I’ve been working on A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis since 2018. At least, that’s the polite, CV-friendly version. The truer account is that it’s been quietly fermenting since the late 1970s, back when I was still trapped in primary school and being instructed on how the world supposedly worked.
Social Studies. Civics. Law. The whole civic catechism. I remember being taught about reasonable persons and trial by a jury of one’s peers, and I remember how insistently these were presented as fair solutions. Fairness was not argued for. It was asserted, with the weary confidence of people who think repetition counts as justification.
I didn’t buy it. I still don’t. The difference now is that I have a hypothesis with some explanatory power instead of a vague sense that the adults were bluffing.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
I’ve always been an outsider. Eccentric, aloof, l’étranger if we’re feeling theatrical. It never particularly troubled me. Outsiders are often tolerated, provided they remain decorative and non-contagious. Eye rolls were exchanged on both sides. No harm done.
But that outsider position had consequences. It led me, even then, to ask an awkward question: Which peers? Not because I thought I was superior, but because I was plainly apart. How exactly was I meant to be judged by my peers when no one else occupied anything like my perspective?
Later, when I encountered the concept of fundamental attribution bias, it felt less like a revelation and more like confirmation. A peer-based system assumes not just similarity of circumstance, but similarity of interpretation. That assumption was dead on arrival.
Then there were reasonable persons. I was assured they existed. I was assured judges were trained to embody them. I had never met one. Even as a teenager, I found the idea faintly comical. Judges, I was told, were neutral, apolitical, and dispassionate. Writing this now from the United States, one hardly needs to belabour the point. But this wasn’t prescience. It was intuition. The smell test failed decades ago.
Before LIH had a name, I called these things weasel words. I still do, as a kind of shorthand. Terms like fair, reasonable, accountable, appropriate. Squishy concepts that do serious institutional work whilst remaining conveniently undefinable. Whether one wants to label them Contestables or Fluids is less important than recognising the space they occupy.
That space sits between Invariables, things you can point to without dispute, and Ineffables, where language more or less gives up. Communication isn’t binary. It isn’t ‘works’ or ‘doesn’t’. It’s a gradient. A continuous curve from near-certainty to near-failure.
Most communication models quietly assume a shared ontology. If misunderstanding occurs, the remedy is more explanation, more context, more education. What never sat right with me, even as a child, was that this only works when the disagreement is superficial. The breaking point is ontological.
If one person believes a term means {A, B, C} and another believes it means {B, C, D}, the overlap creates a dangerous illusion of agreement. The disagreement hides in the margins. A and D don’t merely differ. They are often irreconcilable.
Image: Venn diagramme of a contested concept. Note: This is illustrative and not to scale
Fairness is a reliable example. One person believes fairness demands punishment, including retributive measures. Another believes fairness permits restoration but rejects retribution, citing circumstance, history, or harm minimisation. Both invoke fairness sincerely. The shared language conceals the conflict.
When such disputes reach court, they are not resolved by semantic reconciliation. They are resolved by authority. Power steps in where meaning cannot. This is just one illustration. There are many.
I thought it worth sharing how LIH came about, if only to dispel the notion that it’s a fashionable response to contemporary politics. It isn’t. It’s the slow crystallisation of a long-standing intuition: that many of our most cherished concepts don’t fail because we misuse them, but because they were never capable of doing the work we assigned to them.
How retribution stays upright by not being examined
There is a persistent belief that our hardest disagreements are merely technical. If we could stop posturing, define our terms, and agree on the facts, consensus would emerge. This belief survives because it works extremely well for birds and tables.
It fails spectacularly for justice.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH) isn’t especially interested in whether people disagree. It’s interested in how disagreement behaves under clarification. With concrete terms, clarification narrows reference. With contested ones, it often fractures it. The more you specify, the more ontologies appear.
Justice is the canonical case.
Retributive justice is often presented as the sober, adult conclusion. Not emotional. Not ideological. Just what must be done. In practice, it is a delicately balanced structure built out of other delicately balanced structures. Pull one term away and people grow uneasy. Pull a second and you’re accused of moral relativism. Pull a third and someone mentions cavemen.
Let’s do some light demolition. I created a set of 17 Magic: The Gathering-themed cards to illustrate various concepts. Below are a few. A few more may appear over time.
Card One: Choice
Image: MTG: Choice – Enchantment
The argument begins innocently enough:
They chose to do it.
But “choice” here is not an empirical description. It’s a stipulation. It doesn’t mean “a decision occurred in a nervous system under constraints.” It means a metaphysically clean fork in the road. Free of coercion, history, wiring, luck, trauma, incentives, or context.
That kind of choice is not discovered. It is assumed.
Pointing out that choices are shaped, bounded, and path-dependent does not refine the term. It destabilises it. Because if choice isn’t clean, then something else must do the moral work.
Enter the next card.
Card Two: Agency
Image: MTG: Agency – Creature – Illusion
Agency is wheeled in to stabilise choice. We are reassured that humans are agents in a morally relevant sense, and therefore choice “counts”.
Counts for what, exactly, is rarely specified.
Under scrutiny, “agency” quietly oscillates between three incompatible roles:
a descriptive claim: humans initiate actions
a normative claim: humans may be blamed
a metaphysical claim: humans are the right kind of cause
These are not the same thing. Treating them as interchangeable is not philosophical rigour. It’s semantic laundering.
But agency is emotionally expensive to question, so the discussion moves on briskly.
Card Three: Responsibility
Image: MTG: Responsibility – Enchantment – Curse
Responsibility is where the emotional payload arrives.
To say someone is “responsible” sounds administrative, even boring. In practice, it’s a moral verdict wearing a clipboard.
Watch the slide:
causal responsibility
role responsibility
moral responsibility
legal responsibility
One word. Almost no shared criteria.
By the time punishment enters the picture, “responsibility” has quietly become something else entirely: the moral right to retaliate without guilt.
At which point someone will say the magic word.
Card Four: Desert
Image: MTG: Desert – Instant
Desert is the most mystical card in the deck.
Nothing observable changes when someone “deserves” punishment. No new facts appear. No mechanism activates. What happens instead is that a moral permission slip is issued.
Desert is not found in the world. It is declared.
And it only works if you already accept a very particular ontology:
robust agency
contra-causal choice
a universe in which moral bookkeeping makes sense
Remove any one of these and desert collapses into what it always was: a story we tell to make anger feel principled.
Which brings us, finally, to the banner term.
Card Five: Justice
Image: MTG: Justice – Enchantment
At this point, justice is invoked as if it were an independent standard hovering serenely above the wreckage.
It isn’t.
“Justice” here does not resolve disagreement. It names it.
Retributive justice and consequentialist justice are not rival policies. They are rival ontologies. One presumes moral balance sheets attached to persons. The other presumes systems, incentives, prevention, and harm minimisation.
Both use the word justice.
That is not convergence. That is polysemy with a body count.
Why clarification fails here
This is where LIH earns its keep.
With invariants, adding detail narrows meaning. With terms like justice, choice, responsibility, or desert, adding detail exposes incompatible background assumptions. The disagreement does not shrink. It bifurcates.
This is why calls to “focus on the facts” miss the point. Facts do not adjudicate between ontologies. They merely instantiate them. If agency itself is suspect, arguments for retribution do not fail empirically. They fail upstream. They become non sequiturs.
This is also why Marx remains unforgivable to some. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” isn’t a policy tweak. It presupposes a different moral universe. No amount of clarification will make it palatable to someone operating in a merit-desert ontology.
The uncomfortable conclusion
The problem is not that we use contested terms. We cannot avoid them.
The problem is assuming they behave like tables.
Retributive justice survives not because it is inevitable, but because its supporting terms are treated as settled when they are anything but. Each card looks sturdy in isolation. Together, they form a structure that only stands if you agree not to pull too hard.
LIH doesn’t tell you which ontology to adopt.
It tells you why the argument never ends.
And why, if someone insists the issue is “just semantic”, they’re either confused—or holding the deck.
As the publication date of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH) draws nearer, I feel it’s a good time to promote it (obviously) and to introduce some of the problems it uncovers – including common misperceptions I’ve already heard. Through this feedback, I now understand some of the underlying structural limitations that I hadn’t considered, but this only strengthens my position. As I state at the start of the book, the LIH isn’t a cast-in-stone artefact. Other discoveries will inevitably be made. For now, consider it a way to think about the deficiencies of language, around which remediation strategies can be developed.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.
Let’s clear the undergrowth first. The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis is not concerned with everyday ambiguity, garden-variety polysemy, or the sort of misunderstandings that vanish the moment someone bothers to supply five seconds of context. That terrain is already well-mapped, thoroughly fenced, and frankly dull.
Take the classic sort of example wheeled out whenever someone wants to sound clever without doing much work:
‘I made a 30-foot basket’.
Video: a woman making a large basket
If you’re a basketweaver, you picture an absurdly large basket and quietly question the maker’s life choices. If you’re watching basketball, you hear ‘score’. If you’re anywhere near the context in which the sentence was uttered, the meaning is obvious. If it isn’t, the repair cost is trivial. Add context, move on, live your life.
Language did not fail here. It merely waited for its coat. This is not the sort of thing the LIH loses sleep over.
The Groucho Marx Defence, or: Syntax Is Not the Problem
Logicians and armchair philosophers love to reach for jokes like Groucho Marx’s immortal line:
‘I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. Why it was wearing my pyjamas, I’ll never know’.
Video: A man and elephant in pyjamas (no sound)
Yes, very funny. Yes, the sentence allows for a syntactic misreading. No, nobody actually believes the elephant was lounging about in striped silk. The humour works precisely because the “wrong” parse is momentarily entertained and instantly rejected.
Again, language is not insufficient here. It’s mischievous. There’s a difference.
If the LIH were worried about this sort of thing, its ambitions would be indistinguishable from an undergraduate logic textbook with better branding.
Banks, Rivers, and the Myth of Constant Confusion
Likewise, when someone in a city says, ‘I went to the bank’, no sane listener imagines them strolling along a riverbank, unless they are already knee-deep in pastoral fantasy or French tourism brochures. Context does the heavy lifting. It almost always does.
Video: Rare footage of me trying to withdraw funds at my bank (no sound)
This is not a crisis of meaning. This is language functioning exactly as advertised.
Where the Trouble Actually Starts: Contestables
The LIH begins where these tidy examples stop being helpful. It concerns itself with Contestables: terms like truth, freedom, justice, fairness, harm, equality. Words that look stable, behave politely in sentences, and then detonate the moment you ask two people what they actually mean by them. These are not ambiguous in the casual sense. They are structurally contested.
In political, moral, and cultural contexts, different groups use the same word to gesture at fundamentally incompatible conceptual frameworks, all while assuming a shared understanding that does not exist. The conversation proceeds as if there were common ground, when in fact there is only overlap in spelling.
That’s why attempts to ‘define’ these terms so often collapse into accusation:
That’s not what freedom means. That’s not real justice. You’re redefining truth.
No, the definitions were never shared in the first place. The disagreement was smuggled in with the noun.
‘Just Ignore the Word’ Is Not a Rescue
A common response at this point is to suggest that we simply bypass the troublesome term and discuss the concrete features each party associates with it. Fine. Sensible. Often productive. But notice what this manoeuvre concedes. It does not save the term. It abandons it.
If meaningful discussion can only proceed once the word is set aside and replaced with a list of clarifications, constraints, examples, and exclusions, then the word has already failed at its primary job: conveying shared meaning. This is precisely the point the LIH is making.
The insufficiency is not that language is vague, or flexible, or context-sensitive. It’s that beyond a certain level of conceptual complexity, language becomes a confidence trick. It gives us the feeling of agreement without the substance, the appearance of communication without the transaction.
At that point, words don’t merely underperform. They mislead.
I shared this post not too long ago. Today, I shared it in a different context, but I feel is interesting – because I feel that many things are interesting, especially around language and communication.
Ocrampal shared a link to an article debating whether we are cold or have cold. Different cultures express this differently. It’s short. Read it on his site.
Audio: Exceptional NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
I replied to the post:
Nicely observed. I’ve pondered this myself. Small linguistic tweak: between être and avoir, avoir already behaves better metaphysically, but sentir seems the cleanest fit. Cold isn’t something one is or has so much as something one senses — a relational encounter rather than an ontological state or possession.
Between having and being, having is the lesser sin — but sensing/feeling feels truer. Cold belongs to the world; we merely sense it.
He replied in turn:
Agree except for: “Cold belongs to the world”. That is a metaphysical assumption that has consequences …
Finally (perhaps, penultimately), I responded:
Yes, it does. That statement was idiomatic, to express that ‘cold’ is environmental; we can’t be it or possess it. Coincidentally, I recently wrote about ‘cold’ in a different context:
A more verbose version of this response might have been:
This pushback is fair, but I’m not trying to re-ontologise cold. “Belongs to the world” in that context is doing rhetorical, not metaphysical, work; it’s idiomatic.
The point isn’t that cold is a mind-independent substance waiting around like a rock. It’s that whatever cold is, it doesn’t sit comfortably as an identity predicate (‘I am…cold’ – ‘J’ai…froid‘) or a possession (‘I have…cold’ – so, not ‘Je suis…froid‘) – neither to be confused with ‘I have a cold’, a different animal altogether.
‘Sensing’ (‘I feel…cold’ – ‘Je me sens…froid‘ – we have to use the reflexive pronoun, me, here; in English, this syntax has been deprecated) keeps the relation explicit without smuggling in ownership or essence. It leaves cold as an encounter-property, not a thing I contain and not a thing I am.
If anything, that phrasing was meant to resist metaphysical inflation, not commit to it.
And this is exactly the problem I gestured at in the aliens piece. We mistake familiar grammatical scaffolding for shared metaphysics. We assume that if the sentence parses cleanly, the ontology must be sound.
Language doesn’t just describe experience. It quietly files it into categories and then acts surprised when those categories start making demands.
Cold, like aliens, exposes the trick. The moment you slow down, the grammar starts to wobble. And that wobble is doing far more philosophical work than most of our declarative sentences are willing to admit.
Naturally, it will make more sense alongside the book. But it may still provide a bit of entertainment – and mild discomfort – in the meantime.
tl;dr: Language is generally presumed to be stable. Words mean what you think they mean, right? A table is a table. A bird is a bird. Polysemy aside, these are solid, dependable units.
Then we arrive at freedom, justice, truth, and an entire panoply of unstable candidates. And let’s not even pretend qualia are behaving themselves.
So when someone says ‘truth’, ‘free speech’, or ‘IQ’, you may suddenly realise you’ve been arguing with a cardboard cut-out wearing your own assumptions. That isn’t just interpersonal mischief. It’s language doing exactly what it was designed to do: letting you glide over the hard problems while sounding perfectly reasonable.
Audio: Short NotebookLM summary of this page content*
Video: Legacy video explaining some features of the LIH.
If that sounds banal, you’ve already fallen for the trap.
Give it a try – or wait until you’ve digested the book. Not literally, unless you’re short on fibre.
Cheers.
Written by Bry Willis
microglyphics
* As I’ve cited previously, the quality of NotebookLM varies – usually in predictable directions. This one does well enough, but it doesn’t have enough context to get the story right (because it was only drawing from this page rather than from a fuller accounting of the LIH). Its trailing comment reveals that it doesn’t grasp that “new words” don’t solve the problem.
Earlier, it suggests that language is intentionally vague. This is not an assertion I make. You can read some of the earlier incarnations, or you can wait for it to be published.
I commenced a series where I discuss the responses to the 2020 PhilPapers survey of almost 1,800 professional philosophers. This continues that conversation with questions 2 through 4 – in reverse order, not that it matters. Each is under 5 minutes; some are under 3.
For the main choices, you are given 4 options regarding the proposal:
Accept
Lean towards
Reject
Lean against
Besides the available choices, accepted answers for any of the questions were items, such as:
Combinations (specify which.) For the combos, you might Accept A and Reject B, so you can capture that here.
Alternate view (not entirely useful unless the view has already been catalogued)
The question is too unclear to answer
There is no fact of the matter (the question is fundamentally bollocks)
Agnostic/undecided
Other
Q4: The first one asks, ‘What is the aim of philosophy?’ Among the responses were:
Truth/Knowledge
Understanding
Wisdom
Happiness
Goodness/Justice
Before you watch the video, how might you respond?
Video: What is the aim of philosophy?
Q3: What’s your position on aesthetic value?
Objective
Subjective
Video: What is aesthetic value?
Q2: What’s your position on abstract objects?
Platonism (these objects exist “out there” in or beyond the world)
Nominalism (the objects are human constructs)
Video: Where do abstract objects reside?
Q1: What’s your position on à priori knowledge?
This video response was an earlier post, so find it there. This is asking if you believe one can have any knowledge apart from experience.
Yes
No
NB: I’ve recorded ten of these segments already, but they require editing. So I’ll release them as I wrap them up. Not that I’ve completed them, I realise I should have explained what the concepts mean more generally instead of talking around the topics in my preferred response. There are so many philosophy content sites, I feel this general information is already available, or by search, or even via an LLM.
What do you think – should I?
In the other hand, many of these sites – and I visit and enjoy them – support very conservative, orthodox views that, as I say, don’t seem to have progressed much beyond 1840 – Kant and a dash of Hegel, but all founded on Aristotelian ideas, some 2,500 years ago.
Spoiler alert, I think knowledge has advanced and disproved a lot of this. It turns out my brothers in arms don’t necessarily agree. Always the rebel, I suppose.
Why shared language creates the illusion – not the reality – of shared experience
Human beings routinely assume that if another agent speaks our language, we have achieved genuine mutual understanding. Fluency is treated as a proxy for shared concepts, shared perceptual categories, and even shared consciousness. This assumption appears everywhere: in science fiction, in popular philosophy videos, and in everyday cross-cultural interactions. It is a comforting idea, but philosophically indefensible.
Video: Could You Explain Cold to an Alien? – Hank Green
Recent discussions about whether one could ‘explain cold to an alien’ reveal how deeply this assumption is embedded. Participants in such debates often begin from the tacit premise that language maps transparently onto experience, and that if two interlocutors use the same linguistic term, they must be referring to a comparable phenomenon.
A closer analysis shows that this premise fails at every level.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
Shared Language Does Not Imply Shared Phenomenology
Even within the human species, thermal experience is markedly variable. Individuals from colder climates often tolerate temperatures that visitors from warmer regions find unbearable. Acclimation, cultural norms, metabolic adaptation, and learned behavioural patterns all shape what ‘cold’ feels like.
If the same linguistic term corresponds to such divergent experiences within a species, the gap across species becomes unbridgeable.
A reptile, for example, regulates temperature not by feeling cold in any mammalian sense
A reptile, for example, regulates temperature not by feeling cold in any mammalian sense, but by adjusting metabolic output. A thermometer measures cold without experiencing anything at all. Both respond to temperature; neither inhabits the human category ‘cold’.
Thus, the human concept is already species-specific, plastic, and contextually learned — not a universal experiential module waiting to be translated.
Measurement, Behaviour, and Experience Are Distinct
Thermometers and reptiles react to temperature shifts, and yet neither possesses cold-qualia. This distinction illuminates the deeper philosophical point:
Measurement registers a variable.
Behaviour implements a functional response.
Experience is a mediated phenomenon arising from a particular biological and cognitive architecture.
Aliens might measure temperature as precisely as any scientific instrument. That alone tells us nothing about whether they experience anything analogous to human ‘cold’, nor whether the concept is even meaningful within their ecology.
The Problem of Conceptual Export: Why Explanation Fails
Attempts to ‘explain cold’ to hypothetical aliens often jump immediately to molecular description – slower vibrational states, reduced kinetic energy, and so forth. This presumes that the aliens share:
our physical ontology,
our conceptual divisions,
our sense-making framework,
and our valuation of molecular explanation as intrinsically clarifying.
But these assumptions are ungrounded.
Aliens may organise their world around categories we cannot imagine. They may not recognise molecules as explanatory entities. They may not treat thermal variation as affectively laden or behaviourally salient. They may not even carve reality at scales where ‘temperature’ appears as a discrete variable.
When the conceptual scaffolding differs, explanation cannot transfer. The task is not translation but category creation, and there is no guarantee that the requisite categories exist on both sides.
The MEOW Framework: MEOWa vs MEOWb
The Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW) clarifies this breakdown by distinguishing four layers of mediation:
T0: biological mediation
T1: cognitive mediation
T2: linguistic mediation
T3: social mediation
Humans run MEOWa, a world structured through mammalian physiology, predictive cognition, metaphor-saturated language, and social-affective narratives.
Aliens (in fiction or speculation) operate MEOWb, a formally parallel mediation stack but with entirely different constituents.
Two systems can speak the same language (T2 alignment) whilst:
perceiving different phenomena (T0 divergence),
interpreting them through incompatible conceptual schemas (T1 divergence),
and embedding them in distinct social-meaning structures (T3 divergence).
Linguistic compatibility does not grant ontological compatibility. MEOWa and MEOWb allow conversation but not comprehension.
Fiction as Illustration: Why Aliens Speaking English Misleads Us
In Sustenance, the aliens speak flawless Standard Southern English. Their linguistic proficiency invites human characters (and readers) to assume shared meaning. Yet beneath the surface:
Their sensory world differs;
their affective architecture differs;
their concepts do not map onto human categories;
and many human experiential terms lack any analogue within their mediation.
The result is not communication but a parallel monologue: the appearance of shared understanding masking profound ontological incommensurability.
The Philosophical Consequence: No Universal Consciousness Template
Underlying all these failures is a deeper speciesist assumption: that consciousness is a universal genus, and that discrete minds differ only in degree. The evidence points elsewhere.
If “cold” varies across humans, fails to apply to reptiles, and becomes meaningless for thermometers, then we have no grounds for projecting it into alien phenomenology. Nor should we assume that other species – biological or artificial – possess the same experiential categories, emotional valences, or conceptual ontologies that humans treat as foundational.
Consciousness is not a universal template awaiting instantiation in multiple substrates. It is alocal ecological achievement, shaped by the mediations of the organism.
Conclusion
When aliens speak English, we hear familiarity and assume understanding. But a shared phonological surface conceals divergent sensory systems, cognitive architectures, conceptual repertoires, and social worlds.
Linguistic familiarity promises comprehension, but delivers only the appearance of it. The deeper truth is simple: Knowing our words is not the same as knowing our world.
And neither aliens, reptiles, nor thermometers inhabit the experiential space we map with those words.
Afterword
Reflections like these are precisely why my Anti-Enlightenment project exists. Much contemporary philosophical commentary remains quietly speciesist and stubbornly anthropomorphic, mistaking human perceptual idiosyncrasies for universal structures of mind. It’s an oddly provincial stance for a culture that prides itself on rational self-awareness.
To be clear, I have nothing against Alex O’Connor. He’s engaging, articulate, and serves as a gateway for many encountering these topics for the first time. But there is a difference between introducing philosophy and examining one’s own conceptual vantage point. What frustrates me is not the earnestness, but the unexamined presumption that the human experiential frame is the measure of all frames.
Having encountered these thought experiments decades ago, I’m not interested in posturing as a weary elder shaking his stick at the next generation. My disappointment lies elsewhere: in the persistent inability of otherwise intelligent thinkers to notice how narrow their perspective really is. They speak confidently from inside the human mediation stack without recognising it as a location – not a vantage point outside the world, but one local ecology among many possible ones.
Until this recognition becomes basic philosophical hygiene, we’ll continue to confuse linguistic familiarity for shared ontology and to mistake the limits of our own embodiment for the limits of consciousness itself.
I’ve spent more hours than I care to admit rummaging through the Jungian undergrowth of fairy tales – reading Marie-Louise von Franz until my eyes crossed, listening to Clarissa Pinkola Estés weave her wolf-women lore, and treating folklore like an archaeological dig through the psychic sediment of Europe. It’s marvellous, really, how much one can project onto a story when one has a doctorate’s worth of enthusiasm and the moral flexibility of a tarot reader.
But every so often, a tale emerges that requires no archetypal lens, no mythopoetic scaffolding, no trip down the collective unconscious. Sometimes a story simply bares its ideological teeth.
Enter Tatterhood – the Norwegian fairy tale so blunt, it practically writes its own critical theory seminar.
I watched Jonny Thomson’s recent video on this tale (embedded below, for those with sufficient tea and patience). Jonny offers a charming reversal: rather than focusing on Tatterhood herself, he offers the moral from the prince’s perspective. In his reading, the story becomes a celebration of the power of asking – the prince’s reward for finally inquiring about the goat, the spoon, the hood, the whole aesthetic calamity before him.
Video: Jonny Thomson discusses Tatterhood.
It’s wholesome stuff: a TED Talk dressed as folklore. But – my word – apply the slightest bit of critical pressure, and the whole thing unravels into farce.
The Story No One Tells at the Royal Wedding
Here’s the short version of Tatterhood that Jonny politely sidesteps:
A fearless, ragged, hyper-competent girl rescues her sister from decapitation.
She confronts witches, navigates the seas alone, storms a castle, and performs an ad hoc ontological surgical reversal.
She does all of this without help from the king, the court, the men, or frankly, anyone with a Y chromosome.
And how is she rewarded for her trouble? She’s told she’s too ugly. Not socially acceptable. Not symbolically coherent. Not bride material.
The kingdom gazes upon her goat, her spoon, her hood, her hair, and determines that nothing – nothing – about her qualifies her for legitimacy.
But beauty? Beauty is the passport stamp that grants her entry into the social realm.
Jonny’s Prince: A Hero by Low Expectations
Now, bless Jonny for trying to rehabilitate the lad, but this prince is hardly an exemplar of virtue. He sulks through his own wedding procession like a man being marched to compulsory dentistry. He does not speak. He does not ask. He barely manages object permanence.
And suddenly, the moral becomes: Look what wonders unfold when a man asks a single question!
It’s the philosophical equivalent of awarding someone a Nobel Prize for remembering their mother’s birthday.
And what do his questions achieve? Not insight. Not understanding. Not intimacy. But metamorphosis.
Each time he asks, Tatterhood transforms – ugly goat to beautiful horse, wooden spoon to silver fan, ragged hood to golden crown, ‘ugly’ girl to radiant beauty.
Which brings us to the inconvenient truth:
This Isn’t the Power of Asking. It’s the Power of Assimilation.
His questions function as aesthetic checkpoints.
Why the goat? Translation: please ride something socially acceptable.
Why the spoon? Translation: replace your tool of agency with a decorative object.
Why the hood? Translation: cover your unruliness with something properly regal.
Why your face? Translation: you terrify me; please be beautiful.
And lo, she becomes beautiful. Not because he sees her differently. Because the story cannot tolerate a powerful woman who remains outside the beauty regime.
The prince isn’t rewarded for asking; the narrative is rewarded for restoring normative order.
And Yet… It’s Absurdly Fascinating
This is why fairy tales deserve all the interpretive attention we lavish on them. They’re ideological fossils – compressed narratives containing entire worldviews in miniature.
Part of me admires Jonny’s generosity. Another part of me wants to hand the prince a biscuit for performing the bare minimum of relational curiosity. But mostly, I’m struck by how nakedly the tale reveals the old bargain:
A woman may be bold, brave, clever, loyal, and sovereign – but she will not be accepted until she is beautiful.
Everything else is optional. Beauty is compulsory.
So Here’s My Version of the Moral
Ask questions, yes. Be curious, yes. But don’t let anyone tell you that Tatterhood was waiting for the prince’s epiphany. She was waiting for the world to remember that she ran the plot.
If you’ve made it this far and know my proclivities, you’ll not be shocked that I side with Roland Barthes and cheerfully endorse la mort de l’auteur. Jonny is perfectly entitled to his reading. Interpretive pluralism and all that. I simply find it marvelously puzzling that he strolls past the protagonist galloping through the narrative on a goat, spoon upraised, and instead decides to chase the side-quest of a prince who contributes roughly the energy of a damp sock.
The Travelogue of a Recovering Enlightenment Subject
I’m asked endlessly – usually by people who still believe TED talks are a form of knowledge production – ‘Why are you so negative? Why must you tear things down if you’ve no intention of replacing them?’
It’s adorable, really. Like watching a toddler demand that gravity apologise.
They’ve been trained for years in the managerial catechism:
‘Don’t bring me problems; bring me solutions.‘
As if the world were some badly-run workshop in need of a fresh coat of agile methodology.
They might as well say, ‘Don’t tell me I can’t win at Lotto; give me money’.
I, too, would enjoy the spare universe. Or the winning Lotto ticket. And yes, one day I might even buy one. Until then, I’ve embraced the only adult philosophy left: Dis-Integrationism – the fine art of taking things apart without pretending they can be reassembled into anything coherent.
A Little History
My suspicion began early. Secondary school. All those civic fairytales whispered as if they were geology.
The ‘reasonable person’? Bollox. ‘Jury of one’s peers’? What are peers? Whose peers? I have no peers. ‘Impartial judges’? Please. Even as a teenager, I could see those robed magicians palming cards like bored street performers. Everyone else nodded along, grateful for the spectacle. I stared, wondering how the other children hadn’t noticed the emperor’s bare arse.
Later, I watched adults talk past each other with a fluency bordering on performance art. Not disagreement – different universes, cosmetically aligned by grammar.
A Federal mediator once tried to teach me that common ground could be manufactured. Not by clarifying meaning, mind you – that would have required honesty – but by rhetorical pressure and a touch of Jedi mind-trickery. Negotiation was simply controlled hallucination.
University communications classes offered temporary distraction with denotation and connotation, a little semantic drift, the illusion that language might be domesticated with enough theory. Charming. Almost convincing.
Then Gödel and Arrow arrived like two polite assassins and quietly removed the floorboards.
And then – happily, inevitably – Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard. I’d already danced with Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus. I’d ingested the Western canon like every obedient young acolyte: Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire. Americans force-feed their citizenry Jefferson and Franklin as moral fibre, as if the republic might otherwise suffer constipation.
It never gelled. Too much myth, too much marketing. The Enlightenment had the energy of a regime insisting on its own benevolence while confiscating your torch. To call oneself ‘enlightened’ should have raised suspicion – but no, the branding stuck.
Whenever les garçons dared tug at the curtain, we were assured they simply didn’t ‘understand’, or worse, they ‘hated civilisation’.
Image: “I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids.”
Then Came the Internet
The digital age didn’t usher in clarity — it unmasked the whole pantomime. Like Neo seeing the Matrix code or Roddy Piper slipping on the sunglasses in They Live, one suddenly perceives the circuitry: meaning as glitch, discourse as scaffolding, truth as a shabby stage-set blinking under fluorescent tubes.
Our civilisation speaks in metaphors it mistakes for mechanisms. The Enlightenment gave us the fantasy that language might behave, that concepts were furniture rather than fog. Musicians and artists always knew better. We swim in metaphor; we never expected words to bear weight. But philosophers kept pretending communication was a conveyor belt conveying ‘meaning units’ from A to B.
By 2018, the cracks were gaping. I began taking the notes that would metastasise into A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis – an attempt to map the hollow spaces between our words, the fractures we keep wallpapering with reason.
Half a decade later, the work is ready. Not to save anything – nothing here merits salvation – but to name the debris honestly.
If that sounds negative, good. Someone has to switch off the Enlightenment’s flickering lightbulb before it burns the whole house down.
Where This Road Actually Leads
People imagine negativity is a posture – a sort of philosophical eyeliner, worn for effect. But dismantling the world’s conceptual furniture isn’t a hobby; it’s the only reasonable response once you’ve noticed the screws aren’t actually attached to anything.
The Enlightenment promised us a palace. Step inside and you discover it’s built out of IKEA flatpacks held together with wishful thinking and a prayer to Kant.
Once you’ve seen that, you can’t go back to pretending the furniture is sturdy.
You stop sitting.
You start tapping the beams.
You catalogue the wobble.
This is where Dis–Integrationism enters – not as a manifesto, but as the practice of refusing to live inside collapsing architecture out of sheer politeness. Negativity is simply the weather report.
The Lie We Keep Telling Ourselves
We cling to the fantasy that if we critique something long enough, a solution will crystallise out of the void, like enlightenment through sheer irritation. It’s the Protestant work ethic meets metaphysics: salvation through sufficient grumbling.
But critique is not alchemy. It unmakes. It refuses. It loosens the bolts we pretended were load-bearing.
Once you stop demanding that thought be constructive, you can finally see the world as it is: improvised, rhetorical, and permanently under renovation by people who don’t read the instructions.
The Enlightenment’s heirs keep insisting there must be a blueprint. There isn’t. There never was. We’ve merely been tracing the silhouettes of scaffolding, calling it a cathedral.
And Yet – Here We Still Are
The online age (God help us all) didn’t deepen the crisis; it merely turned the lights on. What Enlightenment rationality hid beneath a tasteful layer of neoclassical varnish, the internet sprayed with fluorescent graffiti.
Turns out, when seven billion people speak at once, meaning doesn’t ’emerge’; it buckles. Our systems weren’t built for this volume of contradiction. Our language wasn’t built for this density of metaphor. Our myths weren’t built for this much empirical evidence against them.
And yet here we are, still demanding coherence from a medium held together by emojis and trauma. If you laugh, it’s only to stop crying. If you critique, it’s only because someone has to keep the fire marshal informed.
The Only Honest Next Step
Having traced the cracks, you’re now in the foyer of the real argument – the one hanging like a neon sign over your entire Anti-Enlightenment project:
We don’t need to rebuild the house. We need to stop pretending it was ever architecture.
Language is insufficient. Agency is a fiction. Objectivity is an etiquette ritual. Democracy is a séance. Progress is a hallucination with better marketing. And yet – life continues. People wake, work, argue, aspire, despair.
Dis-Integrationism isn’t about nihilism; it’s about maintenance. Not repairing the myth, but tending the human who must live among its debris. Not constructing new temples, but learning to see in the half-light once the old gods have gone.
The travelogue becomes a guidebook: Welcome to the ruins. Mind the uneven floor. Here is how we walk without pretending the path is paved.
The Fetish for Solutions
Here is the final indignity of the age: the demand that every critique come bundled with a solution, like some moral warranty card. As if naming the rot weren’t labour enough. As if truth required a customer-service plan.
‘Where is your alternative?’ they ask, clutching Enlightenment logic the way a drowning man clutches a shopping receipt.
But solutions are the real tyranny. They arrive bearing the smile of reason and the posture of progress, and behind both sits the same old imperial instinct: replace ambiguity with order; replace lived complexity with a diagram. A solution is merely a problem wearing a fresh coat of confidence.
Worse, a solution presumes the system is sound, merely in need of adjustment. It imagines the structure holds. It imagines the furniture can be rearranged without collapsing into splinters, and the memory of Kant.
Solutions promise inevitability. They promise teleology. They promise that the mess can be disinfected if only one applies the correct solvent. This is theology masquerading as engineering.
The Violence of the Answer
A solution is a closure – a metaphysical brute force. It slams the window shut so no further interpretation can slip in through the draft. It stabilises the world by amputating everything that wriggles. Answers are how systems defend themselves. They’re the intellectual equivalent of riot police: clean uniforms, straight lines, zero tolerance for nuance.
This is why the world keeps mistaking refusal for chaos. Refusal isn’t chaos. It’s hygiene. It is the simple act of not adding more furniture to a house already bending under its own delusions. When you decline to provide a solution, you aren’t abandoning the world. You’re declining to participate in its coercive optimism.
And So the Travelogue Ends Where It Must
Not in triumph or a bluepirnt, but in composure – the only posture left after the Enlightenment’s glare has dimmed. Negativity isn’t sabotage; it’s sobriety. Dis-Integrationism isn’t cynicism; it’s the refusal to replace one failing mythology with another wearing vegan leather.
A world obsessed with solutions cannot recognise maintenance as wisdom. It can’t tolerate ambiguity without reaching for a hammer. It can’t breathe unless someone somewhere is building a ladder to a future that never arrives.
So no – I won’t provide solutions. I won’t participate in the fantasy that the human condition can be patched with conceptual duct tape. I will not gift the Enlightenment a eulogy that surrenders to its grammar.
What I offer is far smaller and far more honest: Attention. Description. Steady hands in a collapsing house. And the simple dignity of refusing to lie about the architecture.
Most grand moral theories assume a degree of conceptual stability that moral language has never possessed.
Aristotle’s aretê, Kant’s maxims, Mill’s utilities, Rawls’s ‘reasonable rejection’ – pick your passion/poison. Each one presupposes that a concept has a single, portable meaning that obligingly follows philosophers from ancient Greece to medieval Christendom to your local ethics seminar. It doesn’t. It never did. We’ve merely been pretending it does in order to keep the theoretical architecture standing.
Drawing on conceptual genealogy, philosophy of language, and cross-cultural moral psychology, I argue that the universalist ambitions of virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism, and contractualism collapse not because their logic is flawed, but because their vocabulary evaporates the moment you ask it to do heavy lifting. Our moral terms drift, fracture, mutate, and occasionally reinvent themselves altogether. Yet moral theorists continue to legislate universal principles as if the words were obedient little soldiers rather than unruly historical artefacts.
This isn’t a manifesto for relativism – quite the opposite. It is a call for modesty: an acknowledgement that moral frameworks function as context-bound heuristics, exquisitely useful within particular forms of life but laughably overextended when dressed up as timeless moral law.
If the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis has taught me anything, it’s that once you stop bullying language into behaving like mathematics, you begin to see moral philosophy for what it is – a set of imaginative tools, not an ontology of obligation.
Read it, disagree with it, file it under ‘Why Bry insists on burning down the Enlightenment one paper at a time’ – your choice. But at least now the argument exists in the world, properly dressed and indexed, ready to irritate anyone still clinging to the dream of universal moral principles.
Philosophics 