Thing-in-Itself Engineering’s Self-Critique: Does Repeated Localization Bring Us Closer to Reality-as-a-Whole?

This paper critically examines Thing-in-Itself Engineering by asking whether repeated localization, measurement, model revision, and expansion of scientific access genuinely bring inquiry closer to reality as a whole. The paper distinguishes local epistemic improvement from global ontological convergence. Scientific inquiry can increase resolution, generate new observables, revise variables, reconstruct boundaries, and extend intervention across previously inaccessible domains, yet none of these achievements by itself establishes that the resulting representations converge on an exhaustive account of reality. Repeated localization may therefore increase practical and explanatory reach while simultaneously generating new boundaries, scales, dependencies, and unobserved regions. The paper argues that Thing-in-Itself Engineering should not be understood as progressive approximation to a final noumenal totality, but as an open-ended process of configuration-dependent access in which each gain in observability can alter the conditions of what becomes observable next. Reality-as-a-whole functions not as a hidden object gradually uncovered, but as the non-exhausted remainder relative to every finite scientific configuration. The self-critique therefore preserves scientific realism while rejecting closure: scientific representations can be increasingly constrained by reality without becoming identical with reality as a whole. The broader claim is that epistemic progress should be measured by expanded discrimination, intervention, and revisability rather than by presumed convergence toward a final complete world-description.