Abstract
Contemporary process metaphysics has achieved a number of important
results, most significantly in accounting for emergence, a problem on which substance
metaphysics has foundered since Plato. It also faces trenchant problems of its
own, among them the related problems of boundaries and individuation. Historically,
the quest for ontology may thus have been largely responsible for the persistence
of substance metaphysics. But as Plato was well aware, an ontology of
substantial things raises serious, perhaps insurmountable problems for any account
of our epistemic access to such things. Physical things are subject to change, and as
such, they are poor objects of knowledge—if knowledge is to be more reliable than
mere opinion. There is a reading of Plato’s Theaetetus on which knowledge may be
understood as a relation between an epistemic subject and a logos, where logoi are
intrinsically dialectical, and where dialectic is a kind of intersubjective activity.
Insofar as this epistemology may be attributed to Plato, the project of this paper is
Platonic in spirit. It is also, in a sense, Kantian, in that it divorces ontology from the
search for things-in-themselves, redirecting our attention from things to objects:
epistemic objects. Such objects can be understood, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty
proposed, as shared by multiple subjects by virtue of their participation in an
intersubjective world, constituted by what Shaun Gallagher calls ‘‘participatory
sense-making.’’ On an epistemology constructed in this way, the fact that both
epistemic objects and their subject are mutable is no obstacle to knowledge.
Far-from-equilibrium systems are forever mutable; at thermodynamic equilibrium,
there would be neither subject, nor object. Epistemic objects, on this picture, are
metastable loci of interactive potential.