How Much Ontology Follows Beyond Correlationism?
1. The anti-anthropocentric move is compelling
Object-Oriented Ontology and Meillassoux's critique of correlationism matter because they refuse to make the human-world relation philosophy's final horizon. A universe before humans, unobserved processes, other subjects, and relations among nonhuman entities can all be treated as real. This sits comfortably with scientific realism.
2. But “there is mind-independent reality” is thinner than “reality has this structure”
OOO, especially Harman, advances a positive ontology in which objects are not exhausted by their relations and real objects withdraw. The reservation here is not that this is materialism—it is not. The question is instead: what epistemic warrant licenses objecthood and withdrawal as basic structures of reality?
Likewise, moving from Meillassoux's anti-correlationism to the stronger thesis of the necessity of contingency requires additional argument.
3. The order used here
- Candidate minimum: something is presently appearing.
- Strong inference: an external world, other minds, and temporal continuity exist.
- Stronger best explanation: contemporary science, including a broadly physicalist world-picture, is presently the best model.
- Further metaphysics: positive theories about the ultimate structure of objects, relations, laws, causation, and possibility.
The later steps contain thicker inferential commitments. Physicalism can therefore be believed very strongly without being placed at the epistemic foundation.
4. A thin realism
This position is anti-correlationist insofar as it does not reduce the world to human language or access. But it also refuses to fill the space beyond correlationism immediately with a particular object-metaphysics.
It is therefore ontologically thinner than OOO, while more strongly committed to scientific realism than simple agnosticism.
5. Implication for the Core
Separate “the ontology currently best supported” from “the absolute epistemic foundation.” The same separation carries into value theory: even overwhelming inferential realism about objective value is not yet identical to foundational normativity.
Sources / notes
For OOO, see Graham Harman's discussions of objects and withdrawal; for Meillassoux, see After Finitude on correlationism and the necessity of contingency. This page is not a comprehensive interpretation of either thinker, but a map of their distance from this project's epistemic minimalism.