The Interdependencies of the Six Experiential Structures
The Interdependencies of the Six Experiential Structures
Six documents have been produced, each mapping the experiential structure of one of Sterling’s six philosophical commitments: substance dualism, libertarian free will, ethical intuitionism, foundationalism, correspondence theory of truth, and moral realism. Each document stands alone. But the six do not merely coexist. Their experiential structures are mutually dependent in specific and traceable ways. This document maps those dependencies.
The Primary Dependency: Substance Dualism as the Experiential Floor
Substance dualism is the foundation on which the experiential structures of all five other commitments rest. This is not merely because it is philosophically prior — it is because the subject pole, which substance dualism identifies and describes, is the agent whose operations all five other commitments require.
Libertarian free will requires an agent who originates choices. The origination model places that agent at the subject pole. Without the subject pole — without the categorical distinction between the faculty that acts and everything that merely arrives — there is no locus for the originating cause that libertarian free will posits. The experience of genuine openness in deliberation is the experience of the subject pole holding its position against the pressure of what arrives at the object pole. If the distinction collapses — if the agent becomes what arrives — the experience of origination collapses with it. Assent becomes reaction. The deliberating self disappears into the forces acting on it.
Ethical intuitionism requires a faculty capable of direct rational apprehension. The direct apprehension model locates that faculty at the subject pole. The moment of seeing a moral truth — of grasping its meaning and recognizing its truth in a single act — is an operation of the subject pole, not an event at the object pole. Impressions arrive. Apprehension is performed. If the line between arriving and acting is not maintained, apprehension cannot be distinguished from impression, and the claim that some moral truths are directly seen rather than merely received loses its experiential basis.
Foundationalism requires an agent capable of tracing, evaluating, and organizing his beliefs in an asymmetric structure. All three operations — tracing an error to its source, recognizing bedrock, watching a system hold or collapse — are operations of the subject pole. They are performed, not received. Without the subject pole operative and distinct, the agent cannot engage in the kind of reflective epistemic activity that encountering foundational structure requires.
Correspondence theory requires an agent who can test an impression against a standard external to himself. The test is an act of the subject pole: the faculty holds the impression, examines what it claims, and assesses whether the claim matches reality. Without the two-pole distinction, the impression and the testing of the impression collapse into a single undifferentiated event. The discipline of assent — which is correspondence theory in moment-by-moment operation — requires the subject pole to be operative and positioned as distinct from what it is testing.
Moral realism requires an agent capable of recognizing something that exists independently of his own cognitive acts. The experiences of moral discovery, moral shame, moral resistance, and the corrected belief that found rather than made — all four require the subject pole to be in a position to encounter something other than itself. If the agent has collapsed into what arrives, he cannot recognize a gap between his beliefs and a mind-independent moral fact. The gap requires a subject who stands apart from what he encounters.
The dependency in one sentence: All five other commitments require the subject pole to be operative. Substance dualism is the commitment that establishes the subject pole as real and categorically distinct. Without substance dualism at the experiential level, the other five have no agent to operate through.
The Second Dependency: Libertarian Free Will as the Activation Condition
Substance dualism establishes the subject pole. Libertarian free will establishes that the subject pole’s operations are genuinely its own — that they originate there rather than arriving as outputs of prior causes.
This dependency runs through all four remaining commitments because each of them requires not merely that an agent exist but that the agent’s operations be genuinely his own acts rather than determined transmissions.
Ethical intuitionism requires that the act of direct moral apprehension be the agent’s own recognition, not the determined output of cognitive processes running through him. If apprehension is determined, the agent does not see moral truths — he processes inputs and produces outputs that happen to match moral truths. The difference matters: seeing requires a genuine act of the faculty; processing does not. The moment of direct moral apprehension is a libertarian moment — the agent could have failed to attend, could have withheld recognition, could have been distracted. That the apprehension occurred is his act.
Foundationalism requires that the agent genuinely trace, evaluate, and organize his beliefs — that these are acts he performs rather than processes he undergoes. Tracing an error to its source requires the agent to direct his attention, follow a chain of inferences backward, and arrive at a recognition. Each step is an act of will. If the tracing is determined, it is not tracing in the operative sense — it is computation. The experience of hitting bedrock, in particular, requires the agent to recognize that he has reached a genuine terminus rather than merely stopping. That recognition is his own act, and it requires libertarian free will to be what it presents itself as being.
Correspondence theory requires that the discipline of assent be a genuine act of testing rather than a determined process of impression-filtering. When the agent withholds assent from a false value impression, he is not executing a program. He is making a choice to refuse endorsement of what the impression presents. The choice requires libertarian free will: the agent could have assented, and the fact that he did not is his own act. Without libertarian free will, the discipline of assent is a mechanical process that happens to produce correct outputs in an agent with the right character. It is not the agent exercising his rational faculty over his own cognitive life.
Moral realism requires that the agent’s recognition of mind-independent moral facts be a genuine cognitive achievement rather than a determined state. Moral shame in private is only morally significant if the agent who recognizes his own wrongness is genuinely the one doing the recognizing — if the recognition is his own act. Moral resistance is only philosophically interesting if the agent who refuses a monstrous conclusion is genuinely refusing, not merely failing to process it due to cognitive limitations. The finding rather than making character of corrected value judgments requires a genuine act of finding: an agent who turns his attention toward what is the case and arrives at it through his own cognitive effort.
The dependency in one sentence: All four remaining commitments require not merely an agent but an agent whose cognitive operations are genuinely his own acts. Libertarian free will is the commitment that makes the subject pole’s operations originations rather than transmissions.
The Third Dependency: Ethical Intuitionism as the Epistemic Entry
With the subject pole established and its operations confirmed as genuine acts, the remaining question is how the agent gains access to the moral truths the framework requires him to know. Ethical intuitionism answers this question. Its experiential structure is the entry point for the content that foundationalism organizes, correspondence theory tests, and moral realism posits as real.
Foundationalism requires that some propositions be genuinely foundational — self-justified, load-bearing, not requiring derivation from prior premises. The experience of hitting bedrock is the experience of arriving at such a proposition. But what makes it a genuine terminus rather than an arbitrary stopping point? Ethical intuitionism: the proposition at bedrock is recognized as true by direct rational apprehension, not by derivation. The experience of the foundational structure terminating at a self-evident truth presupposes the capacity for direct moral apprehension. Without intuitionism, foundationalism’s foundations have no epistemic ground to stand on. They are either arbitrary or require external justification they cannot receive.
Correspondence theory requires a standard against which impressions can be tested. That standard is the actual value status of things as established by Theorem 10 and its derivatives. But how does the agent know what the actual value status is? Through direct apprehension of the foundational moral truths — specifically, that virtue is the only genuine good and vice the only genuine evil. The correspondence test applies an intuitively apprehended standard. Without ethical intuitionism, the agent has no access to the standard itself, and the discipline of assent has nothing to test against except derived propositions whose own foundations are in question.
Moral realism posits that moral facts exist independently of what anyone believes. Ethical intuitionism is the capacity through which the agent makes contact with those facts. The experience of moral discovery — of finding that something was wrong before you knew it — is the experience of intuitionism arriving at a moral realist fact. Moral resistance is the rational faculty’s direct apprehension that a conclusion is false — apprehension making contact with an objective moral reality that the argument cannot change. Without ethical intuitionism as the faculty of contact, moral realism posits facts that are in principle inaccessible. They exist but cannot be known. That is not the Stoic position.
The dependency in one sentence: Foundationalism needs intuitionism to justify its foundations; correspondence theory needs intuitionism to supply its standard; moral realism needs intuitionism as the faculty through which its facts are accessed.
The Fourth Dependency: Foundationalism as the Organizational Structure
Foundationalism is the commitment that organizes what intuitionism apprehends and what correspondence theory tests. Its experiential structure — the load-bearing asymmetric architecture of moral knowledge — gives the other commitments their systematic character.
Correspondence theory requires not merely a standard but an organized standard — one in which the agent knows which propositions are foundational and which are derived, so that the correspondence test can be applied at the right level. Testing an impression against a peripheral derived proposition while the foundational proposition remains uncorrected produces local fixes that leave the source of error intact. Foundationalism is what makes systematic error-correction possible: by organizing the propositions in a dependency structure, it tells the agent where to direct corrective effort. The discipline of assent, applied foundationally, corrects at the level of Theorem 10 rather than case by case.
Moral realism requires not merely that moral facts exist but that they be organized in a structure the agent can navigate. The four experiential markers of moral realism — discovery, shame, resistance, correction — all involve specific moral facts, not moral reality as an undifferentiated whole. The agent discovers that a particular practice was wrong, recognizes a particular act as shameful, resists a particular monstrous conclusion, corrects a particular false value judgment. Foundationalism gives these specific encounters their systematic location: they are encounters with propositions at specific levels of the moral architecture, and their significance depends on where they sit in the structure.
The dependency in one sentence: Correspondence theory needs foundationalism to make its testing systematic; moral realism needs foundationalism to make its facts navigable.
The Fifth Dependency: Correspondence Theory as the Corrective Mechanism
Moral realism posits that moral facts exist independently. Correspondence theory is the mechanism through which that posit becomes operationally effective — through which the agent can actually bring his beliefs into alignment with the facts that moral realism says are there.
Without correspondence theory, moral realism remains epistemically inert. The agent might believe that moral facts exist and still have no method for distinguishing his beliefs that correspond to them from his beliefs that do not. The experiences of moral discovery and the corrected value judgment that found rather than made both require a correspondence standard: the discovery is of a gap between what was believed and what was the case, and the correction is directed at closing that gap. If truth is not correspondence — if it is coherence or utility instead — the gap has no fixed character, and the direction of correction has no fixed target.
The dependency in one sentence: Moral realism needs correspondence theory as the operative mechanism through which its mind-independent facts become correctable targets for the agent’s beliefs.
The Full Dependency Map
Reading the dependencies together, the structure is this:
Substance dualism establishes the subject pole — the agent whose operations all other commitments require.
Libertarian free will confirms that the subject pole’s operations are genuine acts — originations, not transmissions — activating the agent as a genuine moral agent rather than a sophisticated processor.
Ethical intuitionism provides epistemic access to moral truth — the faculty through which foundational propositions are known without derivation, correspondence standards are grasped, and moral realist facts are encountered.
Foundationalism organizes what intuitionism apprehends into an asymmetric load-bearing structure — making systematic error-correction possible and giving moral reality its navigable architecture.
Correspondence theory makes the organized structure operationally effective — providing the mechanism through which the agent’s beliefs can be tested against, corrected toward, and brought into alignment with moral facts.
Moral realism provides the objective facts that all five other commitments presuppose — the mind-independent moral reality that the subject pole encounters, that the libertarian agent can align with through genuine choice, that intuitionism apprehends, that foundationalism organizes, and that correspondence theory enables the agent to correct toward.
The Mutual Dependencies: Why No Commitment Stands Alone
The dependency map above runs in one direction for clarity. But the dependencies also run in the other direction, confirming the system’s character as a web of mutual requirement rather than a simple hierarchy.
Substance dualism requires moral realism to give the subject pole its point. The subject pole is privileged not because it is metaphysically unusual but because it is the sole locus of genuine moral value. Without moral realism, the categorical distinction between subject pole and object pole is an arbitrary metaphysical preference.
Libertarian free will requires substance dualism to identify the domain in which genuine origination occurs. Freedom without a categorically distinct domain in which to operate is not the libertarian freedom the framework requires.
Ethical intuitionism requires moral realism to have something to intuit. Direct rational apprehension of moral truth presupposes that moral truths exist to be apprehended. Without moral realism, intuitionism apprehends nothing — it produces the feeling of recognition without a fact for the recognition to be of.
Foundationalism requires ethical intuitionism to justify its foundations without regress. Without intuitionism, foundational propositions are either arbitrary or require external justification. Neither preserves their foundational status.
Correspondence theory requires foundationalism to make its standard systematic. Without foundationalism, the agent cannot identify which level of the moral architecture his impression should be tested against, and the discipline of assent produces local fixes without foundational correction.
Moral realism requires correspondence theory as its operative mechanism. Without correspondence theory, moral facts exist but the agent has no method for bringing his beliefs into alignment with them. The facts are there but unreachable in practice.
The Single Point of Failure
The mutual dependencies mean that the system has a specific vulnerability: any commitment that fails takes with it precisely those commitments that depend on it, in a pattern that is traceable and specific rather than a general weakening of the whole.
Removing substance dualism dissolves the subject pole. Without a subject pole, libertarian free will has no domain, ethical intuitionism has no faculty, foundationalism has no agent to do the tracing, correspondence theory has no one to apply the test, and moral realism has no agent to encounter its facts. The entire framework collapses because its experiential operator has been removed.
Removing libertarian free will leaves the subject pole structurally present but operationally hollow. The faculty exists but its operations are not genuine acts. Intuitionism becomes impression-processing, foundationalism becomes mechanical computation, correspondence theory becomes automated filtering, and moral realism becomes a set of facts the agent is determined to approach or not approach depending on prior causes. Practice becomes something the agent undergoes, not something he does.
Removing ethical intuitionism leaves the subject pole operative and its acts genuine, but cuts off access to foundational moral truth. Foundationalism has no justified foundations. Correspondence theory has no apprehended standard. Moral realism posits facts that cannot in principle be known. The framework is structurally intact but epistemically disconnected from the moral reality it requires.
Removing foundationalism leaves moral knowledge accessible but unorganized. Correspondence theory cannot be applied systematically. Moral realism’s facts are accessible but their structure is invisible. Error-correction becomes case-by-case rather than foundational. Smorgasbord adoption becomes inevitable because there is no map showing what depends on what.
Removing correspondence theory leaves moral facts posited and apprehended but not correctable. The agent knows that false value judgments are wrong in principle but has no operational mechanism for identifying his own as false and directing correction toward what is actually the case. Moral realism persists as a theoretical commitment without practical force.
Removing moral realism leaves the entire structure intact but aimed at nothing. The subject pole operates, the acts are genuine, the apprehensions occur, the architecture is organized, the tests are applied — but there are no mind-independent moral facts for any of it to be about. Practice becomes sophisticated self-management. The difference between getting it right and getting it wrong dissolves.
Status: Dave Kelly’s independent contribution. Synthesizes the six experiential structure documents produced in this session. Not a source of governing propositions for framework runs.
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