Deductions: Public Knowledge from Ontic Process

Abstract

I developed the above prototype of realist reasoning through a critique of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism from a standpoint justified by the thesis that all attempts at reductionism are bound to failure and that, as a result, elements of realist-metaphysical thought introduced merely to permit the reduction of the system to the facts of immediate experience are eliminable, since their function is spurious and superfluous with respect to the scheme itself. Hence I have criticised the principles of ‘eternal objects’, and ‘imposed law’ and the latter’s corollary ‘external relations’, and attempted to replace the former by an arrangement of universals which permits the formulation of the concept of substance as self-determined Dynamic Actuality, and the latter by the notion of immanent law and internal relations, implied by the notion of Dynamic Actuality. Through the heuristic principle of ‘process’ I analysed and explored the realist’s notion of space-time being and determined the concept ‘ontic function’. My purpose now is to define the kinds of knowledge implied by space-time existence in an ontic process.