Essay On Epistemology

Process Philosophy and Epistemology

With this very rudimentary sketch of process metaphysics, the question now turns to epistemology. The epistemology of scientific rationalism is detached, observational, and quantifiable—necessarily so in a traditional metaphysical framework. It presupposes a “given” world, external to us, that can be dissected through precise analysis. Modern epistemology has been plagued by various dualisms that are seemingly irreconcilable within this framework, namely subject–object, fact–value, and mind–body. But within Whitehead’s metaphysics, the marked epistemological shift is away from “objective” knowledge toward what Whitehead calls “appreciative consciousness” or what I would call an aesthetic understanding. Strictly speaking, there is no

In The Inclusion of the Other (1998), he reveals his dissatisfaction with traditional metaphysics, arguing that within such a framework, self-understanding reflects one universal worldview. For Habermas this conception of self or worldview is no longer adequate given social and ideological pluralism, a fact I think Whitehead would concede as a metaphysical given. Although Habermas (1998) marginalizes the question of metaphysics, he nevertheless offers a reconstruction of rationality as dialogue, and argues for a discourse ethics that “views the moral point of view as embodied in inter-subjective praxis of argumentation which enjoins those involved to an idealized enlargement of their interpretative perspectives” (p. 57). Among other things, this discourse is noncoercive and includes all viewpoints, a shared arena for dialogue where a plurality of perspectives and “generalizable interests,” as he puts it, can begin to emerge. To further explain this view, Habermas (2001) points out that “globalization is a multi-leveled process, not an end-state” (p.