I published A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis this month, and this is one of a series of videos summarising the content. In this segment, I’m discussing Chapter 1: A Genealogy of Insufficiency
In this video, I touch on Plato to Barthes and Foucault. Derrida gets no love, and I mention bounded rationality, but not Simon. I discuss Steven Pinker’s dissent in more detail in a later chapter.
Below, I’ve included some artefacts from the book.
Image: Chapter 1: Page 1
And always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you. — Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography
Image: Genealogy of Insufficiency: A Historical TrajectoryImage: Table of Contents
I’ve just published an essay following on the work of cognitive neuroscientist Evelina Fedorenko (cover image). It arrives on the heels of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH). A companion essay is in the works.
Language as Interface strengthens the position of LIH, explaining why moral issues fail before language is even engaged. Her work also leads me to believe that we should revisit 20th-century accounts of the history of language.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of the underlying essay.
The essay I am working on now explains why this extends to emotional language more generally.
Meanwhile, read the essay or listen to the podcast summary.
A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis is now available, and I am commencing a series of video content to support it.
Video: Language Insufficiency Hypothesis – Part 1 – The Basic Concepts (Duration: 6:44)
In this primer, I introduce the Language Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient and the nomenclature of the hypothesis: Invariants, Contestables, Fluids, and Ineffables.
In the next segment, I’ll discuss the Effectiveness and Presumed Effectiveness Horizons.
If you would like to support my work, consider purchasing one of my books. Leaving ratings and reviews helps more than you know to appease the algorithm gods.
Almost a decade in the making, this book explains why more time, more effort, and more detail do not reliably improve certain forms of communication. Beyond a point, returns diminish sharply. In some domains, they collapse altogether.
The manuscript focuses on English, but the hypothesis has already been extended to French (published separately), and I am continuing work on other ontological barriers. If you’re interested in testing or extending the framework in your own language, feel free to get in touch.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be unpacking aspects of the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis in more depth here. The book’s role is deliberately limited: it defines the problem, establishes the structure, and offers grounding examples. The real work happens in the consequences.
For now, the important thing is simple: the book is finally available.
Lewis Goodall, a talk show host, calls the cross-border seizure of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro a ‘kidnapping’. His guest and Trump apologist, Angie Wong, rejects the word. She first says ‘arrest’, then ‘extradition’, then finally the improvised ‘special extradition’. Around that single lexical choice, a 12-minute standoff unfolds.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
As a language philosopher, I am evaluating the language and am less concerned with the underlying facts of the matter. Language serves to obscure these facts from the start and then rhetorically controls the narrative and framing.
Video: Source segment being analysed
There is a familiar mistake made whenever public discourse turns heated: the assumption that the real disagreement lies in the facts. This is comforting, because facts can, at least in principle, be checked. What follows examines a different failure mode altogether. The facts are largely beside the point.
Consider a broadcast exchange in which a political commentator and an interviewer argue over how to describe the forcible removal of a head of state from one country to another. The interviewer repeatedly uses the word kidnapping. The guest repeatedly resists this term, preferring arrest, extradition, and eventually the improvisational compromise ‘special extradition’.
What matters here is not which term is correct. What matters is what the interaction reveals about how meaning is negotiated under pressure.
The illusion of disagreement
Superficially, the exchange appears to be a dispute about legality. Was there a treaty? Was due process followed? Which court has jurisdiction? These questions generate heat, but they are not doing the work.
The real disagreement is prior to all of that: which lexical frame is allowed to stabilise the event.
Once a label is accepted, downstream reasoning becomes trivial. If it was an extradition, it belongs to one legal universe. If it was a kidnapping, it belongs to another. The participants are not arguing within a shared framework; they are competing to install the framework itself.
Equivocation as method, not error
The guest’s shifting vocabulary is often described as evasive or incoherent. This misreads what is happening. The movement from extradition to special extradition is not confusion. It is a deliberate widening of semantic tolerance.
‘Special extradition’ is not meant to clarify. It is meant to survive. It carries just enough institutional residue to sound procedural, while remaining sufficiently vague to avoid binding criteria. It functions less as a description than as a holding pattern.
This is equivocation, but not the amateur kind taught in logic textbooks. It is equivocation under constraint, where the aim is not precision but narrative continuity.
Why exposure fails
The interviewer repeatedly points out that extradition has a specific meaning, and that the situation described does not meet it. This is accurate, and also ineffective.
Why? Because the exchange is no longer governed by definitional hygiene. The audience is not being asked to adjudicate a dictionary entry. They are being asked to decide which voice has the authority to name the act.
Once that shift occurs, exposing misuse does not correct the discourse. It merely clarifies the power asymmetry. The guest can concede irregularity, precedent-breaking, even illegality, without relinquishing control of the label. The language continues to function.
Truth as a downstream effect
At no point does the exchange hinge on discovering what ‘really happened’. The physical sequence of events is relatively uncontested. What is contested is what those events are allowed to count as.
In this sense, truth is not absent from the discussion; it is subordinate. It emerges only after a rhetorical frame has been successfully installed. Once the frame holds, truth follows obediently within it.
This is not relativism. It is an observation about sequence. Rhetoric does not decorate truth here; it prepares the ground on which truth is later claimed.
Language doing institutional work
The most revealing moment comes when the guest effectively shrugs at the legal ambiguity and asks who, exactly, is going to challenge it. This is not cynicism. It is diagnostic.
Words like arrest and extradition are not merely descriptive. They are operational tokens. They open doors, justify procedures, and allow institutions to proceed without stalling. Their value lies less in semantic purity than in administrative usability.
‘Kidnapping’ is linguistically precise in one register, but administratively useless in another. It stops processes rather than enabling them. That is why it is resisted.
What the case study shows
This exchange is not about geopolitics. It is about how language behaves when it is tasked with carrying power. Meaning drifts not because speakers are careless, but because precision is costly. Labels are selected for durability, not accuracy. Truth does not arbitrate rhetoric; rhetoric allocates truth. Seen this way, the debate over terminology is not a failure of communication. It is communication functioning exactly as designed under modern conditions. Which is why insisting on ‘the correct word’ increasingly feels like shouting into a ventilation system. The air still moves. It just isn’t moving for you.
On Self-Evidence, Personhood, and the Administrative Nature of Rights
The following sentence is among the most quoted in political history and among the least examined. It is invoked as moral bedrock, taught as civic catechism, and insulated from scrutiny by a reverence that mistakes repetition for comprehension. It is rarely read closely, and rarely read sceptically.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
What follows is not a rebuttal. It is an annotation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Most readers will recognise this as the opening of the Declaration of Independence by the United States of America. Recognition, however, is not comprehension. The sentence survives on familiarity. Once that familiarity is set aside, it begins to fail clause by clause.
I. A Best Case, Briefly
A more charitable reading deserves brief consideration. ‘Self-evident’, in the intellectual context of the eighteenth century, did not mean obvious in the sense of requiring no reflection. It referred instead to propositions taken as axiomatic: not inferred from prior premises, but serving as starting points for reasoning. On this view, influenced by Scottish Common Sense philosophy, the claim is not that these truths are psychologically irresistible, but that they are rationally basic.
Likewise, ‘we hold’ need not be read as an admission of arbitrariness. It may be understood as a public avowal: a political body formally affirming what reason is said to disclose, rather than grounding those truths in the act of holding itself. Read this way, the sentence does not collapse into mere opinion.
Finally, the Declaration is often understood as performative rather than descriptive.[1] It does not merely state political facts; it brings a political subject into being. The ‘we’ is constituted in the act of declaration, and the language functions as a founding gesture rather than a philosophical proof.
Even on this charitable reading, however, the appeal to rational self-evidence presupposes capacities that were unevenly distributed at best. The Enlightenment notion of ‘reason’ was never a raw human faculty equally available to all. It depended on literacy, education, leisure, and institutional participation—conditions enjoyed by a narrow segment of the population.
In the late eighteenth century, large portions of the population were functionally illiterate. The ability to engage abstract political principles, to treat propositions as axiomatic starting points for reasoning, was not merely rare but socially restricted. The universal address of the sentence thus rests on a practical contradiction: it invokes a form of rational accessibility that its own social conditions actively prevented.
Nor is this merely a historical observation. Whilst formal literacy has expanded, the distribution of the capacities required for sustained abstract reasoning remains sharply constrained. What has changed is scale, not structure. Appeals to ‘self-evident’ political truths still presuppose forms of cognitive access that cannot be assumed, even now.
There is an important distinction here between innocent misreading and bad-faith translation. A modern reader who takes ‘self-evident’ to mean what it now ordinarily means is not at fault; semantic drift makes this nearly unavoidable. But to continue reading the sentence this way once its historical and philosophical context is understood is no longer an error. It is a decision.
Under the principle of least effort, claims that present themselves as ‘self-evident’ are maximally efficient. They require no sustained attention, no conceptual labour, and no challenge to inherited categories. For individuals ill-equipped – by education, time, or institutional support – to interrogate abstract political claims, such language is not merely persuasive; it is relieving.
To accept a proposition as self-evident is to be spared the burden of understanding how it works. The sentence can be consumed whole, in a single uncritical gulp. What is swallowed is not an argument, but a posture: assent without inquiry, agreement without comprehension.
This is not a personal failing. It is the predictable outcome of a cognitive environment in which complexity is costly, and authority is familiar. ‘Self-evidence’ functions here as a labour-saving device, converting political commitments into ready-made certainties. The capacity to recognise self-evident truths thus functions as an unmarked prerequisite for political subjecthood – a gatekeeping mechanism that precedes and enables the more explicit exclusions to come.
With this in mind, the sentence can be examined clause by clause – not as philosophical proposition, but as rhetorical machinery.
II. An Annotated Deconstruction
‘We hold’
To whom does this ‘we’ apply? Who is included in this collective voice, and who is not? More importantly, what does it mean to hold something that is allegedly self-evident?
Holding is an act of maintenance. It implies agreement, reinforcement, repetition. Beliefs must be held; axioms must be held; norms must be held. Self-evidence, by contrast, is supposed to require none of this. If a truth is genuinely self-evident, it does not need to be held at all. It simply imposes itself.
The opening clause announces immediacy whilst confessing mediation. This is not a subtle tension. It is an outright contradiction. The sentence begins by undermining its own epistemic posture. The axiomatic framing does not eliminate contestability; it displaces it. What is presented as rational starting point functions, in practice, as rhetorical closure.
‘Truths’
What kind of truths are being held here?
The word does far too much work whilst remaining resolutely undefined. These are not empirical truths. They are not logical truths. They are not even clearly moral truths in the narrow sense. Instead, the term oscillates between epistemic certainty, moral assertion, and political aspiration, sliding between categories without ever settling long enough to be examined.
The pluralisation matters. By multiplying ‘truths’ whilst leaving their nature unspecified, the sentence creates an aura of obviousness without committing to a standard of justification. Disagreement is pre-empted not by argument, but by tone.
‘Self-evident’
Unless one invokes something like Descartes’ cogito as a limiting case, nothing is genuinely self-evident. Even the cogito depends on language, conceptual inheritance, and a shared grammar of doubt. Self-evidence is not an epistemic given; it is an experiential effect produced by familiarity, stability, and low resistance.
Here, ‘self-evident’ functions as rhetorical closure masquerading as epistemology. It does not establish certainty; it enforces silence. To question what is ‘self-evident’ is to risk being cast as obtuse, perverse, or acting in bad faith. Inquiry is not answered. It is short-circuited.
‘All men’
This is not the inclusive ‘men’ of abstract mankind. It is a concrete, historically bounded category: adult males, and not coincidentally white ones. The exclusions are not implied later. They are operative here, at the point of entry.
This is the quietly active boundary of the entire sentence. Before any rights are named, before any equality is asserted, the scope of applicability has already been narrowed. The universal tone is achieved by selective admission.
‘Created equal’
Created by whom? And equal in what respect?
The notion of equality here is never specified, because specification would immediately expose contestation. Equal in capacity? In worth? In standing before the law? In outcome? In moral consideration? Readers are invited to supply their preferred interpretation retroactively, which is precisely what allows the sentence to endure.
Some have suggested that ‘equal’ means ‘equal under the law’, but this simply defers the problem. The law defines equality however it pleases, when it pleases, and for whom it pleases. Equality without a metric is not a claim. It is a metaphysical gesture.
It is often said that the Declaration’s universal language contained the seeds of its own expansion. That Douglass, King, and the suffragists appealed to it is taken as evidence of its latent emancipatory power. But this confuses rhetoric with causation. These advances were not the unfolding of a promise, but the result of sustained political pressure, moral confrontation, and material struggle. The language was repurposed because it was available and authoritative, not because it was prophetic.
To call this a ‘promissory note’ is to mistake a battlefield for a contract. Promises are kept by their authors. These were extracted by those excluded, often in direct opposition to the very institutions that sanctified the sentence.
The story also flatters the present. If the promise is always being fulfilled, it is never being broken. Yet the same language remains actively contested, narrowed, and rescinded. Personhood is still conditional. Rights still evaporate at borders, prisons, and classifications. The note, if it exists at all, is perpetually past due.
‘Endowed by their Creator’
No one believes the drafters were referring to genetics or parentage. This capital-C Creator is a theological move, not a biological one. The sentence quietly abandons the pretence of self-evidence and imports divine authority as a grounding mechanism.
This is not incidental. By placing rights beyond human origin, the sentence renders them simultaneously unquestionable and unreachable. Legitimacy is outsourced to a source that cannot be interrogated. Appeals are closed by design.
‘Unalienable Rights’
Here the sentence delivers a double assertion. First, that rights exist independently of institutions. Second, that they cannot be taken away. Both claims fail on contact with history.
Rights are constructed, recognised, enforced, suspended, and withdrawn by institutions. Bentham saw this clearly: ‘natural rights’ function rhetorically to obscure the institutional conditions that alone make rights actionable.[2] And far from being inalienable, rights prove remarkably fragile. The record is unambiguous: rights track status, not humanity. The moment personhood is questioned, rights do not need to be violated. They simply cease to apply.
‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’
Under the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis – the framework treating key political terms as structurally underdetermined – these are textbook Contestables.[3] None are measurable. None have stable definitions. None come with clear thresholds or enforcement criteria.
‘Happiness’ is the most revealing substitution of all. Locke’s blunt ‘property’ at least named what was being protected.[4] ‘Happiness’ softens the promise whilst emptying it of content. It gestures toward flourishing whilst committing to nothing beyond tolerable participation.
Life, liberty, and happiness are curated abstractions, not guarantees – property in softer clothing.
III. Personhood as the Hidden Mechanism
Zooming out, the operational logic becomes clear. Rights depend on personhood.[5] Personhood is conferred, not discovered. Declaring non-personhood resolves the contradiction without ever touching the rhetoric.
This is the mechanism that allows a universal language to coexist with selective application. When personhood is withdrawn, rights are not violated. They are bypassed. Ethics never gets a hearing, because the subject has already been administratively erased.
To call this administrative is not metaphor. Personhood is assigned, reclassified, and revoked through documentation, categorisation, and procedural determination. The question of who counts is settled before any ethical consideration can begin.
IV. The Sentence as Prototype, Not Mistake
It is tempting to read this sentence as naïve, hypocritical, or aspirationally flawed. That would be a mistake. The sentence is not a failure of Enlightenment thinking. It is its prototype.
It was never meant to survive scrutiny. It was meant to mobilise, stabilise, and legitimise. Its vagueness is functional. Its incoherence is load-bearing. The sentence works precisely because it is conceptually promiscuous, rhetorically elevated, and operationally evasive. What looks like philosophical sloppiness is political engineering.
V. Why It Still Matters
This sentence is not an historical curiosity. It is the template for modern political language.
Universal in tone.
Conditional in application.
Moral in rhetoric.
Administrative in practice.
The future did not reveal the sentence to be false. It revealed what the sentence was for.
Footnotes
[1] J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words
[2] Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies; Being an Examination of the Declarations of Rights Issued During the French Revolution
[3] See The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis for a full treatment of Contestables and their function in political discourse.
[4] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government
[5] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Written by Bry Willis
Philosophics
NB: I wrote this as a polemic rather than in a manner suitable for a journal submission. I did not wish to expend the effort to understand counterarguments. This interpretation stands on its own. This said, in Section I. I still note some historical perspective that is somewhat important. It even illustrates semantic drift, which I cover in A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis.
Fairness, Commensurability, and the Quiet Violence of Comparison
Fairness and Commensurability as Preconditions of Retributive Justice
This is the final part of a 3-part series. Read parts 1 and 2 for a fuller context.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Before the Cards Are Dealt
Two people invoke fairness. They mean opposite things. Both are sincere. Neither can prove the other wrong. This is not a failure of argument. It is fairness working exactly as designed.
Before justice can weigh anything, it must first decide that the things being weighed belong on the same scale. That single move – the assertion that comparison is even possible – quietly does most of the work.
Most people think justice begins at sentencing, or evidence, or procedure. But the real work happens earlier, in a space so normalised it has become invisible. Before any evaluation occurs, the system must install the infrastructure that makes evaluation legible at all.
That infrastructure rests on two foundations:
fairness, which supplies the rhetoric, and
commensurability, which supplies the mathematics.
Together, they form the felt beneath the table – the surface on which the cards can be dealt at all.
1. Why Fairness Is Always Claimed, Never Found
Let’s be precise about what fairness is not.
Fairness is not a metric. You cannot measure it, derive it, or point to it in the world.
Fairness is not a principle with determinate content. It generates no specific obligations, no falsifiable predictions, no uniquely correct outcomes.
Fairness is an effect. It appears after assessment, not before it. It is what you call an outcome when you want it to feel inevitable.
Competing Fairness Is Not a Problem
Consider how disputes actually unfold:
The prosecutor says a long sentence is fair because it is proportional to harm.
The defender says a shorter sentence is fair because it reflects culpability and circumstance.
The victim says any sentence is unfair because nothing restores what was taken.
The community says enforcement itself is unfair because it predictably targets certain groups.
Each claim is sincere. None can be resolved by fairness itself.
That is because fairness has no independent content. It does not decide between these positions. It names them once the system has already decided which will prevail. This is not a bug. It is the feature.
A Fluid Masquerading as an Invariant
In the language of the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, fairness is a Fluid – a concept whose boundaries shift with context and use – that masquerades as an Invariant, something stable and observer-independent.
The system treats fairness as perceptual, obvious, discoverable. But every attempt to anchor it collapses into:
Intuition (‘It just feels right’)
Precedent (‘This is how we do things’)
Consensus (‘Most people agree’)
None of these establishes fairness. They merely perform it.
And that performance matters. It converts contested metaphysical commitments into the appearance of shared values. It allows institutions to claim neutrality whilst enforcing specificity. Fairness is what the system says when it wants its outputs to feel unavoidable.
2. The Real Gatekeeper: Commensurability
Fairness does rhetorical work. But it cannot function without something deeper.
That something is commensurability: the assumption that different harms, injuries, and values can be placed on a shared scale and meaningfully compared.
Proportionality presupposes commensurability. Commensurability presupposes an ontology of value. And that ontology is neither neutral nor shared.
When Incommensurability Refuses to Cooperate
A parent loses a child to preventable negligence. A corporation cuts safety corners. A warning is ignored. The system moves. Liability is established. Damages are calculated. £250,000 is awarded.
The parent refuses the settlement. Not because the amount is insufficient. But because money and loss are not the same kind of thing. The judge grows impatient. Lawyers speak of closure. Observers mutter about grief clouding judgment. But this is not grief. It is incommensurability refusing to cooperate.
The parent is rejecting the comparison itself. Accepting payment would validate the idea that a child’s life belongs on a scale with currency. The violence is not the number. It is the conversion. The system cannot process this refusal except as emotional excess or procedural obstruction. Not because it is cruel, but because without commensurability the engine cannot calculate.
Two Ontologies of Value
There are two incompatible ontologies at work here. Only one is playable.
Ontology A: The Scalar Model
Harm is quantifiable
Suffering is comparable
Trade-offs are morally coherent
Justice is a balancing operation
Under Ontology A, harms differ in degree, not kind. A broken arm, a stolen car, and a dead child all occupy points on the same continuum. This makes proportionality possible.
Ontology B: The Qualitative Model
Harms are categorical
Some losses are incommensurable
Comparison itself distorts
Justice is interpretive, not calculative
Under Ontology B, harms are different kinds of things. Comparison flattens what matters. To weigh them is to misunderstand them.
Why Only One Ontology Can Play
Retributive justice, as presently constituted, cannot function under Ontology B.
Without scalar values, proportionality collapses. Without comparison, equivalence disappears. Without trade-offs, punishment has no exchange rate.
Ontology B is not defeated. It is disqualified. Structurally, procedurally, rhetorically. The house needs a shared scale. Without it, the game cannot settle accounts.
3. Why Incommensurability Is Treated as Bad Faith
Here is where power enters without announcing itself. Incommensurability does not merely complicate disputes. It stalls the engine. And stalled engines threaten institutional legitimacy.
Systems designed to produce closure must ensure that disputes remain within solvable bounds. Incommensurability violates those bounds. It suggests that resolution may be impossible – or that the attempt to resolve does further harm. So the system reframes the problem.
Not as an alternative ontology, but as:
Unreasonableness
Extremism
Emotional volatility
Refusal to engage in good faith
Reasonableness as Border Control
This is why reasonableness belongs where it does in the model. Not as an evaluative principle, but as a gatekeeping mechanism.
Reasonableness does not assess claims. It determines which claims count as claims at all. This is how commensurability enforces itself without admitting it is doing so. When someone refuses comparison, they are not told their ontology is incompatible with retributive justice. They are told to be realistic.
Ontological disagreement is converted into:
A tone problem
A personality defect
A failure to cooperate
The disagreement is not answered. It is pathologised.
4. Why These Debates Never Resolve
This returns us to the Ontology–Encounter–Evaluation model.
People argue fairness as if adjusting weights would fix the scale. They debate severity, leniency, proportionality.
But when two sides inhabit incompatible ontologies of value, no amount of evidence or dialogue bridges the gap. The real disagreement is upstream.
A prosecutor operating under scalar harm and an advocate operating under incommensurable injury are not disagreeing about facts. They are disagreeing about what kind of thing harm is.
Fairness cannot resolve this, because fairness presupposes the very comparison under dispute. This is why reform debates feel sincere and go nowhere. Outcomes are argued whilst ontological commitments remain invisible.
Remediation Requires Switching Teams
As argued elsewhere, remediation increasingly requires switching teams.
But these are not political teams. They are ontological commitments.
Ontologies are not held like opinions. They are held like grammar. You do not argue someone out of them. At best, you expose their costs. At worst, you force others to operate within yours by disqualifying alternatives.
Retributive justice does the latter.
5. What This Means (Without Offering a Fix)
Justice systems are not broken. They are optimised. They are optimised for closure, manageability, and the appearance of neutrality. Fairness supplies the rhetoric. Commensurability supplies the mathematics. Together, they convert contestable metaphysical wagers into procedural common sense.
That optimisation has costs:
Disagreements about value become illegible
Alternative ontologies become unplayable
Dissent becomes pathology
Foundations disappear from view
If justice feels fair, it is because the comparisons required to question it were never permitted.
Ontology as Pre-emptive Gatekeeping
None of this requires conspiracy.
Institutions do not consciously enforce ontologies. They do not need to.
They educate them. Normalise them. Proceduralise them. Then treat their rejection as irrationality.
By the time justice is invoked, the following have already been installed as reality:
That persons persist over time in morally relevant ways
That agents meaningfully choose under conditions that count
That harms can be compared and offset
That responsibility can be localised
That disagreement beyond a point is unreasonable
None of these are discovered. All are rehearsed.
A law student learns that ‘the reasonable person’ is a construct. By year three, they use it fluently. It no longer feels constructed.
This is not indoctrination. It is fluency.
And fluency is how ontologies hide.
By the time an alternative appears – episodic selfhood, incommensurable harm, distributed agency – it does not look like metaphysics. It looks like confusion.
Rationality as Border Control
The system does not say: we reject your ontology.
It says: that’s not how the world works.
Or worse: you’re being unreasonable.
Ontological disagreement is reframed as a defect in the person. And defects do not need answers. They need management.
This is why some arguments feel impossible to have. One ontology has been naturalised into common sense. The other has been reclassified as error.
The Final Irony
The more fragile the foundations, the more aggressively they must be defended as self-evident.
Free will is taught as obvious.
Fairness is invoked as perceptual.
Responsibility is treated as observable.
Incommensurability is treated as sabotage.
Not because the system is confident.
Because it cannot afford not to be.
The Point
Justice does not merely rely on asserted ontologies. It expends enormous effort ensuring they never appear asserted at all.
By the time the cards are dealt, the rules have already been mistaken for reality. That is the felt beneath the table. Invisible. Essential. Doing all the work. And if you want to challenge justice meaningfully, you do not start with outcomes. You start by asking:
What comparisons are we being asked to accept as natural? And what happens to those who refuse?
Most people never make that move. Not because it is wrong. But because by the time you notice the game is rigged, you are already fluent in its rules. And fluency feels like truth.
Final Word
Why write these assessments? Why care?
With casinos, like cricket, we understand something fundamental: these are games. We can learn the rules. We can decide whether to play. We can walk away.
Justice is different. Justice is not opt-in. It is imposed. You do not get to negotiate the rules, the scoring system, or the house assumptions about what counts as a move. Once you are inside, even dissent must be expressed in the system’s own grammar. Appeals do not question the game; they replay it under slightly altered conditions.
You may contest the outcome. You may plead for leniency. You may argue fairness. You may not ask why chips are interchangeable with lives, why losses must be comparable, or why refusing comparison itself counts as misconduct.
Imagine being forced into a casino. Forced to play. Forced to stake things you do not believe are wagerable. Then told, when you object, that the problem is not the game, but your attitude toward it.
That is why these assessments matter. Not to declare justice illegitimate. Not to offer a fix. But to make visible the rules that pretend not to be rules at all. Because once you mistake fluency for truth, the house no longer needs to rig the game.
If you want a useful metaphor for how justice actually operates, don’t picture a blindfolded goddess with scales. Picture a casino.
Image: Lady Justice in Casino. The dice are rigged. haha
The rules are printed. The games look fair. Everyone is technically allowed to play. But the mathematics are tuned in advance, the exits are discreet, and the house never risks its own solvency. You don’t walk into a casino to discover whether chance is fair. You walk in to participate in a system whose advantage has already been engineered.
Justice works the same way – like a casino with house-favoured odds.
By the time a defendant appears, the ontological dice have already been loaded. The system has quietly asserted a set of metaphysical commitments that make certain outcomes legible, actionable, and punishable – whilst rendering others incoherent, inadmissible, or ‘unreasonable’. Because I am a philosopher of language and not a lawyer, I am free from the indoctrination and selection bias inherent in that system. This allows me to critique the system directly without being excommunicated from the club.
What follows are not neutral assumptions. They are ontological wagers, each chosen because its alternative would tilt the field away from institutional power.
Justice presumes that the person who acted yesterday is meaningfully the same entity standing in court today. This is not discovered; it is asserted.
Why? Because retribution requires persistence. Desert cannot attach to a momentary configuration of consciousness. Responsibility requires a carrier that survives time, memory gaps, psychological rupture, intoxication, trauma, and neurological variance.
An episodic self – Parfit’s reductionism, trauma-fractured identity, or situational selfhood – collapses the attribution pipeline. If the ‘self’ is a series of loosely connected episodes, punishment becomes conceptually incoherent. Who is being punished for whom?
So the law treats episodic accounts not as alternative ontologies but as defects: insanity, automatism, incompetence. The self is patched, not replaced.
The house needs continuity. Without it, the game cannot settle accounts.
Justice requires that actions originate somewhere. Agency is that somewhere.
The system asserts that agents could have done otherwise in a morally relevant sense. This is compatible with compatibilism, folk psychology, and everyday moral intuitions – but deeply hostile to hard determinism, strong situationism, or neurobiological deflation.
Why exclude weaker agency models? Because if agency dissolves into causation, environment, or neurochemistry, responsibility evaporates. At best, you get risk management. At worst, you get treatment or containment. Retribution has nowhere to land.
So the law nods politely to influences – upbringing, coercion, impairment – whilst ring-fencing agency as the default. Mitigation is permitted. Ontological revision is not. The house needs someone who could have chosen otherwise, even if that claim grows increasingly fictional under scrutiny.
The house needs someone who could have chosen otherwise
Justice models human action as a series of forks in the road. At some point, the agent ‘chose’ X over Y. This is enormously convenient.
Continuous decision spaces – poverty gradients, addiction loops, survival trade-offs – are messy. They resist clean counterfactuals. ‘What should they have done instead?’ becomes a sociological question, not a moral one.
So the system discretises. It locates a moment. A click. A trigger pull. A signature. A punch. A text sent.
Once the choice is frozen, the rest of the apparatus can proceed. Without discrete choice points, proportionality and culpability lose their anchor.
The house needs moments, not milieus.
Ontology 4: Causation
Asserted (m): Local, linear causation Excluded (n): Diffuse, systemic, or emergent causation
Justice prefers causes that point: Who did this? When? How directly?
Systemic causation – economic pressure, cultural narratives, institutional design – creates attribution problems. If harm is emergent, no individual carries it cleanly. Responsibility smears.
So causation is narrowed. Chains are shortened. Proximate cause replaces contributing conditions. Structural violence becomes background noise.
This is not because systemic causation is false. It is because it is unmanageable within a retributive frame.
The house needs causes that fit inside a sentence.
‘Reasonableness’ is the softest and most insidious ontology of the lot.
It pretends to be procedural, but it functions as cultural enforcement. The reasonable person is not an average human. They are an acculturated one.
Intensity becomes suspect. Rage becomes irrational. Grief becomes excessive. Radical interpretations become unreasonable not because they’re false, but because they disrupt cadence.
This ontology stabilises the game by disciplining tone. It doesn’t matter what you argue if you fail to argue it reasonably. Reasonableness is not required for responsibility to exist, only for dissent to be ignored.
Reasonableness is not required for responsibility to exist, only for dissent to be ignored.
The house needs calm players, not correct ones.
Why These Ontologies, and Not Their Rivals?
Because every excluded ontology threatens legibility. Justice is not designed to discover truth. It is designed to terminate cases. Ontologies that complicate attribution, disperse responsibility, or destabilise narrative continuity slow the machine. So they are ruled out – not explicitly, but structurally.
Once these commitments are in place, disagreement downstream becomes theatre. Arguments about fairness, proportionality, or intent occur within a rigged metaphysical envelope. That’s why reform debates feel sincere yet go nowhere. People argue outcomes whilst the house quietly keeps the rules.
The Point
None of this means justice is a scam. Casinos aren’t scams either. They do exactly what they are designed to do.
The problem is pretending the odds are neutral.
If you want to challenge justice meaningfully, you don’t start with sentencing guidelines or evidentiary thresholds. You start by asking which ontologies are being asserted – and why alternatives are unplayable.
Most people won’t make that move. Not because it’s wrong. Because it requires leaving the table.
Now that A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis has been put to bed — not euthanised, just sedated — I can turn to the more interesting work: instantiating it. This is where LIH stops being a complaint about words and starts becoming a problem for systems that pretend words are stable enough to carry moral weight.
What follows is not a completed theory, nor a universal schema. It’s a thinking tool. A talking point. A diagram designed to make certain assumptions visible that are usually smuggled in unnoticed, waved through on the strength of confidence and tradition.
The purpose of this diagram is not to redefine justice, rescue it, or replace it with something kinder. It is to show how justice is produced. Specifically, how retributive justice emerges from a layered assessment process that quietly asserts ontologies, filters encounters, applies normative frames, and then closes uncertainty with confidence.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Most people are willing to accept, in the abstract, that justice is “constructed”. That concession is easy. What is less comfortable is seeing how it is constructed — how many presuppositions must already be in place before anything recognisable as justice can appear, and how many of those presuppositions are imposed rather than argued for.
The diagram foregrounds power, not as a conspiracy or an optional contaminant, but as an ambient condition. Power determines which ontologies are admissible, which forms of agency count, which selves persist over time, which harms are legible, and which comparisons are allowed. It decides which metaphysical configurations are treated as reasonable, and which are dismissed as incoherent before the discussion even begins.
Justice, in this framing, is not discovered. It is not unearthed like a moral fossil. It is assembled. And it is assembled late in the process, after ontology has been assumed, evaluation has been performed, and uncertainty has been forcibly closed.
This does not mean justice is fake. It means it is fragile. Far more fragile than its rhetoric suggests. And once you see that fragility — once you see how much is doing quiet, exogenous work — it becomes harder to pretend that disagreements about justice are merely disagreements about facts, evidence, or bad actors. More often, they are disagreements about what kind of world must already be true for justice to function at all.
I walk through the structure and logic of the model below. The diagram is also available as a PDF, because if you’re going to stare at machinery, you might as well be able to zoom in on the gears.
Why Retributive Justice (and not the rest of the zoo)
Before doing anything else, we need to narrow the target.
“Justice” is an infamously polysemous term. Retributive, restorative, distributive, procedural, transformative, poetic, cosmic. Pick your flavour. Philosophy departments have been dining out on this buffet for centuries, and nothing useful has come of letting all of them talk at once.
This is precisely where LIH draws a line.
The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis is not interested in pedestrian polysemy — cases where a word has multiple, well-understood meanings that can be disambiguated with minimal friction. That kind of ambiguity is boring. It’s linguistic weather.
What LIH is interested in are terms that appear singular while smuggling incompatible structures. Words that function as load-bearing beams across systems, while quietly changing shape depending on who is speaking and which assumptions are already in play.
“Justice” is one of those words. But it is not usefully analysable in the abstract.
So we pick a single instantiation: Retributive Justice.
Why?
Because retributive justice is the most ontologically demanding and the most culturally entrenched. It requires:
a persistent self
a coherent agent
genuine choice
intelligible intent
attributable causation
commensurable harm
proportional response
In short, it requires everything to line up.
If justice is going to break anywhere, it will break here.
Retributive justice is therefore not privileged in this model. It is used as a stress test.
The Big Picture: Justice as an Engine, Not a Discovery
The central claim of the model is simple, and predictably unpopular:
Justice is not discovered. It is produced.
Not invented in a vacuum, not hallucinated, not arbitrary — but assembled through a process that takes inputs, applies constraints, and outputs conclusions with an air of inevitability.
The diagram frames retributive justice as an assessment engine.
An engine has:
inputs
internal mechanisms
thresholds
failure modes
and outputs
It does not have access to metaphysical truth. It has access to what it has been designed to process.
The justice engine takes an encounter — typically an action involving alleged harm — and produces two outputs:
Desert (what is deserved),
Responsibility (to whom it is assigned).
Everything else in the diagram exists to make those outputs possible.
The Three Functional Layers
The model is organised into three layers. These are not chronological stages, but logical dependencies. Each layer must already be functioning for the next to make sense.
1. The Constitutive Layer
(What kind of thing a person must already be)
This layer answers questions that are almost never asked explicitly, because asking them destabilises the entire process.
What counts as a person?
What kind of self persists over time?
What qualifies as an agent?
What does it mean to have agency?
What is a choice?
What is intent?
Crucially, these are not empirical discoveries made during assessment. They are asserted ontologies.
The system assumes a particular configuration of selfhood, agency, and intent as a prerequisite for proceeding at all. Alternatives — episodic selves, radically distributed agency, non-volitional action — are not debated. They are excluded.
This is the first “happy path”.
If you do not fit the assumed ontology, you do not get justice. You get sidelined into mitigation, exception, pathology, or incoherence.
2. The Encounter Layer
(What is taken to have happened)
This layer processes the event itself:
an action
resulting harm
causal contribution
temporal framing
contextual conditions
motive (selectively)
This is where the rhetoric of “facts” tends to dominate. But the encounter is never raw. It is already shaped by what the system is capable of seeing.
Causation here is not metaphysical causation. It is legible causation. Harm is not suffering. It is recognisable harm. Context is not total circumstance. It is admissible context.
Commensurability acts as a gatekeeper between encounter and evaluation: harms must be made comparable before they can be judged. Anything that resists comparison quietly drops out of the pipeline.
3. The Evaluative Layer
(How judgment is performed)
Only once ontology is assumed and the encounter has been rendered legible does evaluation begin:
proportionality
accountability
normative ethics
fairness (claimed)
reasonableness
bias (usually acknowledged last, if at all)
This layer presents itself as the moral heart of justice. In practice, it is the final formatting pass.
Fairness is not discovered here. It is declared. Reasonableness does not clarify disputes. It narrows the range of acceptable disagreement. Bias is not eliminated. It is managed.
At the end of this process, uncertainty is closed.
That closure is the moment justice appears.
Why Disagreement Fails Before It Starts
At this point, dissent looks irrational.
The system has:
assumed an ontology
performed an evaluation
stabilised the narrative through rhetoric
and produced outputs with institutional authority
To object now is not to disagree about evidence. It is to challenge the ontology that made assessment possible in the first place.
And that is why so many justice debates feel irresolvable.
They are not disagreements within the system. They are disagreements about which system is being run.
LIH explains why language fails here. The same words — justice, fairness, responsibility, intent — are being used across incompatible ontological commitments. The vocabulary overlaps; the worlds do not.
The engine runs smoothly. It just doesn’t run the same engine for everyone.
Where This Is Going
With the structure in place, we can now do the slower work:
unpacking individual components
tracing where ontological choices are asserted rather than argued
showing how “reasonableness” and “fairness” operate as constraint mechanisms
and explaining why remediation almost always requires a metaphysical switch, not better rhetoric
Justice is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was built to do.
That should worry us more than if it were merely malfunctioning.
This essay is already long, so I’m going to stop here.
Not because the interesting parts are finished, but because this is the point at which the analysis stops being descriptive and starts becoming destabilising.
The diagram you’ve just walked through carries a set of suppressed footnotes. They don’t sit at the margins because they’re trivial; they sit there because they are structurally prior. Each one represents an ontological assertion the system quietly requires in order to function at all.
By my count, the model imposes at least five such ontologies. They are not argued for inside the system. They are assumed. They arrive pre-installed, largely because they are indoctrinated, acculturated, and reinforced long before anyone encounters a courtroom, a jury, or a moral dilemma.
Once those ontologies are fixed, the rest of the machinery behaves exactly as designed. Disagreement downstream is permitted; disagreement upstream is not.
In a follow-up essay, I’ll unpack those footnotes one by one: where the forks are, which branch the system selects, and why the alternatives—while often coherent—are rendered unintelligible, irresponsible, or simply “unreasonable” once the engine is in motion.
That’s where justice stops looking inevitable and starts looking parochial.
And that’s also where persuasion quietly gives up.
Written by Bry Willis and ChatGPT 5.2 after a couple of days of back and forth
I’ve been working on A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis since 2018. At least, that’s the polite, CV-friendly version. The truer account is that it’s been quietly fermenting since the late 1970s, back when I was still trapped in primary school and being instructed on how the world supposedly worked.
Social Studies. Civics. Law. The whole civic catechism. I remember being taught about reasonable persons and trial by a jury of one’s peers, and I remember how insistently these were presented as fair solutions. Fairness was not argued for. It was asserted, with the weary confidence of people who think repetition counts as justification.
I didn’t buy it. I still don’t. The difference now is that I have a hypothesis with some explanatory power instead of a vague sense that the adults were bluffing.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
I’ve always been an outsider. Eccentric, aloof, l’étranger if we’re feeling theatrical. It never particularly troubled me. Outsiders are often tolerated, provided they remain decorative and non-contagious. Eye rolls were exchanged on both sides. No harm done.
But that outsider position had consequences. It led me, even then, to ask an awkward question: Which peers? Not because I thought I was superior, but because I was plainly apart. How exactly was I meant to be judged by my peers when no one else occupied anything like my perspective?
Later, when I encountered the concept of fundamental attribution bias, it felt less like a revelation and more like confirmation. A peer-based system assumes not just similarity of circumstance, but similarity of interpretation. That assumption was dead on arrival.
Then there were reasonable persons. I was assured they existed. I was assured judges were trained to embody them. I had never met one. Even as a teenager, I found the idea faintly comical. Judges, I was told, were neutral, apolitical, and dispassionate. Writing this now from the United States, one hardly needs to belabour the point. But this wasn’t prescience. It was intuition. The smell test failed decades ago.
Before LIH had a name, I called these things weasel words. I still do, as a kind of shorthand. Terms like fair, reasonable, accountable, appropriate. Squishy concepts that do serious institutional work whilst remaining conveniently undefinable. Whether one wants to label them Contestables or Fluids is less important than recognising the space they occupy.
That space sits between Invariables, things you can point to without dispute, and Ineffables, where language more or less gives up. Communication isn’t binary. It isn’t ‘works’ or ‘doesn’t’. It’s a gradient. A continuous curve from near-certainty to near-failure.
Most communication models quietly assume a shared ontology. If misunderstanding occurs, the remedy is more explanation, more context, more education. What never sat right with me, even as a child, was that this only works when the disagreement is superficial. The breaking point is ontological.
If one person believes a term means {A, B, C} and another believes it means {B, C, D}, the overlap creates a dangerous illusion of agreement. The disagreement hides in the margins. A and D don’t merely differ. They are often irreconcilable.
Image: Venn diagramme of a contested concept. Note: This is illustrative and not to scale
Fairness is a reliable example. One person believes fairness demands punishment, including retributive measures. Another believes fairness permits restoration but rejects retribution, citing circumstance, history, or harm minimisation. Both invoke fairness sincerely. The shared language conceals the conflict.
When such disputes reach court, they are not resolved by semantic reconciliation. They are resolved by authority. Power steps in where meaning cannot. This is just one illustration. There are many.
I thought it worth sharing how LIH came about, if only to dispel the notion that it’s a fashionable response to contemporary politics. It isn’t. It’s the slow crystallisation of a long-standing intuition: that many of our most cherished concepts don’t fail because we misuse them, but because they were never capable of doing the work we assigned to them.
Philosophics 