Tag: ontology

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.

Philosophics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

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

Posted in language, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
2–3 minutes

I shared this post not too long ago. Today, I shared it in a different context, but I feel is interesting – because I feel that many things are interesting, especially around language and communication.

When Aliens Speak English: The False Promise of Linguistic Familiarity

It commenced here on Mastodon.

Ocrampal shared a link to an article debating whether we are cold or have cold. Different cultures express this differently. It’s short. Read it on his site.

Audio: Exceptional NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

I replied to the post:

Nicely observed. I’ve pondered this myself. Small linguistic tweak: between être and avoir, avoir already behaves better metaphysically, but sentir seems the cleanest fit. Cold isn’t something one is or has so much as something one senses — a relational encounter rather than an ontological state or possession.

Between having and being, having is the lesser sin — but sensing/feeling feels truer. Cold belongs to the world; we merely sense it.

He replied in turn:

Agree except for: “Cold belongs to the world”. That is a metaphysical assumption that has consequences …

Finally (perhaps, penultimately), I responded:

Yes, it does. That statement was idiomatic, to express that ‘cold’ is environmental; we can’t be it or possess it. Coincidentally, I recently wrote about ‘cold’ in a different context:

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

A more verbose version of this response might have been:

This pushback is fair, but I’m not trying to re-ontologise cold. “Belongs to the world” in that context is doing rhetorical, not metaphysical, work; it’s idiomatic.

The point isn’t that cold is a mind-independent substance waiting around like a rock. It’s that whatever cold is, it doesn’t sit comfortably as an identity predicate (‘I am…cold’ – ‘J’ai…froid‘) or a possession (‘I have…cold’ – so, not ‘Je suis…froid‘) – neither to be confused with ‘I have a cold’, a different animal altogether.

‘Sensing’ (‘I feel…cold’ – ‘Je me sens…froid‘ – we have to use the reflexive pronoun, me, here; in English, this syntax has been deprecated) keeps the relation explicit without smuggling in ownership or essence. It leaves cold as an encounter-property, not a thing I contain and not a thing I am.

If anything, that phrasing was meant to resist metaphysical inflation, not commit to it.

And this is exactly the problem I gestured at in the aliens piece. We mistake familiar grammatical scaffolding for shared metaphysics. We assume that if the sentence parses cleanly, the ontology must be sound.

Language doesn’t just describe experience. It quietly files it into categories and then acts surprised when those categories start making demands.

Cold, like aliens, exposes the trick. The moment you slow down, the grammar starts to wobble. And that wobble is doing far more philosophical work than most of our declarative sentences are willing to admit.

Philosophics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

I Need a Break

Posted in modernism, morality, philosophy, podcast, political theoryTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
5–7 minutes

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

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

Audio: Short NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.

Still, there’s a bottleneck.

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

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

Now add AI to the mix.

This is where things get dangerous.

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

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

This week, it was Bernard Williams.

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

Why didn’t I read this sooner?

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

But then I went further.

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

That became my second paper.

And this is where things went off the rails.

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

And what I found was… astonishing.

Let me paraphrase the admissions:

First:

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

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

Then:

Image: Vagueness is inevitable. Deal with it.

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

Then, almost casually:

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

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

Say what?

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

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

The subtext isn’t even hiding.

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

This does not sit well with a sceptical cynic.

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

How does this pass under the radar?

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

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

I’ve seen this before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So yes. I need a break.

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

Mostly, I need to type:

WTAF?

And then go outside.

Philosophics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Why We Keep Talking Past Each Other

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
8–11 minutes

I am a philosopher of language. That is typically my primary perspective, so communication and limitations often fall into my sights. I believe that not all disagreements can be resolved through language communication. This illustrates one barrier in particular.

This essay is not an attempt to resolve disagreement, adjudicate truth, or reconcile competing worldviews. It is an attempt to explain why so many disagreements persist despite intelligence, good faith, and shared vocabulary – and why escalating those disagreements often makes them worse rather than better.

What follows is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. I am less interested in who is right than in why arguments so often fail to converge, and why those failures are routinely misinterpreted as moral defects rather than structural mismatches. The claim is not that ‘anything goes’, nor that all perspectives are equally valid, but that many disputes operate across ontological fault lines that no amount of better reasoning, evidence, or civility can bridge on their own terms.

Recognising this does not require abandoning one’s commitments. It requires abandoning the fantasy that every disagreement is corrigible and that persuasion is always the appropriate response to difference. If the essay succeeds, it will not produce consensus. It may, however, produce a little more clarity, a little less moral theatre, and a slightly more disciplined form of charity – one grounded not in agreement, but in an honest appraisal of where disagreement actually lives.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.

On Ontological Incommensurability and the Case for Civilised Disagreement

Most disagreements that metastasise into moral theatre are not disagreements at all. They are collisions between incompatible ontologies, misdiagnosed as differences of opinion.

This assumption is not merely optimistic.
It’s wrong.

We continue to behave as though all disputes take place on a shared stage called “reality,” where facts sit patiently waiting to be interpreted, weighed, or refuted. From this perspective, disagreement is assumed to be corrigible. If only one side listened harder, reasoned better, or acquired the right evidence, convergence would follow. This assumption is not merely optimistic. It is wrong.

Many of our most entrenched conflicts persist precisely because the parties involved do not inhabit the same world in any substantive sense. They operate with different background assumptions about what exists, what counts as real, what can ground truth, and what sorts of things are even eligible for belief. Argument, in such cases, does not fail due to bad faith or insufficient charity. It fails because it presumes a shared ontology that does not exist.

Before proceeding, a clarification. I am using ontology here in a deliberately broad, working sense. Not merely as an inventory of what exists, but as the background framework that determines what can count as real, meaningful, or normatively binding in the first place. This inevitably overlaps with epistemology, ethics, and theories of agency. Not because these domains are identical, but because in lived discourse they travel together. The fault line I am describing is not disciplinary. It is structural.

Video: Two people in ontological bubbles. (no sound)

Opinion Is Not Ontology

A difference of opinion presupposes a common world. Two people may disagree about what justice requires, but only because they agree, tacitly, that justice is a thing of some kind. Two people may dispute whether God exists, but only because they share enough conceptual scaffolding for the sentence to function.

Ontological disagreement runs deeper. It concerns not what is the case, but what it even means for something to be the case at all. When these levels are conflated, discourse becomes theatrical. Arguments are repeated with increasing urgency, frustration is moralised, and disagreement is reinterpreted as stubbornness, ignorance, or vice. Civility erodes not because people are cruel, but because they are speaking from worlds that do not interlock.

Consider debates over abortion. Pro-life arguments typically presuppose that the fetus is already a moral person; pro-choice arguments often presuppose that moral personhood is inseparable from bodily autonomy. These positions are not primarily disagreements about policy, compassion, or even ‘the value of life’. They are disagreements about what kinds of entities exist and when they begin to matter. Shared language about rights or harm often masks this deeper ontological divergence, which is why such debates rarely converge despite decades of argument.

When Critique Presumes the Ontology It Opposes

This distinction helps explain a familiar but often confusing phenomenon: cases where two parties appear to agree on symptoms, vocabulary, and even outrage, yet remain fundamentally misaligned.

Consider critiques of institutional cruelty that condemn dehumanising practices while retaining the very assumptions that make those practices intelligible. For example, workplace critiques that oppose excessive surveillance, unfair metrics, or punitive performance targets often still presume the figure of the autonomous, responsible worker whose output reflects individual will. The system is blamed for misapplying norms, not for producing those norms as instruments of control. Such critiques are often insightful and well-intentioned. They identify real harm. They name real suffering. And yet they stall.

The reason is not timidity or bad analysis. It is ontological inheritance. These critiques operate inside the same metaphysical framework that generates the harm they diagnose. They presuppose moral realism, individual agency, and normative grounding as givens, then object to their misapplication. The result is an internal critique: coherent, compelling, and structurally limited.

This is not a misunderstanding.
It’s a category error.

From a different ontological position, the problem is not that the norms are misapplied, but that the norms themselves function as delivery mechanisms of harm. What appears as reform from within appears as reenactment from without. This is not a misunderstanding. It is a category error.

Recognising this helps explain why superficial agreement so often feels productive while changing nothing. Shared language can create the appearance of convergence while leaving foundational divergence intact. The temperature drops. The mediator applauds. The underlying machinery hums on.

Igtheism and the Refusal to Pretend

This is why I describe myself, somewhat unfashionably, as an igtheist rather than an atheist.

Atheism still accepts the question ‘Does God exist?’ as well-formed. It grants the concept enough coherence to deny its instantiation. Agnosticism does much the same, merely pausing at the threshold. Both remain inside the game.

Igtheism steps back and asks a prior question: What, precisely, are we talking about? If no stable referent can be specified, the sentence does not become false. It becomes undefined. The system returns ‘does not compute’. This is not evasive. It is diagnostic.

I cannot make sense of strong metaphysical Realism

Try as I may, I cannot make sense of strong metaphysical Realism, let alone Theism. The idea that there exists a fully formed, mind-independent world ‘out there’, grounding truth prior to mediation, language, practice, or perspective, does not parse for me. Not as a contested claim. As a coherent one.

However, and this is the crucial point, once I accept Realism as a mechanism, Theism suddenly makes sense. If you already believe in a metaphysically exterior realm that guarantees truth and coherence, then placing God there is not a leap. It is an economy of scale.

Paraphrased bluntly: They believe there is a whole world ‘out there’. I don’t believe in any of it, so God might as well live out there, too.

From within that worldview, atheistic Realism is arguably the stranger position. The cathedral has been built; denying the altar looks parsimonious rather than principled.

I am not offering a competing metaphysical system here. Not idealism, not pragmatism, not a substitute ontology waiting in the wings. I am declining the assumption that reality must come pre-packaged as a mind-independent domain in order to be intelligible or actionable at all.

Of course, non-realist positions are not exempt from this problem; they, too, can smuggle in unexamined ontological commitments under the guise of pragmatism, coherence, or practice.

Pascal’s Wager and Ontological Blackmail

This is why igtheism tends to offend theists more than atheism ever could. When a theist says, ‘How can you not care? Your soul depends on it’, they are not making an argument. They are issuing an ontological demand. Pascal’s Wager is merely this demand formalised into decision theory.

How can you not care?

The wager only works if one has already granted the existence of souls, post-mortem identity, divine reward structures, and a cosmic enforcement mechanism that cares about belief states. Without those assumptions, there is no wager. There is only a shouted house rule addressed to someone who is not in the casino.

None of this is meant to trivialise the existential seriousness with which such claims are often held. It is simply to note that care does not precede ontology; it follows it. One cannot meaningfully care about entities one does not recognise as intelligible occupants of the world.

Why This Doesn’t End in Relativism

None of this implies that ‘all ontologies are equally true’, nor that disagreement is pointless. It implies something far less comforting and far more useful: many disagreements are non-resolvable by design. This does not deny that ontological frameworks can and do shift over time, sometimes under empirical pressure; it only denies that such shifts are guaranteed, universal, or achievable through argument alone.

Non-resolvability does not entail arbitrariness. Ontological frameworks can be evaluated for internal coherence, practical consequences, and the kinds of lives they make possible. What cannot be done is to adjudicate between them using criteria that belong exclusively to one side. Recognising this does not require abandoning one’s worldview. It requires abandoning the fantasy that persuasion is always possible, or that failure to persuade is a moral defect.

Once we see that we are not standing on the same ground, something like charity becomes possible. Not the saccharine kind. The disciplined kind. I understand that this matters enormously to you. I do not share the ontology that makes it matter to me. This is not a truce forged through compromise. It is a ceasefire born of ontological honesty.

Civility Without Convergence

Our age is addicted to resolution. Every disagreement is treated as a problem to be solved, a synthesis waiting to happen, a bridge yet to be built. Sometimes there is no bridge. Sometimes the most responsible thing to do is to stop pretending there is one.

Sometimes there is no bridge.
Sometimes the most responsible thing to do is to stop pretending there is one.

Civility does not require agreement. It does not even require mutual understanding in the strong sense. It requires only that we stop mistaking incompatible world-models for intellectual obstinacy. We are not all arguing about the same furniture. Some of us are questioning whether the room exists at all.

Once that is acknowledged, the volume drops. The moral theatre loses its urgency. And disagreement, while still real, becomes less corrosive. Not because we have reconciled our ontologies. But because we have finally noticed that they do not reconcile.

Philosophics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Essay: Disagreement Without Referees

Posted in ontology, philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

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

I welcome reviews, comments, and dissents.

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

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this essay.

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

The paper draws a sharp distinction between:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philosophics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

When Aliens Speak English: The False Promise of Linguistic Familiarity

Posted in consciousness, intelligence, language, modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, post-enlightenment, postmodernism, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
5–7 minutes

Why shared language creates the illusion – not the reality – of shared experience

Human beings routinely assume that if another agent speaks our language, we have achieved genuine mutual understanding. Fluency is treated as a proxy for shared concepts, shared perceptual categories, and even shared consciousness. This assumption appears everywhere: in science fiction, in popular philosophy videos, and in everyday cross-cultural interactions. It is a comforting idea, but philosophically indefensible.

Video: Could You Explain Cold to an Alien? – Hank Green

Recent discussions about whether one could ‘explain cold to an alien’ reveal how deeply this assumption is embedded. Participants in such debates often begin from the tacit premise that language maps transparently onto experience, and that if two interlocutors use the same linguistic term, they must be referring to a comparable phenomenon.

A closer analysis shows that this premise fails at every level.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.

Shared Language Does Not Imply Shared Phenomenology

Even within the human species, thermal experience is markedly variable. Individuals from colder climates often tolerate temperatures that visitors from warmer regions find unbearable. Acclimation, cultural norms, metabolic adaptation, and learned behavioural patterns all shape what ‘cold’ feels like.

If the same linguistic term corresponds to such divergent experiences within a species, the gap across species becomes unbridgeable.

A reptile, for example, regulates temperature not by feeling cold in any mammalian sense

A reptile, for example, regulates temperature not by feeling cold in any mammalian sense, but by adjusting metabolic output. A thermometer measures cold without experiencing anything at all. Both respond to temperature; neither inhabits the human category ‘cold’.

Thus, the human concept is already species-specific, plastic, and contextually learned — not a universal experiential module waiting to be translated.

Measurement, Behaviour, and Experience Are Distinct

Thermometers and reptiles react to temperature shifts, and yet neither possesses cold-qualia. This distinction illuminates the deeper philosophical point:

  • Measurement registers a variable.
  • Behaviour implements a functional response.
  • Experience is a mediated phenomenon arising from a particular biological and cognitive architecture.

Aliens might measure temperature as precisely as any scientific instrument. That alone tells us nothing about whether they experience anything analogous to human ‘cold’, nor whether the concept is even meaningful within their ecology.

The Problem of Conceptual Export: Why Explanation Fails

Attempts to ‘explain cold’ to hypothetical aliens often jump immediately to molecular description – slower vibrational states, reduced kinetic energy, and so forth. This presumes that the aliens share:

  • our physical ontology,
  • our conceptual divisions,
  • our sense-making framework,
  • and our valuation of molecular explanation as intrinsically clarifying.

But these assumptions are ungrounded.

Aliens may organise their world around categories we cannot imagine. They may not recognise molecules as explanatory entities. They may not treat thermal variation as affectively laden or behaviourally salient. They may not even carve reality at scales where ‘temperature’ appears as a discrete variable.

When the conceptual scaffolding differs, explanation cannot transfer. The task is not translation but category creation, and there is no guarantee that the requisite categories exist on both sides.

The MEOW Framework: MEOWa vs MEOWb

The Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW) clarifies this breakdown by distinguishing four layers of mediation:

  • T0: biological mediation
  • T1: cognitive mediation
  • T2: linguistic mediation
  • T3: social mediation

Humans run MEOWa, a world structured through mammalian physiology, predictive cognition, metaphor-saturated language, and social-affective narratives.

Aliens (in fiction or speculation) operate MEOWb, a formally parallel mediation stack but with entirely different constituents.

Two systems can speak the same language (T2 alignment) whilst:

  • perceiving different phenomena (T0 divergence),
  • interpreting them through incompatible conceptual schemas (T1 divergence),
  • and embedding them in distinct social-meaning structures (T3 divergence).

Linguistic compatibility does not grant ontological compatibility.
MEOWa and MEOWb allow conversation but not comprehension.

Fiction as Illustration: Why Aliens Speaking English Misleads Us

In Sustenance, the aliens speak flawless Standard Southern English. Their linguistic proficiency invites human characters (and readers) to assume shared meaning. Yet beneath the surface:

  • Their sensory world differs;
  • their affective architecture differs;
  • their concepts do not map onto human categories;
  • and many human experiential terms lack any analogue within their mediation.

The result is not communication but a parallel monologue: the appearance of shared understanding masking profound ontological incommensurability.

The Philosophical Consequence: No Universal Consciousness Template

Underlying all these failures is a deeper speciesist assumption: that consciousness is a universal genus, and that discrete minds differ only in degree. The evidence points elsewhere.

If “cold” varies across humans, fails to apply to reptiles, and becomes meaningless for thermometers, then we have no grounds for projecting it into alien phenomenology. Nor should we assume that other species – biological or artificial – possess the same experiential categories, emotional valences, or conceptual ontologies that humans treat as foundational.

Consciousness is not a universal template awaiting instantiation in multiple substrates. It is a local ecological achievement, shaped by the mediations of the organism.

Conclusion

When aliens speak English, we hear familiarity and assume understanding. But a shared phonological surface conceals divergent sensory systems, cognitive architectures, conceptual repertoires, and social worlds.

Linguistic familiarity promises comprehension, but delivers only the appearance of it. The deeper truth is simple: Knowing our words is not the same as knowing our world.

And neither aliens, reptiles, nor thermometers inhabit the experiential space we map with those words.

Afterword

Reflections like these are precisely why my Anti-Enlightenment project exists. Much contemporary philosophical commentary remains quietly speciesist and stubbornly anthropomorphic, mistaking human perceptual idiosyncrasies for universal structures of mind. It’s an oddly provincial stance for a culture that prides itself on rational self-awareness.

To be clear, I have nothing against Alex O’Connor. He’s engaging, articulate, and serves as a gateway for many encountering these topics for the first time. But there is a difference between introducing philosophy and examining one’s own conceptual vantage point. What frustrates me is not the earnestness, but the unexamined presumption that the human experiential frame is the measure of all frames.

Having encountered these thought experiments decades ago, I’m not interested in posturing as a weary elder shaking his stick at the next generation. My disappointment lies elsewhere: in the persistent inability of otherwise intelligent thinkers to notice how narrow their perspective really is. They speak confidently from inside the human mediation stack without recognising it as a location – not a vantage point outside the world, but one local ecology among many possible ones.

Until this recognition becomes basic philosophical hygiene, we’ll continue to confuse linguistic familiarity for shared ontology and to mistake the limits of our own embodiment for the limits of consciousness itself.

Philosophics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Announcement: MEOW GPT

Posted in consciousness, essays, free will, identity, intelligence, language, modernism, morality, nature, ontology, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, power, psychology, science, society, technologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Instead of sleeping like a functional adult, I’ve spent the night creating, testing, and refining a bespoke GPT that has fully absorbed my MEOW and LIH frameworks. Apologies that the LIH manuscript isn’t yet public; some of the terminology may look delightfully alien if you’re coming in cold.

This model doesn’t role-play a philosopher; it thinks through the Mediated Encounter Ontology. It runs every input through T0–T3 mediations and then applies the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis to explain why our words fail us in predictable, structural ways.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this post on the MEOW GPT.

I stress-tested it with a dozen concepts, from the obvious to the uncooperative. It happily tells you when your input makes sense, when it’s out of scope, and when you’ve handed it conceptual soup. My first test was the hard problem of consciousness, because naturally we begin with the philosophical boss fight. I dialled down some over-enthusiastic LIH flourishes, but the bones are untouched.

I’m making this public for a simple reason: it’s the clearest way for people to see how MEOW operates without wandering through a hundred pages of my prose. These outputs capture how I process information and why these frameworks feel so intuitively correct to me. When you read them, you get a direct view of my interpretive machinery – how the world clicks for me, and how these ideas evolved.

It hasn’t been rigorously battle-tested across the entire conceptual universe, but it’s stable, coherent, and frankly too interesting to keep in the drawer. If you try it – and I hope you do – I’d love to see what it does with your own concepts. If you need help reading the results, ask. I didn’t simplify the system; it expects literacy, nuance, and a working prefrontal cortex.

For orientation, read the introductory post or the colour perception example. Ideally, read the original essay and listen to the summary podcast. My first test was on the hard problem of consciousness because I had already analysed it for this post. I made some adjustments to tone down some LIH intrusions.

Below is a sample output. I asked the model to analyse modernity.

Concept

  • Input: modernity
  • Type: historical–social formation / self-description of an era / conceptual frame
  • Scope check: in-scope – central for how MEOW treats large-scale shifts in mediation (social, technical, cognitive, linguistic)

High-level summary (≤120 words)

Modernity is both a historical bundle (industrialisation, nation-states, capitalism, science, bureaucracy, media) and a story societies tell about themselves (“we are modern, unlike the past”).

In MEOW terms, modernity is a large-scale reorganisation of mediations:

  • T0: new bodily environments (urban life, clocks, artificial light, pollution, medicine).
  • T1: new cognitive habits (individualism, planning, abstraction, risk-calculation).
  • T2: new vocabularies (progress, development, rationality, “religion” vs “science”).
  • T3: new institutions and technologies (markets, states, factories, schools, mass media, digital networks).

“Modernity” is not a single thing but a way these shifts hang together and become a background to everyday encounter.

T0 – Biological Mediation

  • Applicability: Applicable
  • Analysis:
    • Modernity radically reshapes the immediate bodily environment: dense cities, artificial lighting, noise, pollution, sedentary work, and altered sleep cycles change basic sensory and metabolic conditions.
    • Medical advances and public health (vaccination, antibiotics, sanitation, surgery) modify life expectancy, infant mortality, and chronic illness, which in turn change how life cycles feel and are planned.
    • New food systems (industrial agriculture, processed foods, global supply chains) alter nutrition, exposure to toxins, and rhythms of hunger and satiety.
    • Industrial and digital work reorganise movement and posture: repetitive factory labour, office desk work, and screen use all reshape embodiment, fatigue, and bodily awareness.
    • These T0 changes set the stage for new affective baselines (e.g., chronic low-level stress, stimulation overload) that colour what it is like to live in a “modern” world.

T1 – Cognitive Mediation

  • Applicability: Strongly applicable
  • Analysis:
    • Modernity encourages certain cognitive styles: systematic planning, quantification, risk assessment, cost–benefit thinking, and an emphasis on prediction and control.
    • The sense of self is reconfigured toward individualism and reflexivity: people see themselves as projects to be chosen, improved, optimised, often with long-term career and life-planning horizons.
    • Exposure to multiple roles, cultures, and information streams (through migration, media, education) produces more complex identity structures and can create cognitive dissonance or fragmentation.
    • Scientific and technical worldviews teach people to reframe events in terms of mechanisms, probabilities, and systems rather than fate, tradition, or local narratives.
    • The sheer volume and speed of information flows in late modernity (news, social media, notifications) trains attention toward rapid scanning and shallow switching, affecting memory, concentration, and emotional regulation.
    • These patterns make certain experiences “normal” (abstract work, mediated relationships, bureaucratic interactions) that would be extraordinary or impossible in premodern settings.

T2 – Linguistic Mediation

  • Applicability: Strongly applicable
  • Analysis:
    • Modernity itself is a label that societies use to contrast “us” with “them” (the past, “traditional” societies, “the East,” “the primitive”); it is a polemical as well as descriptive term.
    • In Language Insufficiency terms, modernity is highly Fluid: it can mean a period (“since the 18th century”), a style (modernist art), a value system (rational, secular, progressive), or a socio-economic order (capitalist, industrial, bureaucratic). Different authors slide between these quietly.
    • It’s also Contestable: critics and defenders use the same word but point to different aspects—emancipation and progress versus alienation, exploitation, ecological crisis.
    • Pairs like “modern vs traditional” or “modern vs backward” compress complex differences into simple hierarchies, smuggling in a presumption that “modern” is automatically better or more advanced.
    • Talk of “post-modernity” or “late modernity” suggests that we can neatly periodise and step outside the modern, even while our concepts and institutions remain shaped by it—an example of language implying more clarity and control than we actually have.
    • At the most global scale (“the meaning of modernity,” “the modern condition”), we approach an Effectiveness Horizon: the term feels weighty but becomes vague; people resort to sweeping metaphors (disenchantment, liquefaction, acceleration) whose exact content is hard to pin down.
    • First-person experiences of being “overwhelmed by modern life,” “liberated by modern options,” or “disconnected in modern society” often have an Ineffable quality: standard clichés don’t quite capture the texture of these lives, even as they gesture at them.

T3 – Social/Technical Mediation

  • Applicability: Strongly applicable
  • Analysis:
    • Modernity is most visible as a mesh of institutions: nation-states, markets, bureaucracies, public schools, hospitals, prisons, armies, scientific organisations, corporations, NGOs.
    • These institutions standardise time (clocks, schedules), space (borders, property lines, zoning), identity (passports, ID numbers), and value (money, statistics, rankings) so that encounters become predictable and governable across large scales.
    • Technologies—steam engines, electricity, mass transport, broadcasting, computing, the internet, AI—are both products and drivers of modernity. They make possible new encounter-forms (remote work, global real-time communication, mass surveillance).
    • Urbanisation concentrates people into large, heterogeneous populations, which reconfigures social networks, anonymity, solidarity, and conflict; everyday encounters become more mediated by rules, signage, and digital systems than by face-to-face custom.
    • Capitalist production and consumption patterns organise much of life around work, income, and markets; the rhythms of the factory, office, and platform economy structure when and how people interact, rest, and move.
    • Modern governance uses statistics, censuses, and models to “see” and manage populations; this makes certain aspects of life legible (employment, crime, disease) while leaving others under- or uncounted (informal care, undocumented work, emotional labour).
    • Counter-movements (romanticism, traditionalism, environmentalism, decolonial and Indigenous resurgence, slow-living and anti-consumerist practices) can be read as attempts to renegotiate or resist specific modern mediations rather than simply reject “modernity” as a whole.

Limits & failure modes

  • Language insufficiency notes
    • Modernity bundles together time (a historical era), structure (a type of society), and value (being “up to date”). This makes the term rhetorically powerful but analytically slippery: it’s easy to smuggle evaluations into what sound like neutral descriptions.
    • Because the concept is so broad, discussions often conflate distinct issues—technology, capitalism, secularisation, colonialism, individualism, bureaucracy—under one word, obscuring which mechanisms are actually at work.
    • Experiences of living in “modern times” (speed, fragmentation, choice, precariousness, possibility) often outrun our stock phrases; people lean on recurring complaints (“too fast,” “too shallow,” “too lonely”) that only partially capture what it’s like.
  • Missing tiers / blind spots
    • This sketch doesn’t adjudicate between different theories of modernity (Marxist, Weberian, postcolonial, systems-theoretic, etc.); it treats them as emphasising different mediational strands.
    • It’s centred on Euro-Atlantic narratives; “multiple modernities” and non-Western trajectories (where “modern” elements mix with older forms in hybrid ways) would need a richer T3 treatment.
    • The analysis underplays ecological dimensions: industrial modernity’s dependence on fossil fuels, large-scale extraction, and waste has massive implications for how future encounters will be structured.
    • Finally, because we are ourselves situated in what we call modernity, our conceptual vantage is limited; any map we draw is partly an artefact of the very mediations we’re trying to analyse.
Philosophics's avatar

Bry Willis and MEOW GPT

Philosophics

How MEOW Turns a Metaphysical Mountain Into a Linguistic Molehill

Posted in consciousness, essays, language, ontology, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, psychology, realityTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

In the last post, I argued that the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness‘ was never a problem with consciousness. It was a problem with language – specifically, the English language’s unfortunate habit of carving the world into neat little substances and then demanding to know why its own divisions won’t glue back together.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic, on resolving the hard problem of consciousness.

The response was predictable.

  • ‘But what about subjective feel?’
  • ‘What about emergence?’
  • ‘What about ontology?’
  • ‘What about Chalmers?’
  • ‘What about that ineffable thing you can’t quite point at?’

All fair questions. All built atop the very framing that manufactures the illusion of a metaphysical gap.

So here’s the promised demonstration: not yet a full essay (though it may evolve into one), but a clear application of MEOW – the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World – to the hard problem itself. Consider this a field test of the framework. A tidy autopsy, not the funeral oration.

The Set-Up: Chalmers’ Famous Trick

Chalmers asks:

How do physical processes give rise to experience?

The question feels profound only because the terms ‘physical’ and ‘experience’ smuggle in the very metaphysics they pretend to interrogate. They look like opposites because the grammar makes them opposites. English loves a comforting binary.

But MEOW doesn’t bother with the front door. It doesn’t assume two substances – ‘mind’ over here, ‘world’ over there – and then panic when they refuse to shake hands. It treats experience as the way an encounter manifests under a layered architecture of mediation. There’s no bridge. Only layers.

T₀ – Biological Mediation

The body is not a barrier. It is the encounter’s first architecture.

At T₀, the world is already transformed: transduction, gating, synchrony, inhibition, adaptation. Organisms don’t receive ‘raw’ physical inputs. They metabolise them. The form of contact is biological before it is anything else.

The hard problem begins by assuming there’s a realm of dumb physical mechanisms that somehow need to ‘produce’ experience. But organisms do not encounter dumb mechanism. They encounter structured contact –biological mediation – from the first millisecond.

If you insist on thinking in substances, T₀ looks like a problem.
If you think in mediations, it looks like the beginning of sense-making.

T₁ – Cognitive Mediation

Where the Enlightenment saw a window, cognition installs a newsroom.

Prediction, priors, memory, inference, attention – all shaping what appears and what never makes it into view. Experience at T₁ is not something ‘added’. It is the organisational structure of the encounter itself.

The hard problem treats ‘experience’ as a mysterious extra–something floating atop neural activity like metaphysical cream. But at T₁, what appears as experience is simply the organisation of biological contact through cognitive patterns.

There is no ‘what emerges from the physical’. There is the way the encounter is organised.

And all of this unfolds under resistance – the world’s persistent refusal to line up neatly with expectation. Prediction errors, perceptual limits, feedback misfires: this constraint structure prevents the entire thing from collapsing into relativist soup.

T₂ – Linguistic–Conceptual Mediation

Here is where the hard problem is manufactured.

This is the layer that takes an ordinary phenomenon and turns it into a metaphysical puzzle. Words like ‘experience’, ‘physical’, ‘mental’, ‘subjective’, and ‘objective’ pretend to be carved in stone. They aren’t. They slide, drift, and mutate depending on context, grammar, and conceptual lineage.

The hard problem is almost entirely a T₂ artefact – a puzzle produced by a grammar that forces us to treat ‘experience’ and ‘physical process’ as two different substances rather than two different summaries of different mediational layers.

If you inherit a conceptual architecture that splits the world into mind and matter, of course you will look for a bridge. Language hands you the illusion and then refuses to refund the cost of admission.

T₃ – Cultural–Normative Mediation

The Western problem is not the world’s problem.

The very idea that consciousness is metaphysically puzzling is the product of a specific cultural lineage: Enlightenment substance dualism (even in its ‘materialist’ drag), Cartesian leftovers, empiricist habits, and Victorian metaphysics disguised as objectivity.

Other cultures don’t carve the world this way. Other ontologies don’t need to stitch mind back into world. Other languages simply don’t produce this problem.

The hard problem is not a universal insight. It’s a provincial glitch.

Reassembling the Encounter

Once you run consciousness through the mediational layers, the hard problem dissolves:

  • Consciousness is not an emergent property of neural complexity.
  • Consciousness is not a fundamental property of the universe.
  • Consciousness is the reflexive mode of certain mediated encounters, the form the encounter takes when cognition, language, and culture become part of what is appearing.

There is no gap to explain because the ‘gap’ is the product of a linguistic–conceptual framework that splits where the world does not.

As for the ever-mystical ‘what-it’s-like’: that isn’t a metaphysical jewel buried in the brain; it is the way a T₀–T₃ architecture manifests when its own structure becomes reflexively available.

A Brief Disclaimer Before the Internet Screams

Pointing out that Chalmers (and most of modern philosophy) operates within a faulty ontology is not to claim MEOW is flawless or final. It isn’t. But if Occam’s razor means anything, MEOW simply removes one unnecessary supposition — the idea that ‘mind’ and ‘world’ are independent substances in need of reconciliation. No triumphalism. Just subtraction.

Where This Leaves Chalmers

Chalmers is not wrong. He’s just asking the wrong question. The hard problem is not a metaphysical insight. It’s the moment our language tripped over its shoelaces and insisted the pavement was mysterious.

MEOW doesn’t solve the hard problem. It shows why the hard problem only exists inside a linguistic architecture that can’t model its own limitations.

This piece could easily grow into a full essay – perhaps it will. But for now, it does the job it needs to: a practical demonstration of MEOW in action.

And, arguably more important, it buys me one more day of indexing.

Philosophics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Arriving Late to Massimi’s Party: Perspectival Realism in Parallel

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Where our projects nod politely, then go their separate ways

(For the constructive exposition of Perspectival Realism—its three layers of mediation, its commitments, and its ontology without footnotes—see the main article. This piece deals with the differences by Michela Massimi’s and my versions.)

I suppose it was inevitable. You spend years muttering into your notebook about mediation, realism without bombast, the irretrievability of universality, and the peculiar way science manages to stumble forward with partial, parochial tools… and then, inevitably, you discover that someone else—Michela Massimi, in this case—has been busy constructing her own edifice a few hills over.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast summary and discussion of this topic

I arrived late to her party. Fine. But now that I’m here, let’s pour a drink and compare architecture.

Because while our buildings look similar from a distance—both labelled Perspectival Realism—they’re made from different bricks and aimed at different skylines.

1. A Courteous Bow: We Are Not Strangers in the Same Wilderness

Massimi and I share several foundational intuitions:

  • No God’s-eye view.
    She rejects the fantasy of disembodied objectivity. So do I. Reality is not a neutral theatre awaiting the Enlightenment spectator.
  • Knowledge is situated.
    Her emphasis on historically embedded scientific communities echoes my own insistence that sense, cognition, and culture structure every act of knowing.
  • Plural perspectives, not universal sovereignty.
    No single inferential vantage point dominates; multiple perspectives can be fruitfully interlaced.
    That’s strikingly consonant with my claim that mediation is a condition, not a defect.
  • Anti-relativist without universalist delusion.
    Neither of us has patience for the “all maps are equal” caricature peddled by people who wouldn’t know a real relativist if they tripped over one in a library.

From this angle, we’re intellectual cousins—two people independently refusing Enlightenment triumphalism while refusing to surrender realism to the absolutists.

2. The Parting of the Ways: Our Projects Are Not the Same Creature

But similarities disguise deeper divergences. Here are the important ones:

a) She’s doing epistemology; I’m doing ontology.

Massimi reconstructs realism from the inside out by examining scientific practice—models, inferences, historically evolving toolkits.

My project is more structural. Sense mediation (icons), cognitive mediation (instrumentation), and linguistic-cultural mediation (conceptual carving) are not methodological observations; they are conditions of access to reality. They’re deeper than scientific practice—they underlie it.

b) She salvages realism; I happily burn universality and build realism back from the ashes.

Massimi is rehabilitating realism’s good name.
I’m less sentimental. Realism, as a doctrine, has been caught lying too many times. I want the realism of resistance, not the realism of representation.

c) Her anchor is “modal robustness”; mine is “structured resistance through mediation.”

Massimi’s realism rests on the idea that phenomena are robust across models and contexts—they persist modally.

I agree that robustness is useful. But robustness is filtered through linguistic concepts, cognitive priors, and sensorimotor limitations. It’s a second-order indicator, not a metaphysical foothold.

Resistance—the world’s refusal to bend to belief—is deeper. It’s what enables robustness to manifest.

d) Her perspectives are model-based; mine are existential.

Massimi focuses on scientific perspectives—frameworks articulated through inferential blueprints.

My perspectivalism lives at the level of:

  • what our senses can show,
  • what our minds can shape,
  • what our languages can articulate,
  • what our cultures deem thinkable.

That’s a wider cut than scientific models.

We are working at different depths of mediation.

3. Convergences Worth Keeping, Divergences Worth Defending

Let me put it cleanly:

  • Massimi gives us a realism of models.
    A realism that emerges from the community of scientific practice, negotiated through historically situated inferential perspectives.
  • I’m after a realism of resistance.
    A realism that remains intact even when models break, when languages fail, when cognitive categories run aground.
    Not the realism of what we say, but the realism of what pushes back.

Our projects are not incompatible, but they are differently motivated.

She is concerned with scientific rationality’s legitimacy.
I am concerned with the conditions of access to reality in the first place.

She patches the Enlightenment’s ship.
I point out that the ship’s hull is three layers of mediation thick, and pretend that universality is the hole in the floor.

4. A Clean Acknowledgement: She Was Here First (Sort Of)

Yes—Massimi coined the term in this specific form, and she developed a sophisticated, rigorous scientific perspectivism that deserves respect.

But my Perspectival Realism emerged from a different genealogy:

  • the insufficiency of language,
  • the inescapability of conceptual carving,
  • the recursive inadequacy of cognitive tools,
  • the quiet, stubborn existence of a world we only ever meet askance.

Different animals. Same habitat.

So no, I’m not competing with Massimi.
And no, I’m not rebranding her work.

What I’m doing—and what this piece makes explicit—is placing my ontology in dialogue with hers. Two parallel rejections of universality. Two parallel refusals of relativism. Two parallel attempts to articulate realism without pretending we’ve escaped the conditions of being human.

If I arrived late to her race, so be it.
I’m not running for her finish line anyway.

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

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

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

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

As I mentioned at the end of the first series, I may return to this series and publish a coherent expository version more in line with my usual style. Meantime, this allows me to share my ideas unvarnished and unpolished at the same time, granting me more time to focus on other matters. Apologies to those who may disagree with the outline format. Honestly, it annoys me, but I am choosing function over form at the moment.

Philosophics's avatar

Output Produced by ChatGPT

Philosophics

Why Perspectival Realism Is Not Relativism

Posted in perception, philosophy, podcast, realityTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Reality decides; perspectives compete.

(For the constructive exposition of Perspectival Realism—its three layers of mediation, its commitments, and its ontology without footnotes—see the main article. This piece deals with the predictable objection.)

The moment you say “our access to reality is mediated,” someone inevitably performs their civic duty as Defender of Enlightenment Orthodoxy and announces, as if discovering fire, “So you’re a relativist, then?”

It’s a comforting little reflex. If a position denies universality, it must be relativism. If it rejects the view from nowhere, it must reject the very idea of truth. If it acknowledges cultural scaffolding, it must be one critique away from saying flat-earthers and astrophysicists are peers.

This objection misunderstands both relativism and Perspectival Realism.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast summarising this topic.

Let’s begin with the essential distinction—think of this as the tattoo at the base of the spine:

Relativism says: all maps are equally valid.
Perspectival Realism says: all maps are partial, and some are better.

  • Better at predicting.
  • Better at surviving.
  • Better at cohering with everything else we know.
  • Better at not getting you killed.

This is the spine of the position. Everything else is elaboration.

Relativism’s Self-Destruct Button

Relativism denies that reality has enough structure to constrain belief. According to its logic, perspectives are sovereign. The world bends to interpretation.

If that were true:

  • Gravity would turn itself off for anyone sufficiently committed to optimism.
  • Viruses would consult your cosmology before infecting you.
  • The Müller–Lyer illusion wouldn’t vary between populations because there’d be no stable perceptual machinery for it to fool.

Relativism collapses because the world does not permit it.

Perspectival Realism begins from the opposite premise:

  • There is one reality.
  • It resists us.
  • Perspectives rise or fall by how well they handle that resistance.

You can’t get further from relativism than that.

Why Perspective ≠ Prison

Another familiar confusion:
“If access is perspectival, aren’t we trapped in our own little worlds?”

No.
Mediation isn’t isolation. It’s a shared condition.

You and I may wear sunglasses of different tint, but we still walk the same street. Your glasses may darken the building I call “red,” so you call it “dark red.” That’s not incommensurability—that’s disagreement within a shared world. We argue, we adjust, we converge.

Perspectival Realism doesn’t say “worlds are sealed off.”
It says we are situated—embodied, encultured, cognitively structured.
Our lenses differ. The street does not.

The Crucial Point: The World Pushes Back

Relativism has no mechanism for adjudication. Perspectival Realism has the best one available: reality’s structured resistance.

If your perspective predicts, explains, and survives contact with the world, it’s better. If it collapses upon use, it’s worse. If it transfers across contexts, it’s better. If it leaves you dead, it’s worse.

This is not metaphysics.
It’s survival.

And it is very explicitly not relativism.

Logic: Form Universal, Application Situated

A predictable objection:

Objection: “Isn’t logic universal? Doesn’t that kill perspectivalism?”

Response:
Basic inferential forms—modus ponens, contradiction—are indeed widespread. That’s Layer 2 architecture: the cognitive machinery we all share.

But what counts as a valid premise, which inferences feel compelling, and which conclusions are considered exhaustive vary across cultures (Layer 3). Logic’s form is stable; its deployment is contextual.

Perspectival Realism doesn’t deny logic.
It denies the fantasy that logic operates in a cultural vacuum.

Relativism’s Moral Collapse

Why “anything goes” goes nowhere

Relativism becomes lethal the moment ethics enters the scene. If all perspectives are equally valid, you lose the ability to critique harmful practices. Torture, forced servility, institutionalised cruelty—all become “just different frameworks.”

Perspectival Realism rejects this.

You don’t need a metaphysical skyhook to condemn torture.
You need:

  • Shared vulnerability – all humans are embodied beings capable of pain.
  • Empirical observation – societies that normalise cruelty become unstable and self-poisoning.
  • Pragmatic convergence – diverse cultures can agree that some practices destroy the conditions of flourishing.
  • Reality-tested norms – ethical systems survive because they work, not because they download from a Platonic server.

This is not relativism.
It’s ethics under realism-without-universality.

You can condemn harmful practices without pretending to be the mouthpiece of timeless universal Reason. You can ground human rights in intersubjective evidence—not metaphysical fiat.

No view from nowhere required.

The Three-Way Contrast
(The Only Chart You Need)

Naive Realism:
There is one perfectly accurate map.

Relativism:
All maps are equally good.

Perspectival Realism:

  • All maps are partial.
  • Some are atrocious.
  • Some work astonishingly well because they track deeper regularities of the terrain.
  • No map is complete.
  • No map is sovereign.
  • The terrain adjudicates between them.

You don’t need omniscience to compare maps.
You need terrain.
And we all share the same one.

Prediction: The Final Judge

If you want the single litmus test:

  • Does the perspective predict anything?
  • Does it do so consistently?
  • Does it correct itself when wrong?
  • Does it transfer beyond its original context?

If yes → closer to reality.
If no → a charming story, but please don’t build bridges with it.

Relativism has no concept of “closer to.”
Perspectival Realism depends on it.

Putting It All Together

Perspectival Realism maintains:

  • Realism: the world exists independently of our representations.
  • Anti-universalism: no representation escapes mediation.
  • Anti-relativism: some representations perform better because they align more closely with what the world actually does.
  • Humility: we navigate through partial perspectives, comparing, refining, and error-correcting.

No one gets to declare universal sovereignty.
Everyone gets tested by the same reality.

Relativism says everything is equally true.
Perspectival Realism says everything is equally mediated—but not equally successful.

  • Reality decides.
  • Perspectives compete.
  • And relativism loses on the first contact.

COMMENTARY: To be fair, the argument about relativism is a strawman argument against virtually no one who would hold or defend this position. For whatever reason, the training data indicated that this was a significant contender. I’ve heard similar weak strawmen in other disciplines, and I felt I should address the invisible elephant in the room. — Bry Willis

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

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

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

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

As I mentioned at the end of the first series, I may return to this series and publish a coherent expository version more in line with my usual style. Meantime, this allows me to share my ideas unvarnished and unpolished at the same time, granting me more time to focus on other matters. Apologies to those who may disagree with the outline format. Honestly, it annoys me, but I am choosing function over form at the moment.

Philosophics's avatar

Output Produced by ChatGPT

Philosophics