Tag: grammar

Hiding Neurodiversity

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5–8 minutes

This post is a bit different to the rest, though it is about language use. I’m not officially neurodiverse or on a spectrum – at least not this spectrum – but I know many who are, and so I advocate in my own way. Given that we are all neurodiverse, I suppose we all are unofficially so.

There’s a term currently doing heavy administrative labour in HR departments, disability frameworks, school inclusion policies, and the more compassionate corners of LinkedIn. We likely have already encountered this term: neurodivergent. It is, we’re assured, a kinder, more affirming way to describe people whose cognitive, sensory, attentional, or communicative profiles don’t quite fit the expected mould. It has replaced older, uglier vocabulary. It comes with badges and a flag. Cue Eddie Izzard. Workplaces run training sessions about it. People put it in their Twitter bios with quiet pride. 🏳️‍🌈🤔 No, a different sort of pride. It’s also, philosophically speaking, a mess – and not an innocent one.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The Grammar Problem

Start with the word itself. Neurodivergent is a compound: neuro, meaning something to do with the nervous system, and divergent, meaning departing from something. This second element is where the trouble begins, because divergent is a relational predicate. It cannot mean anything in isolation. To diverge is necessarily to diverge from something – a path, a norm, a baseline, a centre. The word is semantically incomplete without its relatum. So, ask yourself: divergent from what, exactly?

The term takes the Fifth. It presents divergence as though it were an intrinsic property of certain people – a fact about their neurology, full stop – rather than a relation between a person and an implied standard. The standard is left unnamed, unexamined, and serenely unaccountable. This isn’t a pedantic complaint. Suppressing the relatum is suppressing the normative commitment that does all the actual work. You can’t hide what you are measuring against and then claim to be merely describing what you find.

The Norm That Dare Not Speak Its Name

So what is the suppressed baseline? What is the nervous system that neurodivergent people are diverging from? It’s not a biological fact. There isn’t a neurologically standard human template, no Platonic baseline brain from which variation can be objectively measured. Every nervous system differs from every other nervous system. Neurological variation is not deviation; it’s quite literally the condition. If neurodivergent meant simply having a nervous system that differs from other nervous systems, it would apply to everyone and say nothing.

In practice, the implied norm is something far less neutral: a composite of statistical frequency, institutional convenience, behavioural compliance, and the tacit preferences of the systems – educational, occupational, social – built around a presumed cognitive majority. The neurotypical person – add scare quotes if you must – isn’t discovered. They’re assembled retrospectively. The centre is a construct. And the term neurodivergent relies entirely on this construction while refusing to acknowledge it.

This is the move that I, as a language philosopher, finds objectionable. The term behaves as though it were tracking a natural kind – a real biological category with a stable referent – when it’s actually encoding a social judgement: this person’s profile doesn’t pass through the normative aperture cleanly. Dressing this judgement in neurological vocabulary doesn’t make it scientific. It just makes it harder to argue with.

Euphemism With a Retention Problem

One might charitably read neurodivergent as a well-intentioned euphemism – an attempt to replace stigmatising diagnostic language with something that affirms rather than pathologises. Fair enough, as far as that goes. The older vocabulary was often brutal, and the intent to do better deserves acknowledgement before it receives its drubbing. But here’s the problem: it retains the entire logic it was meant to replace.

The old pathologising vocabulary said: these people deviate from normal, and that deviation is a deficit. The new vocabulary says: these people diverge from typical, and that divergence is a difference worth celebrating. The architecture is identical. There’s still a centre and a periphery remains. There are still people installed at the unmarked middle and others who are marked, managed, diagnosed, accommodated, sentimentalised, or quietly struggled with. The only thing that’s changed is the tone of the managing.

Euphemism of this kind isn’t neutral, for sure. It performs a service for the system it appears to critique. By making the language warmer, it makes the underlying structure harder to see and therefore harder to contest. As I note, neurodivergent isn’t a challenge to the norm. It’s just more photogenic with a soft filter.

The Tolerance Regime and Its Conditions

If we strip the euphemism back to its functional content, the term actually describes something like: a person whose failure to conform to the behavioural expectations of the statistical fiction called ‘normal’ has been traced, however loosely, to their nervous system, and who has been granted conditional tolerance on that basis.

Conditional tolerance becomes the operative phrase, a tolerance with terms, the primary term being legibility. The person must be divergent in a form the system can process: diagnosable, accommodatable, adaptable enough to participate in the institutions built around the norm they are diverging from. Masking – the performance of neurotypicality sufficient to pass institutional scrutiny – is the behavioural proof that the condition is being met.

Who Gets the Label, and Who Doesn’t

The term’s selectivity is its own quiet indictment. Neurodivergent, as socially deployed, doesn’t even cover the full range of neurological variation it nominally describes. It covers the functional end – those whose divergence is legible, manageable, and compatible, at least in principle, with participation in mainstream institutions. Those whose difference is more severe, more disruptive, more genuinely incompatible with the machinery of normal life don’t get the badge.

The term, then, extends its conditional warmth precisely to those who least require protection from the norm, whilst those most genuinely strained by it remain outside even the euphemism.

And within the group the term does cover, the employment picture is instructive. This cohort suffers markedly higher rates of un- and underemployment than the general population. Where employment is secured, it’s sometimes, if not usually, tokenistic – the divergent hire serving the firm’s reputational and fiscal interests as much as their own, their characteristic drive to succeed and conform exploited rather than accommodated. The vocabulary promises inclusion, but the outcomes record something closer to managed exclusion.

What an Honest Term Would Look Like

A more philosophically honest term would need to do three things the current one refuses:

  1. name the relational structure explicitly
  2. locate the norm rather than concealing it
  3. attribute the social judgement accurately rather than laundering it as biology

Something like norm-attributed divergence comes close inasmuch as it captures that the divergence is from a norm, and that the attribution to neurology is an explanatory move rather than a simple observation. However, it is a bit ungainly to the point of unusability by anyone not already beyond saving.

The more pointed observation may be that no honest replacement term could be as palatable as neurodivergent – and this may very well be self-indictment. The term’s warmth depends on its vagueness. Specify the norm, and you have to defend it. Specify the attribution, and you have to evidence it. Specify the conditionality of the tolerance, and you have to justify it. The language works precisely because it doesn’t do any of these things. It’s a vapid term meant not to offend. Neurodivergent is comfortable because it is evasive. Make it honest, and it becomes uncomfortable. Which is where the honest conversation was always waiting to begin.

Unmasking_NeurodivergenceDownload

Living in the House of the Bat Man

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6–9 minutes

On God, Objectivity, and the Grammar That Outlives Both

NB: After I posted this, I put some more thought into the notion. Rather than extending this post, I decided to post the follow-up on Substack. Where Nagel asks, What’s it like to be a bat? I ask What’s It Like to Be a Human?

I know a nice philosophical parlour trick. It’s performed by asking someone whether they believe in objective truth. If they say yes, ask them where it comes from; if they say no, ask them whether that denial is objectively true. The trick is not a refutation of anything. It is a demonstration: the concept of the Objective has been installed so deeply in the grammar of the question that you can’t coherently step outside of it long enough to evaluate it. In this respect, you’re a starling who can’t see the murmuration from within it.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Let’s start with Nagel. In 1974, Thomas Nagel published a paper that broke a perfectly serviceable assumption in half. The assumption was that consciousness, while subjective in character, was at least comparably subjective across humans – that the gap between my inner life and yours was a matter of degree, navigable by imaginative projection and shared biology, whereas the gap between me and a bat was of a different order entirely. Nagel’s intervention was to question the first assumption by taking the second seriously. If the bat’s echolocation is genuinely inaccessible – not merely unfamiliar but structurally unreachable, given that I have no experiential raw material from which to construct what sonar feels like – then the inference from ‘I can’t imagine this being’s experience‘ to ‘this being probably has no experience worth worrying about‘ is invalid. Not difficult. Invalid. The bat has a perspective; I can’t access it. These two facts are entirely compatible, not mutually exclusive.

The extension Nagel resisted, but which his own argument demands, is this: the same epistemic closure obtains everywhere. Not merely between humans and bats, or humans and artificial systems, but between any two subjects whatever. What we call human-to-human understanding is not epistemic access to another’s inner life. It’s coordination: shared linguistic conventions, overlapping heuristics, statistical regularities of behaviour stable enough to be gamed and relied upon. We don’t experience each other’s experience. We model each other, well enough for most practical purposes, but then mistake the model for the contact. It’s all too common.

The murmuration of starlings is useful here. A rule of seven: Each bird responds to its seven nearest neighbours. Local rules, local information, irreducibly individual embodiment. The apparent organism wheeling across the sky – that single fluid entity that seems to breathe and turn as one – is a scale-dependent phenomenon that observers impose from a sufficient distance. Pareidolia at work. There is no murmuration-subject, and there is no fact of the matter about what it is like to be the flock, because the flock is not the level at which anything is happening. Whilst the coherence is real, the subject isn’t.

A statistical person is the murmuration.

A statistical person is the murmuration. Every apparatus of governance, moral philosophy, and institutional coordination operates by constructing a subject at the flock scale – the rational agent, the bearer of rights, the member of the moral community, the person before the court. These constructions aren’t errors at all. They’re necessary compressions. Courts can’t adjudicate the irreducible particularity of each defendant; they need the type. But the utility of the compression at the institutional scale isn’t evidence that the compression names anything real at the experiential scale. As the average human isn’t actually a human, the murmuration is not a starling.

What does this mean for the consciousness debate – about bats, digital systems, or the person sitting across from you? The question ‘is there something it is like to be X?‘ isn’t merely unanswered, but it’s malformed as posed. It presupposes a subject-object grammar within which the question makes sense: a discrete, bounded subject, either possessing or lacking inner experience, in principle distinguishable from other such subjects. That grammar produces the apparent problem. Dissolve the grammar, and the problem doesn’t get solved; rather, it gets diagnosed. Which brings us to God…

if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him

Here, Voltaire’s quip – if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him – is almost right. But its failure is in the verb. Invention implies architects: identifiable agents who construct a useful fiction and install it in a credulous population. This is the wrong model for how the objective world works. No one decided to construct it. Rather, it accreted. Each starling wasn’t conspiring to produce the murmuration; the murmuration is what the local rules produce at scale – No intention necessary. The exogenous imposition has no imposer behind it, which is precisely why it presents with such unimpeachable authority. Expose an inventor, and you discredit the invention. But when there isn’t an inventor – when the cage precipitated rather than being built – there isn’t a conspiracy to unmask; there’s no priest to dismiss – only the structure itself, which continues to function regardless of whether anyone believes in it.

Nietzsche understood this better. The death of God, for Nietzsche, wasn’t the liberation it appeared to be. It was the removal of the only anchor the entire normative structure had, without anyone noticing what was actually anchoring what. The Enlightenment didn’t interrogate the theological grammar. It secularised it. Reason, Nature, Science, Progress, History – each of these performed the same function God had performed: the external, authoritative, mind-independent referent against which claims could be measured and from which institutional authority could flow downward to the subject. The architecture was identical; only the tenant changed.

Objective is the edifice. When God was evicted, Reason, Science, Objective Truth became the new tenants

And that’s the point. The Objective isn’t a discovery. It’s a slot, a structural position in the grammar of subject-object discourse that requires an occupant if coördination at scale is to function. God was an early and effective tenant. When God was evicted, the slot didn’t disappear. It couldn’t because it’s not a belief but a grammatical necessity. It was immediately re-occupied, with the additional ideological advantage that the new tenants – Reason, Science, Objective Truth – present themselves as discovered rather than inherited. You can lose faith in God. You can’t, without apparent irrationality, lose faith in Objective Reality, because Objective Reality is now the precondition of the concept of rationality itself. The successor is more entrenched than the original. The slot has been occupied so continuously that it now looks like part of the foundation.

But it’s not. The building is the subject-object grammar, which generates the Objective slot as a structural correlate of the Subject. What fills the slot – God, Reason, the Market, the Algorithm – is the history of ideas, the history routinely mistaken for intellectual progress: the mature species finally locating the real external anchor, after centuries of superstitious misdirection. What’s actually happening is tenant succession. Each eviction is experienced as crisis, where each new occupant presents as the permanent solution. The edifice is never inspected because it’s always occupied, and this occupied building looks like a home.

The diagnostic move, then, isn’t to find a better tenant. Every reform programme, every Enlightenment, every revolution has done exactly that, and the slot fills again within a generation. The diagnostic move is to show that there is an edifice, that the grammar has a structure, that the structure generates the slot, and that the slot’s current occupant inherited its authority from the grammar rather than earning it from the world.

This is a different kind of intervention. Rather than a replacement, it produces a recognition that the coordinating function of the Objective is genuine and the ontological claim isn’t, that the murmuration coheres and the murmuration-subject doesn’t actually exist, that we are starlings – or turtles – all the way down, responding to our seven nearest neighbours, producing from the outside the appearance of a unified orientation toward a common truth.

the statistical person is regular enough to be governed, predicted, and addressed

A relativistic social model operates well enough on this account: It doesn’t require an objective world; it simply requires stable enough local rules that the flock coheres, that the statistical person is regular enough to be governed, predicted, and addressed. The objective world is the name we give to that coherence when observed from a sufficient distance. It’s robust enough for almost every practical purpose. What it isn’t is foundational. Remove the coordinating conventions, and it simply stops being produced.

The starlings don’t need gods. They don’t need Objective Reality either. They only need the local rules, which, unlike their theological and epistemological successors, make no claim about what they are. Which is, in the end, the only honest position available.

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.

The Blind Spot of Moral Maths

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3–5 minutes

I am considering a new essay. That’s nothing new, but this was born from personal experience. Whilst reading Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, I reached the chapters on moral arithmetic and imperceptible harms and effects, and it caught my attention. Not in the ‘Aha!’ way, but because I felt excluded given my own experience. My mind wandered off the reservation, but I wondered if my anecdote might be generalised. After a discussion with ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek, Gemini, and Claude, I concluded that it can. As is my practice for academic writing, I formulate a thesis and then an abstract at the start. Then comes the real work.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

Thesis Statement

Derek Parfit’s moral mathematics relies on an undefended identification between physiological relief and suffering-reduction. Liminal experience exposes the instability of that identification at its source: what is addressed may be a bodily deficit while the suffering that matters lies elsewhere, in suspended indeterminacy itself. Because the preservationist grammar Parfit inherits treats continued life as presumptively good and bodily modulation as prima facie benefit, it cannot distinguish cases in which relief tracks morally salient suffering from cases in which it merely maintains the middle.

Abstract

This essay argues that Derek Parfit’s discussions of ‘moral mathematics’ in Reasons and Persons are not neutral exercises in moral reasoning but operations conducted within a prior ontological grammar that predetermines what can count as a benefit, a harm, and a morally salient outcome. While Parfit explicitly addresses aggregation, commensurability, and imperceptible effects, his examples presuppose an unexamined identification: that physiological relief tracks suffering-reduction, and that such reduction, however marginal, constitutes benefit within a life treated as presumptively worth preserving. This preservationist orientation is not argued for but built into the structure of the cases themselves.

The essay develops this critique through Parfit’s micro-allocation cases, particularly those involving the distribution of small amounts of water to relieve thirst. These examples appear to demonstrate that imperceptible reductions in suffering can aggregate into morally significant goods. But the argument depends on a prior identification that may fail at the point of origin. Slaking thirst addresses a physiological deficit; it does not necessarily diminish the suffering that is morally salient to the subject. The essay does not claim that physiological modulation never tracks suffering-reduction – in many cases it plainly does – but that Parfit’s grammar lacks the resources to distinguish the cases in which it does from those in which it does not. It treats all bodily modulation as benefit by default, and this default is what the essay sets out to make visible.

Drawing on a first-person account of critical illness – respiratory failure, not pain; a demand not for comfort but for determination in either direction – the essay argues that such cases function not as marginal exceptions but as diagnostics that reveal the grammar operating on the wrong dimension of the moral object. The experience of wanting not relief but resolution (‘pick a side’) is both possible and intelligible, yet the framework has no notation for it. What the intervention addressed was a physiological deficit; what it left untouched was suspended indeterminacy – the condition of being maintained in the middle, neither recovering nor ending. That the trajectory eventually resolved toward survival cannot retroactively validate the intervention on the axis that mattered during the interval itself; to argue otherwise would be to confuse post hoc survivorship with moral justification.

The essay argues further that this limitation belongs not to Parfit alone but to a broader preservationist syntax operative across Western medical ethics, legal frameworks governing end-of-life care, and liberal moral philosophy more generally. Within this grammar, life functions as the unmarked container of value; sustaining it is treated as prior to any calculation about its contents; and cessation requires special licence. The cultural entrenchment of this grammar explains why Parfit’s examples feel intuitively compelling: they inherit commitments so deeply embedded that they register as neutral premises rather than contestable positions. The point is not that preservationism is indefensible but that it remains undefended – operative yet unexamined.

Finally, the essay notes that Singer’s universalisation of moral responsibility intensifies rather than resolves the underlying difficulty, since it collapses the bounded cases on which Parfit’s arithmetic depends. What emerges is not a disagreement about consequentialism but about the grammar through which suffering, benefit, and moral salience are first made legible – and about whether that grammar can survive contact with the full range of conditions it purports to govern.

Video: There Are No Objects… Or Subjects

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What if the biggest trick language played on you is convincing you that the world is made of things?

Every sentence you speak installs a hidden assumption. ‘The rock falls.’ ‘The mind thinks.’ ‘The electron orbits.’ Each one presupposes a thing – a noun – that exists before anything happens to it. Your grammar tells you: first, there are objects, then they do stuff. But what if that’s backwards?

The Mediated Encounter Ontology – MEOW – proposes that it is. Reality isn’t made of things. It’s made of structured interactions. Encounter-events – relational, patterned, constrained – are what’s ontologically basic. Objects, subjects, minds, worlds: these are all downstream. They’re what you get when structured interaction stabilises within a given scale of encounter.

Watch the video…

Ontological Grammars of Abortion

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I’ve created a video to discuss ontological ontology grounded in an example of abortion, a particularly polemic topic. For more details, read the essay, Grammatical Failure – Why Liberal Epistemology Cannot Diagnose Indoctrination.

Video: Architecture of Grammatical Compromise. (Duration: 10:30)

In this video, I define Ontology, Grammar, and Commensurability before I use abortion as a poster child. Then, I discuss what happens when ontological grammars are incommensurable.

These thinkers follow:

Michel Foucault: Biopower, notably The History of Sexuality, Volume I.

Bernard Williams: Thick Moral Concepts from Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.

Pierre Bourdieu: Habitus, notably from Outline of a Theory of Practice.

Karl Popper: Paradox of Intolerance.

I discuss the challenge of the promise of compromise and its three possible outcomes, none of which are true compromises.

Watch the video for context. Read the essay for fuller details.

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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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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Ontology, Grammar, and Incommensurability

Posted in ontology, perception, philosophy, podcast, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

This video uses the gender debate to help explain how ontology and grammar render discourse incommensurable, based on my essay, Grammatical Failure: Why Liberal Epistemology Cannot Diagnose Indoctrination.

Video, duh

I’ve been thinking through dozens of use cases to explain how some polemic positions are intractable via language. When they are resolved through power, at least one ontological cohort is left wanting. In a compromise, likely both sides feel they’ve lost.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of the video transcript for this topic.

I’ll post a separate announcement presently, but I want to share my new Legibility GPT to assess concepts for ontological and grammatical commensurability.

In conventional (read: orthodox Enlightenment thinking), communication and negotiation are supposed to bring groups together. This is only true for intra-ontological conflict; it’s never been true for inter-ontological issues. There are edge cases where differing ontologies might be satisfied with an inter-ontological agreement, but this is likely accidental and certainly differently motivated. Not all such disagreements can be mediated, and this is where power politics steps in – not to ameliorate but to force the matter. This happens in politics, law, and many other power-oriented domains.

NotebookLM Infographic: No idea why this is formatted like this.
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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

The Expiration Date of Object Permanence

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
2–4 minutes

There is a persistent story we tell ourselves about quantum mechanics:* that it reveals reality to be fundamentally strange, paradoxical, or hostile to common sense. Particles in two places at once. Cats be both alive and dead. Worlds multiplying to save appearances.

I’ve never found that story convincing.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Image: NotebookLM infographic for this topic.

What I do find convincing is a simpler diagnosis: that we are applying a cognitive tool far beyond the conditions under which it earned its authority – and then mistaking the resulting discomfort for metaphysical insight.

Object permanence is one of our earliest and most successful heuristics. It allows infants to track toys behind sofas, caregivers behind doors, and threats behind occlusion. Without it, coordinated action would be impossible. With it, the world becomes navigable, predictable, and stable. It is a genuine cognitive achievement. But it is not a universal guarantee about reality.

In a new essay, The Expiration Date of Object Permanence: Heuristics, Grammar, and Quantum Pseudoproblems, I argue that much of what we call ‘quantum weirdness’ arises from the uncritical extension of this heuristic into domains where its ecological licensing no longer holds. The problem is not that quantum mechanics violates common sense. The problem is that we quietly treat common sense as metaphysics.

Quantum mechanics functions here not as a mystery generator, but as a stress test. Recent matter-wave interference experiments with increasingly massive systems show that object-based expectations fail quantifiably under carefully engineered conditions. When environmental coupling is suppressed, when decoherence is delayed, when the world is no longer warm, noisy, and forgiving, the assumptions underwriting object permanence simply stop paying rent.

Nothing spooky happens. A heuristic expires.

The essay also takes a dim view of some familiar cultural furniture. Schrödinger’s cat, for example, was introduced as a reductio – an intentionally absurd demonstration of what happens when microscopic formalism is naively scaled up. That it now circulates as an explanatory image tells us less about quantum mechanics than about the tenacity of object-grammar. Even jokes cannot escape it.

Interpretations fare no better. I suggest that the appeal of frameworks like Many-Worlds is not exhausted by their technical merits. They also function as strategies for preserving object-based reidentification – ways of ensuring that there is still something that can be pointed to, counted, and followed through time, even if the price is ontological inflation.

None of this denies the reality of quantum phenomena, nor does it pretend to solve the measurement problem. The essay is deliberately deflationary. Its claim is methodological, not revisionary: that many of the puzzles we inherit are artefacts of treating developmentally acquired heuristics as if they were unconditional features of the world.

Philosophy’s task, on this view, is not to make reality intuitive. It is to recognise when intuition has reached the end of its jurisdiction.

The paper is now available on Zenodo and will be indexed shortly on PhilPapers. As always, comments, objections, and principled misreadings are welcome.

This post and the underlying essay were inspired by a Nature article: Probing quantum mechanics with nanoparticle matter-wave interferometry, published on 21 January 2026. I get annoyed watching people misunderstand quantum mechanics and its effects, so I decided to address some of the issues in an essay. Read this essay as well as mine, which will explain why the paradoxes and ‘spooky behaviour’ of QM are only counter-intuitive if you’ve fallen into this heuristic trap.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Cold, Grammar, and the Quiet Gatekeeping of Philosophy

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave 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.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics