From “Correspondence” to “Practice”: A Non-Dualistic Reconstruction of the Concept of Truth

From “Correspondence” to “Practice”: A Non-Dualistic Reconstruction of the Concept of Truth

Zhang Pan (pen name: Tianyuanzi)

Independent Researcher, Jining, Shandong, China

Abstract: Contemporary views of truth are trapped in the dual predicament of scientism's absolutism and relativism's fragmentation. This paper diagnoses the root cause of this predicament as the “subject-object dichotomy” cognitive paradigm, and proposes a non-dualistic, practice-oriented conception of truth grounded in the “Science-Xuanxue Double Helix” methodology. The core definition is: Truth is the absolute affirmation of subjective judgment by humanity in the process of pursuing the objective laws of ultimate reality. This paper elucidates that “absoluteness” and “dynamism” are not contradictory but are two inseparable aspects of truth within cognitive practice. The Scientific Chain and the Metaphysical Chain, as two complementary grammatical systems of cognition, jointly approach reality through their spiraling, ascending interplay. “Phenomenological explanatory power” serves as the ultimate standard for mutual validation between different truth affirmations. This paper contends that truth is neither a static correspondence to objective reality nor an arbitrary projection of subjective emotion, but rather a dynamic state of conviction that is continuously generated, validated, and deepened through cognitive practice.

Keywords: Truth; Practicality; Non-Dualism; Science-Xuanxue Double Helix; Phenomenological Explanatory Power

1. Introduction: Why Have We “Lost” Truth?

“You have your reasoning, and I have mine—so what, then, is truth?”

This is perhaps one of the most familiar spiritual predicaments of modern people. On social media, every event can be fragmented into countless “versions of the truth”; in academia, every theory has its proponents and opponents; in daily life, we are bombarded by “science says,” “experts say,” and “influencers say,” yet we grow increasingly uncertain about what we should believe.

We possess more information than ever before, yet find it harder than ever to answer that fundamental question: “What is real?”

The paradox of modernity lies precisely here: scientific rationality should have provided us with the most reliable truth, yet when science itself is reduced to “scientism,” it becomes, like religious dogma, a new kind of absolute truth that excludes all modes of cognition that cannot be accommodated by its paradigm. At the same time, the advent of the “post-truth” era has reduced “truth” to a mere appendage of subjective emotion, where everyone can claim that their feelings are the truth.

On one side lies the absolutization of scientism; on the other, the fragmentation of relativism. Caught between these two extremes, truth is either solidified into unquestionable dogma or dissolved into a thousand different illusions.

However, the real way out does not lie somewhere between these two poles—because these seemingly opposing poles share the same erroneous premise: they both understand “truth” as something static, something waiting to be possessed. Scientism believes this “thing” to be “objective facts,” while relativism believes it to be “subjective feelings.” But the premise of a “static entity” itself is the root of all predicaments.

What this paper attempts to propose is precisely a thorough redefinition of “truth” itself: not viewing truth as an opposition between the “subjective” and the “objective,” nor treating it as a static “answer” waiting to be discovered, but understanding it as a dynamic process that is continuously generated, validated, and deepened through cognitive practice.

2. The Genealogy of Truth: Two Traditions, One Blind Spot

Before unfolding a new definition, it is necessary to review the significant conceptions of truth in the history of human thought. They are like lighthouses of different eras, illuminating their respective times while leaving behind their own blind spots.

2.1 The Western Tradition: From “Correspondence” to “Consensus”

The Western philosophical inquiry into truth began with ancient Greece. Plato's “Theory of Forms” anchored truth in a transcendent world of Forms, with the phenomenal world being merely their shadows—truth being the eternal and unchanging “Form.” This line of thinking established the fundamental premise for the subsequent “Correspondence Theory”: truth is the correspondence between a proposition and objective reality.

This premise presupposes a crucial dichotomy: the knowing subject and the known object are separate. Truth is regarded as something “external,” waiting for the knower to “capture” it. This premise itself was never truly questioned—it constitutes the “silent foundation” of the entire Western epistemological tradition.

In the modern era, with the rise of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, Descartes' “I think, therefore I am” anchored the starting point of truth in the certainty of the subject. Kant further distinguished between “phenomena” and the “thing-in-itself,” suggesting the fundamental limitation of truth cognition—we can never access the “thing-in-itself,” only “phenomena.”

Entering the 20th century, analytical philosophy transformed the problem of truth into a problem of language. The early Wittgenstein believed truth was the correspondence between propositions and facts, while the later Wittgenstein turned to the theory of “language games,” suggesting that truth depends on the rules of use within specific contexts. Pragmatists like James proposed that “truth is what works”—an idea is true because it produces effects in practice.

Meanwhile, the phenomenological and existentialist traditions opened another path. Husserl sought to grasp essential intuition through “returning to the things themselves,” while Heidegger understood truth as “unconcealment”—truth being not the correspondence between propositions and facts, but the very mode of Being's manifestation.

These traditions each have their insights. Yet their shared blind spot lies in this: they all attempt to describe truth from some particular “perspective,” but never ask—how is truth even possible? They presuppose the separation between the “knower” and the “known,” then devote all their energy to “bridging this separation.” It never occurs to them that this separation itself may be merely a local phenomenon, not an ultimate premise.

2.2 The Eastern Tradition: From “Tao” to “Mind-Nature”

The Eastern conception of truth exhibits a temperament fundamentally different from that of the West. In traditional Chinese thought, the question of truth was never abstracted into a purely epistemological subject, but was always intimately connected with life practice and cultivation of mind-nature.

The Taoist “Tao” is ineffable yet pervades all things. “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao”—once truth is fixed by language, it ceases to be itself. The Taoist conception of truth is dynamic and non-objectifying; it requires the knower to relinquish attachments and walk in harmony with the Tao.

The Confucian “sincerity” (cheng) and “doctrine of the mean” point toward a realm of “unity of Heaven and humanity” attained through self-cultivation. Truth is not external, objective knowledge, but the fulfillment and realization of inner virtue. “Sincerity is the Way of Heaven; to realize sincerity is the Way of humanity”—truth unfolds in the practice of completing oneself and completing things.

Buddhism uses “emptiness” to break attachments, holding that all concepts and judgments are nominal designations that are dependently originated and empty of intrinsic nature. Truth is found in no fixed formulation, but in the transcendence of attachment itself.

The Eastern conception of truth avoids the predicament of the Western “subject-object dichotomy,” yet its mode of expression is highly dependent on context and personal realization, making it difficult to form a clear framework for public discourse, and easily misconstrued as “mysticism” or “relativism.” Its transcendence of the “subject-object dichotomy” is practical rather than theoretical—it tells you to “go and realize,” but fails to provide a “public language” through which the results of such realization can be shared with others.

2.3 The Unfinished Task Common to Both Traditions

The differences between Eastern and Western conceptions of truth are real, yet their common blind spot may be even more fundamental:

The Western tradition possesses clear “public language” (logic, mathematics, experiment), but lacks a legitimate accommodation for the “subjectivity of the knower”—the subject is either excluded from truth (becoming a mere spectator) or reduced to a physical process.

The Eastern tradition possesses profound “subjective realization,” but lacks a “validation mechanism” that can be shared with others—the depth of realization cannot be externally verified, tending toward privatization.

Therefore, a new conception of truth should simultaneously possess the Eastern “subjective dimension” and the Western “public dimension”—not a compromise between the two, but an integration at a higher level. This is precisely the task to be accomplished by the “Science-Xuanxue Double Helix” methodology.

3. The Non-Dualistic Reconstruction of Truth: From “Static Correspondence” to “Dynamic Affirmation”

Having reviewed the gains and losses of Eastern and Western conceptions of truth, this paper now proposes a new definition:

Truth is the absolute affirmation of subjective judgment by humanity in the process of pursuing the objective laws of ultimate reality.

This definition contains three mutually supportive dimensions, each requiring precise elucidation.

3.1 The Gravitational Field of “Objective Laws”—Truth's “External Anchor”

Truth is not an illusion conjured from nothing. It acknowledges the existence of an objective order independent of subjective will—this is precisely the object of exploration for the Scientific Chain: those regularities and facts that are repeatable, verifiable, and publicly testable.

However, it should be noted that the definition speaks of “pursuing,” not “possessing.” Objective laws are like the distant horizon—we can approach them infinitely, yet we cannot fix them as a “final answer.” This dynamic quality of “pursuit” preserves truth from degenerating into dogma.

At the same time, “objective laws,” as an “external anchor,” provide cognition with a frame of reference that cannot be arbitrarily manipulated. They are not truth itself, but they are an inescapable constraint upon truth. Any truth affirmation that completely disregards the constraints of objective laws is no longer an “affirmation” but a “delusion.”

3.2 The Subjectivity of “Subjective Judgment”—Truth's “Inner Dimension”

Objective laws do not automatically become truth. They must pass through the judgment, understanding, and affirmation of a conscious subject to transform from “external facts” into “inner conviction.” This is precisely the domain of the Metaphysical Chain: intuition, experience, meaning-generation, and value judgment.

Truth without the participation of a subject is empty—it is merely an external fact, unrelated to the knower. Truth without inner conviction is ineffective—having not been “lived,” it remains mere information, not truth.

Every knower participates in the generation and confirmation of truth from their own irreplaceable perspective. This is precisely the manifestation of the “Unique Node”^[1] in the cognitive domain: every conscious individual possesses a unique configuration of perceptual modes, thinking preferences, value orientations, and life experiences, thus the path to truth for each node is unrepeatable.

3.3 The Attainment of “Absolute Affirmation”—Truth's “Practical Mechanism”

This is the most critical and most easily misunderstood concept in the entire definition. It requires special clarification:

“Absolute affirmation” is not a one-time, ultimate pronouncement. It is not a declaration of “I am always right,” nor is it an “unalterable final conclusion.”

“Absolute affirmation” refers to: within a specific cognitive practice, after full exploration and validation, the knower attains an unshakable state of inner conviction. This state possesses full binding force upon the knower—at that moment, it constitutes the foundation for the knower's action.

“Absolute affirmation” can be transcended—but not by subjective caprice; rather, it is transcended by new and more complete cognitive practice. Each transcendence is not a case of “the previous affirmation was wrong,” but of “the previous affirmation being integrated and sublimated by deeper practice.”

In this sense, “absoluteness” and “dynamism” are not contradictory:

“Absoluteness” refers to the intensity of conviction attained by the knower at the present moment—it is real, binding, and not arbitrarily shakeable.

“Dynamism” refers to the fact that this state of conviction can be deepened, refined, and extended over a longer temporal scale.

Just as a person standing on the ground says, “Beneath my feet is solid ground”—this statement is “absolutely” true at that moment; yet years later, standing at the same place, they discover an underground subway tunnel beneath. Their earlier “absoluteness” has not become “false,” but has been integrated into a more complete cognition. This is the real relationship between “absolute affirmation” and “dynamic process.”

4. Practical Truth: How Truth “Operates”

4.1 Truth is Practice—The Expansion of the Meta-Axiom

The fundamental axiom of the “Tianyuanzi Thought” system upon which this paper relies is: “Truth is practice.”

This is not a rhetorical formulation, but an ontological assertion: truth is not “discovered” but “realized” through practice. It is not a static “what,” but a dynamic “how.”

When we say “water boils at 100 degrees Celsius,” this is not merely an observed “fact,” but an “affirmation” confirmed through countless practices and subject to re-examination in new practices. The validity of truth depends on whether it can maintain the stability and explanatory power of its “affirmation” through sustained practice.

4.2 The Three Levels of “Practice”

In the context of this paper, “practice” encompasses three inseparable dimensions:

First Level: Cognitive Practice. This is the most direct meaning—through the concrete operations of the Science-Xuanxue Double Helix, the knower explores, tests, and revises a given judgment. The Metaphysical Chain raises questions and intuitive directions, while the Scientific Chain conducts logical modeling and empirical validation, the two circulating in reciprocal alternation. The core of cognitive practice is “awareness of method”—knowing how one knows, not merely “what one knows.”

Second Level: Existential Practice. The knower transforms the truth they have affirmed into the principles of their actions and the direction of their life. At this level, truth is not merely “known,” but “lived.” A truth that is “lived” possesses a far greater intensity of conviction than one merely “thought.” The core of existential practice is “authenticity to the self” —there is no fissure between affirmation and action; inner conviction and outer practice become the same thing.

Third Level: Civilizational Practice. The truth affirmations of different “Unique Nodes” engage in dialogue, exchange, and resonance within the public sphere, forming a broader “cognitive commonality.” Civilizational practice does not pursue everyone “reaching the same conclusion,” but pursues mutual understanding, mutual validation, and the collective approach toward a more complete cognition among different affirmations.

These three levels of practice jointly constitute the complete meaning of “truth is practice.” The absence of any single level renders truth incomplete—cognitive practice alone reduces truth to abstract knowledge; existential practice alone reduces truth to subjective private opinion; civilizational practice alone reduces truth to group consensus without individual grounding.

4.3 The Science-Xuanxue Double Helix—The Methodology of Practical Truth

Practice is not blind action, but methodical exploration. The “Science-Xuanxue Double Helix” is precisely the concrete path of practicing truth.

Within this paper's framework, “Science” is redefined as: a grammatical system of external experience and cognition, through which humanity employs empirical observation, logical reasoning, and mathematical modeling in an external-instrument laboratory to explore verifiable objective laws.

“Xuanxue” is redefined as: a grammatical system of internal experience and cognition, through which humanity employs systematic intuitive modeling, introspective practice, and symbolic thinking in the laboratory of its own consciousness to explore the ultimate ground of being and the holistic interconnections of all things.

The two are not “two sources of truth,” but “two cognitive organs.” Science is the eye that “looks outward”; Xuanxue is the eye that “looks inward.” The cognitive crisis of modern civilization is essentially a loss of depth perception caused by seeing the world with only one eye.

Within the framework of the “Science-Xuanxue Double Helix”:

The Scientific Chain provides truth with an anchor of “public verifiability,” preventing truth from sliding into private delusion.

The Xuanxue Chain provides truth with a guidance of “meaning and value,” preventing truth from degenerating into meaningless mechanical statements.

Their relationship is neither “competition” nor “cooperation,” but “complementarity” —each reveals a different dimension of the same reality. A complete truth affirmation must withstand scrutiny on both chains.

The concrete meaning of “mutual validation” is: after a judgment receives intuitive affirmation on the Metaphysical Chain, it must undergo logical and empirical examination on the Scientific Chain; likewise, discoveries on the Scientific Chain must undergo scrutiny of meaning and value on the Metaphysical Chain. The purpose of validation is not for one side to “defeat” the other, but to confirm whether the two manifest inner consistency in pointing toward the same reality.

Truth is not the product of either the Scientific Chain or the Metaphysical Chain alone, but a higher-order integrated state arrived at through the spiraling interplay of the two chains in sustained interaction.

5. A Core Response: Truth and Relativism

5.1 A Possible Challenge

The conception of truth presented above may face a core challenge:

“If truth is the 'absolute affirmation of subjective judgment,' what happens when different subjects' 'absolute affirmations' conflict? Does this not relapse into relativism—if everyone believes their own is true, then nothing is truly true?”

This is a question that must be directly addressed.

5.2 Response: Subjective Judgment Is Not Subjective Arbitrariness

“Subjective judgment” in this paper does not mean “unexamined private opinion,” nor does it mean “I can think whatever I want.”

For a judgment to become an “affirmation” in the sense of “truth,” it must undergo full practice through the Science-Xuanxue Double Helix—it must withstand examination by inner experience on the Metaphysical Chain and scrutiny by logic and empirical evidence on the Scientific Chain. An unexamined “opinion” is merely an opinion, not an affirmation; a “conviction” that withstands double scrutiny is what this paper calls an “absolute affirmation.”

Therefore, a conflict between two “absolute affirmations” is not a conflict between two “personal opinions,” but an encounter between two convictions arrived at through serious practice. The path to resolving such conflict is not “who has more power” or “whose voice is louder,” but “whose explanatory power is stronger.”

5.3 The Ultimate Standard: Phenomenological Explanatory Power

When two affirmations that have undergone Double Helix validation come into conflict, “Phenomenological Explanatory Power” serves as the ultimate standard of adjudication.

“Phenomenological Explanatory Power” refers to: the scope of coverage, internal consistency, and depth that an affirmation can provide in explaining the experiential facts and inner experiences encountered by the knower. The affirmation with stronger explanatory power can integrate more facts, resolve more contradictions, and reveal more connections.

This standard is called “phenomenological” because it does not rely on some external “absolute coordinate” to judge right or wrong, but returns to cognitive experience itself—which affirmation enables the knower to feel that, in the face of all experience, it “makes sense,” “works in practice,” and “is livable”?

It should be noted that “Phenomenological Explanatory Power” as the ultimate standard does not mean “Xuanxue eats Science” or “Science eats Xuanxue.” When the conclusions of the Scientific Chain conflict with the intuitions of the Metaphysical Chain, the only path to resolution is: return to practice itself and re-examine—re-examine the design of the experiment, re-examine the depth of realization, re-examine the root of the conflict. The final adjudication is not “choosing a side,” but “integration at a deeper level.”

5.4 Resonance Distinguished from Illusion

Another question requiring clarification: if multiple knowers share the same “affirmation,” how does one distinguish “resonance” from “collective illusion”?

The distinction lies in “whether it withstands the repeated test of practice.” Resonance is resonance rather than illusion because it remains stable through sustained practice—different knowers, under different conditions, repeatedly practicing, still converge toward the same affirmation. The essential characteristic of collective illusion, by contrast, is that once practice conditions change or new perspectives are introduced, the illusion disintegrates.

Therefore, the commonality of truth is not achieved through forced unification, but through the spontaneous “resonance” toward which multiple nodes tend in the course of sustained practical scrutiny.

6. The Unique Node and Cognitive Commonality: The Plurality and Unity of Truth

The conception of truth in this paper faces a deeper question: it emphasizes both that the path of each knower (the “Unique Node”) is unrepeatable and that truth possesses some kind of “commonality.” How are these two reconciled?

6.1 The Ontological Basis of Plurality

Since the “consciousness DNA”^[2] of each conscious individual is absolutely unique—differing in perceptual modes, thinking preferences, value orientations, and life experiences—the path to truth for each knower is also unrepeatable.

This means that the same reality may be touched, expressed, and affirmed in different ways across different nodes' cognitive practices. This is not a defect of cognition, but its richness. If all knowers arrived at the same conclusion in exactly the same way, it would only indicate that the cognitive process itself was mechanical and devoid of depth.

6.2 The Mechanism of Commonality Formation

However, “plurality” does not mean “arbitrariness.” Different truth affirmations are not isolated islands sealed off from one another.

The Scientific Chain provides a “public language”—mathematics, logic, repeatable experiments—enabling different nodes to test one another's affirmations on a common basis. The Metaphysical Chain provides a “deep resonance”—when different nodes' intuitive judgments and value orientations point toward the same direction, this itself is a significant cognitive signal.

The “commonality” of truth is not achieved through forced unification, but through the spontaneous “resonance” toward which multiple nodes tend through sustained practical scrutiny. This is analogous to: countless climbers ascending different paths ultimately meet at the summit—their paths to the summit differ, yet they confirm the existence of the same mountain.

6.3 Resonance as the Manifestation of Reality

From this perspective, the commonality of “truth” is not “everyone says the same thing,” but “explorers of different paths, after sufficient practice, point toward the same direction.”

This “same direction” is not the result of human convention, but the manifestation of reality itself within plural cognition. Precisely because reality truly exists, explorers from different paths tend toward it through sufficiently deep practice. If reality did not exist, plural cognition would forever remain in a fragmented state of isolated assertions.

Therefore, plurality and commonality are not contradictory but mutually presupposing: without plural paths of exploration, commonality would be dogmatic forced uniformity; without reality as the shared direction, plurality would be isolated islands sealed off from one another. The dynamic tension between the two is precisely the field of truth's self-practice.

7. Conclusion: The Far Shore of Truth

The core contributions of this paper are: liberating the question of truth from the static framework of “subject-object correspondence” and turning it toward the dynamic dimension of practice; providing a reconciling mechanism between the plurality and commonality of cognition—“resonance” rather than “unification”; and furnishing an epistemological foundation for the “Science-Xuanxue Double Helix” methodology.

The limitation of this paper lies in: the specific operational mechanism of “Phenomenological Explanatory Power” as the ultimate standard has not been fully elaborated, awaiting further practice and research for its refinement.

What is truth?

It is not an idol waiting to be enshrined, not a discourse that can be monopolized, not a set of either-or dogmas. It is not a “correspondence” to objective reality, not a projection of subjective emotion, not a “consensus” reached through group negotiation.

It is a direction—a direction continuously approached, deepened, and transcended through the practice of the Science-Xuanxue Double Helix.

It is a process—a process in which every Unique Node, through its irreplaceable perspective, participates in the generation and confirmation of truth.

It is an affirmation—an unshakable inner conviction reached through specific cognitive practice, an affirmation that can be transcended by more complete subsequent practice, yet before that transcendence, it serves as the complete foundation for the knower's action.

In this sense, the far shore of truth is not the destination, but practice itself. Every moment of aware exploration, every act of sincere examination and revision, every attempt to calibrate between reason and intuition—these are truth present.

Core Conceptual Notes

[1] Unique Node: The Unique Node is the ontological positioning of a Yuanling within the cosmic relational network. It refers to the irreplaceable, active relational position that each Yuanling (the noumenon of consciousness) occupies in the grand network of cosmic “Truth-Praxis” by virtue of its absolutely unique “Consciousness DNA” code and unreplicable life trajectory (coupling coordinates, interaction paths). This node serves as a singular channel and perspectival carrier through which the cosmos engages in self-praxis, self-cognition, and self-enrichment. It receives, processes, and translates informational flows from the network, while also feeding back its unique output to the network through its own perception, creation, and choices, thereby participating in shaping the evolution of the network itself. The Unique Node is the operative embodiment of Cosmic Mapping and the foundational anchor for the value of the Yuanling’s Absolute Uniqueness within a dynamic cosmology.

[2] consciousness DNA: Consciousness DNA is a deep informational coding structure that determines the absolute uniqueness and basic evolutionary direction of each Yuanling. It governs the dynamic generation of the Yuanling and is continuously enriched and shaped thereafter through “Interactive Evolvability.” Analogous to biological DNA, which encodes the physical blueprint of an organism, Consciousness DNA encodes the existential blueprint of a conscious entity: its inherent inclinations, potential spectrum of abilities, and initial orientation for evolution. Unlike biological DNA, however, Consciousness DNA is not fixed at birth; it is dynamically rewritten through life experiences, choices, and interactions with the environment, other Yuanlings, and higher-order value fields.

About the Author

Zhang Pan (pen name: Tianyuanzi). Independent thinker and researcher based in China. Research areas include cognitive science, philosophy of consciousness, life sciences, artificial intelligence, interdisciplinary studies, and cultural phenomenology.

Grounded in the meta-proposition that “Truth is the cosmic self-praxis,” the “Tianyuanzi Thought” system comprises three interconnected pillars: Yuanling Theory (ontology of consciousness), the Scientific-Xuanxue Double Helix (cognitive methodology), and Spirit-Forging the Farther Shore (practical teleology). The framework integrates scientific rationality with inner experience, offering a transparadigmatic perspective for understanding consciousness and life, science and humanities, and the cosmos and truth.