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The Ground Beneath.

Discover the assumptions beneath how you see, know and act.

Every way of knowing assumes something about the kind of world being known. Most of us inherited both our picture of reality and our habits of knowing without ever examining either, and we may believe one thing while acting on another. This instrument makes the hidden ground visible.

What this is
Three movements27 momentsAbout 15 minutesNothing leaves your browser
iWhat this is

A diagnostic for the philosophy you already have.

Three movements

First, what you take reality to be: your ontology. Second, how you take knowledge to happen: your epistemology. Third, and this is where it differs from a worldview quiz, what your decisions believe, which is not always what you do.

A portrait, not a type

You won't be told you're "an Aristotelian realist". You'll get a layered portrait: your tendencies, a map of where your positions support and contradict one another, the questions your worldview struggles to answer, and the thinkers who'd sharpen it.

No position wins

Process isn't more evolved than substance, nor interpretation than measurement. Every position here reveals something and conceals something. Parmenides has a genuine question for Heraclitus, and it has never been answered to everyone's satisfaction.

The instrument makes three separate judgements and keeps them separate: internal coherence, whether your beliefs fit together; enacted coherence, whether your actions match your stated beliefs; and adequacy, what your worldview can explain and what it struggles to see. Coherence alone is not truth. A delusion can be perfectly coherent.

Your philosophical portrait

The ground you're standing on.

iYour ontological tendencies

iiYour epistemological tendencies

iiiYour coherence map

Where you stand on each tension: what you say, and, where the third movement gave evidence, what you do.

What you say What you do The centre line is the tension itself
ivWhat holds and what pulls apart

These aren't diagnoses. They're invitations to inquiry, and some of the tensions may be worth keeping.

vYour blind spots

Not weaknesses. Questions your current worldview is least equipped to answer, precisely because of what it sees clearly.

viPractical consequences

Worldviews aren't ornaments. Here is where yours is likely to show up in the work.

viiThinkers you may find useful

Affinities first: company for the road you're already on. Then the one who'd argue with you, which is where the growth is.

In The Loop marks the thinkers who live inside The Loop, the forty minds our community sits with across the year. If your affinities point there, or your challenger does, that's a good sign of where to go deeper.

Keep asking

Questions your worldview should keep asking, whatever it concluded today.

Where do you speak of becoming but build systems for Being?

Your result is saved in this browser only. Retake it in a few months and the report will show you how the ground has moved.

Next step

The examining doesn't have to stop here.

The instrument shows you the ground. Walking it is what we do: one-to-one, in programmes, and inside organisations.