ABSTRACT
It remains only to fill out the typology of commitments in the realm of philosophical ontology by elucidating a methodological position that is somewhat tension-filled from the outset: the combination of mind-world monism with a transfactual grasp of objects and entities that exceeds the limits of possible experience. This combination is particularly fraught with tension precisely because mind-world monism, as I argued in the previous chapter, denies that it is sensible to refer to a mind-independent world as the ground upon which to place valid knowledge-claims-but if knowledge is internal to concrete practical involvements, it is quite unclear what it might mean for knowledge to transcend experience. Neopositivism contains no such tension, because neopositivists limit knowledge itself to the realm of perception: although that knowledge refers to a mind-independent world lurking just beyond the reach of our unaided or augmented senses, neopositivists do not claim to have knowledge of that experience-transcending world directly, but limit knowledge to those objects that we can grasp. Likewise, critical realism contains no such tension, because the transfactual character of knowledge of undetectable causal powers is founded on the notion that knowledge refers to a mind-independent world; for realists, mind-world dualism provides a way to get beyond the limitation of knowledge to the phenomenal sphere. And analyticists do not claim transfactual knowledge, so for them, mind-world monism reinforces phenomenalism. The transfactual monist combination, then, looks to be somewhat philosophically disadvantaged from the outset.
