I am working on a new approach to epistemology -- essentially an extension of Frege's context principle -- that explains the nature of meaning and existence. I am finding that it provides traction on many problems in epistemology, linguistics, rationality and philosophy in general. I also believe that it provides traction on problems in more practical fields like physics and computer science.

I think that my approach to epistemology is pretty cool, that it is essentially a "Theory of Everything"; however epistemology is not my field of training or experience -- and it seems that nothing is really "new" -- so I am researching the literature. And yes I suppose that you can say there is related literature, in that essentially all literature in some sense explores meaning. I am reading related material in Buddhism, philosophy, ethics, epistemology, linguistics, semiotics, logic, theory of computation, mathematics, and physics. Much of this material is steeped in domain specific language; to even understand the abstract of many papers I need a deep background in the topic. My only real hope is to thread my way through this material looking for key concepts -- restricting my detailed analysis to sources that effectively add to my network of knowledge.

The research is paying off. My original topic of research was loosely "meaning is context dependent". Certainly this idea is well represented in the literature; there are forms of contextualism in ethics, logic, mathematics, epistemology, and linguistics. There are related philosophies like relativism, pluralism, perspectivism and nihilism. Although contextualism in these fields is clearly a contender for explaining the nature of truth and meaning, there are also valid criticisms of it. It is clear that the traditional approaches to contextualism are flawed; and yet I still believe that the core idea is valid.

I still have much more work to do, but I believe that I have found an approach to contextualism that fixes its traditional failings; but since this approach is potentially (relatively) novel I now need to worry about my intellectual property agreement with my employer. This is an unfortunate barrier to my progress. To verify and extend my ideas I need to expose them to public evaluation and criticism -- but my company has a broad definition of intellectual property and insists that I go through their invention disclosure process -- seeking permission to publish from them; permission that they will only grant if they are convinced it is in their interest.