In the end, we agree with Dr. Nagel’s assertion that pragmatism and anthropology provide a means of thickening our descriptions of bodies and meaning. We further propose that WST helps achieve such a thickening because it asserts that bodies (i.e., embodied contexts) are meaning. From this perspective, anthropology and cognitive science both involve the study of meaning, and differ only in that they focus their descriptions on different levels of nested context, or, to say it another way, different levels of nested meaning.
In addition to providing a means of integrating cognitive science and anthropology, WST’s focus on a coherence approach to truth, as opposed to a correspondence approach to truth, puts it in a position to provide an integrative framework for scholarship in general (Jordan & Vandervert 1999; Jordan & Vinson 2012). In short, all disciplines study some scale of reality, and any scale being measured, because of its inescapable context dependence, is inherently meaningful. This observation leads to yet another point at which we are in agreement with Dr. Nagel. Specifically, we very much appreciate her assertion that WST helps to develop a different approach to what people are. By modeling all of reality as context-dependent, and self-sustaining systems as embodiments of context, WST conceptualizes each and every one of us as world in world instead of as meaningless physical systems. As a result, we are all inescapably meaningful and efficacious. Everything we do alters the contexts within which we sustain ourselves. Everything we do matters.
Given WST’s ability to provide a means of bypassing the meaningless view of reality we have been led to via Hard Naturalism, it is not clear to what extent philosophy is so much experiencing a pragmatic turn (Engel et al. 2013) as it is experiencing a holist turn (Jordan 2013). If it proves to be the latter, sustaining such a turn will be difficult, for it will force us to experience our scientific concepts (e.g., physical, chemical, biological) as epistemic tools we must necessarily utilize if we are to get on with the cooperative, social practice of science. As was stated by Oakeshott (1933) however, science as a mode of experience is inherently an abstraction, an arrestment from the whole. This means that while the practice of science necessitates that we generate conceptual abstractions regarding that within which we are nested, we must always remember that our abstractions can never satisfy a correspondence-driven definition of truth. In short, while me must necessarily represent, we must simultaneously commit to uncertainty. Perhaps it was the potential pathos of this conundrum that W. G. Sebald was referring to in his poem After Nature:
For it is hard to discover
the winged vertebrates of prehistory
embedded in tablets of slate.
But if I see before me
the nervature of past life
in one image, I always think
that this has something to do
with truth. Our brains, after all,
are always at work on some quivers
of self-organization, however faint,
and it is from this that an order
arises, in places beautiful
and comforting, though more cruel, too,
than the previous state of ignorance
(2003, p. 2)