Tag: epistemology

The Grammar of Bettering Yourself

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7–10 minutes

Self-help, pop psychology, LinkedIn, and the metaphysics smuggled into advice

Self-improvement books rarely begin by telling you what it believes a person is. That would be too honest, and honesty is bad for conversion funnels. Instead, it begins with verbs.

Choose. Decide. Commit. Heal. Optimise. Manifest. Reframe. Own. Level up. Set boundaries. Do the work. Become intentional. Stop self-sabotaging. Unlock your potential. Be your authentic self. Take radical responsibility.

The vocabulary shifts depending on the tradition. One speaks of healing, one of discipline, one of nervous systems, one of leadership, one of purpose, one of abundance. What they share is not a doctrine but a grammar: a way of arranging the person before the advice begins. The subject is always inward, sovereign, and temporarily malfunctioning. The problem is always locatable. The solution is always available, often for $29.99 or in a free webinar that becomes a masterclass for $299.

But here is where the easy cynicism runs out of road, because the people writing this stuff — by and large — believe it.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

That is the part of the critique that tends to get skipped, because it is less satisfying than imagining a cynical operator deliberately strip-mining the anxious for recurring revenue. Most self-help authors arrived at their framework the same way their readers are about to: they were struggling, they encountered a grammar that organised their experience, they felt the specific relief of suddenly being intelligible to themselves, and they mistook that relief for discovery. Then they wrote a book about it. The author is not the shark. The author is a previous customer who graduated to the front of the room.

The framework they found — and are now evangelising — is what I call, in The Architecture of Encounter, an ontological grammar: a set of prior commitments about what kind of thing a person is, which arrives upstream of any specific advice and quietly determines what advice is even thinkable. You cannot recommend reframing without first presuming a self transparent enough to observe its own cognitions and sovereign enough to revise them. You cannot prescribe boundaries without presuming a self whose territory is violable and whose autonomy is the relevant moral unit. You cannot offer alignment without presuming a self that has a true direction, temporarily obscured, patiently awaiting discovery through either a values exercise on page forty-seven or a retreat in somewhere with good lighting and worse plumbing.

The grammar arrives first. The advice follows from it. And the person reading it is not being shown a mirror. They are being issued a lens.

The lens finds its wearer. “Take ownership” resonates with people already invested in the idea of themselves as agents who have been insufficiently deliberate — it confirms the worldview while appearing to challenge the behaviour. “Your nervous system is dysregulated” resonates with people for whom the moralised language of laziness and discipline has become intolerable; here is a vocabulary that removes the accusation while retaining the explanation, which is a genuinely useful service even if the mechanism on offer is borrowed loosely from neuroscience and the rest is borrowed from hope. “Mindset is your prison” resonates with people who need their suffering to remain individually tractable — solvable, that is, without anyone having to redistribute anything expensive or inconvenient. “Manifest your abundance” resonates with people who find both structural analysis and self-blame equally unappealing and would like a third option involving the universe.

Each grammar finds its congregation. Which is precisely the problem.

A grammar propagates not because it has been tested against alternatives or evaluated for efficacy, but because it maps onto a prior self-conception cleanly enough to produce the sensation of being understood. The entrepreneur already believes in agency-language: execution, discipline, ownership, leverage. The book that tells them their discipline is the differentiator is not offering new information; it is offering comfortable confirmation in a more expensive format. The therapeutic reader already suspects their relational difficulties involve something called attachment. The book that tells them so is not illuminating; it is flattering them with their own vocabulary. The LinkedIn professional already believes their career is a project of self-authorship. The thought leader who tells them to communicate their value and build authentic leadership is not giving them a strategy; they are giving them a liturgy.

The community that forms around a grammar is a church, not a seminar. It has converts, not students. And like most churches, it is considerably better at solidarity than at falsifiability.

This matters because the mechanism by which self-help content spreads — resonance, recognition, testimonial, referral — is entirely decoupled from the mechanism by which we would establish that it works. A sentence resonates because it fits a grammar the reader has already adopted. That tells you something real: about the anxieties structuring a cohort’s self-understanding, the stories they are trying to make liveable, the descriptions of themselves they find tolerable or intolerable. It does not tell you whether the intervention produces the claimed effect, in whom, under what conditions, and compared with what alternative. Those are duller questions. Less shareable. They do not fit on a carousel post with a soft gradient and a mountain.

Horoscopes also resonate. So do conspiracy theories, national myths, and the first chapter of any book you buy during a difficult stretch of your life.

The point is not that the advice is necessarily wrong. Sometimes “set boundaries” is exactly right. Sometimes “take ownership” is precisely what someone has been avoiding hearing. Sometimes a new frame genuinely reorganises attention in ways that produce durable change, and the person is measurably better off for having found it. None of that is in question. The question is whether a framework that produced one useful instance has any reliable claim to truth beyond that instance — and whether the person reaching for it during a difficult period is in any position to make that evaluation carefully.

They usually are not. That is not stupidity. That is the condition of being in difficulty: you reach for intelligibility, and whoever offers it collects a great deal of credit. The problem is not the reaching. The problem is that the self-help ecosystem — including the parts of it operated by entirely sincere people who believe every word they publish — has no reliable mechanism for distinguishing frameworks that help from frameworks that merely feel like help while the underlying situation continues undisturbed. The true believer and the true seeker share the same vulnerability. Both reached for a grammar. One of them got to write the book.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

It is also worth noting that commerce is the easy villain here, and an overrated one. The same dynamic runs through pop psychology, where the grammar of individual cognitive mechanisms tends to dominate because it produces legible interventions in a way that structural analysis never quite does; blaming cognition is tractable, blaming the organisation of society is dispiriting and hard to monetise, even when it is accurate. It runs through LinkedIn, where the grammar is not therapeutic but managerial — the self reimagined as an optimisable professional asset — and where burnout becomes a boundary failure, precarity becomes an invitation to upskill, and alienation becomes a purpose deficit. Nobody on LinkedIn is necessarily trying to extract money from anyone. Many of them are trying to be useful, or to be visible, or both, which is human enough. But the grammar they are deploying disappears material conditions into interior architecture with the same efficiency as the most cynically produced wellness content. The mechanism does not require a profit motive. It requires only a grammar and an audience that already shares it.

The useful response to all of this is not wholesale dismissal, which would be too easy and almost certainly wrong. Some people need clearer habits. Some need better descriptions of their own conduct. Some need permission to stop tolerating what they have been tolerating. Some need a vocabulary that makes their own patterns visible, and a framework — however approximate — is better than none. These are real services. The fact that they are sometimes delivered inside a dubious metaphysics of the person does not automatically negate them.

But there is a question worth developing the habit of asking, before the grammar installs itself: what kind of person does this advice presume? Is the self it describes sovereign, where I am actually constrained? Wounded where I am actually responsible? Deficient where I am actually being exploited? Misaligned where I am actually just bored? In need of self-belief, where I am in need of rent?

These questions are less fun than a morning routine designed by someone who has never had a difficult commute. They do not come with a community or a badge or an accountability partner who sends encouraging voice notes. But they do something the grammar on its own cannot: they ask whether the patient described in the diagnosis is the one actually in the room.

Most self-help skips that step. So, not infrequently, does the person who wrote it. They found a grammar that made their experience legible, felt the relief that comes from that, and never quite got around to distinguishing legibility from truth. Which is understandable. It is also, for everyone downstream of that decision, a problem.

I don’t occupy this shared space of ontological grammar, so I call bollox.

Full Disclosure: This article was drafted by ChatGPT 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 upon a discussion of my perspective on self-help, pop psychology, and LinkedIn. I am busy with other projects, but I wanted to share my position. Apologies to those who don’t prefer LLM-authored or assisted articles.

My goal is to articulate the connexion between ontological grammar commitments, the noted disciplines, and more. As should be evident, I am not a fan of self-help or some adjacent modalities.

Duration and the Intervalic Imposition

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
6–10 minutes

I’ve got a new annotated edition of Heidegger‘s Being and Time, and it’s got me thinking about time – and thinking out loud. Obviously, Husserl is invoked by Heidegger, and the notion of duration (via durée) is from Bergson. Memory is not stored in the brain by| Victoria Trumbull on IAI TV might have been the real tipping point. I’m not sure how far I’ll develop this, but I wanted to capture my thoughts so I can refocus on my other topics, Parfit and Frege–Geach, to name two.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

NB: I feel compelled to walk the NotebookLM podcasters back onto the reservation with their ending flurry. I would never posit that humans (or beings) will ever have direct access to The Universe™. All access, per MEOW, is necessarily limited by mediational encounter.

Duration – in a sense that will require distinguishing from Bergson’s – is ontologically prior. It is not the absence of structure but structure prior to segmentation, ordering, and metric discretisation. Time – segmented into intervals, directionally ordered, and metrically structured – is what results when intervalic form is imposed upon duration. The imposition is representational rather than discovered: we do not encounter intervals in duration any more than we encounter grid-lines in a landscape. It is not imposed from outside experience but enacted from within it, through the structuring operations by which finite subjects render duration intelligible as time, and this includes succession itself. The ‘before-and-after’ of temporal experience is not inherited from duration but is itself a product of the intervalic cut – the minimal structure required for the grid to function as a grid. Without this stronger claim, the imposition would merely metricise an already ordered flow. Duration would then retain an intrinsic direction independent of the grid. The present thesis denies this: prior to the imposition, duration has no intrinsic ordering of the sort the grid later makes available. This does not make time unreal; it makes it derivative. What follows is an articulation of the temporal distinctions that become available once the imposition is in place.

Once the intervalic cut is made, experience within its frame exhibits an asymmetric structure. The present, the past, the future, history, and futurity are not features of duration itself but modes of access that become intelligible only within the imposed temporal grid. They may be stated compactly:

  1. Present – actuality at the dimensionless limit of the intervalic cut.
  2. Past – prior actuality, no longer extant, now only reconstructible from retention, trace, and surviving fragment.
  3. Future – possible actuality, not yet extant, available only through projection, expectation, and extrapolation from present constraints.
  4. History – lossy interpolation from fragmentary surviving traces of prior actuality.
  5. Futurity – lossy extrapolation from present constraints, tendencies, and uncertainties.

Because the grid resolves duration only partially and from a situated cut, both reconstruction and projection are necessarily lossy: the former inherits only traces of what has been structured, the latter extends only tendencies available from where the cut presently stands.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

What ordinary experience calls the present is not, however, the dimensionless limit itself. It is a heuristic tolerance-band, a phenomenal spread across the cut that permits experience to function as though it inhabits a moment with extension. The strict present, as a product of the intervalic imposition, is an abstraction: a point that formal structure requires but that experience cannot occupy without borrowing width from duration. It is here, at the tolerance-band, that the imposition fails to fully displace what it organises. The failure is not accidental. Any representational scheme that discretises a continuous prior will underdetermine what it carves – there will always be a residue that the grid cannot fully resolve. The tolerance-band is where that residue is phenomenally evident.

The asymmetry between past and future is real, but it is real within the grammar of access generated by the intervalic imposition rather than as a primitive feature of duration itself. The past is reconstructed from what has obtained; the future is projected from what may obtain. A natural objection arises: if duration is truly without intrinsic direction, why is this asymmetry so stubbornly one-way? Why can we not reconstruct forwards or project backwards in any equivalent sense? The answer is that the imposition is not directionless even though what it is imposed upon is. The intervalic cut does not merely segment – it orders, and the ordering it introduces is irreversible because the cut is made from within experience, by subjects who retain traces of what the grid has already structured but have no corresponding access to what it has not yet reached. The arrow belongs to the act of imposition, not to duration itself.

A corollary follows for physics. Bidirectional temporal coordinates are artefacts of the intervalic grid, not discoveries about the deep structure of what the grid represents. That the equations of motion are time-symmetric means only that the formalism remains invariant under temporal reversal operations. It does not mean that duration is reversible, still less that time could ‘go backwards.’ The reversibility belongs to the representational instrument, the coordinate structure and its algebraic properties, not to what is being represented. To conclude otherwise is to read the map’s indifference to orientation as evidence that the terrain has none. Philosophical positions that take this inference at face value, the block-universe interpretation being the most familiar, inherit the error rather than originate it. The error itself is simpler and more general: the conflation of formal symmetry with ontological symmetry.

Situating the Argument

The foregoing account operates on terrain that others have worked before, and it owes debts that should be made explicit – not least so that the points of departure are equally clear.

The most obvious creditor is Bergson. The ontological priority of duration, the critique of spatialised time, and the insistence that metric structure is imposed rather than discovered are all recognisably Bergsonian commitments. The departure is equally plain. Bergson characterises duration positively as qualitative becoming, heterogeneous flow, interpenetrating states – a rich inner life that spatialisation distorts. The present account is more austere. It claims that duration is structure prior to segmentation and ordering, but it does not claim to know what that structure is like from the inside. Bergson thinks he can describe what the imposition conceals; the present thesis maintains that description is itself a structuring operation and therefore cannot reach behind the imposition it enacts. Duration here is an ontological commitment, not an experiential report.

Husserl‘s phenomenology of internal time-consciousness provides much of the apparatus for the epistemic layer. Retention and protention, the specious present, the constitutive role of temporal synthesis in experience – these are Husserlian structures, and the tolerance-band is in obvious dialogue with his account of the living present. The departure is that Husserl treats these structures as disclosing the temporal character of consciousness itself, whereas the present account treats them as artefacts of the intervalic imposition. For Husserl, retention is how consciousness holds the just-past; here, retention is a mode of access that the grid makes available. The difference matters because it determines whether the phenomenology is foundational or derivative. On the present account, it is derivative – downstream of the imposition, not prior to it.

The Kantian resonance is structural rather than doctrinal. The claim that the imposition is enacted from within experience by finite subjects, and that temporal order is a condition of intelligibility rather than a feature of things in themselves, places this account in the neighbourhood of the transcendental aesthetic. But Kant‘s time is a form of inner sense – a pure intuition that structures all experience a priori. The present thesis does not commit to this. It says the imposition is enacted by subjects but does not say it is a priori in Kant’s sense, nor that it is a form of intuition rather than (for instance) a contingent cognitive achievement or an evolved heuristic. The source of the imposition is left deliberately underdetermined at this stage, since settling it prematurely would foreclose possibilities the argument has not yet earned the right to exclude.

Finally, the critique of physics ontologising its own coordinate structure has affinities with van Fraassen‘s constructive empiricism – the insistence that empirical adequacy does not entail structural correspondence between formalism and reality. The affinity is genuine but limited. Van Fraassen is concerned with the epistemology of scientific theories in general; the present argument is concerned with one specific inferential error – the slide from formal symmetry to ontological symmetry – and it grounds that error in a prior thesis about the representational character of intervalic time that van Fraassen does not share. The diagnostic is narrower and the ontological commitment is stronger.

What the present account shares with all four predecessors is the conviction that the ordinary temporal framework – past, present, future, measured and directional – is not simply given. Where it departs from all four is in its specific diagnosis of what the framework is: a representational imposition. It structures a priori, it cannot fully displace, and is enacted from within experience by subjects whose epistemic situation is constitutively shaped by the imposition itself.

Truth, Subjectivity, and Constraint

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3–5 minutes

I like this bloke. Here, he clarifies Rorty’s perspective on Truth. I am quite in sync with Rorty’s position, perhaps 90-odd per cent.

Allow me to explain.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

I have written about truth several times over the years, 1, 2, 3, and more. In earlier posts, I put the point rather bluntly: truth is largely rhetorical. I still think that captured something important, but it now feels incomplete. With the development of my Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World (MEOW) and the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH), the picture needs tightening.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

The first step is to stop pretending that ‘truth’ names a single thing.

Philosopher Bernard Williams helpfully distinguished between thin and thick senses of truth in Truth and Truthfulness. The distinction is simple but instructive.

In its thin sense, truth is almost trivial. Saying ‘it is true that p’ typically adds nothing beyond asserting p. The word ‘true’ functions as a logical convenience: it allows endorsement, disquotation, and generalisation. Philosophically speaking, this version of truth carries very little metaphysical weight. Most arguments about truth, however, are not about this thin sense.

In practice, truth usually appears in a thicker social sense. Here, truth is embedded in practices of inquiry and communication. Communities develop norms around sincerity, accuracy, testimony, and credibility. These norms help stabilise claims so that people can coordinate action and share information.

At this level, truth becomes something like a social achievement. A statement counts as ‘true’ when it can be defended, circulated, reinforced, and relied upon within a shared framework of interpretation. Evidence matters, but so do rhetoric, persuasion, institutional authority, and the distribution of power. This is the sense in which truth is rhetorical, but rhetoric is not sovereign.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic. I prompted NotebookLM to illustrate a 4-layered model that shows how removed language is from encounter, attention, conception, and representation of what we normally consider to be reality. This view is supported by both MEOW and LIH.

Human beings can imagine almost anything about the world, yet the world has a stubborn habit of refusing certain descriptions. Gravity does not yield to persuasion. A bridge designed according to fashionable rhetoric rather than sound engineering will collapse regardless of how compelling its advocates may have been.

This constraint does not disappear in socially constructed domains. Institutions, identities, norms, and laws are historically contingent and rhetorically stabilised, but they remain embedded within material, biological, and ecological conditions. A social fiction can persist for decades or centuries, but eventually it encounters pressures that force revision.

Subjectivity, therefore, doesn’t imply that ‘anything goes’. It simply means that all human knowledge is mediated.

We encounter the world through perception, language, culture, and conceptual frameworks. Every description is produced from a particular standpoint, using particular tools, within particular historical circumstances. Language compresses experience and inevitably loses information along the way. No statement captures reality without distortion. This is the basic insight behind the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis.

At the same time, our descriptions remain answerable to the constraints of the world we inhabit. Some descriptions survive repeated encounters better than others.

In domains where empirical constraint is strong – engineering, physics, medicine – bad descriptions fail quickly. In domains where constraint is indirect – ethics, politics, identity, aesthetics – multiple interpretations may remain viable for long periods. In such cases, rhetoric, institutional authority, and power often function as tie-breakers, stabilising one interpretation over others so that societies can coordinate their activities. These settlements are rarely permanent.

What appears to be truth in one era may dissolve in another. Concepts drift. Institutions evolve. Technologies reshape the landscape of possibility. Claims that once seemed self-evident may later appear parochial or incoherent.

In this sense, many truths in human affairs are best understood as temporally successful settlements under constraint.

Even the most stable arrangements remain vulnerable to change because the conditions that sustain them are constantly shifting. Agents change. Environments change. Expectations change. The very success of a social order often generates the tensions that undermine it. Change, in other words, is the only persistence.

The mistake of traditional realism is to imagine truth as a mirror of reality – an unmediated correspondence between statement and world. The mistake of crude relativism is to imagine that language and power can shape reality without limit. Both positions misunderstand the situation.

We do not possess a final language that captures reality exactly as it is. But neither are we free to describe the world however we please. Truth is not revelation, and it is not mere invention.

It is the provisional stabilisation of claims within mediated encounter, negotiated through language, rhetoric, and institutions, and continually tested against a world that never fully yields to our descriptions. We don’t discover Truth with a capital T. We negotiate survivable descriptions under pressure.

Architecture of Encounter

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I’ve been writing. In fact, I’ve been clarifying A Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World (MEOW) and expanding and extending it into a book with a broader remit. This might well be the cover, following the monograph layout for Philosophics Press.

Image: Mockup of cover art.

As shown, the working title is The Architecture of Encounter: A Mediate Encounter Ontology. I’ve swapped the slate cover for a magenta in this volume.

So what’s it all about?

I’m not going to summarise the book here, but I’ll share some tidbits. I’ve settled on these chapter names:

  1. The Mediated Encounter Ontology
  2. Ontology
  3. Subjecthood
  4. Logic
  5. Epistemology
  6. Perception and Affordances
  7. Language
  8. Social Ontology
  9. Realism
  10. Application
  11. The Normativity Frontier
  12. Conclusion

Chapter 1, The Mediated Encounter Ontology, is a summary and update of the original essay, which will be included in full as an appendix item for reference, but this update will become canonical.

Chapter 2, Ontology: Interaction, Constraint, and the Rejection of Substance, will describe what I mean by ontology and what my proposed ontology looks like.

Chapter 3, Subjecthood: Modal Differentiation Within the Field, will explain how the subject-object relationship changes, and what a subject is in the first place.

Chapter 4, Logic: Coherence Grammar Under Constraint, will explain what logic is and how it operates in this paradigm.

Chapter 5, Epistemology: Convergence, Error, and the Structure of Justification, will describe what knowledge looks like. IYKYK.

Chapter 6, Perception and Affordances: Encounter as Orientation, extends Gibson’s work to comport with MEOW 2.0 (or 1.1).

Chapter 7, Language: Synchronisation, Ontological Grammar, and Structural Limits, explains how language works and how it limits our perception. We’re not talking Sapir-Whorf here, but what respectable language philosopher wouldn’t reserve a chapter for language?

Chapter 8, Social Ontology: Second-Order Constraint Systems. MEOW has a lot to say about first-order constraints, but there are higher-order considerations. I discuss them here.

Chapter 9, Realism: Cross-Perspectival Convergence and the Invariant Anchor, talks about the real elephant in the room. Since MEOW challenges both realism and idealism, we need to talk about it.

Chapter 10, Application: The Apophatic Mind, is mostly an observation on artificial intelligence as it relates to the mind-consciousness debate, primarily scoped around LLMs and similar machine processes.

Chapter 11. The Normativity Frontier, doesn’t yet have a subtitle, but this is where I discuss issues like normative ethics and morality.

I probably don’t need to tell you how Conclusion chapters work.

I expect to have 3 appendices.

  1. Summary of commitments, which will summarise and distil key topics – so like a cheat sheet for reference – a bit more robust than a glossary.
  2. Bibliography of reference material. As this is not an essay, it won’t be chock-full of citations – only a few, where I feel they are necessary. Much of this work represents years of thinking, and in many cases, the attribution has been lost; I remember the contents and not necessarily the attribution. I will prompt AI to fill in some missing pieces, but that’s that. The bibliography attempts to capture the general flavour.
  3. The original MEOW essay. This is already freely available on several platforms, including Zenodo. Download it here if you haven’t already – or wait for the book.

The rest of the story

This book not only extends MEOW, but it also ties in concepts from A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis and other of my already published and yet unpublished work.

I expect to produce a decent amount of explanatory and support material, though to be fair, I tell myself that every time until I get distracted by the next project. I need a producer to manage these affairs.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

The Trouble with Ockham’s Razor

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4–6 minutes

Few philosophical aphorisms travel as lightly and cut as confidently as Ockham’s Razor. “Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.” The phrase has the air of austere wisdom. It sounds disciplined, economical, rational. It promises clarity by subtraction. One imagines conceptual clutter swept aside by a single elegant stroke.

The Razor is attributed to William of Ockham, though like many slogans it has acquired a life far removed from its origin. In contemporary discourse it functions less as a methodological reminder and more as an epistemic trump card. The simpler explanation, we are told, is the better one. Case closed.

The trouble begins precisely there.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast

The Hidden Variable: Necessity

The Razor does not forbid multiplicity. It forbids unnecessary multiplicity. But who decides what is necessary?

Necessity is not a neutral category. It is already embedded within a framework of assumptions about what counts as explanation, what counts as sufficiency, and what counts as legitimate ontological commitment.

For one thinker, invoking a divine ground of physical law is unnecessary because the laws themselves suffice. For another, the laws are unintelligible without a grounding principle, and so God is necessary. Both can claim parsimony within their respective ontologies. The Razor does not adjudicate between them. It presupposes the grammar within which “necessity” is assessed.

The aphorism thus functions less as a rule and more as a reinforcement mechanism. It stabilises the commitments one already holds.

Parsimony Is a Heuristic, Not a Law

Science has often rewarded simplicity. Copernicus simplified celestial mechanics. Newton reduced motion to a few principles. Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism. These episodes encourage a romantic attachment to elegance.

Yet physics has also revealed a universe that is anything but tidy. Quantum fields, curved spacetime, dark matter, inflationary cosmology. Nature has shown little regard for our aesthetic preference for minimal furniture.

Parsimony, then, is pragmatic. It helps us avoid gratuitous complication. It disciplines theory formation. But it is not a metaphysical guarantee that reality itself is sparse.

To treat the Razor as if it carries ontological authority is to convert a methodological guideline into a philosophical dogma.

Structural Sufficiency Versus Metaphysical Surplus

The Razor becomes particularly contentious when deployed in debates about ultimate grounds. If a structural model explains observable regularities and survives empirical constraint, some conclude that any additional metaphysical layer is redundant.

This is a defensible position. It is also incomplete.

Redundancy in explanatory terms does not entail impossibility in ontological terms. A structural account of behaviour may render psychological speculation unnecessary for prediction, but it does not disprove the existence of inner motives. Likewise, a lawful cosmology may render a divine hypothesis explanatorily idle without rendering it incoherent.

The Razor trims explanatory excess. It does not settle metaphysical disputes.

Aphorisms as Closure Devices

Part of the Razor’s power lies in its compression. It is aphoristic. It travels easily. It signals intellectual seriousness. It sounds like disciplined thinking distilled.

But aphorisms compress complexity. They conceal premises. They discourage reopening the frame. “Follow the science.” “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” “Trust the market.” These phrases do not argue; they configure. They pre-load the space of acceptable interpretation.

Ockham’s Razor often operates in precisely this way. It is invoked not as the conclusion of a careful analysis but as a device to end discussion. The simpler view wins. Full stop.

Yet simplicity itself is indexed to perspective. What looks simple within one conceptual scheme may appear impoverished within another.

Tolerance for Explanatory Closure

There is also a psychological dimension worth acknowledging. Some individuals are comfortable with open explanatory ceilings. They accept that certain features of reality may lack ultimate grounding within their present framework. Others experience such openness as instability. They seek a final anchor.

The Razor favours the former temperament. It encourages ontological restraint and distrust of ultimate grounds. For those comfortable with structural sufficiency, this is liberating. For those who experience the absence of grounding as incomplete, it feels evasive.

The disagreement is not resolved by invoking parsimony. It reflects divergent tolerances for metaphysical closure.

When the Razor Becomes Inflationary

Ironically, the Razor can itself become an inflationary principle. It can elevate “simplicity” to a quasi-transcendental value. It can be treated as if reality owes us elegance.

At that point, the tool begins to govern the ontology rather than merely discipline it. The Razor becomes an article of faith, a universal heuristic immune to its own demand for justification.

One might then ask, with a certain symmetry: by what necessity is simplicity itself necessary?

A More Modest Use

None of this requires abandoning the Razor. It remains useful. It reminds us not to posit hidden mechanisms when observable structures suffice. It cautions against explanatory extravagance. It protects inquiry from baroque speculation.

But it should be treated as a heuristic, not a hammer. It guides theory construction within a framework. It does not choose the framework.

A more disciplined formulation would be this: when a structural account explains observed regularities under constraint and remains revisable, additional metaphysical posits do not increase explanatory power. Their adoption becomes a matter of ontological preference rather than necessity.

This preserves the Razor’s pragmatic value without inflating it into a metaphysical arbiter.

The Real Trouble

The real trouble with Ockham’s Razor is not that it cuts too much. It is that we often wield it without noticing the hand that holds it. We treat it as neutral when it is already embedded within a grammar of sufficiency, explanation, and legitimacy.

The Razor does not eliminate ontological commitment. It expresses one.

Recognising that does not blunt the blade. It merely reminds us that even the sharpest instruments are guided by the frameworks in which they are forged.

And frameworks, unlike aphorisms, are rarely simple.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

The Nerve of Not Being Correct

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I’ve received feedback like, ‘Not everything you believe is right’ and ‘What if you’re not right?’

First: I agree. Second: And what if I’m not?

This isn’t new feedback, but I’ll address it in terms of my latest work.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast

Not everything you believe is right

This is true, but one cannot hold an idea one believes to be false as true, so the idea that one believes what one believes to be true to tautological. This is also why I continue to research and attempt to expand my horizon. I even wander outside of my discipline at the risk of Dunning-Kruger errors.

In my recent work on ontology and grammar, I collided with Bourdieu, so I read his work. As helpful as it was, it served to reinforce my position, but from a position of Social Theory instead of Philosophy. When I read Judith Butler, I see how I might connect my ideas to Gender theory. It should be obvious that I’ve read much on Linguistics, but I am not a linguist. Our lenses all differ to some extent.

I’ve even corrected some of the ideas I’ve posted on this blog as I gain new information. To be fair, it’s a reason I post here. I hope to get feedback. I may not fully pursue alternative disciplines, but it’s nice to know they exist, and I can at least perform cursory surveys.

If I am wrong – or if you think I am wrong – tell me. If you can, tell me why. If not precisely why, then what’s your intuition?

NotebookLM Infographic

Historically, many times I’d been claimed to be wrong because the person was coming from a differnt ontology. I might have been arguing something within the realm of Continental philosophy, and I’d get a critique from an Analytical philosopher. This is akin to a vegan critiquing a steak dinner. It may be valid within their ontological grammar, but it is not otherwise universal. It usually doesn’t take very long to assess one’s commitments to other grammars. That happened recently, when I encountered a philosophical Realist.

When I wouldn’t accept their position, eventually we arrived at this foundational point. Realism is a position I ontologically and grammatically reject. I’ve written several pieces defending or at least articulating my position, notably the Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW). Disagree? Tell me.

I used to be a Realist with an asterisk; then I was an Analytical Idealist with an asterisk; now, I believe in MEOW. The asterisk was necessary because there were holes in the position. When Analytical Idealism came around, there was still an asterisk, but it felt better than that of Realism. When I came up with MEOW, the asterisk went away. Perhaps you might consider that MEOW has an asterisk, if you believe it’s plausible at all. If so, what’s missing – what’s the known unknown? You obviously can’t articulate an unknown unknown.

When I write about ontology, grammar, and commensurability, I do not exempt myself from these biases. I have all of these challenges – perhaps even more so because I don’t tend to fit into the round holes very well myself. This helps me with intellectual humility.

Politically, I am often accused of being on the Left, but I reject the Left-Right paradigm as a valid lens for me; I am on a different axis. The Libertarians added an Authority-Liberty Y-axis to the Progressive-Conservative X-axis, but I am on a Z-axis, which is not to be fully described or accounted for on these planes. Think of the message of Flatland.

What if you’re wrong?

Hopefully, every philosopher understands this and has noticed the dustbin of history littered with wrong ideas.

When I publish essays, they are the result of research and deliberation. Could I be wrong? Again, I’ve been wrong before. I’ll be wrong again, but I need to understand why to change my position. I could shift my position or abandon it outright.

There was a time I believed people to be rational. I was an economist. I studied finance. I believed it until I didn’t. Behavioural Economics likely did the heavy lifting, but it’s likely that they believe that rationality-based systems are salvageable. I don’t. Not meaningfully. Not sustainably.

So, I can be wrong, and I can admit it.

I was once a closet (or adjacent) Libertarian until I realised it didn’t cohere with reality. My last declared stance was an Anarchosydicalist, but I know this isn’t quite right either – on multiple accounts.

Anyway, I’m not afraid of being wrong, and I’m not afraid of wittering on about it. Again, I appreciate constructive criticism. I’m also amicable to non-solutions in the manner of my Dis–Integration approach, but at least break down the pieces.

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Philosophics

Legibility and Ontology

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
3–5 minutes

These two words qualify as my words of the month: legibility and ontology.

I’ve been using them as lenses.

I picked up legibility from James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, which is really a book about how well-intentioned schemes fail once reality is forced to become administrable. Ontology is an older philosophical workhorse, usually paired with epistemology, but I’m using it here in a looser, more pragmatic sense.

When I write, I write through lenses. Everyone does. Writing requires a point of view, even when we pretend otherwise.

In this post, I want to talk more informally about my recent essay, Grammatical Failure. I usually summarise my work elsewhere, but here I want to think out loud about it, particularly in relation to social ontology and epistemology. I won’t linger on definitions. They’re a search away. But a little framing helps.

Ontology, roughly: how reality is parsed.

Epistemology: how knowledge is justified within that parsing.

Audio: NotebookLM summary of this post.

Much of my recent work sits downstream of thinkers like Thomas Sowell, George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt, Kurt Gray, and Joshua Greene. Despite their differences, they converge on a shared insight: human cognition is largely motivated preverbally. As a philosopher of language, that pre-language layer is where my interest sharpens.

I explored this in earlier work, including a diptych titled The Grammar of Impasse – Conceptual Exhaustion and Causal Mislocation. Writing is how I gel these ideas. There are several related pieces still in the pipeline.

When I talk about grammar, I don’t mean Saussure or Chomsky. I mean something deeper: the ontological substrate beneath belief. Grammar, in this sense, is how reality gets parsed before beliefs ever form. It filters what can count as real, salient, or intelligible.

Let’s use a deliberately simplified example.

Imagine two ontological orientations. Call them Ont-C and Ont-L. This isn’t to say there are only two, but much of Western political discourse collapses into a binary anyway.

Ont-C tends to experience people as inherently bad, dangerous, or morally suspect. Ont-L tends to experience people as inherently good or at least corrigible. These aren’t opinions in the usual sense. They sit beneath belief, closer to affect and moral orientation.

Now consider retributive justice, setting aside the fact that justice itself is a thick concept.

From Ont-C, punishment teaches a lesson. It deters. It disciplines. From Ont-L, punishment without rehabilitation looks cruel or counterproductive, and the transgression itself may be read as downstream of systemic injustice.

Each position can acknowledge exceptions. Ont-L knows there are genuinely broken people. Ont-C knows there are saints. But those are edge cases, not defaults.

Now ask Ont-C and Ont-L to design a criminal justice system together. The result will feel intolerable to both. Too lenient. Too harsh. The disagreement isn’t over policy details. It’s over how reality is carved up in the first place.

And this is only one dimension.

Add others. Bring in Ont-V and Ont-M if you like, for vegan and meat-based ontologies. Suddenly, you have Ont-CV, Ont-CM, Ont-LV, and Ont-LM. Then add class, religion, gender, authority, harm, and whatever. Intersectionality stops looking like a solution and starts looking like a combinatorial explosion.

The Ont-Vs can share a meal, so long as they don’t talk politics.

The structure isn’t just unstable. It was never stable to begin with. We imagine foundations because legibility demands them.

Grammatical Failure is an attempt to explain why this instability isn’t a bug in liberal epistemology but a structural feature. The grammar does the sorting long before deliberation begins.

More on that soon.

In any case, once you start applying this ontological lens to other supposedly intractable disputes, you quickly realise that their intractability is not accidental.

Take abortion.

If we view the issue through the lenses of Ont-A (anti-abortion) and Ont-C (maternal choice), we might as well be peering through Ont-Oil and Ont-Water. The disagreement does not occur at the level of policy preferences or competing values. It occurs at the level of what counts as morally salient in the first place.

There is no middle ground here. No middle path. No synthesis waiting to be negotiated into existence.

That is not because the participants lack goodwill, intelligence, or empathy. It is because the ontological primitives are incommensurate. Each side experiences the other not as mistaken but as unintelligible.

We can will compromise all we like. The grammar does not comply.

Contemporary discourse often insists otherwise. It tells us that better arguments, clearer framing, or more dialogue will eventually converge. From this perspective, that insistence is not hopeful. It is confused. It mistakes a grammatical fracture for a deliberative failure.

You might try to consider other polemic topics and notice the same interplay.

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Philosophics

Why “Just Think Critically” Keeps Failing

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2–4 minutes

The paper is now available on Zenodo.

I’ve been wittering on about social ontological positions and legibility for a few months now. I’ve been writing a book and several essays, but this is the first to be published. In it, I not only counter Ranalli – not personally; his adopted belief – I also counter Thomas Sowell, George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt, Kurt Gray, and Joshua Green. (Counter might be a little harsh; I agree with their conclusions, but I remain on the path they stray from.)

Audio: NotebookLM summary of the essay: Grammatical Failure

There is a strange faith circulating in contemporary culture: the belief that disagreement persists because someone, somewhere, hasn’t been taught how to think properly.

The prescription is always the same. Teach critical thinking. Encourage openness. Expose people to alternatives. If they would only slow down, examine the evidence, and reflect honestly, the right conclusions would present themselves.

When this doesn’t work, the explanation is equally ready to hand. The person must be biased. Indoctrinated. Captured by ideology. Reason-resistant.

What’s rarely considered is a simpler possibility: nothing has gone wrong.

Most of our public arguments assume that we are all operating inside the same conceptual space, disagreeing only about how to populate it. We imagine a shared menu of reasons, facts, and values, from which different people select poorly. On that picture, better reasoning should fix things.

But what if the menu itself isn’t shared?

What if what counts as a ‘reason’, what qualifies as ‘evidence’, or what even registers as a meaningful alternative is already structured differently before any deliberation begins?

At that point, telling someone to ‘think critically’ is like asking them to optimise a system they cannot see, using criteria they do not recognise. The instruction is not offensive. It’s unintelligible. This is why so many contemporary disputes feel immune to argument. Not merely heated, but strangely orthogonal. You aren’t rebutted so much as translated into something else entirely: naïve, immoral, dangerous, unserious. And you do the same in return.

Liberal epistemology has a neat explanation for this. It treats these failures as agent-level defects: insufficient openness, motivated reasoning, epistemic irresponsibility. The problem is always how people reason. The argument of Grammatical Failure is that this diagnosis is systematically misplaced. The real constraint, in many cases, lies upstream of reasoning itself. It lies in the semantic frameworks that determine what can count as a reason in the first place. When those frameworks diverge, deliberation doesn’t fail heroically. It fails grammatically.

This doesn’t mean people lack agency. It means agency operates within a grammar, not over it. We choose, revise, and reflect inside spaces of intelligibility we did not author. Asking deliberation to rewrite its own conditions is like asking a sentence to revise its own syntax mid-utterance. The result is a familiar pathology. Disagreement across frameworks is redescribed as epistemic vice. Category rejection is mistaken for weak endorsement. Indoctrination becomes a label we apply whenever persuasion fails. Not because anyone is lying, but because our diagnostic tools cannot represent what they are encountering.

The paper itself is not a manifesto or a programme. It doesn’t tell you what to believe, how to educate, or which politics to adopt. It does something more modest and more uncomfortable. It draws a boundary around what liberal epistemology can coherently explain – and shows what happens when that boundary is ignored.

Sometimes the problem isn’t that people won’t think.

It’s that they are already thinking in a grammar that your advice cannot reach.

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Philosophics

Perish the Thought: You Didn’t Override Anything

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
4–6 minutes

Je m’accuse. I find myself bickering on social media again. Zut, alors! Unfortunately, I struck a nerve with otherwise unidentified Adam. He may believe that I need to be right; rather, I’d like to help him not be wrong – presuming there are such states. In a post, Adam makes an assertion that one can override one’s, let’s call it, intuition. He ends with:

👉 Just don’t silence the most experienced pattern-reader in the room and call it maturity.

💭 What decision are you defending right now that your body already vetoed?

I feel that we are on the same page, or I wouldn’t bother to engage. The point I want to make with this blog article is that one does not override or veto one’s body. You rationalise what your body tells you to do. Just be careful with your language and how you frame it.

Audio: NotebookLM summary of this topic.

On why “reason defeating intuition” is a comforting fiction

There is a familiar story we tell about decision-making: First, the body speaks. A tightening. A lurch. A sense of foreboding or pull.

Then, reason arrives late, clipboard in hand, issuing corrective instructions:

  • ‘Be rational’
  • ‘Sleep on it’
  • ‘Run the numbers’

When things go badly, we narrate the failure like this: I knew. But I overruled it. This story feels true. It is also almost certainly wrong. Not morally wrong. Not introspectively dishonest. Conceptually wrong.

Image: NotebookLM infographics on this topic.

The experiential mistake

Let’s grant the phenomenology immediately. People routinely report that:

  • A decision felt wrong before it was articulated.
  • The articulation came later.
  • The eventual outcome carried an unmistakable sense of fatigue or dissonance.
  • Retrospectively, they say: I ignored the signal.

That experience is real. The inference drawn from it is not.

What the experience shows is temporal asymmetry, not architectural hierarchy. One process surfaces earlier than another. That does not mean a later process overruled it.

It means you are narrating a system whose operations are largely opaque to itself.

What the science actually killed decades ago

The idea that ‘reason’ steps in as a distinct, supervisory faculty that overrides intuition is not merely unproven. It is historically obsolete.

It belongs to the same conceptual family as:

  • The rational actor
  • The detached chooser
  • The inner executive standing above cognition

That family did not survive the twentieth century.

There is no independent referee.

Start with Herbert Simon, who dismantled the fantasy of global optimisation with bounded rationality. Human decision-making does not survey option-spaces and then choose. It satisficies under constraint. There is no god’s-eye view from which “reason” could intervene.

Move to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who made it painfully clear that what we call reasoning is deeply entangled with heuristics, framing effects, and affective weighting. System 2 does not rule System 1. It just writes better prose.

Add Thomas Sowell, whose critique of unconstrained rationalism was never about feelings versus facts, but about the fantasy of an overseeing mind unbound by trade-offs.

Or George Lakoff, who quietly erased the idea that political or moral reasoning could ever be disembodied in the first place.

Or Jonathan Haidt, who showed that moral reasoning overwhelmingly functions as post-hoc justification. The elephant moves. The rider explains.

Or Joshua Greene, whose dual-process models still do not resurrect a sovereign rational self. They show competition, not command.

Or Kurt Gray, whose work on moral perception demonstrates that what we experience as “judgment” is already structured before conscious deliberation enters the scene.

Across these literatures, one conclusion recurs with tedious consistency: There is no independent referee.

Why the “override” story feels so compelling

If reason does not overrule intuition, why does it feel like it does?

Because what you experience as “override” is competition between pre-reflective evaluations, not a coup staged by rationality.

Different subsystems evaluate:

  • social risk
  • loss exposure
  • identity coherence
  • narrative defensibility
  • anticipated regret

Whichever configuration wins becomes the decision. The explanation comes later. Calling that explanation “reason” flatters us. It also confuses sequence with sovereignty. When someone says, ‘I ignored my intuition’, what they usually mean is:

A later-arriving evaluation carried more weight than an earlier one, and I disliked the downstream cost.

That is not an override. That is the outcome.

Exhaustion is not evidence of rational domination

There is a popular add-on to the override story:

We override intuition, and that’s why we’re exhausted.

Again, the fatigue is real. The diagnosis is not. Cognitive fatigue does not indicate that reason heroically suppressed instinct. It indicates conflict resolution under uncertainty without stable convergence.

When multiple evaluative systems fail to cohere cleanly, the result is:

  • prolonged rumination
  • narrative patching
  • justificatory rehearsal
  • defensive rationalisation

That is tiring. Not because reason triumphed, but because coherence never fully arrived.

The real mistake

The mistake is not ‘trusting the body’ or ‘listening to reason’. The mistake is re-importing a discredited architecture because the introspection sounds nice.

You do not have:

  • intuition vs reason
  • signal vs override
  • body vs mind
  • elephant vs rider with veto power

You have distributed pattern-recognition systems, operating at different speeds, with different representational affordances, producing outputs that consciousness stitches into a story after the fact. The story is useful. It is not causal.

What is worth noticing

There is something worth salvaging from the original intuition-first narrative, once it’s stripped of myth.

Early signals matter not because they are purer or wiser, but because they encode long-trained pattern sensitivity that may never become fully articulate.

Ignoring them does not mean you “chose reason.”
It means another pattern won.

And sometimes that pattern is worse.

Not because it was rational.
Because it was legible, defensible, or socially safer.

No resurrection required

None of this requires reviving the rational chooser, the sovereign self, or Homo economicus with a new haircut. The work is already done. The literature is settled. The corpse stays buried. What remains is learning to live without the comforting fiction that someone, somewhere inside you, was supposed to be in charge. That absence is not immaturity. It is the condition under which decisions actually occur. And pretending otherwise only gives the clipboard another imaginary promotion.

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Philosophics

Truth After Deflation: Why ‘Truth’ Refuses to Behave

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
3–4 minutes

I’ve long had a problem with Truth – or at least the notion of it. It gets way too much credit for doing not much at all. For a long time now, philosophers have agreed on something uncomfortable: Truth isn’t what we once thought it was.

Truth isn’t what we once thought it was

The grand metaphysical picture, where propositions are true because they correspond to mind-independent facts, has steadily eroded. Deflationary accounts have done their work well. Truth no longer looks like a deep property hovering behind language. It looks more like a linguistic device: a way of endorsing claims, generalising across assertions, and managing disagreement. So far, so familiar.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

What’s less often asked is what happens after we take deflation seriously. Not halfway. Not politely. All the way.

That question motivates my new paper, Truth After Deflation: Why Truth Resists Stabilisation. The short version is this: once deflationary commitments are fully honoured, the concept of Truth becomes structurally unstable. Not because philosophers are confused, but because the job we keep asking Truth to do can no longer be done with the resources we allow it.

The core diagnosis: exhaustion

The paper introduces a deliberately unromantic idea: truth exhaustion. Exhaustion doesn’t mean that truth-talk disappears. We still say things are true. We still argue, correct one another, and care about getting things right. Exhaustion means something more specific:

After deflation, there is no metaphysical, explanatory, or adjudicative remainder left for Truth to perform.

Truth remains grammatically indispensable, but philosophically overworked.

Image: NotebookLM infographics of this topic. (Please ignore the typos.)

The dilemma

Once deflationary constraints are accepted, attempts to “save” Truth fall into a simple two-horn dilemma.

Horn A: Stabilise truth by making it invariant.
You can do this by disquotation, stipulation, procedural norms, or shared observation. The result is stable, but thin. Truth becomes administrative: a device for endorsement, coordination, and semantic ascent. It no longer adjudicates between rival frameworks.

Horn B: Preserve truth as substantive.
You can ask Truth to ground inquiry, settle disputes, explain success, or stand above practices. But now you need criteria. And once criteria enter, so do circularity, regress, or smuggled metaphysics. Truth becomes contestable precisely where it was meant to adjudicate.

Stability costs substance. Substance costs stability. There is no third option waiting in the wings.

Why this isn’t just abstract philosophy

To test whether this is merely a theoretical artefact, the paper works through three domains where truth is routinely asked to do serious work:

  • Moral truth, where Truth is meant to override local norms and condemn entrenched practices.
  • Scientific truth, where Truth is meant to explain success, convergence, and theory choice.
  • Historical truth, where Truth is meant to stabilise narratives against revisionism and denial.

In each case, the same pattern appears. When truth is stabilised, it collapses into procedure, evidence, or institutional norms. When it is thickened to adjudicate across frameworks, it becomes structurally contestable. This isn’t relativism. It’s a mismatch between function and resources.

Why this isn’t quietism either

A predictable reaction is: isn’t this just quietism in better prose?

Not quite. Quietism tells us to stop asking. Exhaustion explains why the questions keep being asked and why they keep failing. It’s diagnostic, not therapeutic. The persistence of truth-theoretic debate isn’t evidence of hidden depth. It’s evidence of a concept being pushed beyond what it can bear after deflation.

The upshot

Truth still matters. But not in the way philosophy keeps demanding. Truth works because practices work. It doesn’t ground them. It doesn’t hover above them. It doesn’t adjudicate between them without borrowing authority from elsewhere. Once that’s accepted, a great deal of philosophical anxiety dissolves, and a great deal of philosophical labour can be redirected.

The question is no longer “What is Truth?” It’s “Why did we expect Truth to do that?”

The paper is now archived on Zenodo and will propagate to PhilPapers shortly. It’s long, unapologetically structural, and aimed squarely at readers who already think deflationary truth is right but haven’t followed it to its endpoint.

Read it if you enjoy watching concepts run out of road.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics