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Pluralism

Pluralism is less a single doctrine than a recurring conclusion. Across philosophy’s main dimensions — metaphysics, epistemology, language, value, politics — thinkers working on entirely different problems keep arriving at the same shape of answer: the many are real, they are irreducibly many, and no member of the many holds privileged standing over the rest. A pluralist metaphysics counts many kinds of things; a pluralist epistemology counts many valid ways of knowing; value pluralism counts many ultimate goods that cannot be ranked on one scale. The traditions rarely cite each other, and each arrives through its own concerns — which is itself one of the striking facts about the position.

The dimensions

The map of who says what, dimension by dimension — from James’s pluriverse and Whitehead’s actual occasions, through Feyerabend, Goodman and Kuhn on knowing, Wittgenstein and Rorty on language, Berlin on value, to Arendt, Dahl and Laski on politics — is walked in The dimensions of pluralism.

Pluralism and pluralisation

William Connolly draws a distinction that cuts across all the dimensions: pluralism names existing diversity — there are many — while pluralisation names the emergence of new diversity — the many keep growing. Most pluralist positions describe a state; Connolly’s point is that the state has a history and a future, and a pluralism with no account of how new pluralities arise has described its subject at a standstill. The distinction marks a live fault line in the field between static and dynamic readings of the many.

What pluralism is not

Pluralism defines itself against two neighbours. Against monism — the conviction that reality, knowledge, or value reduces to one substance, one method, one good — pluralism holds that the many are not appearances of a deeper one. Against relativism — the position that any view is as good as any other because there is no standard at all — most pluralists insist on a real boundary: the many are genuinely many, but not anything goes. Whether that boundary holds under pressure is the field’s most persistent internal argument, and it leads the disputes below.

The disputes

Pluralism has its own debate space, and the same objections and defences recur whichever dimension they are raised in: the boundary with relativism, the self-refutation charge (is “no privileged view” itself a privileged view?), the anything-goes problem, and the realism disputes — how many true accounts one world can bear. These are walked in Pluralism and its disputes.

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See also: The one and the many — the political question of holding the many together · Cosmopolitics · Philosophy of science — where methodological pluralism has its home ground