Epistemology – Rational-Understanding.com

Exploring Poly-Perspectivism: Using Multiple Perspectives for a More Comprehensive Understanding of Reality

I was pleased to present my paper “Exploring Poly-Perspectivism: Using Multiple Perspectives for a More Comprehensive Understanding of Reality” at the ISSS 2025 Conference.

The work explores how we can engage with diverse perspectives more productively without collapsing them into a single truth or drifting into relativism. It introduces a new meta-framework that evaluates perspectives by the human needs they satisfy or the harms they help prevent, offering a human-centred complement to systems science.

If you’re interested in interdisciplinary collaboration, epistemic coordination, or the cognitive dynamics behind complex decision-making, this work may be of interest. You can download the following:

The full paper
A glossary of key terms
A list of key propositions
Guidance on overcoming personal blind spots
A summary of Motivated Symbolic Interpretation Theory
A summary of the Reflexive meta-Framework
The presentation slides
Speaking notes

From https://rational-understanding.com/my-books#polyperspectivism

I’d welcome feedback, collaboration, or questions. Feel free to get in touch.

The Hierarchy of Organising Principles

I haven’t posted for a while because I have been working on this paper. It is quite long and contains many diagrams. So, I have produced it in pdf format and you can download it via the following link https://rational-understanding.com/my-books#hierarchy-of-organising-principles.

The paper presents a comprehensive hypothesis that seeks to explain the nature of reality and how humans understand it, integrating foundational concepts from critical realism, systems theory, and causality. The hypothesis holds that reality can be viewed as a fractal-like structure, generated by underlying organising principles that operate at various ranks in a hierarchy. Starting from acausal foundational principles, the paper explores how systems interact, transfer matter, energy, and information, and contribute to the complexity observed at different levels of organisation. The hypothesis extends to the idea that human understanding is structured by organising principles that differ from reality’s, leading to distinct layers of comprehension reflected in scientific disciplines. The paper suggests that integrating these principles may help bridge gaps between disciplines, such as the disconnect between social sciences and the biological sciences. This unification has the potential to deepen our understanding of both the natural world and human social behaviour, while identifying new pathways for societal change.