As James and Dewey describe them these minds make, inhabit, and remake the practices, Dean's so-called conventions, by which we interact humanly with the rest of the world. None of these practices, as they change over time, bring us into either participation with eternal verities or closer proximity to a God's eye view of things. Dean then poses the problem of cosmic estrangement. Ontological conventionalism, Dean's proposed solution to his version of the problem of cosmic estrangement, is a theory about what the whole world is like. It is Dean's would-be postmodernist spin on Whiteheadian metaphysics.
Ontological conventionalism posits a world that is historicist and conventional to the core.
All of its formations are, at bottom, functions of the same sort of interested, selective, changeable activities that we find at work in ourselves. This posited continuity between the conventionality of human life and everything else rules out the possibility that American society with its historicist self-image is effectively cut off from everything else in the world. We are able, he says, to feel the whole world in its thorough-going historicity. This affective awareness provides the empirical control on our thinking about what the whole world is like. Attention to this religious experience, Dean claims, is what differentiates his own historicist theology from others.