So do I which is why I am going to be more explicit. When you insert the word "completely" into there you are as far as I can tell making a strawman' argument. And I pointed this out in my reply to you. I just didn't use the explicit word strawman.
How could I be making a strawman argument if I'm talking about positions no one in this thread could possibly be making?
I set up the example specifically so I could show how two people could have a set of specific, testable beliefs where neither was completely right nor completely wrong...that was the whole point. I was showing that you cannot have two people claiming exactly contradictory things and yet both being correct of the same thing, in the same sense, at the same time.
Others--as cited below, per your request--have said that this is
not true. There was even a citation from the books--which references how planar powers can alter what others see of it--to "prove" that this therefore means that perception defines reality in those places.
And even if you aren't making a direct strawman based on your misunderstanding of other peoples' positions it appears that what you are banging on about is a position that (a) no one currently replying to you hold and (B) is a common misrepresentation of positions people present do hold. And you seem to be making no attempt to separate the two.
(a): see below.
(B): If I have misrepresented a position, I apologize, but I'm not sure which position I am misrepresenting. As said, multiple people told me perception/belief
defines reality in this context, and that every perception/belief is true, which is the specific viewpoint I've been pushing against.
And the reason it feels like you are trying to derail the thread with a strawman' is that
you were at one point claiming there were only three possibilities. I pointed out explicitly that there was a fourth (which happens to be what I consider to be the correct one about this world) - and everything you have said since (especially insisting on the word "complete") appears to be an attempt to define this fourth possibility out of the discussion.
Your link is to the wrong target, I believe. But yes, I have made that claim. There can only be three options on any given hypothesis: either that specific hypothesis is correct, or it is not, or it is missing some key detail ("incomplete"). I gave the example I gave to demonstrate how two people could articulate an overall position where no one is completely right, but
on any given point either someone is actually right or no one is actually right about that specific thing.
Frex: the World Axis
explicitly has a serious problem with "Outsiders", that is, dead souls that went to the Astral Sea, but failed to properly connect with their deity's divine domain. As a result, 4e-style "Outsiders" are stuck, unable to truly enter the afterlife they deserve. (As I know I've mentioned several times, one of my favorite things about 4e Bahamut is that he's actually trying to
solve this problem, when all of the other deities, including good ones, are content to just shrug and say, "Welp, reality broke, can't fix it.") This is not only a provable, testable claim (are there soul-forms that cannot go to their appropriate domain?), it's one that drives a number of serious conflicts in the cosmological background of the World Axis.
Conversely, in the Great Wheel, there is no such problem. "Outsider" there just means any being whose soul IS its body (what 4e would call a "soulform"), and that body is specifically made of the stuff of an Outer Plane. All souls go to exactly the plane they're supposed to, there is no gumming up of the works, and there is no serious conflict/problem waiting in the cosmological wings. Reality works exactly the way it's supposed to, even if that ends up assigning a person to somewhere they aren't happy to go.
Travelling between planes specifically using the Astral was another example (where GW and WA agree, but WT does not). A third is the "sloughing off" of layers from one plane to another (e.g. Arcadia used to have three layers, now it has two, and it having two layers is still canonical in the 5e version). A fourth is the nature and origin of angels, which is something the World Axis and the Great Wheel differ on quite strongly. I'm sure if I went digging I could find more. These things--"Do planes slough off layers that accumulate too much of the wrong alignment?" "Can you ever travel specifically through the Astral
directly to another Outer plane?" "Do souls consistently go to the post-life destination they're supposed to?"--are yes/no questions. On these things, the only possibilities are that model A is correct and model B is wrong, or model B is correct and model A is wrong, or
both model A and model B are wrong. There is no possibility where both model A and model B can claim, of the same thing, in the same sense, at the same time, that P is true and also that not-P is true.
Now, it
could be the case that model A's claim P was true before and model B's claim not-P is true now (not true
at the same time). It could be that P is true, but only within a restricted sub-space of reality, while not-P is true of a different restricted sub-space (not true
of the same thing). It could be that P is true in one sense, while not-P is true in another, e.g. a person is generally some shade or tone of orange-y color, but they can be "blue" because they're feeling sad.
But it can't be the case that two people can
correctly claim of the same thing, in the same sense, at the same time, the statement P and the statement not-P. At least one of them is wrong.
Light is a particle. Light is a wave. Anyone who says that light is exclusively a particle or exclusively a wave is one of the just over eight billion living people on this planetwho is wrong about something. Why is "there exist people who are wrong about something?" a remotely interesting thing to discuss?
It was useful as an example of the way that (1) bundles of claims--"cosmologies" in the current discussion--can have a mixture of correct and incorrect claims, (2) on any individual claim, if the statements are in fact incompatible, then at least one person must be wrong, and (3) that you can have specific claims where both(/all) of the positions taken are false, meaning nobody actually has the correct answer among the set you're reviewing. I was recognizing that cosmological models can be incomplete or incorrect on
specific things--but, in the doing, demonstrating that no more than one position on any given claim (true, false, or incomplete) can be the correct position. My "Alice" and "Beth" are both mistaken about what kind of thing a photon is (it is both inherently a wave
and inherently a particle, and those two natures cannot be sundered from one another, even though that does not comport with classical, macro-level experience.)
(I consider metamodernism worth discussing because I think it the best model of reality we have and because too many people haven't heard of it)
I'm unsure of how to reply here, as I was unfamiliar with the term myself, and having investigated it, it appears to be mostly a theory of aesthetics and literary criticism (a pendulum swinging between the "sincere seriousness" of modernism and the "ironic playfulness" of postmodernism). Would you be willing to more precisely explain its application here?
Ask and ye shall receive:
While it's true that this is how it's often presented in 2E, we're also speaking about a cosmology that requires impossible things to be true, like an infinitely tall spire that also has a very visible start and end point. I think there's something to be said that the cosmology of planes of pure thought need not be objective reality because of how perception plays into things.
I would say that the outer planes are the realms spirit, thought and belief. They are not physical. Beings that go there impose their own reality. It behaves like the physical world because the planar travellers believe it behaves like that.
This really seems to be a you issue. If you can't imagine why it might not be possible to take a photo on an outer plan, I can see why you get yourself straightjacketed into a narrow concept of what the outer planes could be. It is an issue I struggle with too, so I get it. However, nothing in D&D is ever presented as absolute IMO. D&D is very clear that it is your game, you make it what you want.
"Beings there impose their own reality." "...a cosmology that requires impossible things to be true." "...it might not be possible to take a photo on an outer plan [sic]".
All saying that perception/belief is not merely making it so (for example) one person sees the blue sides of a cylinder and says it's a blue rectangle, while another sees the white top of a cylinder and says it's a white circle, but that perception/belief outright
defines reality.
Note that it is explicitly the position of at least one of these (dave2008) that all these models of the cosmology are true.
It honestly sounds like a mangling of both Mage: the Ascension and Planescape where perspective makes reality. Which doesn't"t mean "all beliefs are correct" but "with enough power we can make our belief the objectively correct one"
The problem, that causes "all beliefs are correct" to occur, is that people have said--repeatedly--that there is no objective reality, that perception and belief mean any "story" people tell about it is true, etc. The example dave2008 gave early on was that, within Norse mythology, Valhalla exists and is verifiably there, which (somehow) means there's no problem that the World Axis exists and is verifiably there in the same space, in the same sense, at the same time, as both the World Tree
and the Great Wheel. Even though those three things cannot possibly all be verifiably true of the same space, in the same sense, at the same time.