ABSTRACT
In this beginning chapter of Part I, I start with identifying and explaining the “double-reference” phenomenon concerning the basic employment of language to the effect that something is said of an object and people’s pre-theoretic “way-things-are-capturing” understanding of truth that plays its tremendous explanatory role in people’s folk and intellectual lives; I then explain how they respectively constitute the due pre-theoretic foundations for two norms: (1) the same-object-whole-recognizing norm (to the effect that there is the need to recognize that we can all talk about the same object even though we may say different things about it), which is intrinsically related to the “double-reference” phenomenon and whose extension is the “same-natural-world-recognizing” norm, and (2) the “way-things-are-capturing” norm, which is intrinsically related to people’s pre-theoretic understanding of truth and which sets one central strategic foundation (including the truth-pursuit strategic goal) for philosophical inquiry and any intellectual inquiries into “how things are”. In so doing, I give an evaluative examination of several challenging cases that appear to go against the foregoing normative bases for cross-tradition engagement in philosophy. I also explain how the two normative bases are intrinsically related, for the sake of a joint understanding of their nature and normative status.
