Anne, after thinking some more about your comment, I think that I see what you meant. You were offerring Midgley's quote as a means of expressing Paul's position in a different way... Is that correct?

Either way, I found an interesting bit on Midgley's beliefs at Wiki. It goes right to the heart of the issues surrounding pluralism and it's hidden assuptions.

She argues against reductionism or the attempt to impose any one approach to understanding the world as the only right way to see things. She suggests that there are "many maps, many windows" on reality and argues that "we need scientific pluralism - the recognition that there are many independent forms and sources of knowledge - rather than reductivism, the conviction that one fundamental form underlies them all and settles everything" and that it is helpful to think about the world as "a huge aquarium. We cannot see it as a whole from above, so we peer in at it through a number of small windows ... We can eventually make quite a lot of sense of this habitat if we patiently put together the data from different angles. But if we insist that our own window is the only one worth looking through, we shall not get very far".

On one hand I think Midgley is right.... We cannot look at reality through only one window.

The confusion comes when we recognize that that is itself a (or the) 'one window'.

She says that 'we cannot see it as a whole from above'. That is a very Kantian idea and it is very inadequate because such a truth claim cannot be made with any authority, unless one has seen everything as a whole from above.

Here is the resolution as I see it...

Reality cannot be known by pure rationalism (ie. Rene Descartes).

Empericism on it's own is also inadequate and irrational (David hume).

We cannot trust our existential desires for peace and harmony exclusively (Jean-Paul Sartre).

All of these disciplines and clues must be united under a common and composite philosophical whole.

So... the one legitimate window... is the window that every culture strives to produce (some better than others). And that is... 'A coherent set of answers to the exitential questions that confront all human beings in the passage of their lives' ( Daniel Bell / http://www.rzim.org/slice/slicetran.php?sliceid=1020 )

Paul has already disavowed Pluralism in the absolute sense and wisely so... let me use that as an illustration for putting this principle into practice. But every worldview can be tested with this formula.

----------

Pluralism and relativism are not totally wrong. It is only when they are taken as an absolute that the post-modern worldview falls to pieces.

'Some things are relative... and some things are absolute'. That is the only logical way to state the equation.

Without a self-evident absolute or an axiomatic truth, there is nothing for that which is relative to be relative to.

In an 'absolutely relative' reality, everything becomes equal (not relative) as far as 'reason' is concerned; ie. Hitler is no better or worse than Jesus; cannabalism is the same as vegetarianism. This violates not only our need to incorporate 'reason' as a window, but also our existential moral desires as well.

Absolute relativism becomes nonsensical and incompatible with our existential dimension. So it with reason. It is antithetical to it.

It is only compatible with the physical universe (the emperical window)... and even then, that is only so if we exclude the problem of entropy and the reality of a material beginning with some philosophical explanation that is ultimately not emperical. So it really doesn't cohere even with the emperical world.

The point is, that we are all searching for the absolute. We all want to know what reality is... But we cannot define it subjectively. It is (by definition) objective. In fact, it 'is'... our objective.