For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories--such as religion, science, and art--has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the possibility of progress and even the value of knowledge. Jason.

• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Note on Texts and Citations
• Opening
  • 0.1 Into the Abyss: Postmodernism Unraveling
  • 0.2 Overview of the Work
• Part I. Metarealism
  • 1. How the Real World Became a Fable, or the Realities of Social Construction
    • 1.1 Realism as Scientism
    • 1.2 Varieties of Mind-Dependence
    • 1.3 When Realism Becomes Antirealism and the Reverse
    • 1.4 Apocalyptic Realism and the Human Sciences, or Real as Socially Constructed
    • 1.5 Metarealism: Modes of the Real
    • 1.6 Conclusion: Modes of Reality; Modes of Existence
• Part II. Process Social Ontology
  • 2. Concepts in Disintegration & Strategies for Demolition
    • 2.1 The End of Religion
    • 2.2 The End of Art
    • 2.3 Strategies for Demolition
      • 2.3.1 Immanent Critique
      • 2.3.2 Relativizing Critique
      • 2.3.3 Ethical Critique
    • 2.4 Family-Resemblance, Polythetic Concepts, and Other Category Errors
    • 2.5 Conclusion: Legitimation Crisis
  • 3. Process Social Ontology
    • 3.1 A World in Motion
    • 3.2 Natural Kinds
    • 3.3 Process Social Kinds: A First Pass
    • 3.4 Conclusion: Beyond Anti-Essentialism
  • 4. Social Kinds
    • 4.1 Homeostatic Property-Cluster Kinds
    • 4.2 A Process-Cluster Account of Social Kinds
      • 4.2.1 Socially Constructed
      • 4.2.2 Dynamic Clusters of Powers
      • 4.2.3 Causal Processes that Anchor Clusters
    • 4.3 Deconstructing and Reconstructing Social Kinds
    • 4.4 Conclusion: Changing the Social World
• Part III. Hylosemiotics
  • 5. Hylosemiotics: The Discourse of Things
    • 5.1 Beyond the Linguistic Turn
    • 5.2 A Minimal Metaontology
    • 5.3 The Meanings of Meaning
    • 5.4 The Lion’s Roar: A Brief Excursion on the Possibilities of Translation
    • 5.5 A Hylosemiotics of Sign-Aspects
    • 5.6 The Mind Turned Inside Out
    • 5.7 Conclusion: A Light in the Abyss
• Part IV. Knowledge and Value
  • 6. Zetetic Knowledge
    • 6.1 Doubting Doubt
    • 6.2 Knowledge without Certainty
    • 6.3 Zetetic Abduction and Prediction: Inference beyond Pattern Recognition
    • 6.4 Conclusion: From Skeptical Dogmatism to Emancipatory Zeteticism
  • 7. The Revaluation of Values
    • 7.1 The Values of Postmodernism
    • 7.2 The Value of Value-Free Social Science
    • 7.3 Illusions of Fact and Value: Overcoming the Is-Ought Distinction
    • 7.4 The Human Sciences as a Way of Life
    • 7.5 Revolutionary Happiness: Critical Virtue Ethics
    • 7.6 Conclusion
  • 8. Conclusion: Becoming Metamodern
• Notes
• Index