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Defining Fundamentals by Exploring and Leveraging the Limits of the Imagination

We share our personal experience on the fruitfulness of a constructive, pragmatic approach to metaphysics as the mechanics of philosophy, the "nuts and bolts" of wisdom, of how a knowledge of everything can be pulled to together. An insightful vantage point can be further informed by neurology, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, mathematics and other disciplines.

Consider the ground of reality to be what we are able to imagine. This is useful in that our imagination is extremely limited, and those limits are reproducible, definitive and consequential. We can leverage these limits to solve the problem of how to define fundamentals.

The concept of everything is naturally central if we seek a knowledge of everything. Note the following properties of everything:

• A) Existentially, everything has no external context (if we think it, then it includes us)
• B) Phenomenologically, everything is the simplest algorithm, which accepts all we perceive, that is, has no filter (and so your everything and my everything are the same)
• C) Structurally, everything has no internal structure (it may be orderly or chaotic, and thus all statements are true about it, as there is no structure to latch onto)
• D) Pragmatically, everything is a required concept (we could not have learned it and we can't get rid of it)

As defined above, "everything" functions as an absolute. We can explore our imagination by trying to divide everything into two, three, four or more perspectives. This yields:

• a twosome for issues of being: one perspective where "opposites coexist" (as when we ask, Does this chair exist or not?) and another perspective where "all things are the same" (as when we answer, If it exists, then it exists, and if not, then not.)
• a threesome for participation: taking a stand, following through, and reflecting (as with the scientific method)
• a foursome for knowledge: whether (a cup is in a cupboard if nobody looks for it there), what (the cup looks and feels like), how (the cup is created and used), why (the cup is related to absolutely everything else).

Such fundamental frameworks describe the options that we experience as our conscious mind keeps perspectives separate. They are attested by their recurrence in philosophical disputes, classifications, and more complex structures.

We can then define *perspectives* on perspectives by which we conceive them. We conceive knowledge either as Idealists asking Why? How? What? but dismissing Whether? or as Materialists answering Whether! What! How! but dismissing Why!

We can also generate perspectives on *perspectives* with "mind games" as in defining One, All, Many: Search for constancy... either you find One example, or All is constantly unconstant, and what you select and then appraise must be Multiply constant.

We can then extend the conscious mind with dynamic languages of unconscious, unified intuitions of conditional knowledge: argumentation by which anything matters, verbalization by which something has meaning, and narration by which nothing happens. These are perspectives on perspectives on perspectives.

Epistemology of Metaphysics 3

The focus of this workshop is on an area of meta-metaphysics that could be termed “the epistemology of metaphysics”. On one hand, the epistemology of metaphysics deals with topics that are well established in their own right, such as modal epistemology. On the other hand, it deals with topics related to the “toolbox” of metaphysics, such as theoretical virtues and various dependence relations (realization, ontological dependence, grounding etc.) that connect different “levels” of reality. One pressing question is how these dependence relations relate to the notion of fundamentality. There is also a natural overlap with more epistemically oriented topics, such as the use of intuitions and thought experiments in metaphysics and the role of a priori (armchair) methods vs. a posteriori (empirical) elements in metaphysics. Submissions engaging with any of these topics are welcome.