The Pluriverse

In the AI Story

The pluriverse stands opposed to what Escobar calls the One-World World — the ontological assumption that there is one reality, accessible through one set of methods, describable in one vocabulary, and subject to one form of governance. The One-World World is not the world as it is but the world as it appears to those whose knowledge systems have achieved institutional dominance. The 2025 CHI study demonstrating that large language models default to Western philosophical frameworks when asked about ontology was an empirical confirmation of the theoretical claim: the models encode the One-World World and present it as universal.

A genuinely pluriversal technology would not be a single technology deployed universally. It would be a landscape of technologies, each rooted in the knowledge system and governance arrangement of a specific community, coexisting through what Escobar calls autonomy in relation — the capacity of communities to engage with wider networks on terms they define rather than on terms imposed by the dominant system.

The pluriversal framework has practical implications for AI that extend across four dimensions: the pluralization of design, the pluralization of training data, the pluralization of evaluation criteria, and the pluralization of governance. Each dimension involves structural change that the current political economy resists — the concentration of capital in AI development, the intellectual property regimes that protect corporate advantages, the network effects that reward dominant platforms. But each also has precedents in existing practices that demonstrate feasibility.

Critics sometimes read the pluriverse as a rejection of universalism in favor of cultural relativism. Escobar has resisted this reading consistently. The pluriverse is not the claim that all frameworks are equally valid. It is the claim that no single framework is adequate to the full range of human purposes, that each framework has blind spots the others can illuminate, and that the suppression of plurality in the name of a single model is not progress but incorporation.

Origin

The concept entered Escobar's work through engagement with Latin American social movements, particularly the Zapatistas and the Afro-Colombian communities of the Pacific region with whom he worked for decades. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Duke University Press, 2018) was its most systematic articulation.

It draws on the ontological turn in anthropology — the work of Marisol de la Cadena, Mario Blaser, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and others — which pushed beyond the framework of multiculturalism (many perspectives on one world) toward multinaturalism (many worlds) as a more adequate description of ontological difference.

Key Ideas

Ontological plurality. The world is not one but many — a plurality of realities constituted by different knowledge systems, governance arrangements, and forms of life.

Against the One-World World. The assumption of a single reality accessible through a single vocabulary is itself a specific historical construction, not a neutral description.

Design as world-making. Tools do not serve pre-existing worlds. They construct worlds by determining what objects exist, what relationships obtain, and what actions are possible.

Autonomy in relation. Pluriversality requires not isolation but the capacity of communities to engage with wider networks on terms they define.

AI and the pluriverse. A pluriversal AI is not a single technology serving all worlds but a landscape of technologies rooted in diverse knowledge systems.

Debates & Critiques

The pluriverse concept has been challenged from multiple directions. Universalists argue it makes cross-cultural communication and global coordination impossible. Materialists argue it underemphasizes the economic forces that produce homogenization. Some postcolonial theorists argue it romanticizes traditional communities. Escobar's position has been that the pluriverse is not a normative prescription but an empirical description — the world is already plural, and the question is whether institutional arrangements will sustain or suppress that plurality.