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Leon Niemoczynski
IMMACULATA UNIVERSITY
2014
What are the options for the pluralist here? One could, of course, deny
pluralism outright. One could, on the other hand, just be a pluralist,
yet dogmatically undermine their own position, as many pluralist
philosophers who orient their perspective to either material or ideal
objects (exclusively) do, thus stating that only one genuine
philosophical position exists. This defeats the purpose in a classical
reductive monism.
One must ask whether there can really be more than one
philosophyObjectively, inasmuch as there can be only one human
reason, so likewise there cannot be many philosophies; that is, only
one true system of philosophy based on principles is possible
The corollary to this latter type of realism is that all things among
these realities (i.e. "orientations" or "perspectives" or "compositions")
are equally real in that they are rather than are not. This was the
idea sharpened by the (neglected) American philosopher Justus
Buchler whose principle of ontological parity states that no one thing
is any more or less real than any other, including orientations of
knowledge. An Amazonian tribes' belief system in the gods is no more
or less "real" than an American banking systems' belief in capitalist
economics. Reality, in this way is ontologically flat, but this does not
mean necessarily that reality is epistemologically relative. There are
forms of generality and contemporaneity among these belief systems.
There are two positions that deny the above four theses: skepticism
(no rational knowledge is possible), and relativism (there may be some
positions so diverse that rationality elides such and such a perspective
entirely). More broadly put, skepticism and relativism both deny that
there is any common fact of reality that is able to constrain
perspectives. Let us then answer to this objection.
First, various perspectives compose the world but are not "the world"
itself. While it is true that there is no world per se, it is not true that
reality is "simply" diverse perspectives and their claims. One must ask
in light of this: How is error at all possible if the pluralist (in this sense
also a relativist) states that reality is simply the sum of perspectives?
Error in this view would be the error of relativism, in that we could
only know plural perspectives, but not much more about the facts of
perspectives. Skepticism, likewise, cannot stand on its own feet. It
may state that we can never know x, but it does so as a statement that
I ought to know non-skeptically.