I’ve been experimenting with different cover designs most of the day. I’m leaning toward this one.
It’s intentionally minimalist, uses a story element – the red button – and avoids a box, which had been in some earlier design candidates.
I’ve always published fiction as Ridley Park, as I shall continue, but I usually get into a mindset of that persona. For The Box, I didn’t, and it doesn’t feel like that, so I opted to use my own name when I release this.
Yet again, I solicited designers, but they inevitably ask what I am looking for. Honestly, if I knew, I’d do it myself. I am not opposed to design assistance or even execution, but it needs to be upstream and not down.
I’ll not dawdle here because I need to save details for the release. I just wanted to share where I am at the end of the day.
I find myself interesting, not in a narcissistic way, but in examination.
I wrote an academic blog post (and then a couple others, 1, 2) to clarify a nonfiction book that commenced as an academic essay. The blog post spawned a novella (pending, in revision), which in turn spawned both a short story (pending novella) and another academic essay (pending novella). With the short story, I plan to release meta commentary and background around the novella.
This seems like an unusual ecosystem, but it’s how my brain operates – on inputs and synthesis. Having completed The Architecture of Encounter, itself a follow-up to A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis and the second of a planned series of three, but hard-pressed to call it a trilogy.
This post might make more sense when the unfinished projects are complete, but until then, consider it a status update.
A bit more…
The reason for the short story is that the novella ends intentionally ambiguous, and the short story is a disconnected possible resolution. But I want the novella to remain open to interpretation, as is my modus operandi in many cases. I had considered including it as an epilogue – and I may do this in a future edition – but for now, I don’t want to prematurely close the discussion.
If I can get someone to publish the short story in a collection, that would be great, but I’ll otherwise publish it with the notes I mentioned above.
To quote The Critical Drinker, ‘Anyway, that’s all I’ve got today. Go away, now‘.
NB: I reviewed the credentials of the hosts and revised my critique at the end of this piece.
I joined a scheduled close reading of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil recently and came away less refreshed than exasperated. I will spare the platform and the hosts, not out of charity exactly, but because the problem is broader than two particular men fumbling through a canonical text in public. What disappointed me wasn’t that they disagreed with Nietzsche, nor even that they may have misunderstood him in places. Misreading is inevitable. The problem was that they seemed not to have brought much of a reading to begin with.
I had read Beyond Good and Evil years ago and thought a return to it might do me some good, or at least less evil than the usual intellectual content mill. The format sounded promising enough: two interested hosts working through the introduction live, sentence by sentence, in a supposedly close reading. Both had apparently read the book before. One therefore assumed they might arrive with at least a provisional grasp of its architecture, key provocations, and habitual traps. That assumption, in the event, turned out to be embarrassingly optimistic.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
As one host read line by line, the discussion lurched forward by way of hesitant paraphrase, speculative gloss, and the occasional verbal shrug. He offered the more substantive guesses, such as they were, while the other contributed mostly vague assent, half-memory, and the sort of foggy commentary one gives when one dimly recalls having once encountered a difficult book in a previous phase of life. It was less a close reading than a public rehearsal of not quite knowing what one was doing.
Now, I am not demanding exegetical perfection. Nietzsche is not a writer one simply ‘gets’ and files away like a user manual. Nor am I naïve enough to think authorial intention settles everything. Barthes is right enough to remind us that the text exceeds the author’s sovereign control. But the death of the author is not a licence for the death of preparation. If one is going to host a close reading of a notoriously elliptical and performative philosopher, the least one might do is arrive having done some prior work. Read the introduction carefully beforehand. Refresh the major themes. Check the loaded terms. Develop an argument, or at least a point of view.
That point of view may be wrong. Fine. Better that than the contemporary preference for the curated shrug, where one mistakes visible uncertainty for intellectual seriousness. There is a difference between interpretive openness and simple lack of preparation. One is a virtue. The other is an aesthetic.
I find this especially grating because I cannot imagine teaching a class that way. When I taught, I’d spend hours preparing before entering the room. Not because I imagined myself infallible, but because students deserve more than watching a lecturer discover the material in real time. A formed point of view is not a dogma. It is a starting position. It gives the discussion shape, stakes, and resistance. Without it, one is not leading inquiry but merely simulating it.
The second host did little to improve matters. Rather than complicating or sharpening the reading, he mostly echoed the first. There was very little friction, and thus very little illumination. One of the virtues of reading Nietzsche in company is that he invites productive disagreement. He is slippery, aphoristic, ironic, and often strategic in his provocations. A good discussion can tease out the tensions in his prose, test competing emphases, and ask whether a claim is literal, tactical, genealogical, or satirical. None of that really happened. Instead, one host fumbled, and the other nodded. The result was a kind of interpretive ventriloquism in which agreement substituted for insight.
The accompanying chat made things worse, or perhaps simply made the missed opportunity more obvious. Viewers were offering questions and interpretations, yet the hosts largely ignored them. Aside from one participant, who seemed likely to have some prior relationship with them, the chat was treated as background furniture. This was especially irritating because the event was live. If one is going to perform reading in public, the public should not be reduced to silent witnesses of one’s uncertainty. Otherwise, the ‘community’ aspect is just branding, another little liturgy of digital participation in which the audience is invited to attend but not to matter.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic. To be honest, I am including this because I find it to be humorous.
To be fair, even when they did read from the chat, they handled those comments much as they handled Nietzsche: superficially, without much analytical pressure, as though any sentence placed before them deserved the same tone of vague consideration. This flattening effect was revealing. It suggested not generosity but a lack of discrimination. A close reading requires hierarchy, emphasis, and judgement. One must be able to say: this is a crucial phrase; this term matters; this apparent aside is actually structural; this comment in the chat opens something worth pursuing; that one does not. Without such judgement, everything becomes equally interesting, which is another way of saying that nothing really is.
What emerged, then, was not close reading but the theatre of close reading. The ritual gestures were all in place: slow pace, sentence-by-sentence attention, occasional lexical speculation, the performance of thoughtfulness. But the substance was strangely absent. One had the form of seriousness without much seriousness of form. It was analysis as ambience.
This points to a broader problem in online intellectual culture. Much of it now confuses exposure with engagement. To read a difficult text aloud is not yet to wrestle with it. To host a discussion is not yet to lead one. To hesitate publicly is not yet to think. Somewhere along the line, people began mistaking the visible performance of inquiry for inquiry itself. The result is a style of pseudo-seriousness in which the host need not know very much, so long as he can sound tentative in the correct register.
Nietzsche, of all people, deserves better than that. He is not an author who yields his force to the merely dutiful or the casually adjacent. He requires energy, suspicion, historical feel, and the willingness to risk a reading. One need not become a priest of correctness. But one should at least bring a sharpened knife to the table, rather than two butter spoons and a podcast voice.
What disappointed me, then, was not simply that these hosts stumbled. Everyone stumbles with Nietzsche. It was that the stumbling seemed to be the content. No deep framework, no clear prior preparation, little tension between the readers, and scant engagement with the audience. The whole affair felt less like a serious encounter with Beyond Good and Evil than a performance of cultural literacy: a way of being seen near an important book.
And perhaps that is the real irritation. One expects difficulty. One can even forgive error. What is harder to forgive is the peculiar modern tendency to make a spectacle of one’s underpreparedness and call it interpretation.
To be fair, I later learned that the co-host was not a philosopher by training but came from Literature. That in itself is no objection. Indeed, a pairing like that could have worked very well. Nietzsche is precisely the sort of writer who benefits from both conceptual and stylistic scrutiny. A philosopher can situate the argument, trace its targets, and identify the intellectual inheritance under pressure. A literary reader can pick up tone, irony, rhetorical staging, and the peculiar way Nietzsche so often performs thought rather than merely stating it.
The problem, then, was not the pairing but the execution. The session might have worked if both hosts had prepared properly and if each had leaned into his own strength. Instead, what emerged was a flatter sort of exchange, with the philosopher soliciting the literary co-host’s ‘opinion’ on semantic content as though interpretive adequacy were simply a matter of free-floating textual impressions. What was missing was any real division of labour, any methodological self-awareness, or any sense that different competences might illuminate different aspects of the text.
My attention has yet again been abducted by fiction, tentatively titled The Box, but this time it is (ever so slightly) different. A publisher mate suggested that no one reads nonfiction, and anyway, fiction sticks better because it captures both attention and salience; I decided, why not both? I wrote some perhaps esoteric but non-academic nonfiction and decided to convey at least some of this through literary speculative fiction.
Besides the obvious nod to MEOW and The Architecture of Encounter, the novella explores several philosophical concerns:
The first three are diagnostic. The fourth is operative. The fifth haunts the whole enterprise. None are cited in the text – readers will encounter them through the fiction rather than the sources, which is rather the point.
I don’t want to spoil the plot, but I wanted to share a post today, and this is where I am: somewhere in the middle of a first draft, trying to make a speculative premise carry philosophical weight without the reader feeling the load. It’s harder than nonfiction. It’s also more fun.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of the Substack topic.
It starts like this:
You’ve had the argument. Everyone has. You present evidence. Your interlocutor presents counter-evidence. You cite data. They cite different data – or the same data, read differently. Eventually, someone says something like how can you possibly believe that, and the conversation is effectively over, though the words might continue for another hour.
What’s left is the quiet conviction that the other person is either ignorant, stupid, or arguing in bad faith. Perhaps all three. And you can be certain they’re extending you precisely the same courtesy.
I want to suggest that something structurally different is going on – something that none of the usual explanations (media bubbles, declining education, algorithmic polarisation) quite reach. These explanations aren’t wrong, but they’re shallow. They describe accelerants. The thing they’re accelerating is more foundational.
I published the first version of this essay in February, arguing that the Frege–Geach problem, that three-score-year-old albatross around expressivism’s neck rests on a category error. Analytic philosophers were polite about it in the way that analytic philosophers are polite about things they intend to ignore. I don’t often revise my manuscripts, opting instead to publish a new and improved version, but the meat of this one remained strong and not worth revisiting as much as fortifying.
The trouble was that I’d dissolved the problem without resolving it. Good enough for me. Others were less convinced. Telling people they’ve been asking the wrong question is satisfying but insufficient without a better one. Version 1.1 tidied the prose. Version 1.2 does the actual work.
The new section (§4, if you’ve already read previous versions) introduces recruitable expressions – a broader class of expressions (moral predicates, thick evaluative terms, epistemic and institutional vocabulary) whose full functional load is attenuated under embedding whilst a thinner inferential profile remains available for reasoning. The standard of practical inferential adequacy replaces the demand for semantic identity: what ordinary reasoning requires is not invariance but inferential sufficiency. And the pattern isn’t peculiar to moral language – a noted goal –, which means Frege–Geach stops looking like a special embarrassment for expressivism and starts looking like one symptom of a general feature of how natural language handles multi-functional expressions under logical stress.
The essay is dissolved as a demand for unrestricted semantic invariance. It is resolved insofar as the behaviour it identifies is explained, predicted, and shown to be general.
The revised paper is available here, near the rest of my manuscripts:
This episode is an introduction to the 7-part series that discusses phenomenologists who laid the foundation on which the Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW) is built.
Audio: Introductory Podcast for The Architecture of Encounter
This series begins with philosophers from Descartes through Berkeley, Locke, and Hume to Kant, who will be the focus of the first episode. Except for this introduction, which is 15 minutes. Each episode is around 7 minutes because I wanted to keep them bite-sized.
Or, to put it in one line fit for people skimming with one eye while pretending to work:
Goodman asks how versions make worlds intelligible. MEOW asks what kind of reality makes mediated intelligibility possible at all.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Tl;dr
Goodman and MEOW are neighbours, but not housemates.
Both reject the childish fantasy that the world arrives already parcelled, labelled, and politely awaiting description by some neutral observer. Both are suspicious of naïve realism, fixed essences, and the conceit that language simply mirrors what is there. Both recognise that description, classification, and articulation are active, selective, and world-shaping.
But Goodman’s emphasis falls on versions, symbol systems, and the making of worlds through classificatory practice. MEOW and The Architecture of Encounter go elsewhere. They do not treat symbolic versioning as primary. They treat encounter as primary: mediated, structured interaction under constraint. Language and world-versioning come later, as derivative, partial, and often clumsy attempts to stabilise, synchronise, and re-present what is first given in encounter.
So the shortest contrast is this:
Goodman pluralises worlds. MEOW pluralises mediation while retaining constraint.
That is the hinge.
The longer version
Goodman is often useful precisely because he helps loosen the grip of a bad picture: the notion that there is one fully furnished world, discretely laid out in advance, which language then copies with greater or lesser success. In Ways of Worldmaking, description is not passive transcription. Versions organise, sort, foreground, suppress, classify, and compose. They do not simply mirror. They make.
This much sits quite comfortably beside MEOW and The Architecture of Encounter. MEOW has never been sympathetic to the old theatre in which a subject peers out at a ready-made object-world and then tries to report back accurately. That picture has always seemed less like sober metaphysics and more like a grammatical superstition. It is one of those inherited arrangements that philosophy keeps polishing rather than questioning, as if centuries of confusion were somehow evidence of depth.
On that score, Goodman is an ally. He helps dissolve the myth of innocent description.
He also overlaps with MEOW in his suspicion of essentialist carving. There is no reason to suppose reality presents itself in one uniquely natural partition, fully jointed in the exact way our preferred nouns imply. Goodman’s attention to alternative versions, symbolic orderings, and rival systems of classification fits comfortably with the broader MEOW suspicion that what we call “objects” are not self-announcing substances but stabilised articulations within a mediated field. In The Architecture of Encounter, this becomes still sharper: subjects and objects are not ontological primitives but abstractions from recurring encounter-structures. That already places the framework some distance from ordinary metaphysical furniture.
So far, then, the affinity is genuine.
But it is just as important not to overstate it.
Goodman’s centre of gravity is symbolic and versional. His concern is with how worlds are made through systems of description, notation, projection, ordering, and exemplification. The operative verbs are things like sort, render, compose, construct. The world is inseparable from the version.
MEOW and The Architecture of Encounter are doing something heavier. They are not merely offering a theory of how descriptions organise a world. They are offering an ontology in which encounter-events are primary. The basic unit is not an interpreted object, nor a version, nor a sentence, but a structured event of mediated contact under constraint. Mediation is not a regrettable screen placed between mind and world. It is constitutive of whatever relation there is. But neither is mediation free invention. Encounter is answerable to what resists, pushes back, stabilises, recurs, and converges. That is the role of constraint.
This is where the deepest divergence emerges.
Goodman is often read, not unfairly, as weakening the notion of a single underlying world more radically than MEOW can tolerate. His pluralism risks allowing “worldmaking” to carry most of the ontological burden. The result can begin to sound as though right versions are all the realism one is entitled to. There are worlds, or world-versions, and their legitimacy depends less on correspondence to a singular underlying reality than on fit, function, coherence, utility, and internal rightness.
MEOW resists that move. It does not return to vulgar realism, with its fantasy of a view from nowhere, but it also refuses to let mediation collapse into fabrication. Constraint is not a decorative afterthought. It is the realist anchor. One may have multiple mediations, multiple articulations, multiple ontological grammars, multiple local stabilisations, but these are not unconstrained improvisations. They are answerable to an invariant field of relational resistance.
Put more brutally: Goodman destabilises the ready-made world and then tends to leave us with versions. MEOW destabilises the ready-made world and then asks what must be true for divergent mediations nonetheless to converge, however partially, on the same resistant reality.
That difference matters.
It matters again when language enters the picture. Goodman grants an enormous role to symbol systems in worldmaking. MEOW, especially once read through The Architecture of Encounter and A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, treats language more suspiciously. Language matters, certainly, but it is late, compressed, and lossy. It is not the primordial engine of world-constitution. It is a finite synchronisation technology layered atop more basic forms of mediation: biological, perceptual, attentional, cognitive, social. Language helps coordinate. It helps compress. It helps stabilise public handling. But it also distorts, truncates, nominalises, and overcommits.
That is where LIH adds a useful corrective to Goodman. If Goodman sometimes sounds like a connoisseur of world-versioning, LIH reminds us that our versioning machinery is often embarrassingly underpowered for the tasks philosophers assign to it. Human beings keep trying to force syntax to carry ontological burdens it was never built to bear. We take grammatical distinctions for metaphysical disclosures. We inherit noun-heavy structures and then wonder why the world starts looking like a warehouse of things. We reify processes, discretise continua, and carve durational realities into portable lexical chunks. Then, having manufactured these pseudo-stabilities, we congratulate ourselves for discovering “selves”, “minds”, “meanings”, “moral facts”, and other linguistic taxidermy.
Goodman certainly helps expose the active role of symbolic systems. But LIH presses further by insisting that symbolic systems are not merely worldmaking tools. They are also bottlenecks. They fail. They coarsen. They generate ontological illusions through the very act of public coordination.
That is why I would not place Goodman and MEOW in opposition, but in a relation of partial inheritance and correction.
Goodman is valuable because he helps dismantle the myth of passive representation. He is right to resist the idea that language or symbolisation merely records a pre-cut world. He is right to foreground selection, ordering, categorisation, and articulation. He is right to reject the transparent-window fantasy.
But from a MEOW standpoint, he does not go far enough into encounter, and perhaps goes too far into version.
What is missing is a richer account of pre-linguistic mediation, presentational structure, salience, affordance, and the layered constraints under which any symbolic practice becomes possible in the first place. Symbol systems do not float free. They do not arise in a void. They are parasitic upon lived, embodied, constrained encounter. Nor is their plurality enough, by itself, to explain why some articulations fail, why some converge, why some distort in systematic ways, or why reality resists our preferred descriptions with such vulgar persistence.
That last point is worth dwelling on, because it is where many anti-realist gestures lose their nerve. The fact that access is mediated does not imply that reality is manufactured. The fact that articulation is active does not imply that resistance is optional. The fact that classifications vary does not imply that there is nothing to be classified beyond the classificatory act.
So the bottom line remains the same.
Goodman is useful for breaking the spell of the one already-made world and for showing that symbolisation is not passive mirroring. But MEOW and The Architecture of Encounter push in a different direction. They relocate the primary philosophical action from symbol systems to encounter-events, from worldmaking to world-disclosure under mediation, and from plural worlds to plural access under constraint. A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis then sharpens the point by showing that language is not an omnipotent engine of constitution but a compression scheme with predictable failure modes.
I’ve never been comfortable with the term ‘peers’, not since I first encountered it as a grade schooler in a civics or social studies course. It felt like nonsense at first utterance, but much energy is expended indoctrinating children and adolescents.
Thinking about the Frege–Geach problem has trebled my interest in ontological grammars. It’s also got me thinking about the ontology of peer groups. I’ve always been an eccentric, so I never felt I had any peers. Sure, I’ve had friends, colleagues, bandmates, and acquaintances I’ve genuinely liked and respected, but none were peers. Our connexions might best be described as ‘thin’. We connected through shared work, music, interests, and so on, but peer would have been stretching it.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
So, what do I feel qualifies as a peer? And what is a standard definition? I suppose we should start with the latter.
OED:A person who is associated or matched with another; a companion, a fellow, a mate.
Fair enough. This definition works fine. The devil remains in the details. What does it mean to be associated or a match?
As a moral noncognitivist, I don’t think the concept arrives trailing clouds of metaphysical glory. But it doesn’t need to. The interesting question is grammatical: what ontological conditions would have to be shared for ‘peer’ to mean something thick rather than merely administrative?
The legal system answers in the thinnest way possible. If you are recognisably human, that’s enough. Close enough for the government. Peer means person. Case closed.
When the system invokes ‘a jury of one’s peers’, it doesn’t care whether they are one’s peers in any thick or serious sense. It needs performative placeholders – tokens. Rather, it needs them to be peers of the court: those sufficiently aligned with its assumptions, procedures, and admissibility rules to reproduce its worldview in the form of judgement.
The court decides what counts as legible, what counts as relevant, what counts as rational, and what counts as legitimate. It does not discover peers. It manufactures a category of acceptable judges and then calls the result fairness. The deck is stacked before the first card is turned.
I like two examples, one historical and one fictional, to make my point.
Nuremberg
This case should be obvious. The peers here are precisely not their peers, but adversaries. The defendants were not tried by those who shared their grammar of legitimacy, history, necessity, authority, or even the relevant category boundaries. They were tried by agents operating within a rival grammar – one that had already classified the defendants’ framework not as a competing ontology, but as criminal pathology.
The Nazi grammar was effectively annulled. Not refuted, not outargued – annulled. And as with more typical civil and criminal courts, symmetry was never the goal. The institution ruled by fiat. I call this ontological imperialism in a yet unpublished manuscript. The dominant system merely declares the adversarial grammar invalid and inadmissible.
The standard legitimation story for Nuremberg is natural law: there exist moral facts so fundamental that they transcend positive law and sovereign authority. ‘Crimes against humanity’ was coined precisely to name offences no ontological framework could render legitimate. The phrase does the work – against humanity, not against a particular legal code or polity, but against the species as such. It presupposes exactly the universal semantic accessibility that the philosophy of language has shown to be unavailable.
Man in the High Castle
Now switch venues to a fictional universe. Philip K. Dick asks what would have happened had the Axis won the Second World War. The answer, structurally speaking, is: practically nothing — except that a different ontological grammar would now be dominant.
That is the value of the thought experiment. It doesn’t change the species, the cognitive architecture, or the capacity for deliberation. It changes the constitutive act – the moment at which a grammar gets installed as the world’s grammar. And everything downstream shifts with it. In Dick’s world, the inhabitants don’t experience their moral order as imposed or artificial. They navigate it as the background of intelligibility, the way things simply are. The I Ching functions for Tagomi the way human rights discourse functions for a postwar liberal – not as a choice, but as the grammar within which choices become possible.
The counterfactual is devastating because it is structurally symmetric. Had the Axis won, there would have been trials. Those trials would have applied retroactive categories – perhaps ‘crimes against racial destiny’ or ‘crimes against civilisational hygiene’. Allied leaders would have been the defendants. And the verdicts would have felt, to the inhabitants of that world, exactly as self-evidently correct as Nuremberg’s feel to us.
I don’t secretly wish the Axis had won. But the dialectic is worth consideration, and the discomfort it produces is itself the datum. Not evidence that the examination is wrong – evidence that the grammar is working.
So when modern institutions speak reverently of ‘a jury of one’s peers’, I hear not a triumph of fairness but a legitimating fiction. The phrase conceals the fact that institutions do not seek the defendant’s peers. They seek their own. They seek judges formed within the same order, obedient to the same grammar, and willing to mistake its categories for universal reason.
A peer, in any meaningful sense, would have to share enough ontological grammar with me that the same things register as real, salient, and intelligible in roughly the same way. By that standard, peers are rare. Institutions know this perfectly well. Which is why they do not look for them.
They appoint their own and call the matter settled.
I’ve commenced a new series in support of my new book. First, I’m building a glossary.
Video: Bry – Architecture of Encounter
On the docket in this segment are affordance, salience, and valence as they relate to the book. I selected these terms from the glossary in the appendix.
Over the next few weeks, I plan to produce videos on other terms and additional videos explaining key concepts. This one is straightforward and academic. Others will be less formal, hoping to accommodate different learning styles.
Does anyone subscribe to Kindle Unlimited? I may take time to create Kindle and eBook versions.
My fiction books had some formatting issues with Kindle, but these titles are more standard – no fancy layouts or fonts, and not too many images.
