Foundations
Every framework rests on assumptions about what is real and how we can know it. Most keep them out of sight. Ours are set out here, with how confident we are in each, and what would show them to be wrong.
The ground beneath Master Storytelling: how it knows, what it assumes about value, how value behaves, and how the whole could be shown to be wrong.
Researchers, sceptics, and anyone who wants to know what they are building on
Value phenomenology (Scheler), Polanyi, Murdoch and Putnam
Most of our institutions run on an assumption they never say out loud: that the world is value-neutral, and that what matters is something we add to it.
So anything that cannot be measured is treated as private preference, and the things people care about most become the hardest to defend.
If value is part of what there is, then perceiving it is a way of knowing, not a feeling to be explained away.
The working hypothesis that value is a basic feature of reality. Held openly, tested in public, and not required to use the tools.
In plain words: we think value is real, we hold that as a hypothesis rather than a fact, and the tools are built to work whether or not we are right. Try it for yourself.
What if value is not real?
This is the Separability Thesis at work: the tools are built to stand or fall independently of the metaphysics.
Integral Motivation Theory’s realist commitment (Axiological Primitivism and the ontological reality of Telic Value) is held as a working postulate and a live abductive hypothesis: stronger than agnosticism, but weaker than an established empirical result. While phenomenological experience discloses the qualitative structure of genuine value-encounter, phenomenology alone underdetermines ontology and cannot prove mind-independent Value. Consequently, IMT maintains a strict Separability Thesis: its psychological architecture (the VMP Triad, Telic Resonance, and its empirical research programme) is structurally designed to stand or fall independently of its metaphysical claims. Epistemically, IMT operates through an Integrative Epistemology across four complementary modes of knowing (empirical-analytic, phenomenological-experiential, relational-ecological, and normative-interpretive), governed by epistemic subsidiarity. The practice is judged by its fruit: whether it strengthens human, institutional and ecological flourishing over time. That fruit tests the practice, not the metaphysics; the realist claim stands or falls as an abductive hypothesis.
No single way of knowing sees the whole. Integrative epistemology holds four together: measuring, experiencing, relating and discerning. Each sees something the others cannot, and each answers to the whole.
The rule that governs them is subsidiarity: a question is answered by the way of knowing best placed to answer it. The failure we guard against is one way of knowing claiming authority over every question. We call this epistemic imperialism, and scientism is its most familiar form. Integration is not “anything goes”: a way of knowing that refuses its place in the whole has overreached itself.
Four complementary ways of knowing, each seeing what the others cannot.
Open the Foundations box →Axiological Primitivism holds that value is a basic feature of reality, not something minds add to a neutral world. We hold it as a working hypothesis, stronger than agnosticism and weaker than an established result, and we keep it separable: the tools are built to stand without it.
It sits within a picture of the person as Homo religans, the binding creature, always bound to some story of what matters. The question is never whether we are bound, but to what. Homo economicus is not replaced but re-read: a binding creature bound to an extrinsic story. And the framework as a whole is a web, not a tower. Its parts support one another, and each can be tested on its own.
The philosophical ground beneath the framework, and the status it holds.
Open the Foundations box →If value is real, it should behave in consistent ways. The Law of Value sets these out as working principles, not as natural law in a legal or theological sense.
One we state with confidence, as a law of consequence: the Law of Asymmetry. What is intrinsically valuable always asks something of us; it cannot be passively received, bought or engineered. The others, Telos, Relationality, Disclosure and Coherence, appear here as principles under test.
How value behaves if the realist hypothesis is true: working principles, not natural law.
Open the Foundations box →A framework that cannot be shown to be wrong cannot be trusted when it says it is right, so we publish how ours could fail. Predictions are registered before they are tested, including our strongest empirical claim: that campaigns whose value and motivation pull in different directions deepen polarisation. Each Council records in advance what would count as failure, and its conclusions are judged by what they strengthen over time.
We also name our hardest problem, the wall: experience alone cannot show whether we truly perceive value or only represent it to ourselves. And we do not count practical success as proof of the metaphysics. Praxis is not proof.
How the framework could be shown to be wrong, and the limits it already admits.
Because a framework that hides its assumptions asks for a trust it has not earned. Setting them out lets anyone test the ground before they build on it.
A clear account of what each part of Master Storytelling depends on, and what it does not. The tools stand on their own; the deeper claims are offered for testing.
If you are a practitioner, you can use the framework knowing exactly what you are and are not signing up to. If you are a researcher, you can see where to push.
It is a hypothesis, and we hold it as one, argued from the evidence of experience and the failures of its rivals rather than from faith. Experience alone cannot settle the question, and we say so. That is why the tools are built to work without it, and why we publish what would count against it.
A short introduction to the foundations: the four ways of knowing, the realist hypothesis, the Law of Value, and how the framework could be shown to be wrong.
Free. We will also send occasional essays; unsubscribe any time.
Explored in the full training, in the modules on value and the Law of Value
Collaborate
