My question is, what would it take to refute Ken Wilber’s claim that the 4 Quadrants are a map of reality? Although it is a metatheory, not a regular theory like quantum mechanics or the germ theory of disease, it should still be falsifiable just as they are. Otherwise, it is just an a priori postulate of the kind of metaphysics that everyone hates these days. Integral Theory says anything we could mention as a reality must be either interior or exterior or either individual or collective. So if we could identify something that is neither interior nor exterior or neither individual nor collective, that would seem to refute the theory. One possibility, I thought, would be a field.
In physics a field is a region of space where a force acts.
"In the modern framework of the quantum field theory, even without referring to a test particle, a field occupies space, contains energy, and its presence precludes a classical “true vacuum”.[8] This has led physicists to consider electromagnetic fields to be a physical entity, making the field concept a supporting paradigm of the edifice of modern physics. Richard Feynman said, “The fact that the electromagnetic field can possess momentum and energy makes it very real, and […] a particle makes a field, and a field acts on another particle, and the field has such familiar properties as energy content and momentum, just as particles can have.”[9] Wikipedia
If, as Feynman says, a field is an entity that has physical properties, then it is a holon and has 4 quadrants. So, if Feynman is correct, it appears we cannot use fields to refute the 4 Quadrants.
So over to you, my integral friends. Can you think of something that cannot find a place on the 4 Quadrant map?
I thought that anything we could mention as a reality will emerge simultaneously as interior and exterior, as individual and collective. Because the quadrants are not boxes where to put parts of the reality stored, but perspectives on the whole of reality. So this might be a logical problem caused by the use of the word „or“ instead of „and“.
Yes. I should have written "interior or exterior and either individual or collective. However, none of the replies answers my original question. We could avoid the problem, perhaps, by distinguishing a map from a hypothesis. Whereas a hypothesis in science must be falsifiable, a metatheoretical map does not.
So you extinguished one „or“ but still keep two „or“ in your consideration
Can you imagine, that there could be no conflict between looking at the inside and outside of things, no conflict between looking at the individual and collective side of things as well? Maybe they are complementing each other… The premise of your original critical consideration was: „Integral Theory says anything we could mention as a reality must be either interior or exterior or either individual or collective.“ I can‘t remember to have read this anywhere in the books of Ken Wilber that I know. Could you please give a note about the source where you are quoting this from? I‘ve thought that a big part of Wilbers intention was to help to overcome the „either - or“ way of seeing things, where it is exclusively making use of the rational way of dividing reality into separated sectors. To me the 4 quadrants are not only a way to divide reality (as the exclusively mental and rational type of thinking would prefer) but to help keeping the wholeness in consideration as well, because all of the quadrants emerge together (which would integrate the magical and mythical type of perception).
