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Anthropological Relativity
From the standpoint that all reality is by definiton, de facto, filtered through human cognition and through human sensory apparatus, all reality may be said to be irrevocably human reality. The human experience and perception of reality is not without its own shaping and constraining influence on the received shape and form that reality takes. Reality, shaped inexorably through human filters of sense perception, cognition and interaction, is never received in its pristine or originally unshaped form. In passing through the filter of human consciousness, it becomes shaped in basic albeit usually unconscious ways.
Anthropological relativity characterizes all human experience, and contrains all possible human knowledge. In its broadest sense, it represents the fundamental non-physical constraints of all knowledge, phenomenological experience and understanding or feeling we are capable of. Many forms of relativity may be identified, depending upon the knowledge domain or area we are interested in, but all are derivative of a fundamental anthropological relativity.
We may say that anthropological relativity in the most general sense is the ultimate limit to human knowledge by the fact of its being human in origin, function and derivation. In this sense, it derives from a larger condition of the biological relativity and uniqueness of the human species in the evolutionary history of life on this planet, as well as of possible life in the universe.
The only form of knowledge that may be exempt from the condition of this anthropological relativity may be said to be pure mathematics, mathematical logic, and possibly deep linguistic structure, that constitues an abstract system of reference and inference that is independent of any applied form of its representation. This one set of exceptions creates the foundation of a systems science of natural phenomena that is capable of theoretical distantiation from its phenomenal sources. It forms the foundation for the hypothesis of the systematic structure of natural phenomena in a form that may be said to be partly determined in a non-stochastic manner.
Anthropological relativity is dialectically contraposed to various forms of physical relativity of knowledge, or of what may be called inherent physical constraints to our observational or perceptual capacities. Physical relativity takes various forms in a universal or fundamental sense.
The human being, as an animal, a mammal, is bound within a world of its own imagination, cognitive construction and behavioral experience. This world is defined largely by the eco-evolutionary niche that has been carved out for the human species. Sophisticated linguistic communication has permitted the social extension, elaboration and embedding of this world in a manner that is unparalleled by any other form of life we have yet encountered. There is ultimately no separating the problem of language and knowledge, and thus the general thesis of anthropological relativity of knowledge becomes by derivation a thesis of the linguistic relativity of language that is used to transmit and reify knowledge in our experience. The independence and arbitrariness of the linguistic coding itself does not preclude the interdependence between meaning and the structuring and facilitation provided by the linguistic signaling process. Such process is bound socially by convention and implicit tradition to received frameworks of knowledge and understanding that serve to carve the world in symbolically distinctive and integrated ways.
The links to the primary portals of this framework are found below:
