MKS-THRONAXIS AS A RESEARCH PROGRAMME: Stratified Ontology and Epistemic Governance After Postmodernity

Abstr act The contemporary intellectual landscape confronts not merely a proliferation of competing knowledge claims but a structural crisis of epistemic governance. Postmodernity’s celebrated pluralism has culminated, paradoxically, in fragmentation: competing frameworks possess no principled means of mutual adjudication. This paper formalizes the Metadisciplinary Knowledge System®-Thronaxis (MKS-Thronaxis) as a Lakatosian research programme capable of addressing this crisis. The argument proceeds in six stages. First, the paper diagnoses the post- postmodern epistemic condition as a governance deficit rather than a perspectival surplus, identifying three characteristic collapses: being into method, authority into empiricism, and theology into fideism. Second, it addresses the circularity objection directly: the priority assigned to revelation within MKS-Thronaxis is defended not by self-assertion but by means of a structural-pragmatic argument from the performative conditions of any governance architecture. Third, it identifies the hard core of MKS-Thronaxis: stratified ontological realism, hierarchical epistemic governance, revelation as ontological ground, metadisciplinarity as vertical governance, the Non-Created-Centre Principle (NCCP) as architectonic axiom, and Synthesism as the post-postmodern philosophical identity that names and governs the epoch the programme inaugurates. Fourth, it specifies the protective belt through Empirical Metadisciplinary Theology (EMT) as governed empiricism, incorporating empirical anchoring that coheres with the programme’s ontological pillar—Thronaxis Cosmology—understood as a revelatory ontology of centering rather than a rival astrophysical hypothesis. Fifth, it engages at length with rival programmes—Bhaskar’s critical realism, Plantinga’s reformed epistemology, MacIntyre’s tradition-constituted rationality, and Kuhnian paradigm theory—demonstrating where MKS- Thronaxis extends, corrects, and transcends these frameworks. Sixth, it evaluates MKS- Thronaxis against Lakatos’s criteria for progressive problemshift. A terminological stabilization section formalizes the Three-Term Rule governing the architectonic vocabulary of the programme, ensuring that ontology, epistemology, and methodology retain distinct and non interchangeable terminological domains.