Let us federate our culture's foundations

From the traditional culture we inherited a myth incomparably more subversive than the myth of creation. That myth now serves as the foundation stone on which the edifice of our culture has been erected.

That error is, however, easily forgiven, if we take into account that the idea that "truth" means "correspondence with reality" is coded not only in our common sense, but also in our very language. When I write "worldviews", my word processor underlines it in red. The word "worldview" doesn't have a plural form; since there is only one world, there can be only one worldview—the one that corresponds to that world.

Our situation, however, is calling for that we revisit and reconfigure that very foundation stone on which the edifice of our culture has been constructed.

Before we begin, let us emphasize once again that our goal is not to critique our present foundations; or even to propose new and better ones. Our goal is both more humble and more ambitious than that—namely to initiate and develop a social process through which the assessment and improvement of our culture's foundations will be kept in sync with our knowledge of knowledge, and with our society's needs.

"Reality" is a myth

The common belief that "truth" means "correspondence to reality", and that our ideas, when they are "true", correspond to reality, has been shown to be (1) impossible to verify and (2) a common product of illusion (see our story argument here).

Why base our creation of truth and meaning, and our pursuit of knowledge—which are all-important human activities—on a criterion that cannot be verified; and which itself tends to be a product of illusion?

Causal comprehension is not a reality test

It takes only a moment of reflection to see just how much the "aha feeling"—when we understand how something may result as a consequence of known causes—has been elevated to the status of the reality test. But is it really that?

The Enlightenment empowered the human reason to comprehend the world. Science taught us that women cannot fly on brooms—because that would violate some well established "natural laws". Innumerable prejudices and superstitions were dispelled.

But we've also thrown out the baby with the bathwater!

Reason cannot know "reality"

Even our common sense is a product of (our and our culture's) experience, with things such as pebbles and waves of water. We have no reason to believe that it will still work when applied to things we do not have in experience, such as small quanta of matter—and it doesn't!. A complete argument, based on the double-slit experiment, is in Oppenheimer's essay "Uncommon Sense".

"Reality" has no a priori structure

Indeed, when the insights reached in the last century's science and philosophy are taken into account, the reason is compelled to conclude that there is no "the reality" out there, waiting to be discovered. All we have to work with is human experience—of a world that, to our best knowledge, has no a priori structure.

A piece of material evidence is Einstein's "epistemological credo", which we commented here.

"Reality" is constructed

Having thus lost its bearings in philosophy, "reality" as preoccupation migrated to biology, psychology and sociology—where the mechanisms of our reality constructions could be studied.

We represented them by Maturana, Piaget and Berger and Luckmann—see our commentary that begins here.

"Reality" is a product of socialization

Bourdieu's "theory of practice"

We have now come to the first of the three main components of the socialized reality insight—that what we consider "reality" is really a product of socialization. But what exactly does this mean? What is socialization</p>?</p> <p>While a wealth of academic insights may be drawn upon to illuminate this uniquely relevant idea, we here represent them all by the work of a single researcher, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. His "theory of practice" is the theory of socialization. </p> <p>Specifically, the meaning of Bourdieu's keyword doxa (which he adopted from Max Weber, and whose usage dates all the way back to Plato) points to an essential property of what we call socialized reality. Bourdieu used this keyword to point to the common experience that people had through the ages—that the societal order of things in which they lived was the only possible one. "Orthodoxy" implies that more than one are possible, but that only one ("ours") is the "right" one. Doxa ignores even the possibility of alternative options. </p> <p>Two other Bourdieu's central keywords, "habitus", and "field", will provide us what we need to take along. Think of "habitus" as embodied predispositions to act and behave in a certain way. Think of "field" as something akin to a magnetic field, which deftly draws each person in a society to his or her "habitus". Instead of theorizing more, we provide an intuitive explanation in terms of a common situation, which is intended to serve as a parable.</p>

What makes a real king real