Terminology

Here follows some terminology in use in my essays. This is a work in progress. All terms are subject to interpretation, and in particular the “-isms” may be understood slightly differently from one sub-discipline to another. As I argue, meaning is holistic, so the way I use these terms in my essays provides my meaning, so what is written must be understood as limited representations of this. Let me know if you would like to see some term I use added here.

The Epistemic - “By the epistemic I will mean all discourse, language, mathematics and science, anything and all that we order and structure, all our frameworks, all our knowledge.” The epistemic is the sayable, it is structure, reductive, representation. It is discrete and finite, countable.

The Ontic - “By the ontic I will, tentatively, mean what the epistemic is telling us about or corresponds to in reality, what grounds the epistemic, what ultimately exists.” The ontic is the name of the unnamable, a “placeholder” for reality-in-itself. The limit of the epistemic, unspeakable. It is the territory that the epistemic maps, it is the metaphysics to the physics of the epistemic. It is the “true infinite”, the continuum.

Transcendence - “going beyond what it itself is”.

Immanence - “Immanence … is a keeping within itself…”

Epistemisation - “any epistemic process (linguistic, conceptual, mathematical, empirical) epistemises the ontic. The instant we move away from just experiencing, to structuring experience, talking about it, measuring it, the ontic has already evaporated. From the point of view of the epistemic everything is always-already epistemised.”

World View - The total framework/theory in which your world is cast. A world view can be both individual and collective, in the latter case I mean the intersection of individual world views. Feyerabend in Conquest of Abundance (2001): «…a collection of beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions that involves the whole person, not only the intellect, has some kind of coherence and universality, and imposes itself with a power far greater than the power of facts and fact-related theories.»

Particularism - The dominant world view in industrialized/"Western” culture, founded on reductionism, materialism/physicalism and realism.

Materialism - that all of reality is solely composed of matter, in particular that experience or consciousness is ultimately composed of matter.

Physicalism - “that all of reality is solely composed of physical parts”, in particular that experience or consciousness is ultimately composed of physical parts.

Realism - “that there is an external world independent of us”.

Reductionism - “that the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts”

Holism - The whole is primary and more than the sum of parts. The view of reality as a whole that I am developing is a holistic view.