Paul, thank you for your comment on Mr. Bird’s piece, and mentioning my ideas in it. I’d not heard of relationism before, so I read about it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_knowledge#Karl_Mannheim

I’m not sure what pan-relationism is, but I think you’re right, that truth units goes in a pan-relationist direction. Hopefully though, truth units can be shown to transcend pan-relationism. To be continued there.

While I greatly respect, and find insight, in the Plato-Descartes-Kant tradition, if I had to choose a team to root for, it would be the empiricist and pragmatic traditions. I think Wittgenstein pretty much demolished the Plato-Descartes-Kant tradition’s thinking. Like the logical positivists, I distrust metaphysics, and see Plato as a mystic. So what you said Dewey believed, I believe also.

Turning from these beliefs to Mr. Bird’s piece and truth units, I totally agree with Mr. Bird that we should steer a balanced course between relativism and pragmatism—both have their value and their limitations. When relativism and pragmatism become dogmatic, our thinking becomes limited. Insight, understanding, communication and agreement suffer, and so human society suffers.

The idea of truth units is to understand how *all* the different “ism’s” reduce to a single epistemic structure. On the theory side of truth units, this doesn’t take away from any “ism.” On the practical side of truth units, as Mr. Bird says, we have to agree on some things, have some kind of shared truth. The practical benefit of truth units is to facilitate agreement.

However, agreement at the end of the day requires a finitism. We as social animals can’t process an “infinity” of truths. So in truth units, a few “ism’s” are taken off the table. This is detailed in “A Truth Units Manifesto: Part 1” on Medium. If they were not taken off the table, we ultimately might never agree on anything.

So to me there is no blind spot, strawmen or indifference. We just need to put our fingers in the dike in a few places to make necessary agreements achievable. I’m working to articulate this more clearly.