RELATIVITY OF WORLD VERSIONS

 Continuing the recent line of thought.

   I always imagine an interlocutor like Nelson Goodman, who will say I am privileging one way of seeing the world, one world version over the others, without rational foundation, thus on subjective grounds. It true I say the reductive world versions distort and tend to exploit or destroy what they exclude, from forests to workers to oceans to species on the verge of extinction to unborn babies. But that doesn't prove the world version I think deepest, truest, most hopeful, is so. This is where I get stuck with some version of Plato's transcendent Good, or Aquinas's creating, sustaining God who is Love, Goodness itself. Is that a leap and if so do I have to make it?

    An interlocutor like Nelson Goodman will say: you are simply preferring one “world version” over another, and your preference is not itself grounded in anything that escapes the circle. So your appeal to distortion, exploitation, or destruction only shows your evaluative commitments, not the superiority of your framework. The force of that challenge should not be evaded. But perhaps it can be met without leaping prematurely to a fully articulated metaphysics.

    The first step is to notice that not all “world versions” stand on the same footing even before we appeal to something like the Good. Some are self-limiting in a way that others are not. A reductive framework, one that treats forests only as timber, persons only as economic units, or unborn life only as biological material (source of stem cells), is premised on bracketing out dimensions of reality that are nevertheless there in practice. It relies, often tacitly, on what it excludes. For example, a purely instrumental view of human beings cannot, in practice, dispense with trust, responsibility, dignity, or truthfulness. These are not optional add-ons. They are conditions for the functioning of the very system that reduces persons to instruments, i.e. global capitalism and its implied world version. When these conditions are eroded, the system itself begins to break down, as we are witnessing. Thus the reductive “world version” is not simply different; it is internally unstable. It cannot fully account for the conditions of its own possibility. It follows that I am not merely preferring one framework over another but pointing out that some frameworks fail by their own lights  because they cannot sustain what they presuppose.

     The second step returns to the hermeneutic circle. Goodman is right that we never step outside all frameworks. But it does not follow that all revisions are arbitrary. The circle is not a free play of constructions. It is a process in which some understandings are forced to change because they break down under the pressure of experience. My own examples prove this to me in a way. The nihilistic posture that seemed adequate at one stage becomes untenable in the face of love, i.e., grief and fatherhood. The response of cold detachment reveals itself as a failure, not simply by comparison with another theory but in relation to the experience itself. Similarly, the purely extractive view of the forest encounters limits that it cannot absorb without revision. These are not merely shifts in taste. It is reality itself resisting us, thus calling forth a deeper account.

      This leads to a third point. The appeal to distortion is not purely external. When I say that a reductive framework “distorts,” I am just being moralistic but  making a cognitive claim: that something real is being left out, and that its exclusion leads to misunderstanding. The forest is not only timber. The human being is not only a unit of labor. The experience of love or loss is not only a subjective projection. These claims are not yet a full metaphysics, but they are more than preferences. They arise from the way reality discloses itself when we attend to it more fully.

     However, Goodman can still press: why think that “more fully” has any objective meaning? Why not say that each version organizes the world differently, with no higher court of appeal? This is where my instinct toward Plato and Thomas Aquinas becomes relevant (and where Nietzsche would lambast me for lack of intellectual courage), but it can be brought in in a humble way. Rather than beginning with a fully articulated doctrine of the Good, I begin from a more modest insight: our judgments of adequacy are not arbitrary because they are guided by goods internal to understanding itself. These include truthfulness, coherence, depth, the capacity to do justice to the full range of experience, and the refusal to ignore what is significant. When a framework excludes what is most weighty – suffering, love, responsibility, beauty, justice, etc. – it does not merely differ; it becomes shallow. And shallow here is not just an aesthetic term. It names a failure to respond to what is most real in our experience. This goes beyond mere preference. It implies that there is a kind of normative order built into reality as it is disclosed to us.

    From here, the move toward Plato’s Good or Aquinas’s account of being and goodness does not seem to be an arbitrary leap of faith to save my world version but as an attempt to articulate what is already implicit in these judgments. When we say that some understandings are deeper, truer, or more adequate, we are already measuring them by something that is not reducible to our current framework. Plato calls this the Good; Aquinas speaks of the convertibility of being and goodness. In both cases, the claim is that reality is not indifferent to our ways of understanding it. It has an intelligible and normative structure that can be more or less adequately grasped.

  Thus the response to Goodman, therefore, need not be: “I can prove, from nowhere, that my world version is the true one.” Rather, it can be: some ways of understanding collapse under the weight of what they exclude. Some ways of understanding prove more adequate because they can account for more of what is given without contradiction or reduction. Our very use of terms like distortion, depth, and adequacy already presupposes that understanding is answerable to something beyond itself. Hence, the appeal to the Good is not a leap beyond the hermeneutic circle but a way of naming what guides its movement when it is allowed to proceed honestly. I do not pretend to escape the circle, just show that the circle is not closed.

. . .

Finally, I don't think world versions (frameworks, etc.) are sealed off from one another. I do not need to claim that there is a neutral standpoint outside all frameworks. It is enough, and much more plausible, to claim that frameworks are not sealed off from one another – and thus can “talk to each other,” because they rest, at some level, on shared hinges and overlapping forms of life. 

  Even the most divergent “world versions” must share certain basic conditions if they are to count as understandings of the same world at all. They must recognize objects as persisting in some way; rely on memory and testimony; distinguish appearance from reality, at least in some cases; treat other human beings as interlocutors whose words can be meaningful, and more. These are not philosophical conclusions deduced from premises. They are what Ludwig Wittgenstein would call hinge certainties. They are what we stand fast on to think, speak, and argue at all.

    Now if this is right, then “world versions” are not sealed wholes floating free of one another. They are variations built upon a shared background. This has two important consequences. First, it makes genuine disagreement possible. If there were no shared hinges, there would be no common subject matter. We would not be disagreeing about the same thing; we would simply be speaking past one another. But in my examples – the forest, the war, the human person, a Shakespeare play, an apple – it is precisely because there is a shared world that the disagreement has bite. Both parties are, in some sense, responding to the same reality, even if they articulate it differently.

    Second, it allows for mutual criticism and correction. Because frameworks overlap, one can expose the limits of another not from nowhere, but from within shared commitments. For example, a reductive economic view of human beings may still rely on trust, responsibility, and cooperation. These can then be used as internal points of critique: if a framework cannot account for what it must presuppose, it is incomplete. The criticism does not come from an external metaphysical imposition but from tensions within the shared ground.

   This also points to the role of the hermeneutic circle. The circle is not the closed movement of a self-contained system. It is an open movement within a shared world, where different horizons can encounter one another and be transformed. When two frameworks meet, each brings its Vorurteile (pre-judgments), but because they share enough of a world, those prejudices can be tested, not only against the object but also against alternative ways of seeing the same object.

    My redwood example shows this. The capitalist and the indigenous inhabitant do not live in entirely separate worlds. They can both recognize the same trees, the same land, the same practices of cutting or preserving. What differs is the significance these take on within their respective horizons. But precisely because there is overlap, one can begin to see what the other sees, and also what the other fails to see. The possibility of learning, and of correction, depends on this shared ground.

     I need not claim that all hinges are identical across all frameworks. That would be too strong. It is enough to say that there is sufficient overlap of hinges and practices to make communication and disagreement possible. This overlap allows reality to be a common measure, even if it is never grasped from a single, final perspective. Thus I hope to avoid both extremes: the idea of a fully neutral, framework-independent standpoint; and the idea that each framework is sealed and incommensurable. Which returns me to my earlier Thomistic intuition. If there were no shared orientation toward being, no common participation in intelligibility, then neither understanding nor disagreement would be possible. The very fact that we can argue about forests, wars, or human dignity suggests that we are not constructing separate worlds but responding – however imperfectly – to one and the same reality. Contra Goodman I don’t have to “prove” from nowhere that one framework is true. It is enough to show that we inhabit a shared world structured by common hinges. Some ways of understanding that world are more adequate because they can account for more of what we all, in some sense, already recognize. That is already a step beyond Goodman, without leaving the ground of experience.

 

   *I think this line of thought is consistent with Aquinas, Heidegger, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, Murdoch, Winch, and Gaita, despite the differences between these thinkers. I also think it is consistent with the best Catholic and Orthodox theology, and perhaps some Protestant theology.