The Assumption Nobody Told You You Were Making

Most of us operate with an assumption so basic we've never noticed it. There is one world. It has one set of facts. Science progressively discovers those facts. Different cultures have different beliefs about the world, but only one set of beliefs is ultimately correct, and the others are superstitions, myths, or approximations waiting to be replaced.

This is sometimes called ontological monism: the view that reality has one fundamental structure, one set of entities, one ultimate fabric. Your culture might describe it differently, but what you're all pointing at is the same underlying thing. The Amazonian shaman and the particle physicist are, on this view, both trying to describe the same world, one of them just has better tools.

Now here is the question that the pluriverse philosophy refuses to let you dodge: how confident are you that this assumption is correct, and on what grounds?

Not epistemologically confident, not "how sure are we that we have the right description of the one world." Ontologically confident. How sure are we that there is one world in the relevant sense? That reality has a single structure that all legitimate inquiry converges on, and that all other ways of engaging with it are either proto-science or error?

The philosopher William James, pragmatist, psychologist, and among the most underrated thinkers of the 20th century, argued as early as 1909 (A Pluralistic Universe) that the assumption of a single, unified, monistic reality was a philosophical prejudice masquerading as self-evidence. He was not arguing for supernatural worlds or rejecting science. He was arguing that reality might be genuinely irreducible to a single description, that different aspects of experience might require genuinely different ontological frameworks, and that forcing everything into one framework loses something real.

Fast forward to contemporary anthropology and philosophy, and the argument has been sharpened considerably by thinkers like Arturo Escobar, Mario Blaser, and the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Their claim: many of the world's Indigenous and non-Western traditions do not simply have different beliefs about the same world. They enact and inhabit genuinely different worlds, where different entities exist, where relationships between humans and non-humans are constituted differently, where what counts as a person, an object, or a living being does not coincide with Western categories.

Viveiros de Castro's work with Amazonian peoples introduced the concept of Amerindian perspectivism: the view, widespread in Amazonian cosmology, that the world is composed of different kinds of subjects, humans, animals, spirits, who all see themselves as persons but see other species differently. Jaguars see themselves as humans and see us as prey. Spirits see themselves as humans and see us as game animals. Each perspective constitutes a different world. This is not a different belief about one world; it is, arguably, a different ontology, a different framework for what kinds of entities exist and how they relate.

The pluriverse (as opposed to universe) names the possibility that reality is ontologically multiple: not one world seen differently, but genuinely different worlds that are simultaneously real and partially incommensurable. The stakes of this idea go far beyond academic philosophy, they concern whose knowledge counts, what gets protected when we protect indigenous land, and whether modernity's claim to a unique grip on reality is a philosophical achievement or a colonial imposition.