Types of Pluralism

• Perspectival pluralism suggests that individuals do not experience the same world, but we all experience our own reality. There is no common reality and different views may be genuinely incommensurable. "Anything goes".

• Pluralism of hypotheses suggests that there is a single reality but that we may hold different opinions about it. The differences may be incompatible, but they will disappear as 'the truth' is discovered. "Horses for courses".

• Methodological pluralism also suggests that there is one reality but that different perspectives provide only partial access to it, because of the different methods used in finding out about it. A mixture of methods is desirable and ultimately reconcilable, but there can be danger of philosophical inconsistency.

• Archic pluralism holds that reality is constituted by the inquirer, so that each philosophy has its own reality, but since it is all based on inquiry ('mind') and 'mind' is shared, we can understand each other. "Given the dialectic nature of things, we all need our opponents." (Geertz).

However Dooyeweerd has a strong notion of pluralism: a plurality of aspects of reality that are fundamentally (ontologically) irreducible to each other. Watson does not cover Dooyeweerd's type, which might be called 'ontological pluralism' (possibly because he was publishing in The Monist?) But it seems to me that Dooyeweerd's type can account for each of Watson's types.

Each aspect (e.g. quantitative, physical, biotic, analytical, lingual, economic, aesthetic, juridical, ethical, credal (which, interestingly, is the aspect of commitment, faith, vision)) has its own distinct:

• set of laws, which can be either determinative or normative
• epistemology: way of knowing, methods of research, etc.
• science
• and various other things that need not concern us here

Specifically:

• Perspectivial pluralism would be explained by which aspect a person finds most important or appealing. The possibility of genuine incommensurability stems from the radical irreducibility between the aspects. (There is also perhaps a weaker form of this based on the uniqueness of the individual, which Dooyeweerd holds with, but that would not explain incommensurability.)

• Hypothesis pluralism would be accounted for by the fact that different sciences study different aspects, which are not reducible to each other. So, a situation in which all aspects are valid may be studied from any science (e.g. statistics, biology, psychology, logic, economics, social science, etc.), and each would produce hypotheses and different opinions. Moreover, opinions from different aspects cannot be truly brought side by side. Hence hypothesis pluralism. However, the aspects are all of 'one reality' as this form of pluralism assumes. A full understanding of a situation requires the sets of hypotheses from all aspectual sciences.

• Methodological pluralism comes from the fact that each (aspect-centred) science has its own epistemology and therefore its own methods.

• Archic pluralism is explained, according to Dooyeweerd, by the fact that science and theoretical thinking involve the human functioning in the analytical aspect. We each make our own distinctions. Therefore, to this extent, *our theoretical knowledge of* reality is constituted by the inquirer. Yet reality itself is not so constituted.

Created: 1999? Last updated: 7 February 2001 copyright, email. 17 June 2010 .nav, .end, rid unet. 7 September 2017 rid counter.