In Defense of Integral Postmetaphysics

Bruce Alderman has a great piece at his blog. Quote:

If, as is suggested by the Integral Postmetaphysical approach, we abandon the idea of a single, pre-given world order for one and all and accept that everything in the phenomenal world that we can point to is, first and foremost, a perspective (or perspective-occasion, as Wilber sometimes puts it), what happens to the notions of truth and falsity? Must notions of "truth" and "reality" be thrown out? Clearly not -- not in a system such as AQAL which attempts to honor and integrate as many (relative) truths as possible. But we will need to let go of any residual attachment we may have to the naive metaphysical realism that under girds popular understanding.

From the perspective of scientific theories as operators, we can say that something is "objective" if certain relationships among phenomena can be observed universally, or across a stable range of circumstances, by active human subjects. As Kant showed us, this invariant relational patterning of phenomena says nothing about "intrinsic properties" of things-in-themselves. Because we cannot extract ourselves from the overall situation to adopt a view from nowhere, we can at best study the form given to phenomena by our cognitive apparatus. But as developmental psychology and relativistic/quantum science have shown us, our cognitive apparatus is neither static in its organization nor endowed (as Kant had originally argued) with a priori forms which are valid at all levels of phenomenal reality. The phenomenal world enacted by human beings is, in some important respects, enacted differently by human beings at different times and in different developmental or even cultural contexts, with no apparent perspective available that we can hope to appeal to as final or decisive.

Does this leave us stranded in a flatland, radical relativist swamp?

Read the whole thing.