02 Feb 2025 — Nitin Verma

Beliefs, Scholarship, Ontological Priors, and Polarization

A while ago, I began reading Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India, and while skimming the book for a first pass I came upon a passage that made me pause and think for a bit.

I thought that it is fundamentally important to carefully consider what a scholar believes in, before attaching any weight to their views. This is especially true in the case of reading the works of philosophers and critical scholars. I admit that it is in the spirit of scholarship to be able to detach ideas from the ideators, but when demonstrable evidence for ideas is lacking, we need to adopt an intellectually conservative heuristic to evaluate ideas.

I believe that the prior beliefs as I’ve alluded to above can be called the authors’ ontological priors: pre-existing beliefs about the nature of reality. The question of people’s epistemology becomes significant—in my humble opinion—only after their ontological baseline is understood.

That is, understanding how a person thinks about the existence of or the nature of reality ought to come after we get an idea of what they believe about reality—and whether they even believe in reality in the same way as you do. This of course varies from a case to case basis, and all this mental calculus is only suitable for conversations that matter, say, in the academic context.

What I’m trying to say is that a scholar’s ontological priors define their worldview or paradigm. Consequently, one’s ontological priors define how/what they think about the notion of observation, what to them counts as evidence, and ultimately what constitutes their epistemological perspective. This is vital, because an individual’s ontological stand is indicative of the kind of debate (discursive or otherwise) you could have with them, the kind of evidence you could present to them, and whether at all you can reason with them with any hope of arriving at a common understanding.

If two people’s ontological priors are fundamentally opposed or incompatible, then there may never be a convergence towards a shared understanding of the world.

I find an interesting sociopolitical consequence of such misalignment. When like-minded people tend to self-organize into politically powerful groups, it results in societal polarization that can grind democratic processes to a halt. When we cannot find a basis to share an ontological paradigm, we become gridlocked and we suffer as individuals and as society.

Scholars are no different. We’re drawn from the same population, and we also tend to get polarized. But it’s possible for us to get a better understanding of each other’s perspectives if we understand each other’s ontological realities.