The Felt Beneath the Table

Dec 24, 2025Dec 22, 2025Posted in philosophy, podcast, societyTagged accountability, Commensurability, critical theory, critique, fairness, incommensurability, institutional power, jurisprudence, justice, language, Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, law, law and language, legal philosophy, legal theory, legitimacy, LIH, MEOW framework, metaphysics, moral disagreement, moral philosophy, morality, normativity, ontology, philosophy, philosophy of law, politics, power, reasonableness, retributive justice, Social ConstructionLeave a comment

Fairness, Commensurability, and the Quiet Violence of Comparison

Fairness and Commensurability as Preconditions of Retributive Justice

This is the final part of a 3-part series. Read parts 1 and 2 for a fuller context.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Before the Cards Are Dealt

Two people invoke fairness. They mean opposite things. Both are sincere. Neither can prove the other wrong. This is not a failure of argument. It is fairness working exactly as designed.

Before justice can weigh anything, it must first decide that the things being weighed belong on the same scale. That single move – the assertion that comparison is even possible – quietly does most of the work.

Most people think justice begins at sentencing, or evidence, or procedure. But the real work happens earlier, in a space so normalised it has become invisible. Before any evaluation occurs, the system must install the infrastructure that makes evaluation legible at all.

That infrastructure rests on two foundations:

fairness, which supplies the rhetoric, and
commensurability, which supplies the mathematics.

Together, they form the felt beneath the table – the surface on which the cards can be dealt at all.

1. Why Fairness Is Always Claimed, Never Found

Let’s be precise about what fairness is not.

Fairness is not a metric. You cannot measure it, derive it, or point to it in the world.

Fairness is not a principle with determinate content. It generates no specific obligations, no falsifiable predictions, no uniquely correct outcomes.

Fairness is an effect. It appears after assessment, not before it. It is what you call an outcome when you want it to feel inevitable.

Competing Fairness Is Not a Problem

Consider how disputes actually unfold:

The prosecutor says a long sentence is fair because it is proportional to harm.
The defender says a shorter sentence is fair because it reflects culpability and circumstance.
The victim says any sentence is unfair because nothing restores what was taken.
The community says enforcement itself is unfair because it predictably targets certain groups.

Each claim is sincere. None can be resolved by fairness itself.

That is because fairness has no independent content. It does not decide between these positions. It names them once the system has already decided which will prevail. This is not a bug. It is the feature.

A Fluid Masquerading as an Invariant

In the language of the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, fairness is a Fluid – a concept whose boundaries shift with context and use – that masquerades as an Invariant, something stable and observer-independent.

The system treats fairness as perceptual, obvious, discoverable. But every attempt to anchor it collapses into:

Intuition (‘It just feels right’)
Precedent (‘This is how we do things’)
Consensus (‘Most people agree’)

None of these establishes fairness. They merely perform it.

And that performance matters. It converts contested metaphysical commitments into the appearance of shared values. It allows institutions to claim neutrality whilst enforcing specificity. Fairness is what the system says when it wants its outputs to feel unavoidable.

2. The Real Gatekeeper: Commensurability

Fairness does rhetorical work. But it cannot function without something deeper.

That something is commensurability: the assumption that different harms, injuries, and values can be placed on a shared scale and meaningfully compared.

Proportionality presupposes commensurability. Commensurability presupposes an ontology of value. And that ontology is neither neutral nor shared.

When Incommensurability Refuses to Cooperate

A parent loses a child to preventable negligence. A corporation cuts safety corners. A warning is ignored. The system moves. Liability is established. Damages are calculated. £250,000 is awarded.

The parent refuses the settlement. Not because the amount is insufficient. But because money and loss are not the same kind of thing. The judge grows impatient. Lawyers speak of closure. Observers mutter about grief clouding judgment. But this is not grief. It is incommensurability refusing to cooperate.

The parent is rejecting the comparison itself. Accepting payment would validate the idea that a child’s life belongs on a scale with currency. The violence is not the number. It is the conversion. The system cannot process this refusal except as emotional excess or procedural obstruction. Not because it is cruel, but because without commensurability the engine cannot calculate.

Two Ontologies of Value

There are two incompatible ontologies at work here. Only one is playable.

Ontology A: The Scalar Model

Harm is quantifiable
Suffering is comparable
Trade-offs are morally coherent
Justice is a balancing operation

Under Ontology A, harms differ in degree, not kind. A broken arm, a stolen car, and a dead child all occupy points on the same continuum. This makes proportionality possible.

Ontology B: The Qualitative Model

Harms are categorical
Some losses are incommensurable
Comparison itself distorts
Justice is interpretive, not calculative

Under Ontology B, harms are different kinds of things. Comparison flattens what matters. To weigh them is to misunderstand them.

Why Only One Ontology Can Play

Retributive justice, as presently constituted, cannot function under Ontology B.

Without scalar values, proportionality collapses. Without comparison, equivalence disappears. Without trade-offs, punishment has no exchange rate.

Ontology B is not defeated. It is disqualified. Structurally, procedurally, rhetorically. The house needs a shared scale. Without it, the game cannot settle accounts.

3. Why Incommensurability Is Treated as Bad Faith

Here is where power enters without announcing itself. Incommensurability does not merely complicate disputes. It stalls the engine. And stalled engines threaten institutional legitimacy.

Systems designed to produce closure must ensure that disputes remain within solvable bounds. Incommensurability violates those bounds. It suggests that resolution may be impossible – or that the attempt to resolve does further harm. So the system reframes the problem.

Not as an alternative ontology, but as:

Unreasonableness
Extremism
Emotional volatility
Refusal to engage in good faith

Reasonableness as Border Control

This is why reasonableness belongs where it does in the model. Not as an evaluative principle, but as a gatekeeping mechanism.

Reasonableness does not assess claims. It determines which claims count as claims at all. This is how commensurability enforces itself without admitting it is doing so. When someone refuses comparison, they are not told their ontology is incompatible with retributive justice. They are told to be realistic.

Ontological disagreement is converted into:

A tone problem
A personality defect
A failure to cooperate

The disagreement is not answered. It is pathologised.

4. Why These Debates Never Resolve

This returns us to the Ontology–Encounter–Evaluation model.

People argue fairness as if adjusting weights would fix the scale. They debate severity, leniency, proportionality.

But when two sides inhabit incompatible ontologies of value, no amount of evidence or dialogue bridges the gap. The real disagreement is upstream.

A prosecutor operating under scalar harm and an advocate operating under incommensurable injury are not disagreeing about facts. They are disagreeing about what kind of thing harm is.

Fairness cannot resolve this, because fairness presupposes the very comparison under dispute. This is why reform debates feel sincere and go nowhere. Outcomes are argued whilst ontological commitments remain invisible.

Remediation Requires Switching Teams

As argued elsewhere, remediation increasingly requires switching teams.

But these are not political teams. They are ontological commitments.

Ontologies are not held like opinions. They are held like grammar. You do not argue someone out of them. At best, you expose their costs. At worst, you force others to operate within yours by disqualifying alternatives.

Retributive justice does the latter.

5. What This Means (Without Offering a Fix)

Justice systems are not broken. They are optimised. They are optimised for closure, manageability, and the appearance of neutrality. Fairness supplies the rhetoric. Commensurability supplies the mathematics. Together, they convert contestable metaphysical wagers into procedural common sense.

That optimisation has costs:

Disagreements about value become illegible
Alternative ontologies become unplayable
Dissent becomes pathology
Foundations disappear from view

If justice feels fair, it is because the comparisons required to question it were never permitted.

Ontology as Pre-emptive Gatekeeping

None of this requires conspiracy.

Institutions do not consciously enforce ontologies. They do not need to.

They educate them. Normalise them. Proceduralise them. Then treat their rejection as irrationality.

By the time justice is invoked, the following have already been installed as reality:

That persons persist over time in morally relevant ways
That agents meaningfully choose under conditions that count
That harms can be compared and offset
That responsibility can be localised
That disagreement beyond a point is unreasonable

None of these are discovered. All are rehearsed.

A law student learns that ‘the reasonable person’ is a construct. By year three, they use it fluently. It no longer feels constructed.

This is not indoctrination. It is fluency.

And fluency is how ontologies hide.

By the time an alternative appears – episodic selfhood, incommensurable harm, distributed agency – it does not look like metaphysics. It looks like confusion.

Rationality as Border Control

The system does not say: we reject your ontology.

It says: that’s not how the world works.

Or worse: you’re being unreasonable.

Ontological disagreement is reframed as a defect in the person. And defects do not need answers. They need management.

This is why some arguments feel impossible to have. One ontology has been naturalised into common sense. The other has been reclassified as error.

The Final Irony

The more fragile the foundations, the more aggressively they must be defended as self-evident.

Free will is taught as obvious.
Fairness is invoked as perceptual.
Responsibility is treated as observable.
Incommensurability is treated as sabotage.

Not because the system is confident.

Because it cannot afford not to be.

The Point

Justice does not merely rely on asserted ontologies. It expends enormous effort ensuring they never appear asserted at all.

By the time the cards are dealt, the rules have already been mistaken for reality. That is the felt beneath the table. Invisible. Essential. Doing all the work. And if you want to challenge justice meaningfully, you do not start with outcomes. You start by asking:

What comparisons are we being asked to accept as natural? And what happens to those who refuse?

Most people never make that move. Not because it is wrong. But because by the time you notice the game is rigged, you are already fluent in its rules. And fluency feels like truth.

Final Word

Why write these assessments? Why care?

With casinos, like cricket, we understand something fundamental: these are games. We can learn the rules. We can decide whether to play. We can walk away.

Justice is different. Justice is not opt-in. It is imposed. You do not get to negotiate the rules, the scoring system, or the house assumptions about what counts as a move. Once you are inside, even dissent must be expressed in the system’s own grammar. Appeals do not question the game; they replay it under slightly altered conditions.

You may contest the outcome. You may plead for leniency. You may argue fairness. You may not ask why chips are interchangeable with lives, why losses must be comparable, or why refusing comparison itself counts as misconduct.

Imagine being forced into a casino. Forced to play. Forced to stake things you do not believe are wagerable. Then told, when you object, that the problem is not the game, but your attitude toward it.

That is why these assessments matter. Not to declare justice illegitimate. Not to offer a fix. But to make visible the rules that pretend not to be rules at all. Because once you mistake fluency for truth, the house no longer needs to rig the game.

You will do it for them.

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

Dec 22, 2025Dec 23, 2025Posted in ontology, philosophy, podcast, political theoryTagged accountability, agency, ai, books, conceptual analysis, constructivism, contestable concepts, critical theory, critique, desert, education, fairness, free will, institutional power, justice, language, Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, legal theory, legitimacy, LIH, MEOW, moral philosophy, moral reasoning, normative ethics, ontology, philosophy, philosophy of law, politics, post-Enlightenment critique, power and language, responsibility, retributive justice, selfhood, semantic drift, society, weasel words, writing2 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 1 Download

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.

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

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A Brief, Uncomfortable Historiography on Having, Being, and Feeling

Dec 21, 2025Posted in philosophyTagged being, books, consciousness, critique, feeling, having, history, language, ontology, phenomenology, philosophy, politics, society, spiritualityLeave a comment

4–6 minutes

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.

Written by Bry Willis

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A History of Language Insufficiency

Dec 20, 2025Dec 20, 2025Posted in language, philosophyTagged Anti-Enlightenment, authority versus meaning, book, civic myths, conceptual failure, contestable concepts, critique, epistemic fracture, fairness, fundamental attribution error, history, institutional language, jurisprudence, jury of peers, language, Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, legal fictions, legal philosophy, LIH, linguistic realism, meaning and power, miscommunication, moral disagreement, morality, ontological disagreement, outsider perspective, philosophy, philosophy blog, philosophy of language, post-Enlightenment critique, power and language, reasonable person, semantic ambiguity, semantic drift, shared ontology, society, weasel wordsLeave a comment

3–4 minutes

I’ve been working on A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis since 2018. At least, that’s the polite, CV-friendly version. The truer account is that it’s been quietly fermenting since the late 1970s, back when I was still trapped in primary school and being instructed on how the world supposedly worked.

Social Studies. Civics. Law. The whole civic catechism. I remember being taught about reasonable persons and trial by a jury of one’s peers, and I remember how insistently these were presented as fair solutions. Fairness was not argued for. It was asserted, with the weary confidence of people who think repetition counts as justification.

I didn’t buy it. I still don’t. The difference now is that I have a hypothesis with some explanatory power instead of a vague sense that the adults were bluffing.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

I’ve always been an outsider. Eccentric, aloof, l’étranger if we’re feeling theatrical. It never particularly troubled me. Outsiders are often tolerated, provided they remain decorative and non-contagious. Eye rolls were exchanged on both sides. No harm done.

But that outsider position had consequences. It led me, even then, to ask an awkward question: Which peers? Not because I thought I was superior, but because I was plainly apart. How exactly was I meant to be judged by my peers when no one else occupied anything like my perspective?

Later, when I encountered the concept of fundamental attribution bias, it felt less like a revelation and more like confirmation. A peer-based system assumes not just similarity of circumstance, but similarity of interpretation. That assumption was dead on arrival.

Then there were reasonable persons. I was assured they existed. I was assured judges were trained to embody them. I had never met one. Even as a teenager, I found the idea faintly comical. Judges, I was told, were neutral, apolitical, and dispassionate. Writing this now from the United States, one hardly needs to belabour the point. But this wasn’t prescience. It was intuition. The smell test failed decades ago.

Before LIH had a name, I called these things weasel words. I still do, as a kind of shorthand. Terms like fair, reasonable, accountable, appropriate. Squishy concepts that do serious institutional work whilst remaining conveniently undefinable. Whether one wants to label them Contestables or Fluids is less important than recognising the space they occupy.

That space sits between Invariables, things you can point to without dispute, and Ineffables, where language more or less gives up. Communication isn’t binary. It isn’t ‘works’ or ‘doesn’t’. It’s a gradient. A continuous curve from near-certainty to near-failure.

Most communication models quietly assume a shared ontology. If misunderstanding occurs, the remedy is more explanation, more context, more education. What never sat right with me, even as a child, was that this only works when the disagreement is superficial. The breaking point is ontological.

If one person believes a term means {A, B, C} and another believes it means {B, C, D}, the overlap creates a dangerous illusion of agreement. The disagreement hides in the margins. A and D don’t merely differ. They are often irreconcilable.

**Image**: *Venn diagramme of a contested concept.*
**Note**: *This is illustrative and not to scale*

Fairness is a reliable example. One person believes fairness demands punishment, including retributive measures. Another believes fairness permits restoration but rejects retribution, citing circumstance, history, or harm minimisation. Both invoke fairness sincerely. The shared language conceals the conflict.

When such disputes reach court, they are not resolved by semantic reconciliation. They are resolved by authority. Power steps in where meaning cannot. This is just one illustration. There are many.

I thought it worth sharing how LIH came about, if only to dispel the notion that it’s a fashionable response to contemporary politics. It isn’t. It’s the slow crystallisation of a long-standing intuition: that many of our most cherished concepts don’t fail because we misuse them, but because they were never capable of doing the work we assigned to them.

More to come.

Written by Bry Willis

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Justice as a House of Cards

Dec 20, 2025Dec 18, 2025Posted in Culture & Society, language, modernism, ontology, philosophy, podcast, political theory, post-enlightenmentTagged agency, book, conceptual analysis, consequentialism, contested concepts, critique, desert, free will, justice, Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, LIH, moral disagreement, moral philosophy, moral responsibility, MTG, normative ethics, ontology, philosophy, philosophy of language, political philosophy, polysemy, post-Enlightenment critique, punishment, responsibility, retribution, retributive justice, semantic drift, weasel wordsLeave a comment

4–6 minutes

How retribution stays upright by not being examined

There is a persistent belief that our hardest disagreements are merely technical. If we could stop posturing, define our terms, and agree on the facts, consensus would emerge. This belief survives because it works extremely well for birds and tables.

It fails spectacularly for justice.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH) isn’t especially interested in whether people disagree. It’s interested in how disagreement behaves under clarification. With concrete terms, clarification narrows reference. With contested ones, it often fractures it. The more you specify, the more ontologies appear.

Justice is the canonical case.

Retributive justice is often presented as the sober, adult conclusion. Not emotional. Not ideological. Just what must be done. In practice, it is a delicately balanced structure built out of other delicately balanced structures. Pull one term away and people grow uneasy. Pull a second and you’re accused of moral relativism. Pull a third and someone mentions cavemen.

Let’s do some light demolition. I created a set of 17 Magic: The Gathering-themed cards to illustrate various concepts. Below are a few. A few more may appear over time.

Card One: Choice

The argument begins innocently enough:

They chose to do it.

But “choice” here is not an empirical description. It’s a stipulation. It doesn’t mean “a decision occurred in a nervous system under constraints.” It means a metaphysically clean fork in the road. Free of coercion, history, wiring, luck, trauma, incentives, or context.

That kind of choice is not discovered. It is assumed.

Pointing out that choices are shaped, bounded, and path-dependent does not refine the term. It destabilises it. Because if choice isn’t clean, then something else must do the moral work.

Enter the next card.

Card Two: Agency

**Image**: *MTG: Agency – Creature – Illusion*

Agency is wheeled in to stabilise choice. We are reassured that humans are agents in a morally relevant sense, and therefore choice “counts”.

Counts for what, exactly, is rarely specified.

Under scrutiny, “agency” quietly oscillates between three incompatible roles:

a descriptive claim: humans initiate actions
a normative claim: humans may be blamed
a metaphysical claim: humans are the right kind of cause

These are not the same thing. Treating them as interchangeable is not philosophical rigour. It’s semantic laundering.

But agency is emotionally expensive to question, so the discussion moves on briskly.

Card Three: Responsibility

**Image**: *MTG: Responsibility – Enchantment – Curse*

Responsibility is where the emotional payload arrives.

To say someone is “responsible” sounds administrative, even boring. In practice, it’s a moral verdict wearing a clipboard.

Watch the slide:

causal responsibility
role responsibility
moral responsibility
legal responsibility

One word. Almost no shared criteria.

By the time punishment enters the picture, “responsibility” has quietly become something else entirely: the moral right to retaliate without guilt.

At which point someone will say the magic word.

Card Four: Desert

Desert is the most mystical card in the deck.

Nothing observable changes when someone “deserves” punishment. No new facts appear. No mechanism activates. What happens instead is that a moral permission slip is issued.

Desert is not found in the world. It is declared.

And it only works if you already accept a very particular ontology:

robust agency
contra-causal choice
a universe in which moral bookkeeping makes sense

Remove any one of these and desert collapses into what it always was: a story we tell to make anger feel principled.

Which brings us, finally, to the banner term.

Card Five: Justice

At this point, justice is invoked as if it were an independent standard hovering serenely above the wreckage.

It isn’t.

“Justice” here does not resolve disagreement. It names it.

Retributive justice and consequentialist justice are not rival policies. They are rival ontologies. One presumes moral balance sheets attached to persons. The other presumes systems, incentives, prevention, and harm minimisation.

Both use the word justice.

That is not convergence. That is polysemy with a body count.

Why clarification fails here

This is where LIH earns its keep.

With invariants, adding detail narrows meaning. With terms like justice, choice, responsibility, or desert, adding detail exposes incompatible background assumptions. The disagreement does not shrink. It bifurcates.

This is why calls to “focus on the facts” miss the point. Facts do not adjudicate between ontologies. They merely instantiate them. If agency itself is suspect, arguments for retribution do not fail empirically. They fail upstream. They become non sequiturs.

This is also why Marx remains unforgivable to some.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” isn’t a policy tweak. It presupposes a different moral universe. No amount of clarification will make it palatable to someone operating in a merit-desert ontology.

The uncomfortable conclusion

The problem is not that we use contested terms. We cannot avoid them.

The problem is assuming they behave like tables.

Retributive justice survives not because it is inevitable, but because its supporting terms are treated as settled when they are anything but. Each card looks sturdy in isolation. Together, they form a structure that only stands if you agree not to pull too hard.

LIH doesn’t tell you which ontology to adopt.

It tells you why the argument never ends.

And why, if someone insists the issue is “just semantic”, they’re either confused—or holding the deck.

Written by Bry Willis with ChatGPT 5.2

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Cold, Grammar, and the Quiet Gatekeeping of Philosophy

Dec 19, 2025Dec 18, 2025Posted in philosophyTagged academic culture, academic gatekeeping, academic publishing, analytic philosophy, citation practices, classification, conceptual analysis, continental philosophy, critique, disciplinary boundaries, epistemology, gatekeeping, grammar, grammar as metaphysics, institutional norms, intellectual authority, knowledge production, language, legitimacy, linguistic habits, meaning and use, metaphysics, ontology, peer review, phenomenology, philosophy, philosophy of language, semanticsLeave a comment

5–7 minutes

A great deal of philosophy begins with the claim that we ought to examine our assumptions. Fewer philosophers seem interested in examining the mechanisms that decide which assumptions are allowed to count as philosophy in the first place.

This is not a polemic about the Analytic–Continental divide. It’s an observation about how that divide quietly maintains itself. The immediate provocation was banal. Almost embarrassingly so.

Are cold, or do we have cold?

In English, the answer feels obvious. I am cold. The grammar barely registers. In French, Italian, or German, the structure flips. One has cold. Or hunger. Or thirst. Or age. Or a name, understood as something one performs rather than something one is. I spoke about this here and here. Indulge this link to the original position being argued.

On the surface, this looks like a curiosity for linguistics students. A translation quirk. A grammatical footnote. But grammar is rarely innocent.

Audio: NotepadLM summary podcast on this topic.

Grammar as Ontological Scaffolding

The verbs to be and to have are not neutral carriers. They quietly encode assumptions about identity, property, possession, and stability.

When I say I am cold, I cast coldness as a property of the self. It becomes something like height or nationality: a state attributable to the person. When I say I have cold, the experience is externalised. The self remains distinct from the condition it undergoes. Neither option is metaphysically clean.

Both structures smuggle in commitments before any philosophy has been done. One risks inflating a transient sensation into an ontological state. The other risks reifying it into a thing one owns, carries, or accumulates. My own suggestion in a recent exchange was a third option: sensing.

Cold is not something one is or has so much as something one feels. A relational encounter. An event between organism and environment. Not an identity predicate, not a possession.

This suggestion was met with a fair pushback: doesn’t saying that cold ‘belongs to the world’ simply introduce a different metaphysical assumption? Yes. It does. And that response neatly demonstrates the problem.

When Grammar Starts Doing Philosophy

The original claim was idiomatic, not ontological. It was a negative gesture, not a positive thesis. The point was not to relocate cold as a mind-independent substance floating about like a rock. It was to resist treating it as an essence of the person. But once you slow down, you see how quickly everyday grammar demands metaphysical loyalty.

Being invites substance. Having invites inventory. Sensing keeps the relation open, but even that makes people nervous. This nervousness is instructive. It reveals how much metaphysical weight we quietly load onto grammatical habits simply because they feel natural. And that feeling of naturalness matters more than we like to admit.

Two Philosophical Temperaments, One Linguistic Groove

At this point, the temptation is to draw a clean line:

On one side: the Anglo-American Analytic tradition, comfortable treating mental states as properties, objects, or items to be catalogued. Locke’s introspective inventory. Hume’s bundle. Logical positivism’s clean surfaces.

On the other: the Continental tradition, suspicious of objectification, insisting on an irreducible subject for whom experience occurs but who is never identical with its contents. Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre.

The grammar aligns disturbingly well. Languages that habitually say I am cold make it feel natural to treat experience as something inspectable. Languages that insist on having or undergoing experiences keep the subject distinct by default.

This is not linguistic determinism. English speakers can read phenomenology. German speakers can do analytic philosophy. But language behaves less like a prison and more like a grooved path. Some moves feel obvious. Others feel forced, artificial, or obscure.

Philosophies do not arise from grammar alone. But grammar makes certain philosophies feel intuitively right long before arguments are exchanged.

Where Gatekeeping Enters Quietly

This brings us to the part that rarely gets discussed.

The Analytic–Continental divide persists not only because of philosophical disagreement, but because of institutional reinforcement. Peer review, citation norms, and journal cultures act as boundary-maintenance mechanisms. They are not primarily crucibles for testing ideas. They are customs checkpoints for recognisability.

I have been explicitly cautioned, more than once, to remove certain figures or references depending on the venue. Don’t mention late Wittgenstein here. Don’t cite Foucault there. Unless, of course, you are attacking them. This is not about argumentative weakness. It’s about genre violation.

Hybrid work creates a problem for reviewers because it destabilises the grammar of evaluation. The usual criteria don’t apply cleanly. The paper is difficult to shelve. And unshelvable work is treated as a defect rather than a signal. No bad faith is required. The system is doing what systems do: minimising risk, preserving identity, maintaining exchange rates.

Cold as a Diagnostic Tool

The reason the cold example works is precisely because it is trivial.

No one’s career depends on defending a metaphysics of chilliness. That makes it safe enough to expose how quickly grammar starts making demands once you pay attention.

If something as mundane as cold wobbles under scrutiny, then the scaffolding we rely on for far more abstract notions – self, identity, agency, consciousness – should make us uneasy.

And if this is true for human languages, it becomes far more pressing when we imagine communication across radically different forms of life.

Shared vocabulary does not guarantee shared metaphysics. Familiar verbs can conceal profound divergence. First contact, if it ever occurs, will not fail because we lack words. It will fail because we mistake grammatical comfort for ontological agreement.

A Modest Conclusion

None of this settles which philosophical tradition is ‘right’. That question is far less interesting than it appears. What it does suggest is that philosophy is unusually sensitive to linguistic scaffolding, yet unusually resistant to examining the scaffolding of its own institutions.

We pride ourselves on questioning assumptions while quietly enforcing the conditions under which questions are allowed to count. Cold just happens to be a good place to start noticing.

A Footnote on Linguistic Determinism

It’s worth being explicit about what this is not. This is not an endorsement of strong linguistic determinism, nor a revival of Sapir–Whorf in its more ambitious forms. English speakers are not condemned to analytic philosophy, nor are Romance-language speakers predestined for phenomenology.

Language does not imprison thought. It inclines it.

Grammar operates less like a set of handcuffs and more like a well-worn path. Some moves feel effortless. Others require deliberate resistance. Philosophical traditions co-evolve with these habits, reinforcing what already feels natural while treating alternatives as strained, obscure, or unnecessary.

The claim here is not necessity, but friction.

Written by Bry Willis

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Cold, Aliens, and the Grammar That Thinks It Knows Too Much

Dec 18, 2025Dec 18, 2025Posted in language, philosophyTagged ai, alien language, artificial intelligence, books, category error, communication, conceptual confusion, critique, embodiment, epistemology, first contact, grammar, history, irony, language, linguistic habits, linguistic relativity, meaning, metaphysics, ontology, perception, phenomenology, philosophy, philosophy of language, postmodern philosophy, pragmatics, psychology, satire, science fiction, semantics, sensing, translation1 Comment

2–3 minutes

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.

When Aliens Speak English: The False Promise of Linguistic Familiarity

It commenced here on Mastodon.

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:

where I link back to the post at the top of this article.

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.

Written by Bry Willis

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I Need a Break

Dec 17, 2025Dec 16, 2025Posted in modernism, morality, philosophy, podcast, political theoryTagged academic publishing, AI and research, authority, Bernard Williams, book, Bullshit Jobs, critique, David Graeber, epistemology, H L A Hart, indeterminacy, institutional critique, intellectual burnout, jurisprudence, language, language philosophy, law, legal positivism, legal realism, legitimacy, moral philosophy, morality, ontology, perception, philosophy, philosophy blog, philosophy of law, politics, power and law, psychology, skepticism, sleep, social constructs, society, thick and thin concepts, Timothy Endicott, vagueness, writing lifeLeave a comment

5–7 minutes

More precisely, I need less sleep and longer days – preferably twice as long. I’ve been writing almost non-stop for the better part of a week: fourteen- to sixteen-hour days, fuelled by irritation and the stubborn belief that if I just keep reading, something will finally click into place.

I’m not complaining. This is a virtuous cycle.
Reading leads to writing. Writing demands more reading. Eventually, the loop closes into something that looks suspiciously like progress.

Audio: Short NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.

Still, there’s a bottleneck.

Because some of this work – the work I’m most excited about – I’m deliberately not publishing yet. Journals, bless their glacial hearts, don’t much care for prior publication. So ideas sit in limbo for six to eighteen months, locked in a room like argumentative houseplants, slowly growing sideways.

From the perspective of someone who thinks in public, this is maddening.

Now add AI to the mix.

This is where things get dangerous.

I’ll feed ChatGPT a thesis, a skeletal structure, notes, and references. I ask what I’m missing. It obliges – often helpfully – by pointing me toward adjacent thinkers and relevant literature, complete with page numbers. From there, I verify, hunt down the sources, skim, read, discard, or integrate.

And every so often, I stumble across something that makes me swear out loud.

This week, it was Bernard Williams.

I’ve cited Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy before. But this time, I actually sat down and read it properly. Which immediately prompted the thought:

Why didn’t I read this sooner?

Williams dismantles moral objectivity with the calm precision of someone who knows the Enlightenment project has already lost – he just hasn’t told everyone yet. Thick and thin moral concepts, locality, non-extensibility, the collapse of universal moral reason at scale – yes, yes, yes. He published this in 1985. Fine. I’ll survive.

But then I went further.

Williams shows that morality fails between people at scale.
I argue that it fails within a single person over time.

That became my second paper.

And this is where things went off the rails.

Because in the course of writing that paper, I dipped into Hart’s The Concept of Law and Endicott’s Vagueness in Law. These are not fringe polemics. These are law textbooks. For law students. People allegedly trained to parse language for a living.

And what I found was… astonishing.

Let me paraphrase the admissions:

First:

**Image**: *When the law is vague, judicial decisions may be unconstrained by the law.*

Endicott: “By upsetting the standard view of adjudication, the book reaches conclusions that some people find horrible: when the law is vague, judicial decision- making will in some cases be unconstrained by the law. It is impossible in principle for judges always to treat like cases alike. Predictability in the law is to some extent unattainable. Moreover, I argue in Chapter 9,2 that vagueness cannot be eliminated from law. These conclusions might seem to imply that the rule of law is, at least to some extent, conceptually impossible.”

Then:

**Image**: *Vagueness is inevitable. Deal with it.*

Endicott: “Secondly, I do not claim that vagueness is a purely linguistic feature of law. And the book relies on no claim about the relation between law and language. These points must be stressed, because vagueness is commonly thought of as a linguistic phenomenon. And. indeed, most of the discussion in the book concerns the vagueness of linguistic expressions. But the indeterminacy claim is not just a claim about language (so I argue in Chapter 3.12). So. for example, the claim in Chapter 6 that general evaluative and normative expressions are necessarily vague is not just a claim about the word ‘good’ and the word ‘right1: it is a claim about any linguistic expression in which we could conceivably express general evaluative and normative judgments. It therefore includes a claim about what is good and what is right.”

Then, almost casually:

**Image**: *Whether law is morally valuable to a community is not my concern. Justice and the rule of law may be political virtues — or not. I don’t defend them here.*

Endicott: “Disputes between legal positivists and natural law theorists have concerned not only the relation between law and adjudication, but also the relation between law and morality. Here I take no general position on the intrinsic moral value of law. I do rely on the claims that law can be valuable to a community, and that justice and the rule of law are two ideals which a com- munity can intelligibly pursue as political virtues. Even those claims are controversial (Kelsen and some of the theorists discussed in Chapter 2 have controverted them ). But I do not defend them here. This work aims to show that the indeterminacy claim does nothing to threaten the pursuit of justice and the rule of law. Those ideals cannot be well understood if we try to make them depend on determinacy in the requirements of the law.”

Say what?

Read together – not even uncharitably – the message is clear:

Law is indeterminate.
Indeterminacy is unavoidable.
And whether law is good, just, or valuable is… optional.

The subtext isn’t even hiding.

Law is a power structure first.
If it happens to align with justice, fairness, or communal value, well, lovely. A bonus. Champagne all round.

This does not sit well with a sceptical cynic.

What really broke me, though, wasn’t the argument itself. Philosophers make grim claims all the time. What broke me was the silence around it.

How does this pass under the radar?

How do cohorts of law students – drilled in textual analysis, trained to read footnotes like tea leaves – not trip over this elephant stampede? How do they graduate believing they’re upholding inalienable rights, rather than participating in a managed system of coercion that occasionally behaves itself?

Self-preservation, I suppose.
Wilful ignorance.
Professional cosplay.

I’ve seen this before.

As an economist, ask the wrong foundational question, and you’re instantly radioactive. Persona non grata. Careers don’t end with explosions — they end with polite silence and no invitations.

I probably should have committed to heterodox philosophy from the start.
Or stayed a musician.

I remember leaving graduate school, putting on a suit, and feeling like I was wearing a costume. Cosplay, before we had the word. “Business professional” as a role, not an identity.

I’ve always felt intellectually capable of doing whatever I set out to do. My temperament, however, has never agreed to play along.

Which is perhaps why diagnosing ontologies comes so naturally. Once you see the scaffolding, you can’t unsee it – whether it’s metaphysics, jurisprudence, or a corporate department pretending it has a mission.

Then David Graeber came along with Bullshit Jobs, and I remember thinking:
Thank God. It’s not just me.

So yes. I need a break.

I need sleep.
I need silence.
I need to stop reading law books that accidentally admit they’re about power and then act surprised when someone notices.

Mostly, I need to type:

WTAF?

And then go outside.

Written by Bry Willis

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Essay: Disagreement Without Referees

Dec 16, 2025Dec 16, 2025Posted in ontology, philosophy, podcastTagged critique, disagreement, Enlightenment critique, epistemology, ethics, frame theory, George Lakoff, Kuhn, language, MacIntyre, mediation, metaethics, moral disagreement, moral non-cognitivism, moral philosophy, moral realism, morality, normative theory, ontological incommensurability, ontology, perception, philosophy, philosophy of language, political philosophy, politics, power and normativity, psychology, relativism, wittgensteinLeave a comment

2–3 minutes

I’ve just published a new preprint on Zenodo: Disagreement Without Referees: Ontological Incommensurability and the Limits of Moral Adjudication 📄 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17932544

I welcome reviews, comments, and dissents.

This paper grows out of a frustration that will be familiar to anyone who spends time in moral or political argument: the sense that we keep talking past one another, mistaking deep incompatibilities for mere differences of opinion – and then moralising the failure to converge. Mostly, I’m tired of having to explain why my position isn’t subjectivist, relativist, quietist, nihilist, or whatever –ist flavour du jour. As with John Lennon, I complain about the –isms.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this essay.

The core claim is simple but unfashionable: many persistent disagreements are not epistemic at all. They are ontological. They do not arise within a shared background of assumptions about what exists, what counts as a reason, or what can ground normativity. They arise between incompatible background frameworks. When we treat such conflicts as if they were resolvable by better arguments, clearer communication, or more empathy, we misdiagnose the problem – and often make it worse.

The paper draws a sharp distinction between:

Disagreements of opinion, which presuppose a shared world and are, in principle, corrigible; and
Ontological disagreements, where what is contested is not the right answer, but what it would even mean for an answer to be right.

From there, I examine why charges like ‘relativism’, ‘subjectivism’, or ‘anything goes’ retain such rhetorical force despite their weak logical footing. The argument is not that these labels are false descriptions so much as that they function as boundary-maintenance devices within Enlightenment-inherited moral frames. They stabilise a sense of moral order by excluding positions that deny neutral adjudication.

**Image**: *NotebookLM infographic. (This is the first infographic I’ve produced from NotebookLM. I’m not sure what I think of it, but I might try more directed versions in the future*.)

I also take up the familiar worry that abandoning objective moral grounding leads to arbitrariness or nihilism. The paper rejects this caricature. Evaluation does not disappear when foundations are withdrawn; it relocates. What follows is not moral collapse but moral life without referees, where disagreement is managed through persuasion, coalition-building, institutional design, and power, rather than appeals to metaphysical authority.

Importantly, the paper is diagnostic, not prescriptive. It does not offer a new moral framework, a reconciliatory theory, or a solution to moral conflict. It argues instead for a clearer understanding of why some disagreements resist resolution, and for a more honest account of what remains once the fantasy of neutral adjudication is relinquished.

If nothing else, the hope is that recognising ontological incommensurability can temper the moral theatre that so often accompanies disagreement – replacing accusations of irrationality or bad faith with a clearer sense of what is, and is not, at stake.

This essay is also available on PhilPapers. For now, the full preprint is available on Zenodo at the link above.

As ever, comments are welcome – provided we’re clear about which world we think we’re standing in.

Written by Bry Willis

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Truth → Rhetoric: Why Access Determines Authority

Dec 15, 2025Dec 15, 2025Posted in essays, ontology, philosophyTagged authority, critique, critique of realism, discourse, ethical authority, ethical reasoning, hermeneutics, Hume’s guillotine, ideology, interpretation, is-ought problem, language, mediation, metaethics, metaphysics, moral disagreement, moral realism, morality, normativity, participatory ethics, perception, persuasion, philosophy, philosophy of language, political philosophy, power and normativity, practical reason, psychology, rhetoric, social ontology, truth1 Comment

11–16 minutes

I do not assume that normative assertions function as descriptive truths. Realism is compelling because it promises that moral disagreement has a fact of the matter beyond persuasion. The argument here is that this promise cannot be kept without mediation. Nevertheless, this essay proceeds by granting the realist premise – that Truth exists – in order to examine whether that premise can, on its own terms, generate normative authority. The argument is structural rather than polemical: to move from Ontology (what exists) to Authority (what binds) requires a mechanism of transport. That mechanism is mediation. The claim advanced here is that this mediation is irreducibly rhetorical, and that no account of normativity can bypass this fact without smuggling authority under metaphysical cover.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.

Introduction

Grant, purely for the sake of argument, that Truth – and by extension Justice, Goodness, or any other realist normative entity – exists independently of human cognition. Even so, a prior and unavoidable question arises: how does such Truth ever become accessible to finite, discursive agents like us?

Before asking whether Truth exists in itself, we must account for how it enters ethical life for us. This is not a semantic quibble. It marks the difference between an ontological assertion and an operative ethics.

This essay argues that all access to Truth is irreducibly mediated, and that this mediation is rhetorical in nature. Even if Truth exists independently of human minds, it never arrives in normative life except through language, interpretation, argument, persuasion, narrative, and institutional articulation. Any ethical framework that treats metaphysical grounding as if it bypassed these mediations risks conflating ontology with authority.

This is neither relativism nor subjectivism. It is an analytic claim about conditions of access and normative traction.

Truth and Its Access Conditions

Suppose you accept that Truth exists ‘out there’—not as a projection or consensus shorthand, but as an intransitive feature of reality. This is the core commitment of metaphysical realism. The issue is not whether Truth exists, but how it becomes accessible to agents embedded in language, culture, and institutions.

For any putative Truth to function normatively, at least five stages are required:

Identification — recognising something as a candidate for truth
Description — articulating that candidate in language
Justification — offering reasons for accepting it
Communication — transmitting those reasons to others
Ratification — persuading a community to treat the claim as binding

These stages are not epistemic luxuries. They are the conditions under which a putative Truth acquires normative force – the capacity to obligate, justify, or condemn.

Remove any one of these stages, and Truth collapses into either an inert fact or an unintelligible assertion. Crucially, each stage is rhetorical: none operates through brute ontology alone, but through discursive practices of interpretation, evaluation, and adjudication.

Rhetoric Is Not Spin

To say that Truth is rhetorically mediated is not to reduce truth to manipulation, persuasion-for-its-own-sake, or spin.

It is simply to recognise that:

Truth claims are discerned in language
They are evaluated against alternatives
They are assessed within communities shaped by practices, norms, disciplines, and institutions

Truth as it functions in human life is always a claim in argument, never a self-announcing datum.

Even mathematics – the paradigm of certainty – does not become normatively operative without symbolic articulation, shared standards of proof, and communal validation. Mathematical truths may exist independently, but what counts as a proof, a result, or an error – and thus what obligates assent – is entirely mediated by symbolic practice and communal ratification.

In its classical sense, rhetoric is not deception. It is the set of discursive practices by which claims become intelligible, contestable, and action-guiding across contexts of disagreement.

Where Normativity Actually Emerges: The Three-Stage Problem

The problem crystallizes at a precise moment: the move from description to prescription. Even if we grant that the Good exists objectively and eternally, three distinct operations are required to generate obligation:

Descriptive claim: ‘The Good exists and has properties X, Y, Z’
Interpretive claim: ‘In this situation, the Good requires action A rather than B’
Prescriptive claim: ‘Therefore you ought to do A’

Each transition requires distinct work. The first may be metaphysical. But the second and third are irreducibly rhetorical. They involve judgment, application, contextual interpretation, and the translation of abstract principle into concrete obligation.

Crucially, even the interpretive middle step – which often masquerades as mere clarification – is where most normative force gets generated. To say ‘the Good requires this action in this context’ is not to read off a fact from the world. It is to make an argued claim about meaning, relevance, and application.

This is where participatory metaphysics does its quietest work. By framing interpretation as ‘participation in the Good’ rather than as ‘argued judgment about what the Good requires,’ such frameworks obscure the rhetorical operation they’re performing. Interpretation gets presented as disclosure rather than construction.

But there is no route from ‘the Good exists’ to ‘you must do X’ that bypasses interpretation. And interpretation is rhetoric.

The Potential Energy Analogy

Consider an analogy. Gravitational potential energy exists independently of human recognition. A boulder atop a cliff possesses real energy by virtue of its position. But that energy does no work – moves nothing, heats nothing, powers nothing – until converted through specific mechanisms: falling, rolling, controlled descent.

The Good may be precisely like this: real, eternal, independent of us. But for it to become normatively operative – to obligate us, to guide our choices, to settle our disagreements – it must be converted from potential into kinetic form. That conversion is mediation. And mediation is rhetorical.

This is not relativism about the Good’s existence. It is realism about the conditions under which existence generates obligation.

A Concrete Example

When Catholic bishops disagree about capital punishment:

They agree on the descriptive claim: ‘God exists and is perfectly Good’
They disagree on the interpretive claim: ‘What does divine Justice require regarding state execution?’
They therefore disagree on the prescriptive claim: ‘Is capital punishment permissible?’

The descriptive agreement doesn’t resolve the interpretive disagreement. No amount of metaphysical depth about God’s nature tells you directly what Justice requires regarding capital punishment. That requires interpretation of Scripture, tradition, natural law, human dignity, social context, prudential judgment – all rhetorical operations.

Appeals to ‘the Good itself’ don’t settle the dispute. They just rename it. Instead of ‘bishops disagree about ethics,’ it becomes ‘bishops are discerning what participation in the Good requires’. The language changes; the rhetorical work remains.

The Zeno Structure of Moral Grounding

At this point, the realist faces a structural problem that resembles Zeno’s paradox. When pressed on how Truth becomes binding, the realist response multiplies explanatory depth:

The Good exists objectively
We apprehend it through reason
Reason itself is oriented toward the Good
That orientation is grounded in rational agency
Rational agency participates in…

Each step is coherent. Each promises that obligation is just one more metaphysical move away. But none ever performs the action ‘therefore, you must do X in this situation’.

This is not merely infinite regress – philosophers tolerate infinite structures. The problem is asymptotic normativity: explanations that get progressively closer to bindingness without ever crossing the threshold into concrete obligation.

What’s missing is not metaphysical depth but the moment of arrival. Until someone says ‘this counts as wrong here, and therefore you ought to stop,’ nothing has happened in ethical space. The arrow is still subdividing its path.

Rhetoric is what collapses the infinite series into a finite act. It does for ethics what accepting motion does for Zeno’s paradox: it stops subdividing and acts. This is not an epistemic shortcut – it is the mechanism by which normativity becomes operative.

‘Participation in the Good’ sounds like arrival, but it is actually eternal approach. It explains why the Good matters in principle while indefinitely postponing the moment when obligation becomes concrete and contestable. That postponement is not a feature – it is the avoidance of the very question at issue.

Three Remaining Escapes
(and Why They Fail)

A. The Implicit Normativity Move

A sophisticated realist might respond: ‘Interpretation is required, yes, but the normativity is already there implicitly. Interpretation merely makes explicit what was already required’.

But implicit normativity is indistinguishable from no normativity unless it can be specified. Until interpretation specifies what is required here, the obligation has no action-guiding content. A normativity that exists only implicitly, without criteria of application, is functionally equivalent to no normativity at all.

‘Implicit obligation’ means ‘not yet specified,’ which means ‘not yet operative’. The work of making it operative is interpretation – which is rhetoric.

B. The Practical Wisdom Escape

Another likely move: ‘Interpretation is not rhetoric; it’s phronesis. Practical wisdom directly apprehends what the Good requires’.

But practical wisdom does not bypass mediation; it relocates it into judgment. If practical wisdom yields different answers for different agents, it is still interpretive. If it cannot be articulated, justified, or contested, it cannot function socially. The moment phronesis is communicated or taught, it becomes rhetorical.

Judgment, when it claims authority over others, must still be articulated, defended, and enforced. Incommunicable wisdom is indistinguishable from private intuition. And private intuitions don’t settle public disagreements.

C. The ‘This Proves Too Much’ Objection

Someone might say: ‘If your argument is right, then no ethical system can ever claim authority. Everything dissolves into endless contestation’.

But the claim is not that normativity evaporates under mediation, but that it emerges there. This is not nihilism – it is an explanation of normativity’s location, not its abolition. That normativity is mediated does not mean it is arbitrary. Mediation operates under constraints of coherence, consistency, consequence, and resistance from the world and from other agents.

Mediation is constrained by material resistance, coherence, practical failure, and worldly recalcitrance. The claim is not that ‘anything goes’. It’s that what goes must be argued for, negotiated, and sustained through rhetorical practices. That’s not less demanding than metaphysical grounding – it’s more honest about where the work happens.

Consequences for Ethical Frameworks

If access to Truth is always mediated, then several consequences follow:

Authority is interpretive, not ontological
Disagreement is structural, not pathological
Norms are contested, not deduced unilaterally
Power shapes uptake, not metaphysical purity

This has decisive implications for meta-ethics. Ethical life is not insulated from negotiation; it is constituted by it. Normativity does not descend fully formed from metaphysics into practice. It is worked out – imperfectly, provisionally, and under constraint – within social space.

Ethics, in other words, is not a museum of pristine ideals. It is a field of contested meanings under conditions of risk, conflict, and plural commitment.

Realism Without Rhetoric Is Empty

A realist might reply: Truth exists. Once we uncover it, everything follows.

But uncovering is not a metaphysically neutral act. Discovery, articulation, persuasion, and institutionalisation are themselves conditioned by:

Language, which frames intelligibility
Narrative, which shapes resonance and coherence
Institutions, which ratify selectively
Power, which governs whose claims are heard

The realist may insist that mediation merely follows discovery. But this assumes a distinction that cannot be sustained. Until a truth is articulated, justified, and ratified, there is no criterion by which its discovery can be distinguished from error, fantasy, or ideology. What is not mediated is not merely unpersuasive; it is normatively indistinguishable from falsehood. Ontology alone cannot perform this discrimination.

If access to Truth is always mediated, then metaphysical depth alone cannot generate normative authority. The locus of ethical force shifts from an external realm to the discursive space where claims are interpreted, contested, and enforced. A grounding that never binds except through mediation is indistinguishable, at the level of authority, from mediation itself.

This shift is not relativism. It is a descriptive account of how ethical life actually functions.

Moral Authority Under Rhetorical Conditions

To say Truth → Rhetoric is not to deny the possibility of rigorous assessment. It is to insist that:

Normative claims must offer contestable reasons
Moral authority must disclose its interpretive moves
Disagreement must be treated as clarifying, not corrosive
Ethical systems must be judged by their discursive dynamics as much as their metaphysical commitments

Truth in itself may be metaphysically deep. But truth-as-binding never operates outside rhetoric.

Conclusion

Grant the realist premise if you like: Truth exists. Even then, metaphysical depth alone does not explain how Truth becomes accessible, meaningful, or binding for discursive agents.

Because access is always mediated, authority cannot bypass rhetoric. Ethical life requires not only an ontology, but an account of how claims are interpreted, argued over, and enforced. A Truth that cannot be accessed – named, contested, communicated – remains normatively inert.

The fundamental error is treating the descriptive-interpretive-prescriptive chain as if it could be collapsed into a single operation called ‘participation’. It cannot.

Even if the Good exists exactly as realists claim – eternal, objective, transcendent – it becomes normatively operative for finite agents only through a sequence of mediations:

Interpretation (what does it mean?)
Application (what does it require here?)
Justification (why this action rather than that one?)
Communication (how do we persuade others?)
Enforcement (who ensures compliance?)

Each mediation is rhetorical. Each involves judgment, argument, and institutional power. Each is contestable.

This is not a bug in ethical life. It is its structure. Any framework that promises to transcend these mediations through metaphysical depth is not offering a solution. It is concealing the problem while continuing to rely on exactly the mechanisms it claims to surpass.

To bring Truth into the world of action is to engage rhetoric not as an ornamental layer, but as the condition of ethical life itself.

Thus: Truth → Rhetoric. Not because truth is arbitrary, but because it is always mediated.

Appendix: Clarifying the Claim

This argument does not deny realism, nor does it reject the possibility of mind-independent truth. What it rejects is the unexamined slide from ontology to authority.

This distinction is formalised – though not originated – by the Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW), which holds that all human access to the world is mediated. Whatever exists may exist independently of us; whatever binds us does not. The present argument does not depend on accepting MEOW as a system; it relies only on the minimal claim that access precedes authority.

MEOW formalises this through a layered account of encounter:

T0 — biological substrate
T1 — cognitive–perceptual interface
T2 — linguistic–symbolic mediation
T3 — social–technical norms and institutions

Normativity operates at the upper tiers. Ethical obligation, justice, and virtue do not arrive with built-in binding force. Whatever their metaphysical status, their authority for human agents arises only through interpretation, articulation, justification, and social uptake.

This is the precise sense in which Truth → Rhetoric should be read. It is not an ontological identity claim. It is a claim about normative operability.

Rhetorical mediation is constrained – by material resistance, coherence, practical failure, and worldly recalcitrance. But those constraints do not speak for themselves. They must still be named, argued over, prioritised, and enforced.

There is no route from is to ought that does not pass through language, judgment, and institutional uptake. Appeals to metaphysical depth do not remove this mediation; they conceal it.

Any framework that treats participation in ‘the Good’ as normatively binding without accounting for how that Good is interpreted, communicated, and enforced is already doing rhetorical work while pretending not to.

That pretence isn’t philosophical sophistication. It’s a familiar ideological gesture: power presenting itself as mere disclosure. Rhetoric is not what corrupts ethics. It is what makes ethics possible.

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Fairness, Commensurability, and the Quiet Violence of Comparison

Before the Cards Are Dealt

1. Why Fairness Is Always Claimed, Never Found

Competing Fairness Is Not a Problem

A Fluid Masquerading as an Invariant

2. The Real Gatekeeper: Commensurability

When Incommensurability Refuses to Cooperate

Two Ontologies of Value

Ontology A: The Scalar Model

Ontology B: The Qualitative Model

Why Only One Ontology Can Play

3. Why Incommensurability Is Treated as Bad Faith

Reasonableness as Border Control

4. Why These Debates Never Resolve

Remediation Requires Switching Teams

5. What This Means (Without Offering a Fix)

Ontology as Pre-emptive Gatekeeping

Rationality as Border Control

The Final Irony

The Point

Final Word

Why Retributive Justice (and not the rest of the zoo)

The Big Picture: Justice as an Engine, Not a Discovery

The Three Functional Layers

1. The Constitutive Layer

2. The Encounter Layer

3. The Evaluative Layer

Why Disagreement Fails Before It Starts

Where This Is Going

The rest of the story

The Continental Recoil

Two Ontologies, One Quiet Filter

Where Sensing Falls Through the Cracks

Notes (for those who care)

How retribution stays upright by not being examined

Card One: Choice

Card Two: Agency

Card Three: Responsibility

Card Four: Desert

Card Five: Justice

Why clarification fails here

The uncomfortable conclusion

Grammar as Ontological Scaffolding

When Grammar Starts Doing Philosophy

Two Philosophical Temperaments, One Linguistic Groove

Where Gatekeeping Enters Quietly

Cold as a Diagnostic Tool

A Modest Conclusion

A Footnote on Linguistic Determinism

A more verbose version of this response might have been:

Introduction

Truth and Its Access Conditions

Rhetoric Is Not Spin

Where Normativity Actually Emerges: The Three-Stage Problem

The Potential Energy Analogy

A Concrete Example

The Zeno Structure of Moral Grounding

Three Remaining Escapes (and Why They Fail)

A. The Implicit Normativity Move

B. The Practical Wisdom Escape

C. The ‘This Proves Too Much’ Objection

Consequences for Ethical Frameworks

Realism Without Rhetoric Is Empty

Moral Authority Under Rhetorical Conditions

Conclusion

Appendix: Clarifying the Claim

Three Remaining Escapes
(and Why They Fail)