The World of SPLectrum
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The Seed, Pluralism and the Coin
The seed principles are not one more position about what reality contains. They are a metalanguage: a small set of common principles about how any position at all comes to be statable — a being and its language, the relational character of that language, the medium of experience, sharing, mixing. Their subject-matter is the common: the properties shared by the set of all languages. It puts no constraints on language content, nor on the relationships between languages. What it makes statements about is the envelope every voice already speaks within: relational language, meaning expressed and shared, understanding built up enough for agreement and disagreement alike to be about something.
SPLectrum is the seed principles. But what it has to say — what it deduces and develops out of them — falls into two categories: things that are common to all, and things that are SPLectrum-specific. This gives SPLectrum two sides: where it addresses the common to all, and where it expresses its own (content) voice. It is a coin.
The coin
The coin is SPLectrum’s own shape — one coin, two faces, and the faces cannot be had separately.
The seed side — the common addressed. The single approach on the how. What is said here is deduced from the principles and holds for every voice: all the voices, however deeply they differ, do their differing in the same kind of medium — differentiations held in common, meaning expressed, understanding shared — and the seed principles address that common and nothing beyond it. Because the subject-matter constrains neither content nor the relationships between languages, this face holds the envelope open: every voice enters with equal standing. Not because ranking is forbidden here, but because there is nothing in the common for a ranking to draw on — the medium furnishes no resource by which one voice would come out above another.
The content side — the own voice. The equal standing approach on the what. Metaphysics, cognition, values, coexistence: a content language in its own right, developed out of the same principles but SPLectrum-specific in what it says — entering the envelope as one voice among the many, equal standing claimed, and no more. Coming from the same source as the metalanguage buys it nothing on content; on the what it argues its corner like every other voice.
In practice the split is made explicit by vocabulary: each face has its own core terms, both compliant with the principles. The seed side speaks in the principles’ own vocabulary — being, language, subject, reality, sharing. The content side has re-expressed the essentials of the principles in a core vocabulary of its own: the three core values of belonging, privacy and creativity — the same essence, carried into a voice that takes positions. A reader can tell which face is speaking by the words it uses. And the vocabularies expose a core difference in where each face stands: the common is about the language medium — what carries every voice; SPLectrum’s own voice has the subject central — the one who belongs, keeps a private reality, creates. Medium-centred on one face, subject-centred on the other: the same principles, pivoted around a different centre.
The two faces are one coin because they have one source: the same principles, worked in two directions — toward what holds for all, and toward what one voice makes of them. And neither face exists alone: the own voice speaks in the very medium the seed side describes, and the seed side is spoken by a subject that has a voice. A structure can hold the door and walk through it, because holding and walking happen on different faces. What it cannot do, on its own terms, is walk through the door and then claim to own the room.
The perimeter
Where is all this said from? Not from outside — because there is no outside to stand in. All languages exist within the medium, and that includes the medium’s own metalanguage: the seed principles are as much within as any voice they describe. A view from above — the surveying position beyond every language, ranking the voices from nowhere — is not a place anyone gets to stand, this language included.
What a language can do is stand at the perimeter of its own domain — the edge of the territory its subject-matter covers. Every language has that standing; no exception is made. For a content language, the edge of its domain overlooks its own subject-matter and no further. The seed’s domain, though, is the common to all — so the perimeter of its own domain coincides with the perimeter of the whole structure. Standing at its own edge, and claiming nothing more than any language claims, it has the overview of the structure described within: the common understanding, the shared expression, the many voices. The overview falls out of the subject-matter, not out of privilege — and the one standing there remains a participant in what is seen. The description given from the perimeter is itself in relational language, itself one more thing said in the medium — which is not a weakness of the description but its credentials. A description of the structure from within the structure demonstrates the very fact it describes.
The perimeter is a walk, not a throne. It is re-walked as the envelope grows, and what is seen from it is always the envelope as it stands — finite, many, unfinished.
A standing objection, in passing
Pluralism attracts a familiar refutation: the claim that no view is privileged is itself a view, and so privileges itself. The objection needs a claim to fasten on, and on the seed side there is none — equal standing is not something asserted there but something the common has no means to override. An absence of constraint makes no assertion to be turned back on itself. On the content side there is a voice making claims, and it claims no privilege: it argues its corner as one among many, and any ranking it offers is its own, with nothing at the medium level standing behind it.
See also: The original principles · The seed and Interrelational Pluralism — the full dynamic of the many interacting