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Pluralism is a term used in philosophy, referring to a worldview of multiplicity, often used in opposition to monism (the view that all is one) or dualism (the view that all is two). The term has different meanings in metaphysics, ontology, epistemology and logic. In metaphysics, it is the view that there are in fact many different substances in nature that constitute reality. In ontology, pluralism refers to different ways, kinds, or modes of being. For example, a topic in ontological pluralism is the comparison of the modes of existence of things like 'humans' and 'cars' with things like 'numbers' and some other concepts as they are used in science.[1]
In epistemology, pluralism is the position that there is not one consistent means of approaching truths about the world, but rather many. Often this is associated with pragmatism, or conceptual, contextual, or cultural relativism. In the philosophy of science it may refer to the acceptance of co-existing scientific paradigms which though accurately describing their relevant domains are nonetheless incommensurable. In logic, pluralism is the relatively novel view that there is no one correct logic, or alternatively, that there is more than one correct logic.[2] Such as using classical logic in most cases, but using paraconsistent logic to deal with certain paradoxes.
Metaphysical pluralism in philosophy is the multiplicity of metaphysical models of the structure and content of reality, both as it appears and as logic dictates that it might be,[3] as is exhibited by the four related models in Plato's Republic[4] and as developed in the contrast between phenomenalism and physicalism. Pluralism is in contrast to the concept of monism in metaphysics, while dualism is a limited form, a pluralism of exactly two models, structures, elements, or concepts.[5] A distinction is made between the metaphysical identification of realms of reality[6] and the more restricted sub-fields of ontological pluralism (that examines what exists in each of these realms) and epistemological pluralism (that deals with the methodology for establishing knowledge about these realms).
In ancient Greece, Empedocles wrote that they were fire, air, water and earth,[7] although he used the word "root" rather than "element" (στοιχεῖον; stoicheion), which appeared later in Plato.[8] From the association (φιλία; philia) and separation (νεῖκος; neikos) of these indestructible and unchangeable root elements, all things came to be in a fullness (πλήρωμα; pleroma) of ratio (λόγος; logos) and proportion (ἀνάλογος; analogos).
Similar to Empedocles, Anaxagoras was another Classical Greek philosopher with links to pluralism. His metaphysical system is centered around mechanically necessitated nous which governs, combines and diffuses the various "roots" of reality (known as homoioneroi[9]). Unlike Empedocles' four "root elements" and similar to Democritus' multitude of atoms (yet not physical in nature), these homoioneroi are used by Anaxagoras to explain the multiplicity in reality and becoming.[10] This pluralist theory of being influenced later thinkers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's theory of monads and Julius Bahnsen's idea of will henades. The notion of a governing nous would also be used by Socrates and Plato, but they will assign it a more active and rational role in their philosophical systems.
Aristotle incorporated these elements, but his substance pluralism was not material in essence. His hylomorphic theory allowed him to maintain a reduced set of basic material elements as per the Milesians, while answering for the ever-changing flux of Heraclitus and the unchanging unity of Parmenides. In his Physics, due to the continuum of Zeno's paradoxes, as well as both logical and empirical considerations for natural science, he presented numerous arguments against the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus, who posited a basic duality of void and atoms. The atoms were an infinite variety of irreducibles, of all shapes and sizes, which randomly collide and mechanically hook together in the void, thus providing a reductive account of changeable figure, order and position as aggregates of the unchangeable atoms.[11]
Ontological pluralism
The topic of ontological pluralism discusses different ways, kinds, or modes of being. Recent attention in ontological pluralism is due to the work of Kris McDaniel, who defends ontological pluralism in a number of papers. The name for the doctrine is due to Jason Turner, who, following McDaniel, suggests that "In contemporary guise, it is the doctrine that a logically perspicuous description of reality will use multiple quantifiers which cannot be thought of as ranging over a single domain."[12] "There are numbers, fictional characters, impossible things, and holes. But, we don't think these things all exist in the same sense as cars and human beings."[1]
It is common to refer to a film, novel or otherwise fictitious or virtual narrative as not being 'real'. Thus, the characters in the film or novel are not real, where the 'real world' is the everyday world in which we live. However, some authors may argue that fiction informs our concept of reality, and so has some kind of reality.[13][14]
One reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein's notion of language-games argues that there is no overarching, single, fundamental ontology, but only a patchwork of overlapping interconnected ontologies ineluctably leading from one to another. For example, Wittgenstein discusses 'number' as technical vocabulary and in more general usage:
""All right: the concept of 'number' is defined for you as the logical sum of these individual interrelated concepts: cardinal numbers, rational numbers, real numbers etc.;" ... — it need not be so. For I can give the concept 'number' rigid limits in this way, that is, use the word 'number' for a rigidly limited concept, but I can also use it so that the extension of the concept is not closed by a frontier. ...Can you give the boundary? No. You can draw one..."
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, excerpt from §68 in Philosophical Investigations
Wittgenstein suggests that it is not possible to identify a single concept underlying all versions of 'number', but that there are many interconnected meanings that transition one to another; vocabulary need not be restricted to technical meanings to be useful, and indeed technical meanings are 'exact' only within some proscribed context.
Eklund has argued that Wittgenstein's conception includes as a special case the technically constructed, largely autonomous, forms of language or linguistic frameworks of Carnap and Carnapian ontological pluralism. He places Carnap's ontological pluralism in the context of other philosophers, such as Eli Hirsch and Hilary Putnam.[15]
Epistemological pluralism is a term used in philosophy and in other fields of study to refer to different ways of knowing things, different epistemological methodologies for attaining a full description of a particular field.[16] In the philosophy of science epistemological pluralism arose in opposition to reductionism to express the contrary view that at least some natural phenomena cannot be fully explained by a single theory or fully investigated using a single approach.[16][17]
Logical pluralism can be defined a number of ways: the position that there is more than one correct account of logical consequence (or no single, 'correct' account at all), that there is more than one correct set of logical constants or even that the 'correct' logic depends on the relevant logical questions under consideration (a sort of logical instrumentalism).[18] Pluralism about logical consequence says that because different logical systems have different logical consequence relations, there is therefore more than one correct logic. For example, classical logic holds that the argument from explosion is a valid argument, but in Graham Priest's paraconsistent logic—LP, the 'Logic of Paradox'—it is an invalid argument.[19] However, logical monists may respond that a plurality of logical theories does not mean that no single one of the theories is the correct one. After all, there are and have been a multitude of theories in physics, but that hasn't been taken to mean that all of them are correct.
Pluralists of the instrumentalist sort hold if a logic can be correct at all, it based on its ability to answer the logical questions under consideration. If one wants to understand vague propositions, one may need a many-valued logic. Or if one wants to know what the truth-value of the Liar Paradox is, a dialetheic paraconsistent logic may be required. Rudolf Carnap held to a version of logical pluralism:
In logic there are no morals. Everyone is at liberty to build his own logic, i.e. his own language, as he wishes. All that is required of him is that, if he wishes to discuss it, he must state his methods clearly, and give syntactical rules instead of philosophical arguments.
—Rudolph Carnap, excerpt from §17 in The Logical Syntax of Language
↑ Hector-Neri Castañeda (April 1979). "Fiction and reality: Their fundamental connections: An essay on the ontology of total experience". Poetics. 8 (1–2): 31–62. doi:10.1016/0304-422x(79)90014-7.
↑ Matti Eklund (2009). "Chapter 4: Carnap and ontological pluralism". In David J Chalmers; David Manley; Ryan Wasserman (eds.). Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Clarendon Press. pp.130–156. ISBN978-0199546008. On-line text found at Cornell
1 2 Stephen H Kellert; Helen E Longino; C Kenneth Waters (2006). "Introduction: The pluralist stance"(PDF). Scientific pluralism; volume XIX in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science. The University of Minnesota Press. p.vii. ISBN978-0-8166-4763-7. Archived from the original(PDF) on 9 June 2010.
In logic, the law of non-contradiction (LNC) states that contradictory propositions cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time, e. g. the two propositions "p is the case" and "p is not the case" are mutually exclusive. Formally, this is expressed as the tautology ¬(p ∧ ¬p). The law is not to be confused with the law of excluded middle which states that at least one, "p is the case" or "p is not the case", holds.
Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are also known as neopositivism, is a movement whose central thesis is the verification principle. This theory of knowledge asserts that only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content. Starting in the late 1920s, groups of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians formed the Berlin Circle and the Vienna Circle, which, in these two cities, would propound the ideas of logical positivism.
In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being. It investigates what types of entities exist, how they are grouped into categories, and how they are related to one another on the most fundamental level. Ontologists often try to determine what the categories or highest kinds are and how they form a system of categories that encompasses the classification of all entities. Commonly proposed categories include substances, properties, relations, states of affairs, and events. These categories are characterized by fundamental ontological concepts, including particularity and universality, abstractness and concreteness, or possibility and necessity. Of special interest is the concept of ontological dependence, which determines whether the entities of a category exist on the most fundamental level. Disagreements within ontology are often about whether entities belonging to a certain category exist and, if so, how they are related to other entities.
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only book-length philosophical work by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that was published during his lifetime. The project had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality, and to define the limits of science. Wittgenstein wrote the notes for the Tractatus while he was a soldier during World War I and completed it during a military leave in the summer of 1918. It was originally published in German in 1921 as Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung. In 1922 it was published together with an English translation and a Latin title, which was suggested by G. E. Moore as homage to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670).
Pre-Socratic philosophy, also known as Early Greek Philosophy, is ancient Greek philosophy before Socrates. Pre-Socratic philosophers were mostly interested in cosmology, the beginning and the substance of the universe, but the inquiries of these early philosophers spanned the workings of the natural world as well as human society, ethics, and religion. They sought explanations based on natural law rather than the actions of gods. Their work and writing has been almost entirely lost. Knowledge of their views comes from testimonia, i.e. later authors' discussions of the work of pre-Socratics. Philosophy found fertile ground in the ancient Greek world because of the close ties with neighboring civilizations and the rise of autonomous civil entities, poleis.
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". He served as the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 1978.
Rudolf Carnap was a German-language philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism.
Analytic philosophy is a broad, contemporary movement or tradition within Western philosophy and especially anglophone philosophy focused on analysis.
Ancient Greek philosophy arose in the 6th century BC. Philosophy was used to make sense of the world using reason. It dealt with a wide variety of subjects, including astronomy, epistemology, mathematics, political philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, ontology, logic, biology, rhetoric and aesthetics. Greek philosophy continued throughout the Hellenistic period and later evolved into Roman philosophy.
Understood in a narrow sense, philosophical logic is the area of logic that studies the application of logical methods to philosophical problems, often in the form of extended logical systems like modal logic. Some theorists conceive philosophical logic in a wider sense as the study of the scope and nature of logic in general. In this sense, philosophical logic can be seen as identical to the philosophy of logic, which includes additional topics like how to define logic or a discussion of the fundamental concepts of logic. The current article treats philosophical logic in the narrow sense, in which it forms one field of inquiry within the philosophy of logic.
Logical atomism is a philosophical view that originated in the early 20th century with the development of analytic philosophy. It holds that the world consists of ultimate logical "facts" that cannot be broken down any further, each of which can be understood independently of other facts.
Philosophical realism – usually not treated as a position of its own but as a stance towards other subject matters – is the view that a certain kind of thing has mind-independent existence, i.e. that it exists even in the absence of any mind perceiving it or that its existence is not just a mere appearance in the eye of the beholder. This includes a number of positions within epistemology and metaphysics which express that a given thing instead exists independently of knowledge, thought, or understanding. This can apply to items such as the physical world, the past and future, other minds, and the self, though may also apply less directly to things such as universals, mathematical truths, moral truths, and thought itself. However, realism may also include various positions which instead reject metaphysical treatments of reality entirely.
Neopragmatism, sometimes called post-Deweyan pragmatism, linguistic pragmatism, or analytic pragmatism, is the philosophical tradition that infers that the meaning of words is a result of how they are used, rather than the objects they represent.
The analytic–synthetic distinction is a semantic distinction used primarily in philosophy to distinguish between propositions that are of two types: analytic propositions and synthetic propositions. Analytic propositions are true or not true solely by virtue of their meaning, whereas synthetic propositions' truth, if any, derives from how their meaning relates to the world.
Trivialism is the logical theory that all statements are true and that all contradictions of the form "p and not p" are true. In accordance with this, a trivialist is a person who believes everything is true.
Epistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge. It addresses the questions "What is knowledge?", "How is knowledge acquired?", "What do people know?", "How do we know what we know?", and "Why do we know what we know?". Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief, and justification. It also deals with the means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims.
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science. Cosmology and ontology are traditional branches of metaphysics. It is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world. Someone who studies metaphysics can be called either a "metaphysician" or a "metaphysicist".
Epistemological pluralism is a term used in philosophy, economics, and virtually any field of study to refer to different ways of knowing things, different epistemological methodologies for attaining a fuller description of a particular field. A particular form of epistemological pluralism is dualism, for example, the separation of methods for investigating mind from those appropriate to matter. By contrast, monism is the restriction to a single approach, for example, reductionism, which asserts the study of all phenomena can be seen as finding relations to some few basic entities.
The internal–external distinction is a distinction used in philosophy to divide an ontology into two parts: an internal part concerning observation related to philosophy, and an external part concerning question related to philosophy.
Mathematicism is 'the effort to employ the formal structure and rigorous method of mathematics as a model for the conduct of philosophy', or the epistemological view that reality is fundamentally mathematical. The term has been applied to a number of philosophers, including Pythagoras and René Descartes although the term was not used by themselves.
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