The realism remains; the universality does not.
Update: Please note that I have refined my position on this and documented it in a newer post. It builds upon this idea but clarifies some disconnects and provides me with some ontological distance from Massimi.
There comes a moment in any serious thinker’s life when the metaphysical menu starts looking like a bad buffet: too much on offer, none of it quite edible, and the dishes that appear promising turn out to depend on ingredients you can’t stomach. Realism insists the world is simply there, chugging along regardless of your opinions. Anti-realism points out, inconveniently, that all your access is wildly mediated. Perspectivism adds humility. Constructivism chastises you for overconfidence. Analytic Idealism sweeps matter off the table entirely, until you ask why consciousness spits out such stubbornly consistent patterns.
I’ve been through all of them.
Realism*—asterisk for “but what about mediation?”
Idealism*—asterisk for “but what about resistance?”
Everything almost worked.
And “almost” is the metaphysical kiss of death.
“Almost” is where the asterisks live.
Perspectival Realism is the first position I can hold without planting that apologetic little star in the margins.
The Asterisk Journey (Brief, Painless, Necessary)
This isn’t a conversion narrative. It’s a salvage operation. Each station on the journey left me with tools worth keeping.
Layer 1: Iconography (Hoffman, minus the metaphysics)
Perception is not a window. It’s an interface. A species-specific dashboard designed for survival, not truth. Evolution gave you a set of icons—colour patches, contrast edges, looming shapes—not an accurate rendering of reality’s architecture.
Uexküll called this the umwelt: every organism inhabits its own perceptual slice of the world. Bees see ultraviolet; snakes sense heat; humans see embarrassingly little.
This is Layer 1 mediation:
Reality-as-filtered-for-primates.
Layer 2: Instrumentation (Kastrup, minus the leap)
Consciousness is the instrument through which reality is measured. Measuring instruments shape the measurements. That doesn’t make the world mind-shaped; it just means you only ever get readings through the apparatus you’ve got.
This is Layer 2 mediation:
Your cognitive architecture—predictive priors, attentional limitations, spatial-temporal scaffolding—structures experience before thought arrives.
Where I leave Kastrup behind is the familiar leap:
“Because consciousness measures reality, reality must be made of consciousness.”
That’s the instrumentality fallacy.
You need consciousness to access the world.
That tells you nothing about what the world is.
Layer 3: Linguistic–Cultural Carving (Your home field)
And then comes the mediation philosophers most reliably ignore: language.
Language does not describe reality. It carves it.
Some cultures divide colour into eleven categories; some into five. The Müller-Lyer illusion fools Westerners far more than it fools hunter-gatherers. Concepts feel natural only because you inherited them pre-packaged.
This is Layer 3 mediation: the cultural-linguistic filter that makes the world legible—and in the same breath, distorts it.
You mistake the map for the territory because it’s the only map you’ve ever held.
The Hard Problem, Dissolved — Not Solved
When English splits the world into “mental” and “physical,” it accidentally manufactures the “hard problem of consciousness.” Sanskrit traditions carve reality differently and end up with different “mysteries.”
The hard problem isn’t a revelation about reality.
It’s a conceptual knot tied by Layer 3 mediation.
Changing the ontology to “everything is mind” doesn’t untie the knot.
It just dyes the rope a different colour.
The Triple Lock
Put the three layers together and you get the honest picture:
- Your senses give you icons, not the thing-in-itself.
- Your cognition structures those icons automatically.
- Your culture tells you what the structured icons mean.
And yet—despite all of this—the world pushes back.
Gravity doesn’t care about your interpretive community.
Arsenic does not negotiate its effects with your culture.
Your beliefs about heat won’t keep your hand from burning.
This is the fulcrum of Perspectival Realism:
Reality is real and resists us, but all access is triply mediated.
The realism remains.
The universality does not.
Why Perspectival Realism is Not Relativism
Relativism says: “Everyone’s perspective is equally valid.”
Perspectival Realism says: “Everyone’s perspective is equally situated.”
Very different claims.
Some perspectives predict better.
Some cohere better.
Some survive reality’s resistance better.
Some transfer across contexts better.
Some correct their own errors faster.
You don’t need a view from nowhere to say that.
You just need to notice which maps get you killed less often.
What This Framework Enables
1. Progress without foundation myths
Science improves because reality resists bad models. Mediation doesn’t prevent progress; it’s the condition of it.
2. Critique without arrogance
You can rank perspectives without pretending to hover above them.
3. Cross-cultural dialogue without imperialism or despair
Cultures carve experience differently, but they’re carving the same underlying world. Translation is hard, not impossible.
4. Honest metaphysics
No glamourised escape from sensory embodiment, cognitive bias, or cultural inheritance.
Just the patient business of refining our mediated grip on the real.
What Perspectival Realism Actually Claims
Let me make the commitments explicit:
- There is a world independent of our representations.
- All access to it is mediated by perception, cognition, and culture.
- Perspectives can be compared because reality pushes back.
- No perspective is unmediated.
- The asymptote—Reality-as-it-is—is unreachable.
This isn’t pessimism.
It’s maturity.
Why This Is the First Ontology Without an Asterisk
Every worldview before this needed the quiet, shamefaced footnote:
- Realism*: “But access is mediated.”
- Idealism*: “But resistance is real.”
- Perspectivism*: “But we still need to rank perspectives.”
- Constructivism*: “But the world’s invariances aren’t constructs.”
Perspectival Realism eats the objections instead of dodging them.
There is no asterisk because the worldview is built from the asterisks.
No promises of transcendence.
No pretense of universality.
No linguistic sleight-of-hand.
Just embodied beings navigating a real world through fallible instruments, shared practices, and cultural grammars—occasionally catching a clearer glimpse, never stepping outside the frame.
The realism remains.
The universality does not.
And for once, metaphysics isn’t lying to you.
DISCLAIMER: This article was written or output by ChatGPT 5.1. It started as a conversation with Claude Sonnet 4.5, where I had input days of output for evaluation. One of these outputs was the post about Erasmus and the Emissary Who Forgot to Bow. A group chat ensued between me, Claude and ChatGPT.
What started as a discussion about the merits of my position, expressed in the Erasmus-influenced essay, drifted to one about Perspectival Realism. That discussion deepened on ChatGPT, as I further discussed my recent thoughts on the latter topic. I had rendered a Magic: The Gathering parody trading card as I contemplated the subject. It’s how my brain works.
All of this led me to ask ChatGPT to summarise the conversation, and, upon further discussion, I asked it to draft this very article – the first of five.
- Perspectival Realism: The First Ontology Without an Asterisk 👈
This article discusses what Perspectival Realism means to me and how I got to this position. - Why Perspectival Realism Is Not Relativism
Further discussion prompted me to differentiate this ontology from other perspectives. - Arriving Late to Massimi’s Party: Perspectival Realism in Parallel
I spent another half-hour following Google search results as I wanted to see if anyone else had already been using the term, Perspectival Realism. I ended up on the Oxford publishing site. I found a 2022 book with this name, authored by Michela Massimi. They allowed me to download the book, so I asked ChatGPT to summarise our positions, specifically where we agreed and differed. - Against the Vat: Why Perspectival Realism Survives Every Sceptical Hypothesis
At 0500, I returned to bed, but I woke up again at 0700 thinking about how one might differentiate between Putnam’s brain in a vat from Perspectival Realism. ChatGPT asked if I wanted that output in long-form. - The Constraint Interface: Toward a Nexal Ontology
Being uncomfortable with the dichotomy between Realism and Idealism, I chatted to come up with terminology that disrupts what I consider a false dichotomy, focusing on the nexus rather than privileging one or the other. Consider this similar to the debate on sex and gender binaries.
Could I have improved on these articles if I had rewritten or polished them? Maybe. What’s the purpose? This is all a result of my concepts and inquiries. I endorse the output. I may return to make edits in future, or I may restate this information in my own voice, but for now, let this serve as notice that I am not afraid of generative AI; I am not afraid that it is going to supplant my thinking. I find that whilst I can prompt GPTs to make connexions or to query who else might be relevant to a topic, it doesn’t generally offer its own initiative, what we term Agency.
As for this particular post, it reads more like a listicle. I could have rendered it more expositional, but the structured thinking is all here; why should I reinvent the wheel just to put skin on these bones? As I said, perhaps I’ll flesh this out for elaboration or publication in future, for now, let this serve as a waypoint and a record of how I got here. This supplants my prior position, the asterisked Analytic Idealism, published in 2022, which supplanted my asterisked Realism. Perhaps I’ll finally be able to settle for an ontology and epistemology with no stars.
Philosophics 