Method and methodology form the cornerstone of systematic and reliable knowledge. For encountering truth requires a structured, verifiable, and—to the greatest extent possible—replicable path.
Kabul 24: Although humans sometimes attain a layer of truth through revelation, intuition, or transcendental experiences and bring the “real” into the realm of the “symbolic order” and language, revelation is an extraordinary, personal, and non-replicable phenomenon.
Therefore, to achieve objective, shared, and examinable knowledge, we inevitably must rely on method.Nevertheless, reality does not possess a simple, uniform, or single-layered nature. Objective, subjective, social, and theory-dependent realities each have their own distinct logic and mode of manifestation.
For this reason, one cannot catch all the diverse types of reality with a single net.Reducing the validity of knowledge to a single method ultimately leads to the reduction of reality itself.
In such a view, anything that does not fit within the framework of that method is simply dismissed as “unreal” and excluded from the domain of knowledge.
Accordingly, methodological pluralism guides us to the principle that we should not confine ourselves within the bonds of a single rigid and exclusive method.
To understand each domain of reality, we must employ the tools, logic, and method appropriate to that very domain. Understanding the social realm is not necessarily possible with the same instruments used for natural phenomena.
The more important point is that the number of our methods is always dependent on the boundaries of our ontology; that is, we only recognize those methods that are compatible with our conception of “being real.”The narrower our ontological horizon, the more restricted the scope of our epistemological methods will be.
Therefore, methodological exclusivism is not only an epistemological error but also a sign of ontological poverty.
It predetermines what can count as real and what must be removed from the realm of reality.On the other hand, we can never claim with certainty that we have recognized all types and domains of reality.
There is always the possibility that part of existence lies beyond our current horizon of understanding—a domain for which we not only lack a method of comprehension but may even deny its existence precisely because of this lack of tools.
Even if, with a more radical outlook, we regard the world as a kind of “chaotic flux” or pure chaos and consider reality as the product of order imposed by our epistemological apparatuses, epistemic humility still demands that we not hastily dismiss any claim from the field of possibility without careful reflection.
Therefore, we must always acknowledge the “excess of reality”—that is, accept that something always remains outside our understanding, language, theory, and method.
Every ontological system, including coherent rational systems such as the Spinozist system that I have adopted, can bring order to the mind and draw boundaries between truth, imagination, possibility, and impossibility.
But if this ordering becomes absolutized, it carries the danger of eliminating unknown realities.Thus, safeguarding the concern that we might overlook something is, in truth, safeguarding truth itself.
Truth is always greater than the tools we have constructed to know it. Methodological pluralism is an effort to make our net of knowledge broader, more humble, and more open to the unknown possibilities of reality.
Jamshid Mehrpour – Kabul
