Beyond Physics and Metaphysics Epistemics and the Differentiation of Reality into Subjective, Intersubjective, and Functional-Empirical Physics

The classical distinction between physics and metaphysics is increasingly inadequate for describing contemporary epistemic practice with precision. While empirical physics often implicitly functions as the sole standard of the real, subjective experience and social order are either reduced or relegated to a vague residual category of the metaphysical. This paper proposes an alternative epistemic ordering. Beginning from Epistemics as a prior framework of clarification, reality is understood not as a unified domain of objects, but as an arrangement of distinct orders and spaces of validity that, under certain conditions, can be described as different physicses of stability: as a subjective physics of experience, an intersubjective physics of social order, and a functional-empirical physics of effective constraints. These physicses do not designate new ontologies, but rather a local explication of real modes of stability from the standpoint of resilience, resistance, and boundary signals. Central here is the distinction between validity and stability; truth ascriptions appear, if the concept is used at all, only in a secondary and functionally relieved form. Only within such an order of validity can it be determined whether a claim remains stable under relevant stresses. Friction is understood here as an epistemically readable boundary signal of limited viability. The focus thus shifts from the question of whether something is real as such to the question of under what conditions of validity and within what limits of stress claims about reality can be meaningfully assessed.