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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Dog That Does Not Exist

Ken Wilber and the Epistemological Fallacy

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

The strange case of the nonexistent dog

There is a revealing passage in Appendix 2 of Ken Wilber's Integral Spirituality (2006), where he develops his notion of "Kosmic addressing." Wilber asks where the referents of various signifiers exist: "dog," Santa Claus, the square root of minus one, and Emptiness. His answer is that we should abandon the idea of a single, pregiven object that exists independently of perspective and is then represented by different observers.

As Wilber puts it:

"There simply is no such thing as 'the dog' that is the one, true, pregiven dog to which our conceptions give varying representations, but rather different dogs that come into being or are enacted with our evolving concepts and consciousness." (p. 260)

This sounds sophisticated. It invokes phenomenology, hermeneutics, developmental theory and the postmodern critique of "the myth of the given." It also sounds plausible up to a point. Obviously, different people can perceive, interpret and understand the same dog differently. A biologist sees an organism; a child sees a companion; a veterinarian sees a patient; a painter sees a subject; a philosopher sees an instance of a category. There are indeed multiple ways in which a dog can appear to human beings.

But something very different follows if we conclude from this that there is therefore no dog apart from these perspectives.

That move is not a triumph over naive metaphysics. It is an epistemological fallacy.

From "we know through perspectives" to "there are only perspectives"

The basic distinction is elementary but fundamental.

Epistemology concerns how we know something. Ontology concerns what there is.

There is nothing controversial about saying that our knowledge of a dog is perspectival. Every observation is made from somewhere, by someone, using particular sensory capacities, concepts, instruments, languages and purposes. But it does not follow that the object itself is constituted by those perspectives.

Wilber repeatedly approaches the stronger conclusion.

His formulation is not merely that "the dog is seen from different perspectives." He explicitly rejects this formulation. For him, objects are perspectives—or, more precisely, they are tetra-enacted within a worldspace. The distinction is crucial. He wants to replace the idea of an object existing independently of perspective with a model in which subject and object co-arise within a particular worldspace.

This is an interesting phenomenological thesis. But it becomes problematic when it is treated as an ontological thesis.

The difference can be illustrated very simply.

Suppose there is a dog sitting in a room.

One observer calls it a dog. Another sees a mammal. A third sees a veterinary patient. A fourth sees an organism composed of trillions of cells. A fifth sees a beloved pet. A sixth, using an X-ray machine, sees its skeleton.

There are indeed different objects of knowledge here in the epistemological sense: different descriptions, aspects, profiles and modes of access.

But we need not conclude that there are therefore six dogs—or that the dog itself comes into existence only through these descriptions.

The perspectives vary.

The object need not.

The crucial difference between appearance and existence

Wilber's argument becomes especially problematic because his examples mix together things that have radically different ontological statuses.

Santa Claus, the square root of minus one, a dog and Emptiness are treated as signifiers whose referents have different "Kosmic Addresses." But this can obscure rather than clarify the fundamental differences between them.

The square root of minus one is a mathematical object defined within a formal system. Santa Claus is a cultural and mythological construct with a complicated historical genealogy. Emptiness is a philosophical and contemplative concept with multiple interpretations across Buddhist traditions. A dog is a biological organism.

These are not simply four phenomena waiting to be sorted into different quadrants and levels.

The fact that human beings have different modes of access to these things does not place them on the same ontological footing.

And this is where Wilber's "post-metaphysics" begins to look remarkably metaphysical.

He wants to escape the metaphysical assumption that objects simply sit in a ready-made universe, waiting to be observed. Fair enough. But the replacement can become another absolute assumption: that objects have no existence apart from their enactment within a perspective.

The metaphysical "God's-eye view" is rejected, only to be replaced by a theory about how reality must fundamentally be structured.

That is not the elimination of ontology.

It is ontology under another name.

The "myth of the given" does not prove the nonexistence of the given

Wilber's critique of the "myth of the given" is one of the strongest elements of his post-metaphysical argument, but it is also frequently overextended.

There is no pure, uninterpreted observation. We do not encounter "raw reality" without perceptual and conceptual mediation. Kant already made this point in a much more rigorous philosophical vocabulary. Phenomenology developed it further. The philosophy of science has demonstrated repeatedly that observation is theory-laden.

But the conclusion does not have to be idealism.

The fact that observation is mediated does not entail that there is nothing being observed.

Indeed, science would become unintelligible if it did.

A paleontologist does not simply construct a fossil out of a cultural worldspace. A fossil is encountered as a recalcitrant material object. It can be measured, dated, chemically analyzed, compared with other fossils and independently rediscovered by other researchers. Its properties constrain the interpretations that can legitimately be made about it.

Likewise, a dog does not disappear when nobody is looking at it.

This sounds trivial because it is trivial. Yet that triviality is philosophically important.

The world continually resists our descriptions of it.

The dog bites back

Here is a useful test for Wilber's thesis.

Imagine that a dog runs toward you and bites you.

Did the dog come into being when your consciousness enacted it?

Did your cultural worldspace produce the animal?

Was the bite merely an event within a particular intersubjective clearing?

Obviously not.

You may have various interpretations of the event. You may describe the animal as a mammal, predator, pet, threat, organism, biological holon or companion animal. But the dog's teeth do not require an adequate Kosmic Address before they can penetrate your skin.

The dog possesses causal powers independently of your conceptual interpretation.

This is the point at which ontology stubbornly returns through the back door.

Wilber's framework can describe the different ways the dog is known. It cannot abolish the dog that generates those different encounters.

Indeed, the causal efficacy of the object is precisely what distinguishes an external object from a purely conceptual construction.

If I imagine a dog, I do not have to worry about being bitten.

If an actual dog is standing in front of me, I do.

That difference cannot be explained merely by saying that the two belong to different worldspaces. The relevant distinction is ontological: one exists as an organism in the external world; the other exists as an image or representation in consciousness.

From perspectivism to constructivism

Wilber's argument therefore appears to move through three propositions.

First: all knowledge is perspectival.

Second: what can appear as an object depends partly upon the capacities, concepts and cultural practices of the knower.

Third: therefore there is no perspective-independent object.

The first proposition is almost certainly correct.

The second is defensible and important.

The third does not follow.

This is the classic slide from epistemology into ontology.

One encounters variations of it throughout twentieth-century philosophy. Because we never encounter reality except through structures of perception, cognition and language, reality is sometimes treated as if it were constituted by those structures. But the inference is invalid unless an additional argument is supplied.

Wilber does not supply such an argument. Instead, he treats the conclusion as an implication of his critique of the "myth of the given."

But criticizing naive realism is not the same thing as refuting realism.

There is a large philosophical territory between "the world is exactly as it appears" and "there is no world independent of our appearing."

Wilber's integral theory repeatedly has difficulty occupying that middle ground.

The remarkable return of ontology

There is an additional irony here.

Wilber explicitly declares that "ontology does not exist" in the sense that there is no perspective-free inventory of pregiven objects. Yet his own theory immediately begins to provide an ontology of its own.

• There are quadrants.

• There are levels.

• There are states.

• There are lines.

• There are types.

• There are worldspaces.

• There are holons.

• There are Kosmic Addresses.

• There are deep structures and surface structures.

• There are enacted phenomena.

• There are intersubjective spaces.

• There are developmental stages.

And all of these are presented as features of reality rather than merely as optional vocabularies.

Wilber therefore does not really dispense with ontology. He relocates it.

Instead of saying, "Here is what exists independently of perspective," he says, in effect, "Here is the structure within which existence and perspective co-arise."

That is still a metaphysical claim.

It may be an interesting metaphysics. It may even be a useful metaphysics. But calling it "post-metaphysical" does not make the metaphysics disappear.

The scientific problem

The problem becomes particularly acute when Wilber's argument is applied to scientific knowledge.

Suppose different scientific disciplines disclose different aspects of an organism. A zoologist studies its evolutionary history. A molecular biologist studies its DNA. A neuroscientist studies its nervous system. An ecologist studies its relationship with its environment.

Integral theory can make a useful methodological point here: no single disciplinary perspective exhausts the phenomenon.

But there is a major difference between saying that no perspective exhausts the dog and saying that there is no dog apart from those perspectives.

The first is pluralism.

The second is ontological constructivism.

Science does not need to claim that scientists possess a God's-eye view. It only needs to maintain that their perspectives are constrained by something that is not itself simply invented by those perspectives.

The dog has DNA whether or not anyone knows about DNA.

It had a digestive system before digestive anatomy was discovered.

It evolved before evolutionary theory existed.

Its cells contained genetic material before human beings developed the concept of genes.

This is precisely why Wilber's own example from science is revealing. He argues that cells with DNA did not "exist" for magic and mythic worldviews, although they "subsisted" and only later "existed" for rational consciousness.

But this equivocation between "existed for a knower" and "existed" is the entire problem.

Cells existed long before they existed as objects of human knowledge.

If Wilber means that cells were not conceptually disclosed as such, his point is unobjectionable.

If he means that they did not exist, he has confused epistemology with ontology.

A category mistake disguised as sophistication

The terminology of "worldspaces," "enactment," "tetra-enaction" and "Kosmic Addresses" gives the argument an impressive technical appearance. But technical vocabulary cannot repair a logical gap.

Indeed, there is a danger here that Wilber's elaborate terminology conceals the simplicity of the underlying problem.

Consider the sentence:

"The dog exists for this worldspace."

That is perfectly intelligible if "exists for" means "is disclosed or recognized as an object within."

But then:

"The dog does not exist independently of worldspaces."

That is a much stronger proposition.

The second does not follow from the first.

The distinction between "exists" and "exists for" is not a semantic nicety. It is the difference between ontology and epistemology.

• A dog can exist without being recognized as a dog.

• A bacterium can exist without being classified as a bacterium.

• A galaxy can exist without anyone seeing it.

• A planet can exist before astronomers discover it.

• A species can become extinct without leaving behind a human observer to enact its disappearance.

Reality does not require our permission to exist.

The deeper irony of integral theory

This is particularly unfortunate for Integral Theory because Wilber's original ambition was precisely to overcome one-sidedness.

The integral impulse is supposed to recognize partial truths without absolutizing any one perspective. Yet the post-metaphysical argument risks absolutizing perspective itself.

The lesson should be:

"There are many ways of knowing the dog."

Instead, Wilber sometimes arrives at:

"There are many dogs enacted by different worldspaces."

The first is epistemological pluralism.

The second risks becoming ontological pluralism.

And once the distinction between the two is blurred, there is no obvious reason why the same logic could not be used to protect virtually any claim from external criticism. If a phenomenon exists only within a particular worldspace, then disagreement can always be redescribed as a difference in worldspace rather than a disagreement about what exists.

That is potentially disastrous for critical inquiry.

A creationist, astrologer, clairvoyant, Buddhist, physicist and integral theorist could each claim that their respective objects are real within their appropriate worldspaces. The question of which claims correspond to independently existing structures of reality becomes secondary.

But surely integral theory cannot want this consequence.

Wilber himself wants discrimination between more and less adequate forms of knowledge. He invokes science, developmental research, phenomenology and cross-cultural comparison. Such discrimination requires some criterion that is not simply reducible to the worldspace being examined.

The moment one asks whether an enacted object corresponds to something that exists independently of the enactment, ontology has returned.

The modest realism Wilber needs

There is an obvious way out.

Wilber could distinguish between the object as it exists and the object as disclosed.

A dog-in-itself is not identical with any particular human conception of a dog. Our access to it is always mediated. Yet the object can constrain and correct those mediations.

This would yield a modest critical realism:

Reality exists independently of our representations, but our knowledge of reality is perspectival, partial, theory-laden and historically situated.

That position is neither naive realism nor postmodern relativism.

It is also entirely compatible with methodological pluralism.

A dog can simultaneously be a biological organism, a perceptual object, a social symbol, a companion animal and an object of scientific investigation. These descriptions do not necessarily create separate dogs. They disclose different properties and relations of one underlying organism.

The integral insight survives.

The metaphysical inflation does not.

Conclusion: the dog remains

The most revealing thing about Wilber's "dog" argument is that the dog itself is unnecessary to the argument.

And that is precisely the problem.

Wilber begins with something true: no human being possesses an unmediated, perspective-free representation of reality. From there he concludes that there is no single "true, pregiven dog" behind our various representations.

But the absence of an unmediated representation does not imply the absence of an independently existing object.

We should therefore reverse Wilber's formulation.

There is no single, perspective-free description of the dog.

But there may perfectly well be a single dog whose existence makes the various descriptions possible.

That dog does not need a Kosmic Address before it can exist. It does not have to be enacted by a worldspace before it can bite. It does not wait for rational consciousness before acquiring DNA. And it does not cease to exist when everyone leaves the room.

What changes across worldspaces is how the dog is disclosed, interpreted and understood.

That is epistemology.

The dog itself belongs to ontology.

Wilber's mistake is not that he takes perspective seriously. He does not take it seriously enough to distinguish the perspective-dependent character of knowledge from the perspective-independent character of what is known.

The irony is therefore almost irresistible: in trying to eliminate the "myth of the given," Wilber risks eliminating the given altogether.

But the world has a stubborn habit of giving itself back.

Sometimes it even has four legs.