Mike Surkes

Correspondence accounts of correctness require a relatum whose identity is determinate independently of the practice that represents it. This paper argues that no such relatum is available, because individuation is practice-relative. That claim has standing of its own in the literatures on sorites boundaries and material constitution, and the metaphysics of continuous dual-aspect panexperiential monism motivates it without being required to establish it. What follows is Fixed-Point Constraint Pragmatism, on which correctness consists of what remains invariant under admissible extension of a practice's inferential commitments. That makes admissibility the load-bearing notion, and it is here that the paper's contribution lies: admissibility is fixed jointly by coherence, utility and morality, and a constructive removal argument establishes the three to be independently necessary by building, for each, a system that satisfies the other two and showing what specifically breaks. That result holds whatever verdict is reached on the derivation. The position is located against neopragmatism, inferentialism and ontic structural realism, each of which departs from correspondence without supplying an operative criterion of admissible extension, and is extended to the science and fiction distinction, mathematical and logical necessity, and modality, each treated as internal to constraint-closure rather than grounded outside it.

This paper takes up a question that Jack Reynolds describes and leaves open: whether a pragmatism can retain transcendental reasoning, honor both the coping pragmatism prizes and the disruption Deleuze holds thought requires, and stay answerable to the sciences without collapsing into naturalism. Reynolds finds that none of the frameworks he examines escapes the recognitional image of thought. This paper offers a fourth attempt from a different starting point. It begins from a revision to the metaphysics of consciousness, continuous dual-aspect panexperiential monism, and derives from it an epistemological position, fixed-point constraint pragmatism, that grounds the conditions of inquiry neither in fixed categories nor in the necessities of an existing community, but in what a system of thought cannot absorb without disruption from practices external to it. Coherence, utility, and morality jointly fix which transformations a practice can undergo while remaining stable, with morality requiring that another practice's claim be left standing as pressure rather than converted into content already possessed. Whether this breaks the recognitional operation, or merely equips recognition to register its own limits, is the question on which this framework asks to be judged.

This paper derives an epistemological position, Fixed-Point Constraint Pragmatism (FPCP), from the metaphysics of continuous dual-aspect panexperiential monism (CDAPM). Removing the discrete-unit assumption from the ontology of consciousness removes the discrete relatum that correspondence semantics requires, and a self-sufficient account of correctness follows without appeal to any mind-independent correctness-making layer. Correctness is characterized as fixed-point stability under admissible extension, where admissibility is fixed jointly by three criteria: coherence, utility, and morality. A constructive removal argument shows these three to be independently necessary, each blocking a distinct failure mode the other two cannot. The position is located in relation to Kant, neopragmatism, and ontic structural realism, and is extended to the science/fiction distinction, mathematical and logical necessity, and modality. Each of the latter topics is treated as internal to constraint-closure rather than grounded outside it. FPCP is presented as one component of a broader framework originating in the same foundational move.

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.