Mike Surkes

This paper introduces Dual-Domain Neopragmatism (DDN), a postrealist evaluative framework that extends and departs from the neopragmatist tradition associated with Richard Rorty. Rorty's decisive contribution was the dissolution of representationalism and the relocation of justification inside practices of inquiry. What he did not provide was a stable basis for evaluating those practices from outside any single vocabulary. DDN completes that project by replacing the concept of truth not with a deflated intra-practice label but with three evaluative dimensions: coherence as a formal condition, and two normative domains organizing families of values instrumental to practical wisdom, utility and morality. The paper argues that morality, in particular, functions not as a downstream consequence of good reasoning but as a constitutive dimension of evaluation. This architectural move distinguishes DDN both from Rorty's cultivated solidarity and from the constraint-pragmatism of Peirce, Dewey, and Habermas, all of whom add normative constraints in the service of epistemically motivated inquiry. The paper concludes by specifying the philosophical fault line: DDN does not constrain pragmatism; it reconstitutes what pragmatic evaluation means.

This paper introduces and defends continuous dual-aspect panexperiential monism (CDAPM), a metaphysical position holding that reality consists of a single continuous field that is intrinsically experiential, with experiential and physical aspects present as two inseparable and irreducible modes of description of the same underlying process. Four commitments define the view: monism (one kind of ultimate reality), dual-aspect (two inseparable descriptive faces, neither reducible to the other), and panexperientialism (experience, not consciousness, as fundamental and ubiquitous). The fourth commitment, continuity, holds that there is no ontological discontinuity between minimal and complex forms of experience; experience exists on a spectrum across all scales of nature. The paper argues that CDAPM dissolves rather than solves the combination problem by showing that the discrete-unit assumption that generates it has no independent motivation: it is not derived from observation, not required by physics, and not forced by any prior commitment in the philosophy of mind. Once the discreteness assumption is removed, the combination problem no longer arises; its apparent force was a by product of that assumption rather than a feature of the world itself. In doing so, it reframes the central explanatory task from combination to individuation. The transition from combination to individuation is not merely a relabeling of the problem. Combination concerns the constitution of unity from ontologically distinct experiential entities. Individuation concerns the emergence of bounded organizational patterns within an already unified field. The former is a metaphysical problem generated by discrete ontology; the latter is a question of organization within a continuous ontology. The paper distinguishes itself from both Russellian monism and standard neutral monism, and offers a more parsimonious foundation than panpsychism for the metaphysics of consciousness.