Mohammed Raei

This paper introduces a non-normative, non-hierarchical metatheory organized around five irreducible and interacting dimensions: ontology, epistemology, axiology, praxis, and telos. Existing metatheories often conflate these dimensions, embed hidden normative commitments, or lack reflexive capacity. In contrast, the proposed framework provides an open analytical architecture capable of examining theories, metatheories, paradigms, institutions, and ideologies without imposing predetermined assumptions. The metatheory emerged through a hybrid human–AI co-reasoning process involving cyclical and dialectical refinement, adversarial testing, and multimodel triangulation, which revealed structural blind spots and supported iterative conceptual development. Applications demonstrate the model’s diagnostic and generative power across diverse domains, including the collapse of communism, the persistence of capitalism, failures of organizational change, assessment of transdisciplinary work, and adult development. The metatheory also applies reflexively to itself, addressing a longstanding limitation in integrative frameworks. By offering a rigorous dimensional grammar and a scalable reflexive scaffold, this metatheory enhances conceptual clarity, supports cross-paradigmatic translation, and provides a foundation for designing coherent theories and transformative practices suited to contemporary complexity. Citation DOI: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.17913952.

Much of philosophy has been shaped by dualism, not only as a position to be defended, but as a problem to be solved. Mind and body, subject and object, fact and value, theory and practice, individual and collective, appearance and reality, and being and becoming have provided some of philosophy's most enduring organizing tensions. Yet the dominance of dualism is not limited to frameworks that explicitly affirm binary separation. Many anti-dualistic traditions remain historically or conceptually organized around the dualisms they seek to overcome. They synthesize, dissolve, mediate, transcend, reverse, or collapse dualisms into identity, but the dualism still functions as the generative problem. This article distinguishes between three modes of philosophical architecture: dualistic frameworks, anti-dualistic frameworks, and architecturally non-binary frameworks. The anti-dualistic category is internally diverse, encompassing moves ranging from Hegelian Aufhebung — the most systematic synthesis-based response to binary opposition in the Western tradition — to dissolution of inherent existence (svabhava), dynamic polarity reframing, and reversal of the privileged term. All begin from a binary pair as their originating problem. By contrast, architecturally non-binary frameworks do not take A versus B as their starting grammar. Critical realism (Bhaskar, 1975, 1979), Peircean triadicity (Peirce, 1931–1958), and five-dimensional metatheory (Raei, 2026a) suggest ways of beginning inquiry from architectures other than A versus B. The article concludes that philosophy need not be organized around the repair of inherited splits. It can also begin from depth, triadic relation, or multidimensional differentiation

This paper articulates a dialectical method operative in the development of metatheoretical frameworks, distinguishing it from the Hegelian tradition that has dominated philosophical accounts of dialectic in scholarly discourse. The method is characterized by five move-types (clarification, correction, reduction, addition, integration), a dual-track initiation structure (revelatory and confirmatory), a rhythm of alternating accretion and sculpting phases, and a succession of individually open-ended movements that nonetheless converge onto something. The engine of the dialectic is not negation — as in Hegel — but insufficiency and generative inner pressure; tension is one mechanism among several, not the sole driver of movement. The method is multidimensional, iterative, constructive-developmental in orientation, and keeps first-order commitments outside its structure — making it an uncommitted instrument capable of serving many different intellectual projects. Its emancipatory dimension is structural rather than teleological: multidimensionality itself enacts freedom by opening genuine possibility space that uni-dimensional methods foreclose. A genuinely novel feature is the role of AI as an always-on dialectical partner — a structural condition that makes a qualitatively different mode of dialectical practice possible. The method’s relationship to prior traditions is characterized as transcend-and-include: preserving what is genuinely valid in each tradition while going beyond its limitations. Partial resonances are drawn from Socratic maieutics, Peircean inquiry, Gadamerian hermeneutics, Lakatosian methodology, and Basseches’ dialectical thinking — the closest partial predecessor in structural conception. Thirteen structural departures from Hegel are identified. The paper did not emerge through philosophical reasoning but through reflexive examination of actual practice, and the method has no established lineage — a recurring structural feature of work that originates outside established traditions. The paper is itself an instance of the method it describes.

This article challenges the assumption that novel conceptual and theoretical work should be generated through induction from existing literature. While induction remains valuable in empirical inquiry, its role changes when the object of inquiry is not observed phenomena but inherited concepts, theories, and frameworks. In conceptual and metatheoretical work, premature induction from the literature can constrain originality by anchoring inquiry within the existing possibility-space of a field. The article develops a creativity-based critique of induction, distinct from the classical philosophical critique associated with Hume. The problem is not that induction lacks logical justification, but that it may prematurely narrow the imagination. To support this claim, the article examines a representative set of influential theories in four fields — psychology, sociology, leadership studies, and cognitive science/philosophy of mind — finding that across all four, the large majority of major theories did not emerge through strict literature-first induction, but through abductive, interpretive, metaphorical, clinical, historical, normative, or architectonic moves later refined through evidence, literature, and application. Drawing on the phenomenological distinction between filling and emptying, the concept of beginner's mind, and the expert's internalized literature, the article argues that formal literature review at the generative stage is not merely unnecessary for expert theorists — it is phenomenologically counter-productive. An alternative seven-stage sequence is proposed, repositioning the literature review as a situating and novelty-confirming device that performs its best work after, not before, the generative act. Boundary conditions are discussed, with particular attention to the role of expertise: the critique applies most strongly to expert theorists and least to novice researchers for whom the literature review still serves a genuine capacity-building function.