Beyond Physics and Metaphysics Epistemics and the Differentiation of Reality into Subjective, Intersubjective, and Functional-Empirical Physics

The classical distinction between physics and metaphysics has become increasingly inadequate for describing contemporary epistemic practice. While empirical physics is often implicitly treated as the sole standard of the real, subjective experience and social order are either reduced or relegated to an indeterminate metaphysical remainder. This paper proposes an alternative epistemic ordering. Starting from Epistemics as a prior clarification framework, reality is not understood as a unified domain of objects, but as a configuration of distinct physics of stability: a subjective physics of experience, an intersubjective physics of social order, and a functional-empirical physics of effective constraints. These physics are neither ontological domains nor hierarchically ordered; they differ by their mechanisms of stabilization, load-bearing limits, and characteristic boundary signals. Central to this ordering is the distinction between validity and stability. Epistemics clarifies in which physics a reality claim can be meaningfully raised and tested, that is, its physics of validity. Only within such a validity-physics can stability, robustness, and failure be determined. In this context, friction is analyzed as an epistemically legible boundary signal that makes limited load-bearing capacity visible without constituting an ontological principle. Friction also functions as a selection mechanism over time. Different stabilization patterns generate different costs under strain, which stabilizes some structures while others are abandoned. In this way, core functions traditionally assigned to metaphysics can be fulfilled with greater epistemic precision, without formulating ultimate ontological claims. The focus shifts from whether something is real to the question under which validity conditions and stability limits reality claims can be meaningfully tested.