Necessary Unitariness, Necessary Independence

[KALADIN]

If one can only use signs without granting their reality as one can breathe without accepting the reality of air, then the adoption of a metaphysic - usually unstated - is inseparable from any signage, any utterance. But there is a tacit assumption implicit in this analysis: signs are fundamentally means and "metaphysics" concerns the objects of which signs are a potential means to.

Is it possible to have a metaphysic which does not answer to the above characterization? I have thought and come up with only two ways to deny the intrinsic, other-oriented aspect of a sign:

1. You outright deny any distance between mind and reality; sign is being.

2. You deny the possibility of a sign ever having worldly friction. A means which is by nature estranged from its intended object is no means at all.

Both of these seem to me easily susceptible to self-contradiction. In "1", the identity espoused obliterates any meaningful distinction between "is" and "is not", for both predicates sign and are composed of signs. One could argue against this by stipulating that the form of self-contradiction is itself a sign, leaving the original thesis unscathed. This is where recourse to a reality that is a one and only - to the Objectivist axiom of existence and Parmenides' principles that "what is is" - is necessary. Insistence on the actual reality of what is not can only be met with the injunction "A is A".

In "2", the self (and performative) contradiction is more obvious; its truth demands that it be false. One could argue against this by distancing truth from correspondence but even on a wholly "wholistic" or "coherentist" scheme there is inevitable recourse to a correspondence between the whole's parts in their even generating a shared context whereby difference is potentially coherence as opposed to simply *other*. The very idea of saying something right about the world seems to unconditionally presuppose the metaphysical independence of mind and world as well as the necessary contact of the former with the latter in *coming to be* lest we become - among other things - totally incapable of distinguishing between categories of mere assertion and truth, of meaningfully parsing our signs whatsoever.

Every anti-realist doctrine is by nature parasitic. Only where realism gives its ideological opponents purchase does its axiomatic status seem to shake. The mind and the world are related (and not as identical phenomena or synonyms) by metaphysical necessity, and they are independent of one another also - by metaphysical necessity. We are not moving from the unintelligibility of contradiction as the form of any claim to something existent to then the doctrine of realism, but from the self-evident unreality of metaphysical contradiction - of the mind being in the world and the world not in the mind - to the admission (not the proof) of realism.

To know the world and to know the world is not my knowing - or constituted solely by it - is an axiom, and a first principle not only of scientific demonstration, but of cognition generally.