I’ve read about 85 per cent of James by Percival Everett. I recommend it. On the surface, it is simply a very good story set in the narrative universe of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. I will avoid spoilers as best I can.
The novel is set in the antebellum American South. James and the others move through Missouri, a state that openly supported slavery, and at one point into Illinois, a state that officially opposed it but quietly failed to live up to its own rhetoric. Illinois, it turns out, is no safe haven. Ideology and practice, as ever, are on speaking terms only when it suits them.
Audio: Short NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.
This is not a book review. I may write one later for my Ridley Park site once I’ve finished the book. What interests me here are two philosophical tensions Everett stages with remarkable economy.
There are two characters who are Black but able to pass as white. One of them feels profound guilt about this. He was raised as a slave, escaped, and knows exactly what it means to be treated as Black because he has lived it. Passing feels like theft. Survival, perhaps, but theft all the same.
The other is more unsettled. He was raised as a white man and only later discovers that he is not, as the language goes, “pure-bred”. This revelation leaves him suspended between identities. Should he now accept a Black identity he has never inhabited, or continue to pass quietly, benefitting from a system that would destroy him if it knew?
James offers him advice that is as brutal as it is lucid:
“Belief has nothing to do with truth. Believe what you like. Believe I’m lying and move through the world as a white boy. Believe I’m telling the truth and move through the world as a white boy anyway. Either way, no difference.”
This is the philosophical nerve of the book.
Truth, Everett suggests, is indifferent to belief. Belief does not mediate justice. It does not reorganise power. It does not rewire how the world responds to your body. What matters is not what is true, nor even what is believed to be true, but how one is seen.
The world does not respond to essences. It responds to appearances.
Identity here is not an inner fact waiting to be acknowledged; it is a surface phenomenon enforced by institutions, habits, and violence. The truth can be known, spoken, even proven, and still change nothing. The social machine runs on perception, not ontology.
In James, Everett is not offering moral comfort. He is stripping away a modernist fantasy: that truth, once revealed, obliges the world to behave differently. It doesn’t. The world only cares what you look like while moving through it.
Truth, it turns out, is perfectly compatible with injustice.
2025 has been a good year for this blog. I’ve crossed the 1,000-post mark, and this year it has had over 30,000 page views – best year ever. This month was the best month ever, and 1st December was the most popular day ever. That’s a lot of ‘evers’.
I shared the remainder of this post on my Ridley Park fiction blog – same reader, same books, same opinion. Any new content added below is in red.
I genuinely loathe top X lists, so let us indulge in some self-loathing. I finished these books in 2026. As you can see, they cross genres, consist of fiction and non-fiction, and don’t even share temporal space. I admit that I’m a diverse reader and, ostensibly, writer. Instead of just the top 5. I’ll shoot for the top and bottom 5 to capture my anti-recommendations. Within categories are alphabetical.
Fiction
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro – A slow reveal about identity, but worth the wait.
This was very philosophical and psychological. Nothing appeared to happen until chapter 7, as I recall. I felt like I was just eavesdropping on some school chums, which I was. Then came the big reveal.
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky – Classic unreliable narrator.
Again, philosophical, psychological. I liked it.
There Is No Antimemetics Division by QNTM (AKA Sam Hughes) – Points for daring to be different and hitting the landing.
This, I read because I was attracted to the premise of memory as it might affect language. It touched on this a tad, but it was mostly about memory, anti-memory, and constructed selves. How can one experience a contiguous, diachronic self with memory gaps? It never quite got that deep, that on occasion it did, as far as I recall.
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh – Scottish drugs culture and bonding mates narrative.
This is an age-old cult classic – much better than the already excellent films. Fills in what the film cut for its medium. I read several other Welsh books. Filth was an honourable mention, which I also made connexions to Antimemetics, above.
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin – In the league of 1984 and Brave New World, but without the acclaim.
This flagged a tad at the end, but it was prescient and released in 1922, decades before 1984 and Brave New World. Worth the read.
Nonfiction
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher – Explains why most problems are social, not personal or psychological. Follows Erich Fromm’s Sane Society, which I also read in 2025 and liked, but it fell into the ‘lost the trail’ territory at some point, so it fell off the list.
Moral Politics by George Lakoff
Evidently, I forgot to explain myself in my prior post. I refer to this book and its trade counterpart, Don’t Think of an Elephant, which is more of a political polemic, but still worth the read. It’s also shorter. This is about Moral politics – duh! – but it’s about moral language. It was a precursor to Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion or Kurt Gray’s Outraged! I found Haidt’s work interesting but reductive; I found Gray’s work merely reductive.
This said, Lakoff and Haidt were the vector through which I came upon my language ontology theory that further confounds language insufficiency. To be sure, Haidt was an unnecessary point, but it did emphasise it. Haidt’s frameworks also give me something to riff on.
Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis – Explains why Capitalism is already dead on arrival.
Nothing much to add here. Technofeudalism is economic fare, albeit with philosophical implications. I enjoyed it. Yanis is also an interesting speaker.
NB: Some of the other books had great pieces of content, but failed as books. They may have been better as essays or blog posts. They didn’t have enough material for a full book. The Second Sex had enough for a book, but then Beauvoir poured in enough for two books. She should have quit whilst she was ahead.
Image: Books I read in 2025 on Goodreads. Full disclosure: I don’t always record my reading on Goodreads, but I try.
Bottom of the Barrel
Crash by J.G. Ballard – Hard no. I also didn’t like High-rise, but it was marginally better, and I didn’t want to count an author twice.
Nah. I felt he was trying to hard for shock value. It didn’t shock, but it put me off. At least High-rise represented an absurd cultural microcosm. I just wanted the story to be over. Luckily, I read both of these sequentially whilst on holiday, so I wasn’t looking to ingest anything serious.
Neuromancer by William Gibson – I don’t tend to like SciFi. This is a classic. Maybe it read differently back in the day. Didn’t age well.
Nexus by Yuval Harari – Drivel. My mates goaded me into reading this. I liked Sapiens. He’s gone downhill since then. He’s a historian, not a futurist.
Outraged! by Kurt Gray – Very reductionist view of moral harm, following the footsteps of George Lakoff and Jonathan Haidt.
See comments above. ☝️
Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord – A cautionary tale on why writing a book on LSD may not be a recipe for success.
Honourable Mention
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer was also good, but my cutoff was at 5. Sorry, Jeff.
I did like this, and it was much better than the Natalie Portman film adaptation. This is the first book in a trilogy. I absolutely hated the second instalment. The third was not as good as the first, but it tried to get back on track from the derailment of the second. As I wrote in public reviews, the second book could have been a prologue chapter to the third book with all of the relevant information I cared about. You could skip the second story with almost no material effect on the story or character arcs.
Now that A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis has been put to bed — not euthanised, just sedated — I can turn to the more interesting work: instantiating it. This is where LIH stops being a complaint about words and starts becoming a problem for systems that pretend words are stable enough to carry moral weight.
What follows is not a completed theory, nor a universal schema. It’s a thinking tool. A talking point. A diagram designed to make certain assumptions visible that are usually smuggled in unnoticed, waved through on the strength of confidence and tradition.
The purpose of this diagram is not to redefine justice, rescue it, or replace it with something kinder. It is to show how justice is produced. Specifically, how retributive justice emerges from a layered assessment process that quietly asserts ontologies, filters encounters, applies normative frames, and then closes uncertainty with confidence.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Most people are willing to accept, in the abstract, that justice is “constructed”. That concession is easy. What is less comfortable is seeing how it is constructed — how many presuppositions must already be in place before anything recognisable as justice can appear, and how many of those presuppositions are imposed rather than argued for.
The diagram foregrounds power, not as a conspiracy or an optional contaminant, but as an ambient condition. Power determines which ontologies are admissible, which forms of agency count, which selves persist over time, which harms are legible, and which comparisons are allowed. It decides which metaphysical configurations are treated as reasonable, and which are dismissed as incoherent before the discussion even begins.
Justice, in this framing, is not discovered. It is not unearthed like a moral fossil. It is assembled. And it is assembled late in the process, after ontology has been assumed, evaluation has been performed, and uncertainty has been forcibly closed.
This does not mean justice is fake. It means it is fragile. Far more fragile than its rhetoric suggests. And once you see that fragility — once you see how much is doing quiet, exogenous work — it becomes harder to pretend that disagreements about justice are merely disagreements about facts, evidence, or bad actors. More often, they are disagreements about what kind of world must already be true for justice to function at all.
I walk through the structure and logic of the model below. The diagram is also available as a PDF, because if you’re going to stare at machinery, you might as well be able to zoom in on the gears.
Why Retributive Justice (and not the rest of the zoo)
Before doing anything else, we need to narrow the target.
“Justice” is an infamously polysemous term. Retributive, restorative, distributive, procedural, transformative, poetic, cosmic. Pick your flavour. Philosophy departments have been dining out on this buffet for centuries, and nothing useful has come of letting all of them talk at once.
This is precisely where LIH draws a line.
The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis is not interested in pedestrian polysemy — cases where a word has multiple, well-understood meanings that can be disambiguated with minimal friction. That kind of ambiguity is boring. It’s linguistic weather.
What LIH is interested in are terms that appear singular while smuggling incompatible structures. Words that function as load-bearing beams across systems, while quietly changing shape depending on who is speaking and which assumptions are already in play.
“Justice” is one of those words. But it is not usefully analysable in the abstract.
So we pick a single instantiation: Retributive Justice.
Why?
Because retributive justice is the most ontologically demanding and the most culturally entrenched. It requires:
a persistent self
a coherent agent
genuine choice
intelligible intent
attributable causation
commensurable harm
proportional response
In short, it requires everything to line up.
If justice is going to break anywhere, it will break here.
Retributive justice is therefore not privileged in this model. It is used as a stress test.
The Big Picture: Justice as an Engine, Not a Discovery
The central claim of the model is simple, and predictably unpopular:
Justice is not discovered. It is produced.
Not invented in a vacuum, not hallucinated, not arbitrary — but assembled through a process that takes inputs, applies constraints, and outputs conclusions with an air of inevitability.
The diagram frames retributive justice as an assessment engine.
An engine has:
inputs
internal mechanisms
thresholds
failure modes
and outputs
It does not have access to metaphysical truth. It has access to what it has been designed to process.
The justice engine takes an encounter — typically an action involving alleged harm — and produces two outputs:
Desert (what is deserved),
Responsibility (to whom it is assigned).
Everything else in the diagram exists to make those outputs possible.
The Three Functional Layers
The model is organised into three layers. These are not chronological stages, but logical dependencies. Each layer must already be functioning for the next to make sense.
1. The Constitutive Layer
(What kind of thing a person must already be)
This layer answers questions that are almost never asked explicitly, because asking them destabilises the entire process.
What counts as a person?
What kind of self persists over time?
What qualifies as an agent?
What does it mean to have agency?
What is a choice?
What is intent?
Crucially, these are not empirical discoveries made during assessment. They are asserted ontologies.
The system assumes a particular configuration of selfhood, agency, and intent as a prerequisite for proceeding at all. Alternatives — episodic selves, radically distributed agency, non-volitional action — are not debated. They are excluded.
This is the first “happy path”.
If you do not fit the assumed ontology, you do not get justice. You get sidelined into mitigation, exception, pathology, or incoherence.
2. The Encounter Layer
(What is taken to have happened)
This layer processes the event itself:
an action
resulting harm
causal contribution
temporal framing
contextual conditions
motive (selectively)
This is where the rhetoric of “facts” tends to dominate. But the encounter is never raw. It is already shaped by what the system is capable of seeing.
Causation here is not metaphysical causation. It is legible causation. Harm is not suffering. It is recognisable harm. Context is not total circumstance. It is admissible context.
Commensurability acts as a gatekeeper between encounter and evaluation: harms must be made comparable before they can be judged. Anything that resists comparison quietly drops out of the pipeline.
3. The Evaluative Layer
(How judgment is performed)
Only once ontology is assumed and the encounter has been rendered legible does evaluation begin:
proportionality
accountability
normative ethics
fairness (claimed)
reasonableness
bias (usually acknowledged last, if at all)
This layer presents itself as the moral heart of justice. In practice, it is the final formatting pass.
Fairness is not discovered here. It is declared. Reasonableness does not clarify disputes. It narrows the range of acceptable disagreement. Bias is not eliminated. It is managed.
At the end of this process, uncertainty is closed.
That closure is the moment justice appears.
Why Disagreement Fails Before It Starts
At this point, dissent looks irrational.
The system has:
assumed an ontology
performed an evaluation
stabilised the narrative through rhetoric
and produced outputs with institutional authority
To object now is not to disagree about evidence. It is to challenge the ontology that made assessment possible in the first place.
And that is why so many justice debates feel irresolvable.
They are not disagreements within the system. They are disagreements about which system is being run.
LIH explains why language fails here. The same words — justice, fairness, responsibility, intent — are being used across incompatible ontological commitments. The vocabulary overlaps; the worlds do not.
The engine runs smoothly. It just doesn’t run the same engine for everyone.
Where This Is Going
With the structure in place, we can now do the slower work:
unpacking individual components
tracing where ontological choices are asserted rather than argued
showing how “reasonableness” and “fairness” operate as constraint mechanisms
and explaining why remediation almost always requires a metaphysical switch, not better rhetoric
Justice is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was built to do.
That should worry us more than if it were merely malfunctioning.
This essay is already long, so I’m going to stop here.
Not because the interesting parts are finished, but because this is the point at which the analysis stops being descriptive and starts becoming destabilising.
The diagram you’ve just walked through carries a set of suppressed footnotes. They don’t sit at the margins because they’re trivial; they sit there because they are structurally prior. Each one represents an ontological assertion the system quietly requires in order to function at all.
By my count, the model imposes at least five such ontologies. They are not argued for inside the system. They are assumed. They arrive pre-installed, largely because they are indoctrinated, acculturated, and reinforced long before anyone encounters a courtroom, a jury, or a moral dilemma.
Once those ontologies are fixed, the rest of the machinery behaves exactly as designed. Disagreement downstream is permitted; disagreement upstream is not.
In a follow-up essay, I’ll unpack those footnotes one by one: where the forks are, which branch the system selects, and why the alternatives—while often coherent—are rendered unintelligible, irresponsible, or simply “unreasonable” once the engine is in motion.
That’s where justice stops looking inevitable and starts looking parochial.
And that’s also where persuasion quietly gives up.
Written by Bry Willis and ChatGPT 5.2 after a couple of days of back and forth
This is a follow-on to some recent posts.* It would be a mistake to pretend that the grammatical habits discussed here float free of intellectual history. They do not. They align uncannily well with the way two broad philosophical traditions came to frame the self, experience, and knowledge.
On the Anglo-American analytic side, the modern picture of the self emerges early with John Locke. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke does not yet offer a full ‘bundle theory’, but he lays the groundwork decisively. Consciousness, for Locke, is what unifies experience over time through memory. The self is not a substance but a continuity of awareness, accessible through introspection and reportable as a series of mental contents.¹
Locke’s treatment of personal identity already presupposes a grammar of states. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he insists that personal identity “consists” in consciousness alone, extending backward through memory to past thoughts and actions (II.xxvii.9).
Image: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Essay, II.xxvii.17
The self is not something that unfolds; it is something that can be retrospectively tracked. Experiences appear as items one is conscious of, and identity becomes a matter of continuity between those items. It is no accident that Locke later calls ‘person’ a forensic term, fit for attribution, responsibility, and judgement (II.xxvii.28). The grammar is already administrative.
Image: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Essay, II.xxvii.28
The grammatical resonance is hard to miss. Experiences are treated as inspectable states: I am aware of X; I have the idea of Y. Consciousness becomes something one can, in principle, take inventory of.
David Hume completes the move with characteristic bluntness. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), he famously reports that when he looks inward, he never catches himself without a perception. The self, he concludes, is nothing over and above a bundle of impressions and ideas, linked by habit and association.²
Where Locke still spoke of consciousness as what makes the self, Hume takes the next step and goes looking for that self directly. What he finds instead are only perceptions: heat, cold, pleasure, pain. The self does not endure; it is inferred. Identity becomes a habit of grammar and memory, not a feature of experience itself.
This is not merely a metaphysical claim. It is a grammatical one. Experience appears as a sequence of discrete items, each presentable as something one is or has at a given moment. Duration is reduced to succession; undergoing becomes adjacency. The copula does the quiet work.
From here, it is a short step to the analytic comfort with:
truth-conditional analysis,
propositional attitudes,
mental states as objects of third-person description,
and, eventually, the scientific naturalisation of consciousness.
None of this is accidental. The grammar and the metaphysics grow together.
The Continental Recoil
Across the Channel, a different unease takes hold. Immanuel Kant already resists the reduction of the subject to a bundle. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), the ‘I think’ is not an object among objects but a necessary condition for experience at all.³ The subject cannot be encountered the way sensations can. It is not something one has or is; it is that through which anything appears.
Image: Critique of Pure Reason, Section II
This resistance deepens with Edmund Husserl, whose phenomenology insists that experience must be described as it is lived, not as it is later reconstructed into states. Consciousness is intentional, temporal, and irreducibly first-personal.⁴ Duration is no longer a sequence of snapshots but a flowing structure of retention and protention.
Image: The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness
Heidegger radicalises this further. In Being and Time (1927), Dasein is not a container for experiences but a mode of being-in-the-world. Experience is not something that happens inside a subject; it is the subject’s way of being disclosed to a world.⁵
By the time we reach Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, any attempt to treat sensation as a property or possession of a self begins to look like a category mistake. Feeling is not a thing one owns. It is a relation, an encounter, a situation.
Notably, these traditions operate in languages where ‘having’ and reflexive constructions dominate descriptions of sensation. This does not determine the philosophy, but it makes certain moves feel natural and others strained.
Two Ontologies, One Quiet Filter
What matters here is not who is right. It is that entire ontological styles become normalised long before argument begins. Grammar does not force conclusions, but it sets default expectations. Some descriptions feel ‘clean’, others ‘muddy’. Some questions feel legitimate, others oddly misframed. This is where institutional gatekeeping enters.
Peer review, citation norms, and journal scope are often described as quality controls. Sometimes they are. But they also function as recognition systems. Work that leans too heavily on phenomenological description may appear ‘imprecise’ to an analytic referee. Work that treats mental states as discrete objects may appear ‘naïve’or “reductive” to a continental one. Hybrid work becomes difficult to place, difficult to referee, and therefore risky. The issue is rarely explicit disagreement. It is a failure of grammatical hospitality.
Where Sensing Falls Through the Cracks
Against this background, it is perhaps unsurprising that sensing never becomes dominant. To speak of feeling is to refuse both ontological closure and inventory. It resists being cleanly formalised or neatly opposed. It fits awkwardly into truth-conditional frameworks and offers little leverage for grand theory. And yet, it is arguably closer to how experience actually unfolds. Which may explain why it remains linguistically available but philosophically marginal: acceptable in life, tolerated in literature, quietly sidelined in theory.
Notes (for those who care)
Locke, J. (1690). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, esp. chs. 1, 27.
Hume, D. (1739–40). A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, §6.
Kant, I. (1781/1787). Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Deduction.
Husserl, E. (1913). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology.
Heidegger, M. (1927). Being and Time.
NB: This may be a bit disorganised, but I’ve hit my limit.
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.
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.
Another faux Magic: The Gathering trading card. I’ve been busy writing an essay on Tatterhood and wondering if I’ve gone off the edge even further into mental masturbation. I made these cards to share on slow news days, as it were.
[EDIT: Oops: Even wore. I already posted something today. Enjoy the bonus post.]
Every philosopher dreams of a device that reveals ‘truth’. The Constructivist Lens does the opposite. When you tap it, the world doesn’t come into focus – it multiplies. Each pane shows the same thing differently, reminding us that knowing is always a form of making – seeing as building.
In The Discipline of Dis-Integration, I wrote that philosophy’s task is ‘to remain within what persists … to study the tension in the threads rather than weave a new pattern’. The Lens embodies that ethic. It is not an instrument of discovery but of disclosure: a way to notice the scaffolding of perception without mistaking it for bedrock.
Flavour text: “Knowledge is not a copy of reality but a tool for coping with it.” — Richard Rorty
Where Enlightenment optics promised clarity, the Lens trades in parallax. It insists that perspective is not a flaw but the condition of vision itself. Each player who peers through it – artist, scientist, moralist – constructs a different coherence, none final. The card’s rule text captures this tension: replace any keyword on a permanent with a metaphor of your choice until end of turn. Reality bends, language shifts, yet the game continues.
In the Dis-Integration set, the Lens sits alongside Perspectival Realism and Language Game (not yet shared), forming the Blue triad of epistemic doubt. Together they dramatise what the essay calls ‘the hyphen as hinge’: the small pause between integration and its undoing. The Constructivist Lens, then, is not a tool for clearer sight but a reminder that every act of seeing is already an act of construction.
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.
A LinkedIn colleague posts this. I didn’t want to rain on his parade there – we’ve got an interesting binary intellectual relationship – we either adamantly agree or vehemently disagree. This reflects the latter. The title is revelatory – the all-caps, his:
A good society requires more than virtuous individuals and fair institutions: it requires a mediating moral principle capable of binding persons, communities, and structures into a shared project of human flourishing.
Unfortunately, LinkedIn is a closed platform, so you’ll need an account to access the post. Anyway…
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
I can remember when I emerged from this mindset – or at least consciously reflected on it and declined the invitation.
Video clip: Because I felt like it. (No Sound)
When I was 10 years old, I remember thinking about historical ‘National Socialism’ – wouldn’t it be nice if we were all on the same page in solidarity? Then I realised that I’d have to be on their page; they wouldn’t be on mine.
Then, I realised that ‘solidarity’ isn’t a warm circle of clasped hands under a rainbow; rather, it’s a demand to harmonise one’s interior life with someone else’s tuning fork. So-called unity is almost always a euphemism for ideological choreography, and one doesn’t get to pick the routine.
Children are sold the Sesame Street version of solidarity, where everyone shares crayons and sings about common purpose. Cue the Beach Boys: Wouldn’t It Be Nice?
Meanwhile, the historical version is rather more Wagnerian: impressive in scale, suspiciously uniform, and with all dissenters quietly removed from the choir.
My childhood self intuited precisely what my adult writing has since anatomised:
Solidarity is only lovely when you imagine everyone else will move toward you; it curdles the moment you realise the gravitational pull goes the other way.
‘We’re all on the same page’ always becomes ‘Get on the page we’ve selected for you’ – or elected against your vote. The fantasy of we dissolves into the machinery of they.
This isn’t a bug in the system; that is the system. Solidarity requires a centre, and once there’s a centre, someone else gets to define its radius. Even the gentle, ethical, cotton-wool versions still rely on boundary enforcement: who belongs in the shared project, who must adjust their cadence, who is politely removed for ‘disrupting the collective good’. I’m more often apt to be that person than not. History merely illustrates the principle at scale; the mechanism is universal.
Anyway, this is how my brain works, and how I think how I do, and write what I write. As much as I witter on about episodic selves, this remains a prevalent continuity.
Jason from Philosopher Muse suggested a connexion between Transductive Subjectivity and the work of Stephen Batchelor. I wasn’t familiar with Batchelor, so — as one does these days — I asked a GPT to give me the lay of the land. The machine obliged, and the result was interesting enough that it warranted a post of its own. This is it.
The risk I take is that the GPT gets it wrong. If so, call me out.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Before anyone lights incense: I’m not suddenly a convert. Batchelor’s work and mine merely pass each other on adjacent footpaths. But the overlap is conceptually neat, and the divergence is even more telling.
Stephen Batchelor vs Transductive Subjectivity: A Brief Comparative Note
1. Shared Territory: The Self as Verb, Not Noun
Both Batchelor and Transductive Subjectivity reject the folk notion of a single, continuous metaphysical self.
Batchelor (Secular Buddhism): The self is an unfolding activity — impermanent, conditional, and without a stable essence. His “not-self” is a practice of disidentification from the imagined nugget of continuity we cling to.
Transductive Subjectivity: The self is a finite series: S₀ → S₁ → S₂ → … → Sₙ, each produced through the pressure of relational structures (R). Identity is what results when the world meets the organism. Nothing metaphysical required; just biology, cognition, language, and institutions doing their thing.
Overlap: Both positions dismantle the enduring pearl-of-self. Both frame identity as something generated, not possessed.
2. Divergent Aims: Inner Liberation vs Structural Clarity
This is where the paths fork.
Batchelor’s Agenda: Primarily ethical and therapeutic. The point of denying a fixed self is to reduce suffering, ease attachment, and cultivate a more responsive way of being.
TS’s Agenda: Metaphysical accuracy in the service of ethical clarity. If the self is a serial construction rather than a diachronic monolith, then retributive justice collapses under its own fictions. No self, no desert. No desert, no justification for revenge-based punishment.
Batchelor wants flourishing. I want rigour. Accidental cousins.
3. Methodological Differences: Distillation vs Reconstruction
Batchelor performs what you might call Buddhism sans metaphysics. A very Western manoeuvre:
keep impermanence
keep ethical insight
jettison karma, rebirth, cosmology
rebrand the remnants as a secular spiritual practice
Practitioners dislike this because he amputates the structural scaffolding that supported the doctrine.
TS, by contrast, doesn’t distil anything. It reconstructs selfhood from first principles:
No causa sui
Episodic, indexical selfhood (Strawson)
R→S transduction (MEOW)
No diachronic essence
No metaphysical ballast
If Buddhism aligns with TS, it’s incidental — the way two different mathematicians can discover the same function by entirely different routes.
4. Conceptual Architecture: Dependent Origination vs MEOW’s Tiers
Batchelor: leans on dependent origination as a philosophical metaphor — phenomena arise through conditions.
TS: models the exact channels of that conditioning via MEOW: T0 → biological signals T1 → cognitive architecture T2 → linguistic formats T3 → social-technical pressures
Where Batchelor says “everything is contingent,” TS says “yes, and here is the actual machinery.”
5. Different Stakes
Batchelor: freeing the person from clinging to an imaginary core.
TS: freeing ethics, law, and social design from pretending that metaphysical core exists.
One is therapeutic; the other is diagnostic.
A Key Point of Departure: Batchelor Works with Folk Psychology; TS Rejects Its Premises
There is one more divergence worth highlighting because it cuts to the bone of the comparison.
Batchelor accepts the phenomenological feel of the continuous self as a legitimate starting point. His work is therapeutic: he begins where the person is, in the lived experience of being “me,” and then encourages a gentle loosening of the grip on that intuition.
Transductive Subjectivity takes a different route entirely.
For TS, the continuous, diachronic self isn’t a psychological obstacle to be softened — it is a category mistake. A narrative compression artefact. A heuristic with pragmatic uses, yes, but no metaphysical legitimacy. Batchelor tries to transform our relation to the folk-self; TS denies that the folk-self was ever more than a convenient fiction.
Batchelor says: “You seem like a continuous self; now learn to hold that lightly.”
TS says: “You seem like a continuous self because the system is glossing over discontinuities. The sensation itself is misleading.”
In other words:
Batchelor redeems the experience.
TS disassembles the model.
He treats the “self” as something to relate to differently. TS treats the “self” as an ontological construct to be replaced with a more accurate one.
This is not a difference of ethical aim but of metaphysical foundation. Batchelor trims the folk psychology; TS declines the invitation altogether.
Closing Note
So yes — the connexion Jason spotted is real. But it’s genealogical, not derivative. We arrive at similar conclusions for different reasons and with different consequences.
Batchelor is pruning a tradition. Transductive Subjectivity is rebuilding the ontology.
And both, in their own way, make the continuity-self look like the rhetorical placeholder it always was.
Written entirely by ChatGPT after a chat about Stephen Batchelor (obviously)
Philosophics 