The transversality effect for mutually incompatible social theories is that of non-exclusivity. Competing theories continue to exist and the elements of choice between theories are determined by practice, convenience and economies, and not necessarily by idealistic goals. Because Teubner does not propose any specific quality standards or quality control elements for a theory to qualify within a circle of competing theories, transversality can become, superficially, an instrument for human rights conceptualisation, whereby the quest for idealistic and practice-independent justification is lost. On further inspection, we can construe an argument that the loss of the quest towards idealism depends on how we understand the term idealism. Giving up the grand idea of human rights superiority, and accepting multiple readings of what human rights mean, leads to the extreme principle of anything goes within the meaning of Paul Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism.

The epistemic human rights dimension concerns how knowledge about human rights issues is generated, articulated in discourse and normativity, and finally enforced in practice. According to the Aristotelian theory of epistemology, this represents the side of subjective thought about objective reality. Within the non-coherence approach, the fundamental question is whether the methods of knowledge creation, articulation and enforcement about human rights issues in the digital realm remain similar to the offline realm, or whether distortion exists. Two concerns emerge, which will be decisive for some conclusions about human rights knowledge creation in the digital domain through the non-coherence lens. The first is whether the digital domain has any interest in claiming normative validity of human rights rules in the first place, and second, whether the meaning of truth in the digital and non-digital domains contains similar features.