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.
In the last post, I argued that the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness‘ was never a problem with consciousness. It was a problem with language – specifically, the English language’s unfortunate habit of carving the world into neat little substances and then demanding to know why its own divisions won’t glue back together.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic, on resolving the hard problem of consciousness.
The response was predictable.
‘But what about subjective feel?’
‘What about emergence?’
‘What about ontology?’
‘What about Chalmers?’
‘What about that ineffable thing you can’t quite point at?’
All fair questions. All built atop the very framing that manufactures the illusion of a metaphysical gap.
So here’s the promised demonstration: not yet a full essay (though it may evolve into one), but a clear application of MEOW – the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World – to the hard problem itself. Consider this a field test of the framework. A tidy autopsy, not the funeral oration.
The Set-Up: Chalmers’ Famous Trick
Chalmers asks:
How do physical processes give rise to experience?
The question feels profound only because the terms ‘physical’ and ‘experience’ smuggle in the very metaphysics they pretend to interrogate. They look like opposites because the grammar makes them opposites. English loves a comforting binary.
But MEOW doesn’t bother with the front door. It doesn’t assume two substances – ‘mind’ over here, ‘world’ over there – and then panic when they refuse to shake hands. It treats experience as the way an encounter manifests under a layered architecture of mediation. There’s no bridge. Only layers.
T₀ – Biological Mediation
The body is not a barrier. It is the encounter’s first architecture.
At T₀, the world is already transformed: transduction, gating, synchrony, inhibition, adaptation. Organisms don’t receive ‘raw’ physical inputs. They metabolise them. The form of contact is biological before it is anything else.
The hard problem begins by assuming there’s a realm of dumb physical mechanisms that somehow need to ‘produce’ experience. But organisms do not encounter dumb mechanism. They encounter structured contact –biological mediation – from the first millisecond.
If you insist on thinking in substances, T₀ looks like a problem. If you think in mediations, it looks like the beginning of sense-making.
T₁ – Cognitive Mediation
Where the Enlightenment saw a window, cognition installs a newsroom.
Prediction, priors, memory, inference, attention – all shaping what appears and what never makes it into view. Experience at T₁ is not something ‘added’. It is the organisational structure of the encounter itself.
The hard problem treats ‘experience’ as a mysterious extra–something floating atop neural activity like metaphysical cream. But at T₁, what appears as experience is simply the organisation of biological contact through cognitive patterns.
There is no ‘what emerges from the physical’. There is the way the encounter is organised.
And all of this unfolds under resistance – the world’s persistent refusal to line up neatly with expectation. Prediction errors, perceptual limits, feedback misfires: this constraint structure prevents the entire thing from collapsing into relativist soup.
T₂ – Linguistic–Conceptual Mediation
Here is where the hard problem is manufactured.
This is the layer that takes an ordinary phenomenon and turns it into a metaphysical puzzle. Words like ‘experience’, ‘physical’, ‘mental’, ‘subjective’, and ‘objective’ pretend to be carved in stone. They aren’t. They slide, drift, and mutate depending on context, grammar, and conceptual lineage.
The hard problem is almost entirely a T₂ artefact – a puzzle produced by a grammar that forces us to treat ‘experience’ and ‘physical process’ as two different substances rather than two different summaries of different mediational layers.
If you inherit a conceptual architecture that splits the world into mind and matter, of course you will look for a bridge. Language hands you the illusion and then refuses to refund the cost of admission.
T₃ – Cultural–Normative Mediation
The Western problem is not the world’s problem.
The very idea that consciousness is metaphysically puzzling is the product of a specific cultural lineage: Enlightenment substance dualism (even in its ‘materialist’ drag), Cartesian leftovers, empiricist habits, and Victorian metaphysics disguised as objectivity.
Other cultures don’t carve the world this way. Other ontologies don’t need to stitch mind back into world. Other languages simply don’t produce this problem.
The hard problem is not a universal insight. It’s a provincial glitch.
Reassembling the Encounter
Once you run consciousness through the mediational layers, the hard problem dissolves:
Consciousness is not an emergent property of neural complexity.
Consciousness is not a fundamental property of the universe.
Consciousness is the reflexive mode of certain mediated encounters, the form the encounter takes when cognition, language, and culture become part of what is appearing.
There is no gap to explain because the ‘gap’ is the product of a linguistic–conceptual framework that splits where the world does not.
As for the ever-mystical ‘what-it’s-like’: that isn’t a metaphysical jewel buried in the brain; it is the way a T₀–T₃ architecture manifests when its own structure becomes reflexively available.
A Brief Disclaimer Before the Internet Screams
Pointing out that Chalmers (and most of modern philosophy) operates within a faulty ontology is not to claim MEOW is flawless or final. It isn’t. But if Occam’s razor means anything, MEOW simply removes one unnecessary supposition — the idea that ‘mind’ and ‘world’ are independent substances in need of reconciliation. No triumphalism. Just subtraction.
Where This Leaves Chalmers
Chalmers is not wrong. He’s just asking the wrong question. The hard problem is not a metaphysical insight. It’s the moment our language tripped over its shoelaces and insisted the pavement was mysterious.
MEOW doesn’t solve the hard problem. It shows why the hard problem only exists inside a linguistic architecture that can’t model its own limitations.
This piece could easily grow into a full essay – perhaps it will. But for now, it does the job it needs to: a practical demonstration of MEOW in action.
And, arguably more important, it buys me one more day of indexing.
The Frege–Geach problem was one of the impetuses for finishing my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. From the first encounter it felt off, as though someone were trying to conjure depth from a puddle. There was no paradox here; just another case of mistaking the map for the terrain, a habit analytic philosophy clings to with almost devotional zeal. The more time I spend on this project, the more often I find those cartographic illusions doing the heavy lifting.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
For the uninitiated, the Frege–Geach problem is supposed to be the knockout blow against AJ Ayer’s emotivism. Frege’s manoeuvre was simple enough: moral language must behave like descriptive language, so embed it in a conditional and watch the whole thing buckle. Neat on paper. Vacuous in practice. The entire construction only stands if one accepts Frege’s original fiat: that moral utterances and empirical propositions share the same logical metabolism. And why should they? Because he said so.
This is the core of the analytic mistake. It is grammar dressed up as ontology.
The LIH doesn’t ‘solve’ the Frege–Geach problem for the simple reason that there is nothing to solve. What it does instead is reclassify the habitat in which such pseudo-problems arise. It introduces categories the analytic tradition never suspected existed and drafts a grammar for language’s failure modes rather than politely ignoring them. It exposes the metaphysics analytic philosophy has been smuggling under its coat for decades.
The LIH does four things at once:
• It destabilises an alleged Invariant. • It exposes the Contestable foundations underneath it. • It shows that many analytic puzzles exist only because of the presuppositions baked into the analytic grammar. • And it asks the forbidden question: what if this cherished problem simply isn’t one?
Analytic philosophy proceeds as though it were operating on a single, pristine grammar of meaning, truth, and assertion. The LIH replies: charming idea, but no. Different conceptual regions obey different rules. Treating moral predicates as if they were factual predicates is not rigour; it’s wishful thinking.
As my manuscript lays out, instead of one flat linguistic plain, the LIH gives you an ecology:
• Invariants for the things that actually behave. • Contestables for the concepts that wobble under scrutiny. • Fluids for notions that change shape depending on who touches them. • Ineffables for everything language tries and fails to pin down.
The analytic tradition, bless its little heart, tries to stretch classical logic across the entire terrain like clingfilm. The clingfilm snaps because reality never agreed to be wrapped that way.
This taxonomy isn’t jargon for its own sake. It’s a meta-grammar: a way of describing how language breaks, where it breaks, and why it breaks in predictable places. It names the structures analytic philosophy has been tripping over for a century but studiously refused to acknowledge.
Their error is simple: they treat language as flat. The LIH treats language as topographical – scored with ridges, fault lines, and pressure fronts.
They think in one grammar. I wrote a grammar for grammars.
No wonder there’s disquiet. Their tools have been optimised for the wrong terrain. I’m not challenging their competence; I’m pointing out that the conceptual map they’ve been so proudly updating was drawn as if the continent were uniformly paved.
This is why Frege–Geach, the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, another irritant, paradoxes, semantic embeddings – so many of their grand intellectual fixtures – appear dramatic inside their grammar yet quietly evaporate once you switch grammars. The LIH isn’t a theory about language; it is a theory of the boundary conditions where language stops being able to masquerade as a theory of anything at all.
And the Frege–Geach problem? In the end, perhaps it isn’t.
Note that the cover image is of the rhinocerosin the animated movie, James and the Giant Peach. The rhino was meant to remind James of the importance of perspective. I feel it’s fitting here.
If philosophy were a game, Wittgenstein rewrote the rulebook. Then he tore it up halfway through and told us the game was the thing itself.
“Don’t ask for the meaning; ask for the use.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
Language Game, the third card in my Critical Theory parody set, isn’t just homage; it’s confession. Wittgenstein is among my top five philosophers, and this card embodies why. His idea that ‘meaning is use’ unhooked language from metaphysics and tethered it to life – to the messy, unpredictable business of how humans actually speak.
The card’s text reads: Choose one: Counter target statement; or reframe it as metaphor.
At first glance, it sounds like a standard spell from Magic: The Gathering – a blue card, naturally, since blue is the colour of intellect, deceit, and control. But beneath the parody is an epistemic mirror.
To “counter” a statement is to engage in the analytic impulse – to negate, clarify, define. To “reframe it as metaphor” is the continental alternative – reinterpret, play, deconstruct. These are not two distinct acts of philosophy but the alternating heartbeat of all discourse. Every argument, every essay, every tweet oscillates between contradiction and reframing.
The sorcery lies in recognising that both are linguistic manoeuvres within the same game. Meaning is not fixed in the words themselves but in how they’re used – by whom, in what context, and to what end. Wittgenstein’s point was brutally simple: there’s no hidden substance behind language, only a living practice of moves and counter-moves.
The Shattered Face
The artwork visualises this idea: speech breaking into shards, thought fragmenting as it leaves the mouth. Meaning disintegrates even as it’s formed. Every utterance is an act of creation and destruction, coherence and collapse.
I wanted the card to look like a concept tearing itself apart whilst trying to communicate, a perfect visual for the paradox of language. The cubist angles hint at structure, but the open mouth betrays chaos. It’s communication as combustion.
Wittgenstein’s Echo
Wittgenstein once wrote, ‘Philosophy leaves everything as it is’. It sounds passive, almost nihilistic, until one realises what he meant: philosophy doesn’t change the world by building new systems; it changes how we see what’s already there.
He was the great anti-system builder, a man suspicious of his own intellect, who saw in language both the limits of thought and the infinite playground of meaning. He dismantled metaphysics not through scepticism but through observation: watch how words behave, and they’ll tell you what they mean.
In that spirit, Language Game is less an argument than an invitation – to watch the mechanics of speech, to see how our statements perform rather than merely represent.
Personal Reflection
Wittgenstein earns a place in my top five because he dissolves the boundaries that most philosophers erect. He offers no comforting totalities, no grand narratives, no moral architectures. Just language, and us inside it, flailing beautifully.
His work aligns with my larger project on the insufficiency of language – its inability to capture the real, yet its irresistible compulsion to try. Wittgenstein knew that words are our most sophisticated form of failure, and he loved them anyway.
To play Language Game is to remember that communication isn’t about arriving at truth but about keeping meaning in motion. Every conversation is a temporary alliance against silence.
The card’s instruction remains both playful and tragic: Counter target statement; or reframe it as metaphor.
Philosophics 