Coexistential Realism — A Relational Map of Reality, Language and Practice Reality → experience/resistance → concept → naming → statement → social practice/institution → action → renewed encounter with reality Language is not the sole creator of reality; language is not a passive nameplate either; descriptions may be many; not all descriptions are equally adequate; social reality may depend upon linguistic practice; natural resistance does not disappear through linguistic agreement. Problem The twentieth-century “linguistic turn” taught philosophy an indispensable caution: we do not discuss the world through an unmediated gaze; we apprehend it through words, sentences, concepts, grammar, symbols, classifications and practices. Yet this achievement generated two opposite extremes. On one side, naive realism treated language as transparent glass; on the other, strong linguistic constructionism made the world almost a product of language. The difficulty with naive realism is its assumption that “what exists can simply be said exactly as it is.” Even when an object is present, the way in which its boundary, name, type, relevant properties and relations are identified depends upon conceptual selection. Mountain, river, disease, crime, family, caste, market, language and citizenship do not all designate the same kind of thing. The opposite difficulty confronts strong constructionism. If all reality were merely a linguistic construction, why would fire burn, poison damage the body, a bridge’s load-bearing limit remain unchanged when our statement changes, and mistaken medical terminology fail to remove a patient’s biological crisis? At some points the world resists our descriptions. Naming is not a neutral act. Calling something “normal”, “abnormal”, “legal”, “illegal”, “standard”, “dialect”, “disease”, “risk”, “talent” or “incapacity” can produce social consequences. Words do not merely identify things; they can open or close doors to opportunity, prestige, rights, institutional access and punishment. But this performative power has limits. A valid judicial order can genuinely alter legal status, but a court’s statement cannot suspend gravity. Marriage, money, office, ownership, borders and certificates are constituted through institutional rules; biological death, earthquakes, temperature and the tensile strength of metal are not constituted by declarations of this kind. The relation between language and power deepens the problem. Whoever has the power to name, determine categories, write records, design curricula, publish statistics or control search rankings gains a special capacity to shape social visibility. Yet a proposition does not become true merely because power circulates it; power can, however, alter access to truth, its dissemination and its recognition. Translation sharpens the question. A concept in one language may have no exact synonym in another. Terms such as manas or mind, ātman or self, consciousness, reason, dharma, law, community, caste, class and dignity carry different intellectual histories. Translation is not impossible, but equivalence is often laborious and layered. Non-linguistic experience reveals a limit of the linguistic turn. Infants, animals, the experience of hearing music, intense pain, taste, sense of direction, bodily balance and sudden fear occur in some form before linguistic statement. We describe them later; description organises experience, but the whole existence of experience is not exhausted by description. On the other hand, in institutional life language becomes almost a structural force. Legal definitions, bank accounts, university degrees, land records, citizen registers, medical diagnoses, examination grades and digital user statuses cannot function stably without written or symbolic systems. Here linguistic-symbolic structures cause real consequences. The digital world gives the problem a new form. Database fields, ontologies, tags, embeddings, moderation labels, risk scores and recommendation categories function like a machine language. Once a category has been encoded, it may be reproduced across thousands of decisions. The linguistic turn is therefore now also a turn towards computational classification. Artificial intelligence can intensify the illusion created by linguistic fluency. A system may generate grammatical, stylistically polished and apparently reasoned text, but the relation of a fluent sentence to the external world is a separate question. Linguistic plausibility and worldly truth are not the same. Failure to preserve this distinction would be a new linguistic enchantment of the digital age. Amid all these problems, the question is not simply whether language creates reality. The right questions are plural: which kinds of reality depend upon language, and in what sense? Which claims are tested by external resistance? Which institutions persist through collective recognition? Which experiences exceed description? And which classifications are revisable human constructions? Core Proposition The first principle of coexistential realism is that reality is not uniform but layered. Physical, biological, experiential, interpersonal, institutional, historical, symbolic and digital levels are interconnected without sharing the same kind of dependence. “Existence” does not name a single causal formula at every level. Second principle: there is a domain of resistance independent of language. Stones, rain, bodies, pathogens, geography, physical limits and biological processes are not wholly determined by our naming. We may name them wrongly, but objective resistance can eventually make the wrong name difficult to sustain. Third principle: linguistic mediation is real. Even if the external world is independent, human beings understand it through concepts, comparisons, measurements, memory, narrative, calculation and communication. “Independent reality” therefore does not automatically yield a “completely neutral description”. Fourth principle: descriptions can be multiple. A river may be a water system to a geographer, a source of irrigation to a farmer, a sacred site to a devotee, a boundary to an administrator, a hydraulic system to an engineer, and a memory to a poet. It need not follow that only one of these descriptions is true and all the others false. Fifth principle: plurality is not arbitrariness. If the same river is called a “waterless desert” against experience, maps, water flow and local testimony, the description fails. Perspectives may be multiple; criteria of adequacy nevertheless remain. Sixth principle: relations too can be real. Realism should not be confined to independent “things”. Dependence, causation, reciprocity, inheritance, contract, proximity, debt, trust and obligation can have real effects in the human world. Coexistential realism recognises relational reality alongside the reality of objects. Seventh principle: socially constructed facts are not therefore unreal. Money, universities, marriage, constitutions, offices, institutions and records depend upon human rules and recognition; once established, however, they generate real opportunities, restrictions, rights and consequences. “Constructed” does not mean “imaginary”. Eighth principle: linguistic acts form part of causal chains. Insults, promises, declarations, orders, contracts, testimony, naming, diagnosis and judgement are not merely sentences; in appropriate circumstances and systems of authority they can be events. Language acts within the world here; it does not work magic upon the world from outside it. Ninth principle: truth is answerability. A statement should not be treated as true merely because a community accepts it; it must answer to available evidence, resistance, consequences, coherence and the questions of an opponent. Claims about social facts must likewise answer to the relevant rules, records and practices. Tenth principle: concepts are revisable. Categories can be useful, but treating them as permanent natural boundaries can be misleading. In science, law, sociology and everyday life, definitions may be changed when a category error is discovered. Realism does not make categories rigid. गजेन्द्र ठाकु र Eleventh principle: coexistence is not synonymous with harmony. Persons, groups, living systems, institutions and nature coexist amid conflict, competition, dependence and unequal relations of power. Philosophy’s task is not to declare conflict abolished, but to understand its structure, limits and possible just forms. Twelfth principle: viewpoints are limited, not meaningless. Place, language, history, body, profession and experience shape what we notice. This situatedness does not make every claim equally relative; on the contrary, different viewpoints can be combined to reduce blind spots. Thirteenth principle: the non-linguistic world is one source of linguistic correction. Failed experiments, broken bridges, wrong predictions, unexpected reactions to disease, failed crops or malfunctioning devices force a theory to reconsider its vocabulary or model. Fourteenth principle: linguistic criticism is not an enemy of realism but one of its tools. If a vocabulary conceals assumptions, inequality or ambiguity, analysing it can make objective inquiry more rigorous. Asking “how was this statement formed?” is not equivalent to saying “there is no external reality”. Fifteenth principle: conceptual equivalence across languages is gradual. Even where no perfect counterpart exists in translation, explanation, examples, definitions, context and comparative use can produce approximation of meaning. Translation failure is not evidence of total isolation. Sixteenth principle: silence and the unsaid are also philosophical facts. An experience that has found no words, a community absent from the archive, or suffering that never acquired a public language is not thereby proved not to exist. The linguistic turn must also criticise archival silence. Seventeenth principle: digital classification is linguistic-social power. Code, schemas, labels, scores and rankings are extended forms of words. They cannot be exempted from ethical and political questions under the cover of technical neutrality. The moment a field is created, an ontological decision has already begun. Eighteenth principle: coexistential realism is anti-relativist pluralism. It holds that multiple valid descriptions, levels and perspectives are possible, while claims can still be tested by evidence, internal clarity, external resistance, reciprocal criticism and consequences. Principal Arguments The first argument is from resistance. Reality becomes conspicuous when it opposes expectation. A scientific experiment fails, a farmer’s estimate proves wrong, a language model gives a factless answer, or a policy does not produce the expected result: these moments in which something says “no” indicate an independent dimension of the world. The second argument comes from the history of correction. Scientific vocabularies have changed, but the changes were not merely wordplay. New instruments, measurements, observations and experiments exerted pressure on older concepts. Without resistance from the world, there would be no basis for calling one theory “better” rather than merely more fashionable. The third argument comes from measurement. Metres, kilograms, temperature scales, diagnostic thresholds and statistical categories include human conventions, yet the regularities of what is measured constrain those conventions from outside them. The scale is made, but the measured differences are not wholly made. The fourth argument is from causal intervention. When an intervention based upon a theory regularly produces the expected result, that is stronger evidence than linguistic coherence alone. Successful intervention in medicine, engineering, agriculture or electronics indicates some structure that answers to description from beyond the description itself. The fifth argument is from embodied cognition. The body is not merely an object of language; it shapes attention, memory, orientation, fatigue, pain, hunger, skill and emotion. Language names, classifies and communicates these experiences, but the body’s causal role precedes and exceeds words. The sixth argument comes from infant and animal cognition. Pre-linguistic infants can display forms of object permanence, recognition of familiar faces, sound discrimination or causal expectation; many animals navigate, remember, use tools or learn socially. These facts show that not all cognition is confined to propositional language. The seventh argument comes from the two-level character of social facts. A paper note is a physical object; “money” is its institutional status. The first has material properties, the second depends upon collective rules. Reducing either to the other fails, yet the second is not wholly independent of the first. Coexistential realism captures precisely this layered dependence. The eighth argument comes from promises and contracts. The sentence “I shall do it” can, in suitable circumstances, create a future moral or legal obligation. Here words are events. Yet making a promise does not complete the promised act; subsequent real action tests the truthfulness or fulfilment of the promise. The ninth argument comes from diagnosis. A medical name organises a cluster of disease phenomena, opens pathways of treatment and can alter a patient’s self-understanding. But a diagnosis may be wrong because bodily processes can resist the label. The social effect of the name and the biological fact must therefore both be recognised. The tenth argument concerns judicial facts. A court gives an institutional judgement of “guilty” or “not guilty”, thereby changing social and legal reality. But the historical question “what actually happened?” is not wholly exhausted by the judicial decision. Judicial truth and historical truth are complexly related but not identical. The eleventh argument comes from maps. A map is not the territory, but a successful map preserves some structural correspondence or relation to the territory. Different maps may be valid for different purposes: roads, elevation, water flow or population. Descriptive pluralism is clear here—many maps can represent different relevant structures of the same terrain. The twelfth argument comes from linguistic ambiguity. A word may carry different meanings in different contexts, and a dispute may sometimes concern definitions rather than facts. Philosophical inquiry should therefore ask first: is the disagreement about the object, the word, a value, the evidence, or a decision rule? This distinction dissolves many false disputes. The thirteenth argument is from translation triangulation. When two languages lack exact lexical equivalence, meaning can be triangulated through a shared object, practices, examples, gestures, consequences and definitions. A shared external world provides a basis for translation; linguistic difference does not make translation impossible. The fourteenth argument comes from archives. An archive is a linguistic and institutional selection—what was written, what survived, whose voice is absent. Yet the materiality, dates, signatures, paper, ink, provenance and cross-references of records impose external constraints upon archival claims. The archive is constructed, but not arbitrary. The fifteenth argument comes from memory. Personal and collective memory is reconstructed in narrative form. That does not make memory false; it makes memory a source requiring comparison with other sources. Linguistic form can reshape remembered material, but a past event is not merely a present narrative. The sixteenth argument concerns identity. How a person identifies themself by name, community, profession, gender, language or region can alter social practice. Yet identity is layered: self-ascription, external classification, legal category, bodily history and social recognition may differ from one another. The seventeenth argument concerns the vocabulary of power. Categories adopted by government can affect budgets, welfare, policing, education and representation. Categories therefore have political consequences. But policy outcomes also test the adequacy of a category; bad classifications generate real harm. The eighteenth argument comes from scientific models. Models are purposeful simplifications. An ideal gas, an economic agent, a population model or a climate model is not a complete replica of the world. Nevertheless, success or failure in prediction, explanation and intervention tests its link to the world. Imperfection of representation does not establish anti-realism. गजेन्द्र ठाकु रक समानान्तर दर्शन — खण्ड २ The nineteenth argument is from negative capability. Sometimes refraining from naming an object or experience immediately is an epistemic virtue. Premature classification can force a new experience into an old box. Coexistential realism recognises the validity of categories such as “unknown”, “uncertain”, “borderline” and “mixed”. The twentieth argument comes from feedback loops. Classification can change people’s behaviour, and changed behaviour can in turn become data for the category. Examination scores, credit ratings, crime-risk assessments and social reputation may produce self-fulfilling or self-defeating effects. Social reality is not a fixed object but also a reflexive process. The twenty-first argument comes from ecology. “Forest” may refer to an administrative boundary, an ecological system, a livelihood zone, a sacred landscape or a carbon stock. The same real area is situated in many relations. Conflict arises when a classification designed for one purpose is treated as a complete ontology. The twenty-second argument comes from technical standards. File formats, protocols, units, metadata schemas and naming conventions are made by people; once adopted, however, they become real conditions of interoperability. A convention is socially constructed yet can acquire causal force in infrastructure. The twenty-third argument comes from AI language models. A model can produce statistically plausible text, but its truth- condition is not its token probability. Without links to the world through sources, retrieval, external databases, calculation, sensors, human testimony or direct verification, fluency has limited epistemic value. The twenty-fourth argument is from semantic compression. Every word compresses vast diversity. Saying “tree” gathers many species, states, sizes and ecological roles under one label. Language cannot function without compression, but philosophy must remember that the label does not eliminate real diversity. The twenty-fifth argument concerns the distribution of error. A classification may be useful on average and yet unjust at the margins. Alongside asking whether a category is “accurate”, we must ask: for whom, in what context, and at what cost of error? Realist adequacy is not merely aggregate fit; it includes the consequences of error. Pūrvapakṣa First objection: if access to the world is always mediated by language and concepts, talk of a language-independent reality is meaningless. The existence of something that can never be encountered without mediation is an unnecessary metaphysical claim. Second objection: “resistance” itself is a linguistic interpretation. Calling an experiment a failure, data an anomaly, or an object “the same” all involve conceptual decisions. An appeal to resistance therefore cannot rescue realism. Third objection: social categories are plainly laden with power, so the language of truth can become a means of legitimating structures of domination. Calling something “real” risks naturalising a temporary social arrangement. Fourth objection: neutral comparison between different conceptual schemes is impossible. Each scheme creates its own criteria, evidence and ontology; from where could an “external” standard arise for calling one more adequate than another? Fifth objection: full respect for linguistic plurality is possible only if truth is regarded as community-specific. Universal realism often imposes the categories of a dominant language upon weaker languages. Sixth objection: experience itself is shaped by language. People experience pain, love, illness, sacredness, crime or nature through vocabularies available within their culture. The claim of “pre-linguistic” experience is therefore too simple. Seventh objection: the power of institutional facts is so pervasive that the natural/social distinction cannot hold. Land may be “natural”, but its ownership, use, value, boundary and environmental status are all mediated by language and rules. Where, in practice, is a purely natural fact? Eighth objection: science too is discourse; funding, laboratory practice, publication, peer review and vocabulary are constituted through social institutions. Scientific realism therefore neglects the social conditions under which knowledge is produced. Ninth objection: “many descriptions, but not all equal” does not itself provide a decisive criterion. Authority can again return to experts, the state or the majority. There is a danger that hierarchy will be re-established in the name of pluralism. Tenth objection: coexistential realism accepts too much at once—external reality, social construction, perspective, relation, institution, language and embodiment. Such a broad framework may become unfalsifiable and merely a theory of reconciliation. Uttarapakṣa First response: mediation does not negate existence. We gain access through telescopes, microscopes, statistics, memory, language and instruments; mediated access does not imply an invented object. The question is not “is there mediation?” but “how does the mediation work, and what errors does it introduce?” Second response: resistance is interpreted, but not all interpretations have the same consequences. A model that repeatedly fails in intervention, a prediction that repeatedly breaks down, or an archival claim that conflicts with provenance encounters a pattern of failure that exerts pressure beyond interpretation itself. Third response: realism is not the same as naturalisation. A social category can be genuinely historical and political, and precisely for that reason realism can investigate its causal effects. Saying “this category exists” is not saying “it is eternal or just”. Ontology and normativity are different questions. Fourth response: conceptual schemes are not completely closed islands. Shared bodies, environments, causal interactions, translation practices, successful coordination, prediction, pain, resource constraints and material traces provide partial bases for cross-scheme comparison. Neutrality is not complete, but comparability remains possible. Fifth response: linguistic justice does not require communitarianising truth. Respecting a minority language or local knowledge requires listening to its concepts, sources, experiences and categories; but no empirical claim is thereby exempt from counter- testing. Respect and criticism can coexist. Sixth response: experience is shaped by language but not exhausted by it. Language can alter attention, memory and interpretation; the causal processes of nociception, vestibular response, sensory discrimination and fatigue are not wholly produced by linguistic training. Influence and constitution must be distinguished. Seventh response: the natural/social distinction is not a rigid wall but a dependency map. Land can simultaneously be physical terrain, ecological habitat, legal property, ancestral memory, commodity and sacred place. The advantage of coexistential realism is that it does not impose one level upon all the others. Eighth response: science is a social institution, so its institutional biases should be examined; this does not reduce its objective achievements to zero. Replication, measurement, instrumentation, prediction, cross-laboratory checking and intervention are social practices designed to increase responsiveness to the world. Ninth response: adequacy has multiple criteria—fit with evidence, predictive success, explanatory reach, causal intervention, internal coherence, source independence, translation across contexts, transparency of error and revisability. The weight of each criterion changes with the question. Tenth response: the framework is falsifiable in this sense: if, in some domain, language alone proved to be the sole cause and external resistance wholly irrelevant, its layered thesis would weaken. Conversely, if social institutions proved wholly independent of language and practice, its thesis of social dependence would fail. Eleventh response: the term “coexistence” demands explanatory discipline. For every claim ask: what level is involved? What is the dependence? What is the causal direction? What role does language play? What is the material constraint? Who holds authority? What would trigger revision? Without these seven questions, “coexistence” can become merely decorative. गजेन्द्र ठाकु र Twelfth response: linguistic criticism complements fact-checking. Examining the linguistic effect of a category such as “illegal migrant” is one question; determining a person’s actual legal status is another. Critique investigates the normative effects of words; factual inquiry investigates status evidence. The two should not be conflated. Thirteenth response: treating silence as evidence requires care. Absence from an archive may result from suppression, ordinary recording practices, or the non-occurrence of an event. The meaning of silence must therefore be inferred from context, patterns of preservation and comparative records. Fourteenth response: AI-generated language is a testing ground for this theory. Fluent text is not in itself evidence of contact with the world; but when a tool is connected to verified external sources, sensors, calculation and an audit trail, its epistemic reliability can improve. Language performance and evidence architecture must be kept distinct. Fifteenth response: realism ultimately has an ethical advantage—it prevents the reality of harm from dissolving into mere competition among narratives. Descriptions of pain, displacement, hunger, pollution, violence or discrimination may be contested, but affected bodies, resources and life outcomes demand public accountability. Indian Dialogue In the Nyāya tradition, fine analysis of substances, qualities, actions, relations and means of knowledge is important for the question of language and reality. Words can be instruments of knowledge, but verbal authority depends upon the speaker, the relation of word and meaning, context and the absence of defects. “It was said” is therefore not by itself truth. Nyāya’s relation between word and referent offers a form of realism: meaning can relate to external objects, universals or individuals. Yet comprehension also requires knowledge of convention, syntactic expectancy, proximity and contextual fitness. Classical realism, therefore, is not itself a simple mirror theory. Navya-Nyāya made language into a highly refined instrument of analysis. Technical distinctions such as qualifier, qualificand, relation, absence, locus and delimitor open up ambiguous propositions. They show that more precise language can assist the study of reality, even though technical vocabulary is not itself reality. The Gaṅgeśa tradition examines the conditions of a knowledge episode. Whether cognition is true or false is not determined by verbal form alone; causal chains, the operation of a means of knowledge and defeaters matter. Coexistential realism connects this discipline of evidence with linguistic criticism. Mīmāṃsā provides a serious counter-position through its account of verbal authority. Analysis of Vedic sentences, sentence meaning, speaker-independence and linguistic convention raises the question whether language is not merely a way of naming external objects but can also carry normative knowledge. The debate between abhihitānvaya and anvitābhidhāna illuminates the structure of sentence meaning: do word meanings arise first and then become related, or do words convey already-related meanings from the outset? For modern semantics, the lesson is that meaning does not reside only in isolated tokens but also in relational structure. Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya tradition proposes a profound unity of language and thought. Discussions of sphoṭa and the primacy of the sentence can enter an unexpectedly rich dialogue with the linguistic turn. Coexistential realism learns from this the depth of the language-consciousness relation without abandoning external constraint. The Buddhist apoha theory raises a sharp question about the constructive character of categories. Even if the meaning of “cow” is not a positively existing universal, a practical class can be formed through exclusion of what is other. This concept is useful for criticising the boundaries of modern classification. The Dignāga-Dharmakīrti distinction between perception and conceptual construction also reveals a limit of the linguistic turn. Conceptual construction produces generality, while perception is considered at the level of particulars. This is not identical to modern philosophy of language, but the question of concept-mediated knowledge is parallel. The Madhyamaka tradition criticises the notion of entities possessing intrinsic essence. Things may be understood not as independent essences but within networks of relation and dependent arising. Coexistential realism can learn from this priority of relation without treating empirical responsiveness to the world as conventionally meaningless. Jain anekāntavāda teaches the discipline of multiple viewpoints. The same object can receive different predicates from different standpoints. If this plurality is understood not as “all propositions are equally true” but as a method of specifying standpoints, it can enter a fruitful dialogue with modern perspectival realism. Syādvāda’s conditional propositions cultivate the habit of specifying uncertainty and standpoint. Qualifiers such as “in this respect”, “at this time” and “in this relation” make claims more answerable. This is a particularly useful discipline for the categorical statements of the digital age. The Advaita distinction between empirical and ultimate levels raises the question of layered reality. Coexistential realism need not accept Advaita’s conclusions, but it does take seriously the philosophical importance of asking: “at which level does this claim operate?” Indian debates in grammar, Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya show that reflection on language did not begin with the modern European linguistic turn. Long discussions of word, sentence, meaning, reference, denotation, implication, intention, universals, negation and testimony formed a central current of South Asian philosophy. The conclusion of this dialogue is not imitation but parallelity. Modern analytic philosophy, hermeneutics, post-structural critique and Indian traditions of verbal knowledge have distinct histories; yet they can question one another about access to reality through language, the limits of classification and the relational character of meaning. Mithila’s Parallel Perspective In Mithila’s intellectual history, the subtle terminology of Nyāya and Navya-Nyāya was not merely scholastic ornament; it became an instrument for reducing ambiguity in reasoning. Questions such as “whose property?”, “in what locus?”, “through what relation?” and “with what delimitation?” enter directly into dialogue with coexistential realism’s relational discipline. The historical coexistence in Mithila of Sanskrit, Maithili, the Tirhuta script, Devanagari, oral traditions and several administrative linguistic layers provides a concrete example of coexistence. The same person or community may use different linguistic registers in different contexts; a change of language does not amount to a simple disappearance of identity. Local place-names can connect geography with memory, sacred sites, water sources, cultivation, lineage, profession or historical events. Standardised spelling may be useful on a modern map, but erasing the layers of meaning in local names impoverishes the social reality of place. The coexistence of oral narrative and written record is especially important. It is equally mistaken to assume that written evidence is automatically superior or that oral memory is automatically authentic. The value of both should be tested through date, provenance, transmission, performance context, later interpolation and cross-source comparison. For many philosophical concepts in Maithili, translation cannot be completed merely by transliterating Sanskrit or English words. Developing new terms from local usage, grammatical naturalness, semantic range and readers’ experience is part of linguistic self-rule, but conceptual precision must not be abandoned. Tirhuta and Devanagari can present the same Maithili content in different scripts. Changing the script does not wholly change the linguistic content, but it can alter visual identity, archival continuity, searchability and readers’ access. This is a living example of the relation between form and content. Pañjī records, genealogies, land records, manuscripts, letters, folk songs and modern digital archives record different kinds of “reality”. Treating any one of them as equivalent to the whole of history immediately creates blind spots. The coexistential perspective makes the limits of each source type explicit. गजेन्द्र ठाकु रक समानान्तर दर्शन — खण्ड २ Experiences such as floods, changing river courses, village relocation, agricultural cycles and migration show that “place” is not merely a fixed point on a map. Material geography, administrative boundary, remembered homeland and livelihood network together constitute the reality of place. Mithila’s multilingual intellectuality reveals a limit of linguistic purism. Traditions advance by borrowing words, translating, reshaping and giving them local meanings. The question is not merely “pure or impure”; it is also whether a new term clarifies a concept or increases confusion. The essence of the Parallel perspective is this: local experience should not be crushed beneath universal theory, nor should local vocabulary be placed beyond criticism. Mithila is an example, not an exception—the method developed here can also be tested in the study of other multilingual societies. Contemporary Applications When constructing census categories, keep three levels distinct: self-identification, administrative purpose and empirical comparability. Changing a category does not suddenly change the population ontologically, but it can change visibility, allocation and representation. When comparing historical series, state changes of definition explicitly. Statutory definitions are necessary in law, but a legal category should not be treated as a natural essence. Terms such as “child”, “resident”, “employee”, “consumer” and “public place” determine rights and obligations. In disputes at the boundary, consider the text, purpose, precedent and real-life consequences together. In medicine, diagnosis is a powerful category of clinical communication. But a patient is not a category; individual variation, comorbidity, uncertainty and lived experience should be recorded. A label may open a treatment pathway, but it should not determine the whole personal identity of someone who has an illness. In mental and behavioural health classification, linguistic effects can be still more serious. Diagnostic utility, stigma, self- understanding and eligibility for services operate together. The validity of a category should therefore be accompanied by dignity, informed explanation and the possibility of revision. In education, labels such as “bright”, “weak”, “slow” and “gifted” can change students’ expectations and opportunities. An examination score should be an indicator, not a destiny. Use multiple criteria, teacher observation, growth, context and student voice to reduce the performative harm of classification. In language policy, the decision between “language” and “dialect” is connected not only to linguistic distance but also to history, standardisation, literature, institutional recognition and community self-understanding. The scientific, administrative and identity dimensions of the label should therefore be stated separately. In a digital archive, metadata fields should preserve as much of a source’s complexity as possible. If the author is unknown, write “unknown”; do not turn an inference into a fact. Use multi-value fields or notes for contested dates, multiple titles, scripts, translations and alternative names. In library classification, inherited subject headings may carry outdated or derogatory language. Add current preferred terminology without erasing the historical trace; document the change through redirects, scope notes and provenance. In news, headline categories can rapidly alter perception of reality. Words such as “riot”, “protest”, “terror”, “criminal”, “victim” and “expert” require an evidential threshold before publication. Keep description of the event, legal status and editorial interpretation distinct. In social-media moderation, a label is not merely a description of content but a decision about visibility. Policy definitions, evidence, context, satire or quotation, linguistic variation and appeal mechanisms should be clear. Do not treat an automated classifier’s score as a final ontology. In AI training data, the categories chosen by labelers can become the ontology learned by the model. Guideline ambiguity, intercoder disagreement and marginalised usages should be documented. Instead of always discarding disagreement as noise, sometimes treat it as evidence that the category itself is unstable. In verifying AI output, test the claim-world link rather than the style of the sentence. A factual claim may require a source, calculation, date, version, provenance and contradiction search. A model’s confident tone is not an epistemic status. The problem of entity resolution in a knowledge graph is a direct example of coexistential realism. One name can refer to several persons and one person can have several names; institutions are renamed and place boundaries change. Stable identifiers are useful, but historical identity notes remain necessary. In face recognition and biometric systems, the assumption “one person = one stable measurable pattern” is limited. Sensor conditions, demographic variation, ageing, injury, thresholds and consequences of false matches must be examined. Technical identity and social or legal identity occupy different levels. In credit or risk scoring, a category is a prediction, not a person’s essence. A score depends on data, history and model, and can produce self-fulfilling effects if a high-risk label reduces opportunity. Reasons, uncertainty, adverse-action explanations and appeal are necessary. In environmental policy, terms such as “wasteland”, “forest”, “wetland” and “encroachment” can alter land-use decisions. Cross- check satellite classification, ecological surveys, legal records and local livelihood knowledge. A raster label is not the complete ontology of a lived environment. In climate communication, do not treat model uncertainty as equivalent to “nothing is known”. State scenarios, confidence intervals, attribution and local variability in clear language. Uncertainty is not the enemy of truth; it is part of responsible realism. In writing history, do not impose present categories unchanged upon the past. Today’s nation, caste, profession, religious institution or linguistic boundary may have carried a different meaning in an earlier period. Distinguish a source’s own vocabulary from later interpretation and from modern analytic categories. In genealogy and community history, recognise the real social effects of records without treating retrospective claims as automatically ancient truth. Examine document date, copying history, interpolation, institutional motives and external sources. Preserve both respect for identity and historical method. In translation and publication, prepare a glossary of technical terms. If one word has several translations, explain why; where the original term is necessary, provide transliteration; where a local equivalent is clear, use reader-friendly Maithili. Translation is a negotiation of meaning, not arbitrary rewriting. In democratic debate, first reconstruct an opponent’s vocabulary accurately. A straw man is a form of linguistic violence. Asking “what do you mean by this word?” is not agreement; it is a minimum condition of dialogue. In institutional form design, excessive use of the category “other” requires caution. Collect only necessary fields, allow multi- select or open options where possible, and explain the purpose of data collection. Classification is itself an act of governance. In research papers, state operational definitions clearly. Concepts such as poverty, trust, success, violence, religiosity and language proficiency should be defined before measurement. Different operationalisations may produce different results; treat this difference as transparency, not merely as weakness. The method is useful in everyday life as well. Do not define a person completely by one incident, profession, illness, score, caste label, political opinion or online post. A person is a being of many relations, histories, capacities and possibilities of change. A practical checklist for coexistential realism is: at what level is the claim? How is the term defined? Who created the category? What is the material constraint? Who is affected? What alternative vocabulary is available? What is the evidence? What is the cost of error? What would trigger revision? Which institution or person is accountable? गजेन्द्र ठाकु र Chapter Conclusion The lasting achievement of the linguistic turn is that it broke the naive belief that language is a neutral window. Words select, classify, reveal and conceal relations, perform social acts and carry power. To abandon this achievement would make realism naive again. But when extreme forms of the linguistic turn dissolve reality into language, it becomes difficult to understand the world’s resistance, the body, nature, causal structure, non-linguistic experience and the possibility of false description. At this limit coexistential realism restores the pressure of what lies “outside”. The central principle of this chapter is that reality is layered; language is one powerful level and medium within it, not its total source. Social facts can be constructed and still be real; natural facts can be described without being created by language; and persons or communities can fall under categories while always exceeding those categories. Realism here is not the doctrine of a single description. Multiple perspectives, languages and models can capture different relations within the same world. Plurality is not by itself relativism, because evidence, resistance, consequence, coherence, translation, intervention and revision continue to test descriptions. Coexistence does not mean conflict-free harmony either. In real societies power, inequality, environmental limits, historical memory and competing values exist together. Philosophy’s responsibility is to map these layers of dependence, make harm and injustice visible, and develop a language that remains open to revision. The maxim of this chapter is: “Words are not the world, but words have power in the world. Names make boundaries, but boundaries are not always natural. Let descriptions be many, while truth remains answerable. Treat relations as real, but do not turn constructions into destiny. Examine language—and listen also to the resistance that lies beyond language.”