A really well-known one is the cycle connecting ontology and epistemology: your epistemology should imply your ontology, and your ontology must permit your epistemology. More arcane is the interplay between phenomenology, epistemology, and methodology.
I have read many of your comments and I am uncertain how to model your meanings for ‘ontology’, ‘epistemology’ and ‘methodology’, especially in relation to each other.
Do you have links to sources that describe these types of cycles, or are you willing to describe the cycles you are referring to—in the process establishing the relationship between these terms?
Your approach to ontology seems to combine these two cycles, with the p/e/m cycle being more fundamental. All ontological claims are said to be dependent on a cognitive context, and this justifies ontological relativism.
The term “cycles” doesn’t really capture my sense of the situation. Perhaps the sense of recurrent hypergraphs is closer.
Also, I do not limit my argument only to things we describe as cognitive contexts. My argument allows for any type of context of evaluation. For example an antennae interacting with a photon creates a context of evaluation that generates meaning in terms of the described system.
...and this justifies ontological relativism.
I think that this epistemology actually justifies something more like an ontological perspectivism, but it generalizes the context of evaluation beyond the human centric concepts found in relativism and perspectivism. Essentially it stops privileging human consciousness as the only context of evaluation that can generate meaning. It is this core idea that separates my epistemology from most of the related work I have found in epistemology, philosophy, linguistics and semiotics.
In what you write I don’t see a proof that foundations don’t exist or can’t be reached.
I’m glad you don’t see those proofs because I can’t claim either point from the implied perspective of your statement. Your statement assumes that there exists an objective perspective from which a foundation can be described. The problem with this concept is that we don’t have access to any such objective perspective. We can only identify the perspective as “objective” from some perspective… which means that the identified “objective” perspective depends upon the perspective that generated the label, rendering the label subjective.
You do provide an algorithm for finding an objective description:
I see the possibility of reaching foundations, and also the possibility of countering the relativistic influence of the p/e/m perspective, simply by having a good ontological account of what the p/e/m cycle is about. From this perspective, the cycle isn’t an endless merry-go-round, it’s a process that you iterate in order to perfect your thinking. You chase down the implications of one ology for another, and you keep that up until you have something that is complete and consistent.
Again from this it seems that while you reject some current conclusions of science, you actually embrace scientific realism—that there is an external reality that can be completely and consistently described.
As long as you are dealing in terms of maps (descriptions) it isn’t clear that to me that you ever escape the language hierarchy and therefore you are never free of Gödel’s theorems. To achieve the level of completeness and consistency you strive for, it seems that you need to describe reality in terms equivalent to those it uses… which means you aren’t describing it so much as generating it. If this description of a reality is complete then it is rendered in terms of itself, and only itself, which would make it a reality independent of ours, and so we would have no access to it (otherwise it would simply be a part of our reality and therefore not complete). Descriptions of reality that generate reality aren’t directly accessible by the human mind; any translation of these descriptions to human accessible terms would render the description subject to Gödel’s theorems.
I see no reason to abandon cognitive optimism.
I don’t want anybody to abandon the search for new and better perspectives on reality just because we don’t have access to an objective perspective. But by realizing that there are no objective perspectives we can stop arguing about the “right” way of viewing all of reality and spend that time finding “good” or “useful” ways to view parts of it.
I can help you when you are in the Portland area. Just let me know what you need.