pluriverse
noun

- a reality composed of multiple, coexisting worlds or ontological frameworks, each valid on its own terms and irreducible to any single universal system.

- a theoretical and political framework that recognises the simultaneous existence of multiple, distinct ways of being, knowing, and relating to the world

Sustainability Directory, Oxford English Dictionary

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WORD ORIGIN

The word pluriverse is a deliberate philosophical counter-construction to universe. Universe comes from the Latin universus — uni (one) + versus (turned), literally meaning “turned into one whole.” A universe is everything folded into a single, unified reality.

Pluriverse replaces uni with the Latin plural pluris (many, more), giving us something that refuses that single fold: a world that stays many.

The word was coined around 1907 by the American philosopher and psychologist William James in his lectures published as “A Pluralistic Universe” (1909). James used it to argue against the dominant philosophical tradition of “absolute monism” — the idea that reality is fundamentally one thing, one system, one truth. He believed that reality was inherently messy, open-ended, and multiple, and that no single theory could contain all of it.

The word lay dormant in academic philosophy for most of the 20th century. It was picked up again in the 1990s by the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, who expressed their political vision as un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos — “a world in which many worlds fit.”

Anthropologists, decolonial theorists, and ecologists then adopted the term broadly. Since around 2019, with the publication of "Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary" (Kothari, Escobar et al.), the word has entered mainstream academic and policy discussions.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

a thousand flowers blooming, a world of many worlds, all roads lead somewhere different, alternative ontologies (ways of knowing), beyond one-size-fits-all (the universal template), coexisting realities, competing cosmologies, cornucopia of cultures, cosmological plurality, cosmopolitics, cultural plurality, different strokes for different folks, diverse worldviews, diversity of truths, each to their own path, ecology of knowledges, epistemic diversity (plurality, richness), heterotopia, many knowledge systems (maps of the same territory, ontologies, paths up the mountain, ways of being, worlds), many-worlds model, mosaic of realities, multiple realities, multiplicity of perspectives, multiverse, no single map covers all terrain (single road to Rome), off the single track, ontological diversity (multiplicity, pluralism), outside the Western box, parallel worlds, plural reality, pluralism, plurality of worlds, PLURIVERSE, polycentric world, polyverse, post-development vision, post-universal thinking, radical diversity, relational multiplicity, several truths at once, the whole is not one thing, there is more than one way to be human, world of worlds, worlds of meaning (within the world)

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

"The current dispute between the U.S. government and some AI companies could divide the AI industry into a PLURIVERSE of AI camps, including European AI labs, Chinese tech giants, open research communities."

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