IS “OBJECTIVITY” POSSIBLE? An Alt-Epistemological Exploration

February 4, 2026

Within the past year or two, I began to see references to the “Overton Window.” Hmmm. . . intriguing. What is it?

Hmmm . . . “Window of political possibilities.”  What happens if we deepen its reach to include psychological, sociological, cultural possibilities? What would that look like? And why does it matter?

Think of yourself going around the world with a set of glasses on. These glasses measure your (deepened) Overton Window. Furthermore, you have no idea that you are wearing glasses. You think you are seeing “reality.”

Indeed, beyond the frame everything is blurry, or even, non-existent. You simply don’t see anything clearly except what’s basically, “right in front of you,” or, I should say,  visible to your eyes, which, however, don’t move very far right or left, up or down. Nor does your head swivel. You’re chained to the Overton Window. Yuck.

Now deepen that thought. What if, everything you perceive in your particular Overton Window (the boundaries of which are shaped by all the influences in your life — both conscious or unconscious, subtle or overt, formally educational or otherwise) goes into your brain which itself has been shaped by the particular language you speak! So that what might be visible to a person who speaks Hopi, for example, is not by an English-speaking person. And it’s not just names, says Jean Piaget among others, with which we learn to denote “objects” out there, it’s also the very grammar that structures them into ways of making sense. The Hopi, for one, does not use the linear-causality-implying Subject-Verb-Object sentence structure. For them, “Billy throws the ball” is something like “there is a ball throwing.”

For linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose book Language, Thought, and Reality, was first published in 1956:

“the structures of different languages shape how their speakers perceive and conceptualize the world.” — Wikipedia.

I remember how stunned I was to come across his writings, back in graduate school. And yet, I had been priming myself for just such a revelation, for years.

 

Back in “grammar school” (yes, that’s what they called it then, do they still call it that? Aha! Just looked it up. Originally designated as the type of schooling received by supposedly gifted students from the ages of 10 through 14) I loved diagramming sentences. (Just looked that notion up, too. Aha! while popular when I was young, by the 1960s and 1970s diagramming sentences began to be abandoned.)

I loved diagramming sentences because I truly wanted to grasp how language is structured to convey meaning. I could have asked a deeper question: what is the relationship between language and thought? But even the idea of that question didn’t rise up to awareness until graduate school. Not that I ever learned how to answer it! Frankly, that question is still there, making nonsense of any supposed bottom-line assumptions about how the world “should” be perceived. Nevertheless, my Sagittarian tendency towards dogmatism persists! Mea culpa!

Back to grammar. Hmmm. Are all grammar’s structured the same? According to linguist Noam Chomsky, yes. Their “deep structures,” while “surface structures” may differ, do not. In this view of a priori mental structures, Chomsky echoes the philosopher Immanuel Kant, for whom the framework of space/time was innate. 

In other words, according to Chomsky, John Locke is wrong. There’s no such thing as a tabula rasa, a mind that is blank.

Okay, so what’s the difference between Chomsky and Whorf?

The point is, not only does each of us likely see through our own particular Overton Window (generalized from merely political), but our minds are structured by our own personal history to only see in certain ways.

And with that, all pretense at Objectivity disappears into the mist. As it should.

 

Ready or not, we are heading towards LIFT-OFF

February 3, 2026

I thought I posted here yesterday, as usual, Monday through Thursday mornings, for the first of four posts weekly. But apparently I must have cancelled that draft! Hmmm. .  .

Actually I had been wondering about that post, thinking it a bit too cynical. So glad my hands followed my intuition rather than my intention.

Okay, start over.

 

Let’s face it. My main preoccupation is epistemology, or “how we think we know what we think we know.” Always has been. Or at least it has been since I “woke up” in my mid-20s with the sudden recognition that the dogmas of my Roman Catholic faith could no longer hold me in their fierce mental grip.

How did that happen? I think I’ve mentioned it here before. I decided to try an experiment. What if, I didn’t go to Mass three Sundays in a row. Would I still feel as guilty after the third Sunday as I did after the first?

Well, you know what happened next, that is, if you have also woken up. My experiment produced a result I did not expect: I didn’t feel at all guilty after the very first Sunday of not going to Mass! Frankly, that pissed me off. I had been caging myself, not realizing that I didn’t have to do or not do what I had been indoctrinated to do or not do. That discovery was a revelation, and set me on my Sagittarian life quest. To just keep opening, further and further, wider and wider, no mater what.

My experiment had revealed to me that any dogma is a result of  operant conditioning, a la B. F. Skinner. It was as if I had been a rat in a cage, conditioned to follow orders, and willingly obeying them. Or, I should say, automatically obeying. Will was not involved. That would imply that my will had been free.

But wait: my will was (and is) free! That’s what I discovered. That whatever happened next was up to me. Which meant that there was no limit: I could conduct my entire life as an experiment.

Which I have done, in spades.

And furthermore, as time went on, I realized that whatever happens next fulfills my expectation, whether negative or positive. (This can be subtle. I may think I’m expecting one thing, and actually, underneath, expecting its opposite. Self-awareness is key, and must be constantly cultivated.)

Expectations, or: what I project into the future. Either fear or love. Those were and are the choices: cower before the imagined threat, or greet each and every surprising moment, as a miracle.

The first requires what we now call (on a political level) the Overton Window, a framework that determines/constrains possibilities.

The second dispenses with frameworks altogether.

I choose the second alternative: stay centered and grounded Ann, no matter what life in a body “throws” at you.

This admonition to myself is, for me, for all of us, more and more difficult to maintain. Five planets are now in fixed, airy, very very mental Aquarius; five, out of nine! They include Pluto, Sun, Venus, Mercury, and Mars. Plus, once Saturn enters fiery Aries, to join Neptune (which entered Aries on the 27th January), on February 15th, we will then be experiencing 7 out of nine planets in air and fire signs. This, folks, is lift-off.

Oops! No, wait. By that time, both Venus and Mercury will have entered the next sign, Pisces. So only three planets, not five. Plus, by February 19th, Sun will also leave Aquarius for Pisces.

One way to look at the sequence of signs around the zodiac is to say that each one corrects the excesses of the one before it.

So, with with Sun, Venus and Mercury soon shifting from Aquarius to Pisces, any heady concerns will soon be followed/overwhelmed by emotional reactions, or responses, depending on our level of conscious awareness. (Not aware, we react; aware, we respond).

Notice how confusing it is, and yes, it always is, especially now, as Pluto transits through Aquarius until 2044, with both planets (and our mentation) wandering this way and that?

And keep this in mind: Uranus is still regressing back into earthy Taurus, and of course, being eruptive Uranus, it’s wrecking/liberating/deconstructing everything we thought we could count on in this material reality.

Uranus is due to turn direct tomorrow. Tomorrow! February 4th. I imagine we will see plenty of disturbing action on this day.

Keep in mind that Taurus rules whatever makes us feel secure. And the financial system, i.e., money, has long been the way we attempt to make sure we ARE secure.

So it’s easy to predict that the already vastly disturbed financial system is to be perhaps even wrecked, by Uranus, during these few days surrounding Uranus turning direct.

Uranus entered Gemini for four months on July 8 through November 9th, 2025. That was prelude. Now comes the main deal, starting on April 27,  seven years of Uranus moving through Gemini, another very mental air sign.

So, altogether, we will have, for the brief time that Sun, Venus and Mercury, and a bit less brief, Mars, in fixed, airy Aquarius, along with Pluto (which remains there until 2044), plus Uranus in Gemini, six planets in air signs, and two (Saturn and Neptune) in fire signs. That’s eight out of nine, folks.

This folks, is ignition.

Lift-off our beloved earthy planet.

Or at least my beloved earthy planet. (Yes, my Moon is in Taurus.)

And of course with the integration of very very mental, left-brain AI, into all our thinking processes, space opens and time speeds up — to infinity.

Are we ready? I’m certainly not.