Bridging the divide between Absolute and Relative accounts of knowledge

[DocWatts]

Hello fellow actualizers, thought I might share a write-up from my philosophy book, '7 Provisional Truths: How We Come To Know Things, And Why It Matters'.

In this section, I explore the dichotomy between Absolutism and Relativism, while offering a more pragmatic 'middle way' for thinking about knowledge, grounded in the role that our minds play in constructing an experiential reality. Hope you enjoy!

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The Enactive Approach

How can we navigate between the extremes of unyielding certainty and paralyzing skepticism? One method is to chart a ‘middle way’ that’s grounded in our lived engagement with the world. Mind you, this ‘middle way’ doesn’t mean finding a lukewarm compromise that’s halfway between these opposing sides. Rather, it involves rejecting the game entirely, and shifting to a new playing field with a fresh set of rules for thinking about certainty. Our name for this framework is Enactivism, and its course-correction emerges from acknowledging the active role that minds play in ‘bringing forth’, or enacting, an experiential world. 

Having left the old playing field behind, Enactivism threads a course between two traditional opponents: Absolutism and Relativism. The former contending that knowledge is strictly impersonal; perhaps best personified by the statement that ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’. While the latter attests that knowledge is inherently perspectival, meaning that it’s unavoidably interpreted through a set of individual and social circumstances.

Our decision to name this framework Enactivism is no accident - 'enact' means to 'carry out' or 'bring to fruition'. The etymology of our term hints at its core hypothesis: that knowledge is constructed. The key insight? Knowledge doesn’t exist ‘out there’, as a fixed feature of some ‘neutral’ Reality. Nor does it emerge as a pure invention of an isolated mind. Instead, it arises at the intersection of mind, body, and environment, through a dynamic feedback loop we call world disclosure.

The crux of world disclosure is that our minds give us an experiential Reality to live in that comes pre-arranged in terms of our needs and capacities. Enactivism extends this insight by showing that knowledge emerges from the relational process between a living body-mind and its environment. Far from being passive receptors for ‘external’ inputs, our mind works in tandem with our living body and our environment to actively construct an experiential reality. The most impressive part? Most of this occurs beneath conscious awareness - our minds' considerable effort to construct an intelligible reality is largely invisible to us

And while this generative process can lead to reliable knowledge about Reality, what it can’t provide is absolute certainty. Our knowledge remains inseparable from our lived perspective within Reality, and the perspectives of living minds are necessarily bounded by biology. So does this condemn us to be forever isolated within our individual perspective? Far from it! As we’ll see, our shared evolutionary heritage makes possible stable forms of knowledge that are broadly applicable.

An additional aspect of Enactivist epistemology lies in its insistence that Absolutist and Relativist accounts are true, but partial. What this means is that both viewpoints contain elements of truth, but are partial in the sense that they miss the dynamic interplay between observer and observed - how mind and world define and shape one another in a dynamic feedback loop. Armed with this insight, our Enactive approach will aim to synthesize aspects of these two opposing accounts, while rejecting key assumptions from both.

Enactivism rejects the shared assumption that knowledge is primarily conceptual, and mostly a matter of holding beliefs. As we’ve seen, this is flawed because it fails to account for how nonconceptual ways of knowing and being are central to everyday life. Our extended survey on the centrality of Situated Coping for everyday forms of knowing and being was an articulation of this precise point.

Another area where Enactivism parts way with both camps lies in another one of their shared blind spots: treating knowledge as disembodied. This oversight has direct implications for how perspectives shape knowledge; both Absolutism and Relativism miss the mark here, though for different reasons. Absolutism gets it wrong by ignoring how perspectives inevitably shape what counts as valid knowledge. While Relativism falls short by fixating on the social and cultural dimensions of knowledge, overlooking how our shared human perspective within Reality opens the door to forms of understanding that transcend individual and societal contexts.

Lastly, Enactivism shatters a final cornerstone of these opposing views: that there's an absolute boundary between ourselves and the world. It rejects the notion that Reality can be neatly divided into an 'external' world of objects and an 'internal' world of experience. As we’ll see, this taken-for-granted divide dissolves under closer scrutiny.

This perceived boundary typically masks a deeper assumption: that one of these domains - internal or external - is more ‘real’ than the other. We can see this in materialist perspectives that try to ‘explain away’ consciousness, arguing that minds are nothing more than an arrangement of matter and energy. On the flip side of the coin, certain spiritual perspectives contend that physical reality is a mere illusion created by our minds. Both instances are illustrative of reductionism - trying to ‘explain away’ a particular phenomena by conjecturing that it’s in fact a property of something else. 

As we’ll see, one of Enactivism’s core aims is to sidestep this tug-of-war over what’s ultimately ‘real’, in favor of a pragmatic perspective grounded in everyday experience. A guiding insight of this pragmatism could be summed up as: no unmediated access to Reality - that our embodied perspective within Reality is what’s ultimately ‘real’ for us. Precisely because it’s only through this perspective that we have access to a world of people, place, and things, theorizing about what Reality ultimately 'is' is beside the point - when what we actually care about is what Reality is for us. 

This shift in focus opens a more fruitful path forward. By questioning the fixed boundary between ourselves and the world, we can explore our interaction with these domains without falling into the trap of reductionism. Enactivism's key insight? The divide between 'self' and 'world' is mentally constructed - indeed, the world itself is indispensable to what minds are. 

With this groundwork in place, it becomes clear why Enactivism offers a compelling 'middle way' for thinking about certainty - without succumbing to a half-hearted compromise between two played-out extremes. Yet instead of a stubborn refusal to find anything of value in these camps, Enactivism reveals how their partial insights can be synthesized into a fresh perspective for reflecting upon our lived experience. The cornerstone of this synthesis? It lies in recognizing that while knowledge is perspectival, perspectives aren’t boundless - they’re grounded in a shared biological and evolutionary context. As a practical matter, there are fundamentals that human beings can and must be able to agree upon to have functional societies. In every society, people fall in love, have children, get sick, grow old, and die. While the meanings we attach to these experiences vary across cultures, their universality creates common ground for shared understanding.

So that’s the gist of the Enactive approach. What’s to follow is a brief followup on the Absolutist and Relativist viewpoints which Enactivism offers itself as an alternative to. Our aim is to unearth the basic assumptions behind both viewpoints, while excavating the partial truths contained within. Lastly, we’ll tie this all together with a look at the meaning crisis that’s unfolding within the West, why this crisis calls for reconstructive epistemology, and how Enactivism can play a small but promising part in bridging these divides.

Edited November 19, 2024 by DocWatts

[Rafael Thundercat]

@DocWatts very good

[DocWatts]

On 11/19/2024 at 6:35 AM, Rafael Thundercat said:

@DocWatts very good

Thank you!