Correlationism

Critique of correlationism

Related to 'anthropocentrism', object-oriented thinkers reject speculative idealistcorrelationism, which the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux defines as "the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other". Because object-oriented ontology is a realist philosophy, it stands in contradistinction to the anti-realist trajectory of correlationism, which restricts philosophical understanding to the correlation of being with thought by disavowing any reality external to this correlation as inaccessible, and, in this way, fails to escape the ontological reification of human experience. Many take this to mean that object-oriented ontologists see inert or inanimate objects as being equal to humans. Object-oriented ontologists, on the other hand, reject this understanding, arguing that the claim of objects existing in the same way humans do is not synonymous with the claim that all things are equal in terms of moral, ethical, or aesthetic value.