Tag: constructivism

Footnotes from the House: Justice as a Casino Game

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
4–6 minutes

This is part 2 of a structural critique of Justice™. Read Part 1, The Ontology–Encounter–Evaluation Model: Retributive Justice as an Instantiation.

If you want a useful metaphor for how justice actually operates, don’t picture a blindfolded goddess with scales. Picture a casino.

Image: Lady Justice in Casino. The dice are rigged. haha

The rules are printed. The games look fair. Everyone is technically allowed to play. But the mathematics are tuned in advance, the exits are discreet, and the house never risks its own solvency. You don’t walk into a casino to discover whether chance is fair. You walk in to participate in a system whose advantage has already been engineered.

Justice works the same way
– like a casino with house-favoured odds.

By the time a defendant appears, the ontological dice have already been loaded. The system has quietly asserted a set of metaphysical commitments that make certain outcomes legible, actionable, and punishable – whilst rendering others incoherent, inadmissible, or ‘unreasonable’. Because I am a philosopher of language and not a lawyer, I am free from the indoctrination and selection bias inherent in that system. This allows me to critique the system directly without being excommunicated from the club.

Justice Ontology Rev 1Download

What follows are not neutral assumptions. They are ontological wagers, each chosen because its alternative would tilt the field away from institutional power.

Ontology 1: The Self

Asserted (g): Diachronic, continuous self
Excluded (h): Episodic, fragmented, or non-self

Justice presumes that the person who acted yesterday is meaningfully the same entity standing in court today. This is not discovered; it is asserted.

Why? Because retribution requires persistence. Desert cannot attach to a momentary configuration of consciousness. Responsibility requires a carrier that survives time, memory gaps, psychological rupture, intoxication, trauma, and neurological variance.

An episodic self – Parfit’s reductionism, trauma-fractured identity, or situational selfhood – collapses the attribution pipeline. If the ‘self’ is a series of loosely connected episodes, punishment becomes conceptually incoherent. Who is being punished for whom?

So the law treats episodic accounts not as alternative ontologies but as defects: insanity, automatism, incompetence. The self is patched, not replaced.

The house needs continuity.
Without it, the game cannot settle accounts.

Ontology 2: Agency

Asserted (i): Robust individual agency
Excluded (j): Distributed, constrained, or illusory agency

Justice requires that actions originate somewhere. Agency is that somewhere.

The system asserts that agents could have done otherwise in a morally relevant sense. This is compatible with compatibilism, folk psychology, and everyday moral intuitions – but deeply hostile to hard determinism, strong situationism, or neurobiological deflation.

Why exclude weaker agency models? Because if agency dissolves into causation, environment, or neurochemistry, responsibility evaporates. At best, you get risk management. At worst, you get treatment or containment. Retribution has nowhere to land.

So the law nods politely to influences – upbringing, coercion, impairment – whilst ring-fencing agency as the default. Mitigation is permitted. Ontological revision is not. The house needs someone who could have chosen otherwise, even if that claim grows increasingly fictional under scrutiny.

The house needs someone who could have chosen otherwise

Ontology 3: Choice

Asserted (k): Discrete, identifiable choice points
Excluded (l): Continuous, coerced, or structurally constrained decision spaces

Justice models human action as a series of forks in the road. At some point, the agent ‘chose’ X over Y. This is enormously convenient.

Continuous decision spaces – poverty gradients, addiction loops, survival trade-offs – are messy. They resist clean counterfactuals. ‘What should they have done instead?’ becomes a sociological question, not a moral one.

So the system discretises. It locates a moment. A click. A trigger pull. A signature. A punch. A text sent.

Once the choice is frozen, the rest of the apparatus can proceed. Without discrete choice points, proportionality and culpability lose their anchor.

The house needs moments, not milieus.

Ontology 4: Causation

Asserted (m): Local, linear causation
Excluded (n): Diffuse, systemic, or emergent causation

Justice prefers causes that point: Who did this? When? How directly?

Systemic causation – economic pressure, cultural narratives, institutional design – creates attribution problems. If harm is emergent, no individual carries it cleanly. Responsibility smears.

So causation is narrowed. Chains are shortened. Proximate cause replaces contributing conditions. Structural violence becomes background noise.

This is not because systemic causation is false. It is because it is unmanageable within a retributive frame.

The house needs causes that fit inside a sentence.

Ontology 5: Reasonableness

Asserted (a): Normative moderation
Excluded (b): Atypical intensity, outsider rationalities

‘Reasonableness’ is the softest and most insidious ontology of the lot.

It pretends to be procedural, but it functions as cultural enforcement. The reasonable person is not an average human. They are an acculturated one.

Intensity becomes suspect. Rage becomes irrational. Grief becomes excessive. Radical interpretations become unreasonable not because they’re false, but because they disrupt cadence.

This ontology stabilises the game by disciplining tone. It doesn’t matter what you argue if you fail to argue it reasonably. Reasonableness is not required for responsibility to exist, only for dissent to be ignored.

Reasonableness is not required for responsibility to exist, only for dissent to be ignored.

The house needs calm players, not correct ones.

Why These Ontologies, and Not Their Rivals?

Because every excluded ontology threatens legibility. Justice is not designed to discover truth. It is designed to terminate cases. Ontologies that complicate attribution, disperse responsibility, or destabilise narrative continuity slow the machine. So they are ruled out – not explicitly, but structurally.

Once these commitments are in place, disagreement downstream becomes theatre. Arguments about fairness, proportionality, or intent occur within a rigged metaphysical envelope. That’s why reform debates feel sincere yet go nowhere. People argue outcomes whilst the house quietly keeps the rules.

The Point

None of this means justice is a scam. Casinos aren’t scams either. They do exactly what they are designed to do.

The problem is pretending the odds are neutral.

If you want to challenge justice meaningfully, you don’t start with sentencing guidelines or evidentiary thresholds. You start by asking which ontologies are being asserted – and why alternatives are unplayable.

Most people won’t make that move. Not because it’s wrong. Because it requires leaving the table.

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Written by Bry Willis

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The Ontology–Encounter–Evaluation Model: Retributive Justice as an Instantiation

Posted in ontology, philosophy, podcast, political theoryTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
7–10 minutes

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.

Read part 2 of this essay.

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.

Justice Ontology Rev 1Download

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.

The rest of the story

Read part 2 of this essay.

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.

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Written by Bry Willis and ChatGPT 5.2 after a couple of days of back and forth

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Contructivist Lens: Parody Artefact

Posted in art, critical theory, Culture & Society, modernism, perception, philosophy, post-enlightenment, postmodernism, psychology, quoteTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

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.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Perspectival Realism: The First Ontology Without an Asterisk

Posted in perception, philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments
6–10 minutes

The realism remains; the universality does not.

Update: Please note that I have refined my position on this and documented it in a newer post. It builds upon this idea but clarifies some disconnects and provides me with some ontological distance from Massimi.

There comes a moment in any serious thinker’s life when the metaphysical menu starts looking like a bad buffet: too much on offer, none of it quite edible, and the dishes that appear promising turn out to depend on ingredients you can’t stomach. Realism insists the world is simply there, chugging along regardless of your opinions. Anti-realism points out, inconveniently, that all your access is wildly mediated. Perspectivism adds humility. Constructivism chastises you for overconfidence. Analytic Idealism sweeps matter off the table entirely, until you ask why consciousness spits out such stubbornly consistent patterns.

I’ve been through all of them.
Realism*—asterisk for “but what about mediation?”
Idealism*—asterisk for “but what about resistance?”

Everything almost worked.
And “almost” is the metaphysical kiss of death.
“Almost” is where the asterisks live.

Perspectival Realism is the first position I can hold without planting that apologetic little star in the margins.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast summary on this topic.

The Asterisk Journey (Brief, Painless, Necessary)

This isn’t a conversion narrative. It’s a salvage operation. Each station on the journey left me with tools worth keeping.

Layer 1: Iconography (Hoffman, minus the metaphysics)

Perception is not a window. It’s an interface. A species-specific dashboard designed for survival, not truth. Evolution gave you a set of icons—colour patches, contrast edges, looming shapes—not an accurate rendering of reality’s architecture.

Uexküll called this the umwelt: every organism inhabits its own perceptual slice of the world. Bees see ultraviolet; snakes sense heat; humans see embarrassingly little.

This is Layer 1 mediation:
Reality-as-filtered-for-primates.

Layer 2: Instrumentation (Kastrup, minus the leap)

Consciousness is the instrument through which reality is measured. Measuring instruments shape the measurements. That doesn’t make the world mind-shaped; it just means you only ever get readings through the apparatus you’ve got.

This is Layer 2 mediation:
Your cognitive architecture—predictive priors, attentional limitations, spatial-temporal scaffolding—structures experience before thought arrives.

Where I leave Kastrup behind is the familiar leap:
“Because consciousness measures reality, reality must be made of consciousness.”
That’s the instrumentality fallacy.

You need consciousness to access the world.
That tells you nothing about what the world is.

Layer 3: Linguistic–Cultural Carving (Your home field)

And then comes the mediation philosophers most reliably ignore: language.
Language does not describe reality. It carves it.

Some cultures divide colour into eleven categories; some into five. The Müller-Lyer illusion fools Westerners far more than it fools hunter-gatherers. Concepts feel natural only because you inherited them pre-packaged.

This is Layer 3 mediation: the cultural-linguistic filter that makes the world legible—and in the same breath, distorts it.

You mistake the map for the territory because it’s the only map you’ve ever held.

The Hard Problem, Dissolved — Not Solved

When English splits the world into “mental” and “physical,” it accidentally manufactures the “hard problem of consciousness.” Sanskrit traditions carve reality differently and end up with different “mysteries.”

The hard problem isn’t a revelation about reality.
It’s a conceptual knot tied by Layer 3 mediation.

Changing the ontology to “everything is mind” doesn’t untie the knot.
It just dyes the rope a different colour.

The Triple Lock

Put the three layers together and you get the honest picture:

  1. Your senses give you icons, not the thing-in-itself.
  2. Your cognition structures those icons automatically.
  3. Your culture tells you what the structured icons mean.

And yet—despite all of this—the world pushes back.

Gravity doesn’t care about your interpretive community.
Arsenic does not negotiate its effects with your culture.
Your beliefs about heat won’t keep your hand from burning.

This is the fulcrum of Perspectival Realism:

Reality is real and resists us, but all access is triply mediated.

The realism remains.
The universality does not.

Why Perspectival Realism is Not Relativism

Relativism says: “Everyone’s perspective is equally valid.”
Perspectival Realism says: “Everyone’s perspective is equally situated.”

Very different claims.

Some perspectives predict better.
Some cohere better.
Some survive reality’s resistance better.
Some transfer across contexts better.
Some correct their own errors faster.

You don’t need a view from nowhere to say that.
You just need to notice which maps get you killed less often.

What This Framework Enables

1. Progress without foundation myths

Science improves because reality resists bad models. Mediation doesn’t prevent progress; it’s the condition of it.

2. Critique without arrogance

You can rank perspectives without pretending to hover above them.

3. Cross-cultural dialogue without imperialism or despair

Cultures carve experience differently, but they’re carving the same underlying world. Translation is hard, not impossible.

4. Honest metaphysics

No glamourised escape from sensory embodiment, cognitive bias, or cultural inheritance.
Just the patient business of refining our mediated grip on the real.

What Perspectival Realism Actually Claims

Let me make the commitments explicit:

  1. There is a world independent of our representations.
  2. All access to it is mediated by perception, cognition, and culture.
  3. Perspectives can be compared because reality pushes back.
  4. No perspective is unmediated.
  5. The asymptote—Reality-as-it-is—is unreachable.

This isn’t pessimism.
It’s maturity.

Why This Is the First Ontology Without an Asterisk

Every worldview before this needed the quiet, shamefaced footnote:

  • Realism*: “But access is mediated.”
  • Idealism*: “But resistance is real.”
  • Perspectivism*: “But we still need to rank perspectives.”
  • Constructivism*: “But the world’s invariances aren’t constructs.”

Perspectival Realism eats the objections instead of dodging them.
There is no asterisk because the worldview is built from the asterisks.

No promises of transcendence.
No pretense of universality.
No linguistic sleight-of-hand.

Just embodied beings navigating a real world through fallible instruments, shared practices, and cultural grammars—occasionally catching a clearer glimpse, never stepping outside the frame.

The realism remains.
The universality does not.
And for once, metaphysics isn’t lying to you.

DISCLAIMER: This article was written or output by ChatGPT 5.1. It started as a conversation with Claude Sonnet 4.5, where I had input days of output for evaluation. One of these outputs was the post about Erasmus and the Emissary Who Forgot to Bow. A group chat ensued between me, Claude and ChatGPT.

What started as a discussion about the merits of my position, expressed in the Erasmus-influenced essay, drifted to one about Perspectival Realism. That discussion deepened on ChatGPT, as I further discussed my recent thoughts on the latter topic. I had rendered a Magic: The Gathering parody trading card as I contemplated the subject. It’s how my brain works.

All of this led me to ask ChatGPT to summarise the conversation, and, upon further discussion, I asked it to draft this very article – the first of five.

  1. Perspectival Realism: The First Ontology Without an Asterisk 👈
    This article discusses what Perspectival Realism means to me and how I got to this position.
  2. Why Perspectival Realism Is Not Relativism
    Further discussion prompted me to differentiate this ontology from other perspectives.
  3. Arriving Late to Massimi’s Party: Perspectival Realism in Parallel
    I spent another half-hour following Google search results as I wanted to see if anyone else had already been using the term, Perspectival Realism. I ended up on the Oxford publishing site. I found a 2022 book with this name, authored by Michela Massimi. They allowed me to download the book, so I asked ChatGPT to summarise our positions, specifically where we agreed and differed.
  4. Against the Vat: Why Perspectival Realism Survives Every Sceptical Hypothesis
    At 0500, I returned to bed, but I woke up again at 0700 thinking about how one might differentiate between Putnam’s brain in a vat from Perspectival Realism. ChatGPT asked if I wanted that output in long-form.
  5. The Constraint Interface: Toward a Nexal Ontology
    Being uncomfortable with the dichotomy between Realism and Idealism, I chatted to come up with terminology that disrupts what I consider a false dichotomy, focusing on the nexus rather than privileging one or the other. Consider this similar to the debate on sex and gender binaries.

Could I have improved on these articles if I had rewritten or polished them? Maybe. What’s the purpose? This is all a result of my concepts and inquiries. I endorse the output. I may return to make edits in future, or I may restate this information in my own voice, but for now, let this serve as notice that I am not afraid of generative AI; I am not afraid that it is going to supplant my thinking. I find that whilst I can prompt GPTs to make connexions or to query who else might be relevant to a topic, it doesn’t generally offer its own initiative, what we term Agency.

As for this particular post, it reads more like a listicle. I could have rendered it more expositional, but the structured thinking is all here; why should I reinvent the wheel just to put skin on these bones? As I said, perhaps I’ll flesh this out for elaboration or publication in future, for now, let this serve as a waypoint and a record of how I got here. This supplants my prior position, the asterisked Analytic Idealism, published in 2022, which supplanted my asterisked Realism. Perhaps I’ll finally be able to settle for an ontology and epistemology with no stars.

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Output Produced by ChatGPT

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Language Games: Sorcery

Posted in language, perception, philosophy, postmodernismTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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.

Whichever you choose, you’re still playing.

Perspectival Realism – Enchantment

Posted in art, consciousness, language, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, psychology, realityTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

This Magic: The Gathering parody trading card was the first in my Critical Theory series.

It’s an important card for me. As with sex and gender, creating a taxonomic or ontological dichotomy poses categorical challenges. Despite the insufficiency of language, it’s still all I have to attempt to classify the world. In the case of articulating the perception of reality, we can choose between idealism and realism. The problem is that it’s not either; it’s both. Reality cannot be realised without both.

Reality, we’re told, exists. That confident noun has carried a great deal of human arrogance. It has underwritten empires, sciences, and sermons. Yet somewhere between Plato’s cave and the latest TED Talk, we forgot to ask a simpler question: for whom does reality exist, and from where is it seen?

Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this topic.

The parody trading card Perspectival Realism was born from that unease. Its mechanic is simple but cruel: at the beginning of each player’s draw step, they must describe the card they drew. The enchantment persists until two players describe a card in the same way—at which point the spell collapses. In other words, consensus kills magic.

Reality is always viewed from somewhere.

—Johannes Jaeger

That rule is the metaphysics of the thing.

When a player ‘describes’ a card, they are not transmitting information; they are constructing the object in linguistic space. The moment the description leaves their mouth, the card ceases to be a piece of paper and becomes a conceptual artefact.

This mirrors the insight of Kant, Nietzsche, and every post-structuralist who ever smoked too much Gauloises: perception isn’t passive. We don’t see reality; we compose it. Language isn’t a mirror but a paintbrush. The thing we call truth is not correspondence but coherence – a temporary truce among competing metaphors.

So the card’s enchantment dramatises this process. So long as multiple descriptions circulate, reality remains vibrant, contested, alive. Once everyone agrees, it dies the death of certainty.

Philosophers have spent centuries arguing whether the world is fundamentally real (existing independent of mind) or ideal (a projection of mind). Both sides are equally tiresome.

Realism, the old bulldog of metaphysics, insists that perception is transparent: language merely reports what’s already there. Idealism, its mirror adversary, claims the opposite – that what’s “there” is mind-stuff all along. Both mistakes are symmetrical. Realism forgets the perceiver; Idealism forgets the world.

Perspectival realism refuses the divorce. It begins from the premise that world and mind are inseparable aspects of a single event: knowing. Reality is not a photograph waiting to be developed, nor a hallucination spun from neurons – it’s a relation, a constant negotiation between perceiver and perceived.

For years, I called myself a Realist™ with an asterisk. That asterisk meant I understood the observer problem: that every ‘fact’ is perspective-laden. Then I became an Idealist™ with an asterisk, meaning I recognised that mind requires matter to dream upon.

The asterisk is everything. It’s the epistemic scar left by perspectival humility – the tacit admission that every claim about the world carries a hidden coordinate: said from here. It is not relativism, but situatedness. It is the philosophical equivalent of depth perception: without the offset, there’s no vision at all.

The card’s rule – sacrifice Perspectival Realism when two players describe a card identically – captures the tragedy of modernity. The Enlightenment taught us to chase consensus, to flatten multiplicity into “objective truth.” We became addicted to sameness, mistaking agreement for understanding.

But agreement is anaesthetic. When all perspectives converge, the world ceases to shimmer; it becomes measurable, predictable, dead. The card’s enchantment disappears the moment reality is stabilised, precisely as our cultural enchantment did under the fluorescent light of ‘reason’.

To live under perspectival realism is to acknowledge that reality is not what is drawn but what is described. And the description is never neutral. It is always written from somewhere – by someone, with a vocabulary inherited from history and stained by desire.

As long as multiple descriptions coexist, the game remains alive. The moment they fuse into one, the spell is broken, and the world returns to grey.

Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism reminded me that consciousness might be primary, but perspectival realism refuses to pledge allegiance. It keeps both flags tattered but flying. The world exists, yes, but only ever for someone.

The enchantment, then, is not belief but perspective itself. So long as difference endures, the game continues.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Constructivist Lens — Artifact

Posted in perception, philosophy, psychology, quoteTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Parody Magic: The Gathering trading card

When drawn, this card alters perception itself. It reminds the player that truth is not something one finds under a rock but something one polishes into shape. Each metaphor becomes a spell; each keyword a crutch thrown aside.

Those who wield the Constructivist Lens see not “facts,” but fictions so useful they forgot to call them that. Reality wobbles politely to accommodate belief.

“Knowledge is not a copy of reality but a tool for coping with it.”
— Richard Rorty

In game terms: Tap to reframe existence as interpretation. Duration: until the next disagreement.

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Rendered by Bry Willis

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Bell Curves and Constructivism

Posted in intelligence, philosophy, politics, science, societyTagged , , , Leave a comment

I recently had a discussion with my son about a controversial academic topic. He was struggling to find someone willing to engage in a meaningful dialogue. People on both sides of the issue seemed either emotionally invested without evidentiary support or lacking sufficient background knowledge for substantive debate. Moreover, due to the current political correctness and cancel culture environment, even gathering new data on this unpopular subject is challenging. This exemplifies the failure of the scientific community to uphold impartial inquiry, a key factor underlying my view that scientific consensus is predicated more on rhetorical appeals than dispassionate analysis.

The topic stemmed from The Bell Curve, a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray. The authors argued that intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, has a strong genetic component, with race and ethnicity as statistically significant variables. Specifically, they claimed the average IQ score for whites in the US was one standard deviation higher than for blacks – 102 versus 85, as depicted in the chart below.

While the details are less relevant here, the core issue is the purported gap between racial groups. As shown, there is substantial overlap in the bell curves, but the one representing blacks is notably shifted leftward from the white curve.

As a statistician, I tend to focus more on methodological rigour and meta-analyses than the mathematical computations themselves, which I presume were executed properly.

My first consideration was the validity of IQ tests as a proxy for achievement, given the cultural biases these metrics contain. Even accepting the IQ gap argument, issues around test construction leave open the ‘so what?’ question. However, the study’s findings were largely replicated 15 years later, suggesting some robustness.

My son observed that the current sociopolitical climate would likely preclude similar research from being funded or published today. Accusations of racism would be inevitable, even for a purely academic inquiry on this topic – creating an artificial blind spot in the science.

While understandable given the history of eugenics abuses, refusing to objectively investigate testable hypotheses is antithetical to the scientific method, which relies on falsifiability and replication. Without permitting studies to potentially confirm or refute a claim, we are left guessing. This is how scientific narratives are socially constructed – not by a disinterested search for truth, but through consensus and conformity enforcement.

I am sceptical of social science approaches generally, which often appear pseudoscientific. However constructive criticism should apply equally to so-called hard sciences like physics, where incompatible models of quantum gravity and dark matter proliferate, awaiting the next paradigm shift.

In summary, my son’s concern was that even proposing this controversial thesis as a dissertation topic could lead to professional censure. Personally, I take no position on the veracity of this hypothesis. However, as a matter of scientific integrity and public policy relevance, arbitrarily declaring certain academic questions off limits seems contrary to the principles of an enlightened, post-Enlightenment society. We cannot refuse to ask difficult questions for fear of inconvenient answers.

Žižek’s Essentialism

Posted in identity, philosophy, psychologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

So, I’ve gone down a rabbit hole. Again. This time, it’s Žižek. Again. I’ve still not read any of Žižek’s own work, but people mention him often and he is a shameless self-promoter. In this video clip, he responds to whether gender is a social construct. Unfortunately, he conflates gender with sex, and his examples cite transsexuals not transgenders.

sex is about biological sex assignment

To set the stage, sex is about biological sex assignment—the sex category you are assigned into at birth: male, female, or other for some 1.8%. This is a simplistic categorisation: penis = male; vagina = female; both or neither: rounding error. In some cases, a decision is made to surgically conform the child to either male or female and ensure through prophylactic treatment that this isn’t undone hormonally in adolescence.

gender is about identity

Gender is about identity. As such, it is entirely a social construct. All identity of this nature is a function of language and society. In this world—in the West—, females wear dresses (if they are to be worn at all) and males don’t—kilts notwithstanding. In this world, sex and gender have little room for divergence. so the male who identifies as this gender (not this sex) is ostracised.

The example I usually consider first is the comedian Eddie Izzard—a cross-dresser. He’s probably a bad example because he does identify as a male. He just doesn’t wish to be constrained by male role restrictions and wants to wear the makeup that’s been reserved for women in the West at this time.

Žižek eventually gets to an argument about essentialism—so we’re back at Sorites paradoxes and Theseus again. At the start, I could argue that the sexual distinction has few meaningful contexts. For me, unless I am trying to have sex and/or procreate, the distinction is virtually meaningless. For others, only procreation remains contextually relevant. In this technological world, as Beauvoir noted in the late 1940s, strength differentials are not so relevant. End where they are, sex is not the deciding factor—it’s strength.

Žižek’s contention seems to be that the postmoderns (or whomever) disclaim essentialism in favour of constructivism but then resolve at essentialism as a defence because ‘now I am in the body originally intended’. I’ll argue that this is the logic employed by the person, but this person is not defending some academic philosophical position. They are merely engaging in idiomatic vernacular.

I am not deeply familiar with this space, and if the same person who is making a claim against essentialism is defending their actions with essentialism, then he’s got a leg to stand on. As for me, the notions of essentialism and constructivism are both constructed.