are - the idea that you can get rid of the fallible human aspect of philosophy and the idea that all other views are incoherent (contain a contradiction in them) and the idea that you need to collapse epistemology and ontology (the existence of the Christian God is what grounds epistemology).

Now presumably you reject their reasoning and you would label it as question-begging, but when it comes to your reasoning (where structurally you do the exact same), you label question-begging on your side as a postive thing ("feature, not a bug").

I take it that you think that this way of reasoning is a necessary thing in order to justify anything.

There are multiple ways to respond to that

• First way is to grant that what you are saying is true, (that thats the only way to properly justify anything), but that alone doesn't say anything about other views being impossible, it would just mean that other views (where the proposed metaphysics is different to yours) cant 'properly' justify/ground themselves. It would be a pragmatic argument at best.
• Second way is to question the idea that this is the only way to properly justify things and asking for an argument that establish that all other views different to yours are incoherent without question-begging.

 

TL;DR - I don't understand why you are more justified in your view than presups in theirs (or more justified than anyone who use the exact same reasoning structure, where question-begging is allowed). I also dont understand why collapsing epistemology and ontology is helpful in any way at all - if we are allowed to question-beg then maintaining the epistemology-ontology distinction and question-beg that way doesn't seem any worse than collapsing it and question beg that way. It sounds like question begging is taken to be a necessary feature - but question begging is compatible with multiple different metaphysics

 

 

Just as a sidenode - I don't necessarily reject the idea in principle that one could put forth a view where there is 100% certainty that it is true - Its just that the argument that would be required to establish that in a non-question-begging way won't be pulled off in practice (you would need to find a trait  that is in all views except your proposed view and derive a contradiction from that).

Until/Unless that certainty is actually established in a non-question-begging way - I think @DocWatts's epistemic humility (where there is room for error and where there is an acknowledgement of epistemic limitations and where there is constant epsitemic-refinement) is the way to go.

Edited Tuesday at 11:39 AM by zurew

[zurew]

7 hours ago, zurew said:

The parallels are - the idea that you can get rid of the fallible human aspect of philosophy and the idea that all other views are incoherent (contain a contradiction in them) and the idea that you need to collapse epistemology and ontology (the existence of the Christian God is what grounds epistemology).

+1 - their "infallible" non-inferential justification would be revelation , actualized.org's would be awakening

[aurum]

17 hours ago, zurew said:

I can grant that - I just dont see how that solves the epistemic anarchy problem. 

I'm not claiming it "solves it". You just realize that an Absolute exists, which shifts your understanding and epistemology.

The Absolute is the reason for epistemic anarchy.

17 hours ago, zurew said:

1) To me it seems that multiple people can agree on the Absolute being 'real' or 'existing', but still make different interpretations and inferences about

You don't agree about it, you become directly conscious of it. That's what makes it different.

But yes, people could interpret it in different ways. It's not a perfect solution.

17 hours ago, zurew said:

2) There are multiple different ways to arrive at the same conclusion about the Absolute (its not constrained to one way of knowing)

No.

There is only one way: direct consciousness.

17 hours ago, zurew said:

Like - I don't see how you would possibly derive from the Absolute existing that 'being is the right/correct way of knowing'.  The Absolute doesn't seem to have any epistemic norms embedded in it.

It's not that "being" is only the correct way to understand. 

It's that all knowing must eventually derive from Being.

You cannot know anything without existence.

17 hours ago, zurew said:

Now presumably you reject their reasoning and you would label it as question-begging, but when it comes to your reasoning (where structurally you do the exact same), you label question-begging on your side as a postive thing ("feature, not a bug").

No, their reasoning is mostly correct.

God is logically necessary for knowledge to exist. But they corrupt this with Christianity and lack of direct consciousness. 

Before direct consciousness, God is question-begging.

After direct consciousness, God must exist.

Edited yesterday at 01:05 AM by aurum

[zurew]

On 2025. 05. 21. at 3:04 AM, aurum said:

Before direct consciousness, God is question-begging.

After direct consciousness, God must exist.

The way I use logical necessity (and the way philosophers I know use the term) under that saying what you said would be a category error. Logical necessity isn't affected by time or knowledge or lack of realization.

Its like saying " before I realized that a triangle must have 3 sides, a triangle might have more or less than 3 sides

After realizing that it must have 3 sides - it became logically impossible for the triangle to have more or less than 3 sides."

No, the triangle having more or less than 3 sides have always been logically impossible,regardless of one's lack of knowledge or realization. 

 

So given all that - saying "God must exists" means God is a logical necessity which in principle can be proven and you take that burden on yourself the moment you state logical impossibility claims.

 

On 2025. 05. 21. at 3:04 AM, aurum said:

No, their reasoning is mostly correct.

God is logically necessary for knowledge to exist. But they corrupt this with Christianity and lack of direct consciousness. 

And they would say that actualized.org's reasoning is mostly correct, they just confuse and corrupt the right infallible way of knowing (revelation) with direct consciousness and they confuse God with something other than the Christian God.

 

I can generate a 1000 other views where the exact same reasoning structure is used, and none of them would be more epistemically warranted than the other.

I Just need to say that ontology and epistemology needs to be collapsed , then I need to select an arbitrary ground, then I need to select an arbitrary 'correct' way of knowing that I assert to be infallible, that I can then use to validate/realize that my arbitrary selected ground is logically necessary and then assert that all other views (other than mine) are incoherent and the only way to substantiate the claim that all other views are incoherent is by using my arbitrary selected, infallible, 'correct' way of knowing.

 

 

You and Leo and some other actualizers take on burden that none of you can substantiate. I don't understand why make a claim that one cant defend or substantiate. And you cant get out of this by saying that you can only realize by using direct consciousness (correct way of knowing, thats infallible), because again 1) you make a logical possibility claim (which in principle can be proven) and 2) you also have a presupposed  correct, infallible way of knowing that you take for granted. The method that you propose that one needs to use to realize the truth of what you are saying , presupposes that  that particular method is infallible, and how do you establish the infallible part? Well, you just presuppose it. 

 

Why not just stay epistemically humble and just say that your view makes more sense, why there is a need to  take it up a billion notch and give yourself burden that you can't substantiate and say things like - only your view is possible and all other views are incoherent?

 

Imagine presups saying this:

Quote

Before revelation, the Christian God is question-begging.

After revelation  , the Christian God must exist.

And then saying "Yeah well, I know actualized.org users have the same reasoning structure -  see humans cant solve these problems, what you actually need in order to realize truth is revelation"

"After going through the transformation caused/generated by revelation, I can now see the Truth, that I cant be wrong about and I know for certain that relevation is infallible"

 

@DocWatts Sorry btw for derailing your thread, I just felt the need to highlight some of these points, because I havent seen any good or satisfying response to any of these challenges by people who hold Leo's views.

Edited 4 hours ago by zurew