Tag: philosophy of science

Truth After Deflation: Why ‘Truth’ Refuses to Behave

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3–4 minutes

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

Truth isn’t what we once thought it was

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

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

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

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

The core diagnosis: exhaustion

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

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

Truth remains grammatically indispensable, but philosophically overworked.

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

The dilemma

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

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

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

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

Why this isn’t just abstract philosophy

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

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

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

Why this isn’t quietism either

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

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

The upshot

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

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

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

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

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Written by Bry Willis

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The Expiration Date of Object Permanence

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

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

I’ve never found that story convincing.

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing spooky happens. A heuristic expires.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reality Happens Once. Facts Happen Many Times.

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I want to clarify my recent The Trouble with Facts post. I realise that I was speaking to one non-trivial form of facts, but there is more than one class of facts. We argue about facts as if the word named a single, stable thing. It doesn’t. It names a family of very different things, quietly grouped together by habit, convenience, and institutional need. Most disputes about facts go nowhere, not because one side is irrational, but because the word itself is doing covert work. We slide between meanings without noticing, then act surprised when disagreement follows. This piece is an attempt to slow that slide.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Polysemy We Notice, Polysemy We Don’t

We are comfortable with ambiguity when it is obvious. A bank can be a financial institution or the edge of a river. A bat can be an animal or a piece of sports equipment. Context resolves these instantly. No one feels existentially threatened by the ambiguity.

Fact is different. The word is polysemous in a way that is both subtle and consequential. Its meanings sit close enough to bleed into one another, allowing certainty from one sense to be smuggled into another without detection. Calling something a fact does not merely describe it. It confers authority. It signals that questioning should stop. That is why this ambiguity matters.

Different Kinds of Facts

Before critiquing facts, we need to sort them.

1. Event-facts (brute, world-facing)
As mentioned previously, these concern what happens in the world, independent of observation.

  • A car collides with a tree.
  • Momentum changes.
  • Metal deforms.

These events occur whether or not anyone notices them. They are ontologically robust and epistemically inaccessible. No one ever encounters them directly. We only ever encounter traces.

2. Indexical or performative facts (trivial, self-reporting)
“I am typing.”

I am doing this now – those now may not be relevant when you read this. This is a fact, but a very thin one. Its authority comes from the coincidence of saying and doing. It requires no reconstruction, no inference, no institutional validation. These facts are easy because they do almost no work.

3. Retrospective personal facts (memory-mediated)
“I was typing.”

This may be relevant now, at least relative to the typing of this particular post. Still a fact, but weaker. Memory enters. Narrative compression enters. Selectivity enters. The same activity now carries a different epistemic status purely because time has passed.

4. Prospective statements (modal, not yet facts)
“I will be typing.”

This is not yet a fact. It may never come to be one. It is an intention or prediction that may or may not be realised. Future-tense claims are often treated as incipient facts, but this is a category error with real consequences.

5. Institutional facts (designated, procedural)
“The court finds…”
“The report concludes…”

These are facts by designation. They are not discovered so much as selected, formalised, and stabilised so that systems can act. They are unlikely to rise to the level of facts, so the legal system tends to generate facts in name only – FINO, if I am being cute.

All of these are called ‘facts’. They are not interchangeable. The trouble begins when certainty migrates illicitly from trivial or institutional facts into brute event-facts, and we pretend nothing happened in the transfer.

One Motor Vehicle

Reconsider the deliberately simple case: A motor vehicle collides with a tree. Trees are immobile, so we can rule out the tree colliding with the car.

Ontologically, something happened. Reality did not hesitate. But even here, no one has direct access to the event itself.

The driver does not enjoy privileged access. They experience shock, adrenaline, attentional narrowing, selective memory, post hoc rationalisation, perhaps a concussion. Already several layers intervene before language even arrives.

A rough schema looks like this:

event → sensory registration → cognitive framing → linguistic encoding → social validation

Ontology concerns what happens.
Epistemology concerns how anything becomes assertable.

Modern thinking collapses the second into the first and calls the result the facts.

People speak of “hard facts” as if hardness transfers from objects to propositions by proximity. It doesn’t. The tree is solid. The fact is an artefact assembled from observation, inference, convention, and agreement.

And so it goes…

Why the Confusion Persists

When someone responds, “But isn’t it a fact that I read this?”, the answer is yes. A different kind of fact.

The error lies not in affirming facts, but in failing to distinguish them. The word fact allows certainty to migrate across categories unnoticed, from trivial self-reports to brute world-events, and from institutional verdicts to metaphysical claims. That migration is doing the work.

Conclusion

Clarifying types of facts does not weaken truth. It prevents us from laundering certainty where it does not belong.

Facts exist. Events occur. But they do not arrive unmediated, innocent, or singular.

Reality happens once. Facts happen many times.

The mistake was never that facts are unreal. It was believing they were all the same kind of thing.

The Trouble with Facts

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
5–8 minutes

One Motor Vehicle

What we call facts are not discoveries of an unfiltered world. They are the end-products of mediation.

Let’s walk through an example.

Image: Autosmash example. An observer arrives with experience – from genetic predisposition to childhood trauma to winning the lottery. Whatever it might be. Of course, they have many cognitive deficits, biases and filters. Then, there’s the immediate problem of attention. When did they notice the event? Did they turn to look after hearing the noise, or were they meditating on the tree in that moment?

Apparently, a motor vehicle has collided with a tree. Trees are immobile objects, so we can safely rule out the tree colliding with the car.*

So what, exactly, are the facts?

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Ontology (the boring bit)

Ontologically, something happened.

A car struck a tree.
Metal deformed.
Momentum stopped.

Reality did not hesitate. It did not consult witnesses. It did not await interpretation.

This is the part Modernity likes to gesture at reverently before immediately leaving it behind.

Image: Requisite NotebookLM infographic on this content.

The Witness

Even the driver does not enjoy privileged access to “what really happened”.

They get:

  • proprioceptive shock
  • adrenaline distortion
  • attentional narrowing
  • selective memory
  • post hoc rationalisation
  • possibly a concussion

Which is already several layers deep before language even arrives to finish the job.

We can generalise the structure:

event → sensory registration → cognitive framing → linguistic encoding → social validation

Ontology: events occur. States of affairs obtain. Something happens whether or not we notice.

Epistemology: observation is always filtered through instruments, concepts, language, habits, and incentives.

Modern sleight of hand: collapse the second into the first and call the result the facts.

People love the phrase “hard facts”, as if hardness transfers from objects to propositions by osmosis. It doesn’t. The tree is solid. The fact is not.

Facts are artefacts. They are assembled from observation, inference, convention, and agreement. They function. They do not reveal essence.

Reality happens once. Facts happen many times, differently, depending on who needs them and why.

Filtration

An event occurred. A car struck a tree.

Then an observer arrives. But observers never arrive empty-handed.

They arrive with history: genetics, upbringing, trauma, habits, expectations, incentives. They arrive already filtered.

Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein spend an entire book explaining just how unreliable this process is. See Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment if you want the empirical receipts.

  • Even before bias enters, attention does.
  • When did the observer notice the crash?
  • At the sound? At the sight? After the fact?
  • Were they already looking, or did the noise interrupt something else entirely?

Reality happens once. Facts happen many times, differently, depending on who needs them and why.

Here Comes the Law

This is where the legal system enters, not because truth has been found, but because closure is required.

Courts do not discover facts. They designate versions of events that are good enough to carry consequences. They halt the cascade of interpretations by institutional force and call the result justice.

At every epistemic level, what we assert are interpretations of fact, never access to ontological essence.

Intent, negligence, recklessness. These are not observations. They are attributions. They are stopping rules that allow systems to function despite uncertainty.

The law does not ask what really happened.
It asks which story is actionable.

Two Motor Vehicles

Now add a second moving object.

Another car enters the frame, and with it an entire moral universe.

Suddenly, the event is no longer merely physical. It becomes relational. Agency proliferates. Narratives metastasise.

Who was speeding?
Who had the right of way?
Who saw whom first?
Who should have anticipated whom?

Intent and motive rush in to fill the explanatory vacuum, despite remaining just as unobservable as before.

Nothing about the ontology improved.
Everything about the storytelling did.

Where the tree refused intention, the second vehicle invites it. We begin inferring states of mind from trajectories, attributing beliefs from brake lights, extracting motives from milliseconds of motion.

But none of this is observed.

What we observe are:

  • vehicle positions after the fact,
  • damage patterns,
  • skid marks,
  • witness statements already filtered through shock and expectation.

From these traces, we construct mental interiors.

The driver “intended” to turn.
The other driver “failed” to anticipate.
Someone was “reckless”.
Someone else was merely “unlucky”.

These are not facts. They are interpretive assignments, layered atop already mediated observations, selected because they allow responsibility to be distributed in socially recognisable ways.

This is why explanation now fractures.

One cascade of whys produces a story about distraction or poor judgment.
Another produces a story about road design or visibility.
Another about timing, traffic flow, or urban planning.

Each narrative is plausible.
Each is evidence-constrained.
None is ontologically privileged.

Yet one will be chosen.

Not because it is truer, but because it is actionable.

The presence of a second vehicle does not clarify causation. It merely increases the number of places we are willing to stop asking questions.

Modernity mistakes this proliferation of narrative for epistemic progress. In reality, it is moral bookkeeping.

The crash still occurred.
Metal still deformed.
Momentum still stopped.

What changed was not access to truth, but the urgency to assign fault.

With one vehicle and a tree, facts already fail to arrive unmediated.
With two vehicles, mediation becomes the point.

And still, we insist on calling the result the facts.

Many Vehicles, Cameras, and Experts

At this point, Modernity regains confidence.

Add more vehicles.
Add traffic cameras.
Add dashcams, CCTV, bodycams.
Add accident reconstruction experts, engineers, psychologists, statisticians.

Surely now we are approaching the facts.

But nothing fundamental has changed. We have not escaped mediation. We have merely scaled it up and professionalised it.

Cameras do not record reality. They record:

  • a frame,
  • from a position,
  • at a sampling rate,
  • with compression,
  • under lighting conditions,
  • interpreted later by someone with a mandate.

Video feels decisive because it is vivid, not because it is ontologically transparent. It freezes perspective and mistakes that freeze for truth. Slow motion, zoom, annotation. Each step adds clarity and distance at the same time.

Experts do not access essence either. They perform disciplined abduction.

From angles, debris fields, timing estimates, and damage profiles, they infer plausible sequences. They do not recover the event. They model it. Their authority lies not in proximity to reality, but in institutional trust and methodological constraint.

More data does not collapse interpretation.
It multiplies it.

With enough footage, we don’t get the story. We get competing reconstructions, each internally coherent, each technically defensible, each aligned to a different question:

  • Who is legally liable?
  • Who is financially responsible?
  • Who violated policy?
  • Who can be blamed without destabilising the system?

At some point, someone declares the evidence “clear”.

What they mean is: we have enough material to stop arguing.

This is the final Modern illusion: that accumulation converges on essence. In reality, accumulation converges on closure.

The event remains what it always was: inaccessible except through traces.
The facts become thicker, more confident, more footnoted.
Their metaphysical status does not improve.

Reality happened once. It left debris. We organised the debris into narratives that could survive institutions.

Cameras didn’t reveal the truth. Experts didn’t extract it. They helped us agree on which interpretation would count.

And agreement, however necessary, has never been the same thing as access to what is.

* I was once driving in a storm, and a telephone pole fell about a metre in front of my vehicle. My car drove over the pole, and although I was able to drive the remainder of the way home, my suspension and undercarriage were worse for the wear and tear.

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Written by Bry Willis and ChatGPT 5.2 after an extended chat about the image as a talking point about the inaccessibility of facts.

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Homo Legibilis

Posted in fiction, identity, intelligence, language, modernism, nature, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, power, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
3–4 minutes

I’ve taken the day after Thanksgiving in the US to decompress with a less serious post before I get back to indexing. I came up with this concept whilst writing my essay on Homo Normalis, but I felt this was a bit too cheeky for a formal essay. This is where my thoughts led me.

A Brief Field Note from the Department of Bureaucratic Anthropology

Still reeling from the inability to fold some pan into homo, Palaeontologists are seemingly desperate for a new hominid. Some dream of discovering the ‘missing link’; others, more honest, just want something with a jawline interesting enough to secure a grant. So imagine the surprise when the latest species didn’t come out of the Rift Valley but out of an abandoned server farm somewhere outside Reading.

They’ve named it Homo Legibilis – the Readable Human. Not ‘H. normālis’ (normal human), not ‘H. ratiōnālis (rational human), but the one who lived primarily to be interpreted. A species who woke each morning with a simple evolutionary imperative: ensure one’s dataprints were tidy, current, and machine-actionable.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

You’ll have seen their skeletons before, though you may not have recognised them as such. They often appear upright, mid-scroll, preserved in the amber of a status update. A remarkable creature, really. Lithe thumbs. Soft cranial matter. Eyes adapted for low-light environments lit primarily by advertisements.

Habitat

The species thrived in densely surveilled ecosystems: corporate intranets, public Wi-Fi, facial-recognition corridors, anywhere with sufficient metadata to form a lasting imprint. They built vast nests out of profiles, settings, dashboards. Territorial disputes were settled not through display or violence but through privacy-policy updates. Their preferred climate? Temperate bureaucracy.

Diet

Contrary to earlier assumptions, H. Legibilis did not feed on information. It fed on interpretation: likes, metrics, performance reviews, and algorithmic appraisal. Some specimens survived entire winters on a single quarterly report. Every fossil indicates a digestive tract incapable of processing nuance. Subtext passed through untouched.

Mating Rituals

Courtship displays involved reciprocal data disclosure across multiple platforms, often followed by rapid abandonment once sufficient behavioural samples were collected. One famous specimen is preserved alongside fourteen dating-app profiles and not a single functional relationship. Tragic, in a way, but consistent with the species’ priorities: be seen, not held.

Distinguishing Traits

Where Homo sapiens walked upright, Homo legibilis aimed to sit upright in a chair facing a webcam.
Its spine is subtly adapted for compliance reviews. Its hands are shaped to cradle an object that no longer exists: something called ‘a phone’. Ironically, some term these ‘mobiles’, apparently unaware of the tethers.

Researchers note that the creature’s selfhood appears to have been a consensual hallucination produced collaboratively by HR departments, advertising lobbies, and the Enlightenment’s long shadow. Identity, for H. legibilis, was not lived but administered.

Extinction Event

The fossil record ends abruptly around the Great Blackout, a period in which visibility – formerly a pillar of the species’ survival – became inconvenient. Some scholars argue the species didn’t perish but simply lost the will to document itself, making further study inconvenient.

Others suggest a quieter transformation: the species evolved into rumour, passing stories orally once more, slipping back into the anonymity from which its ancestors once crawled.

Afterword

A few renegade anthropologists insist Homo Legibilis is not extinct at all. They claim it’s still out there, refreshing dashboards, syncing calendars, striving to be neatly interpreted by systems that never asked to understand it. But these are fringe theories. The prevailing view is that the species perished under the weight of its own readability. A cautionary tale, really. When your survival strategy is to be perfectly legible, you eventually disappear the moment the lights flicker.

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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.

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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.

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Perspectival Realism: The First Ontology Without an Asterisk

Posted in perception, philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments
6–10 minutes

The realism remains; the universality does not.

Update: Please note that I have refined my position on this and documented it in a newer post. It builds upon this idea but clarifies some disconnects and provides me with some ontological distance from Massimi.

There comes a moment in any serious thinker’s life when the metaphysical menu starts looking like a bad buffet: too much on offer, none of it quite edible, and the dishes that appear promising turn out to depend on ingredients you can’t stomach. Realism insists the world is simply there, chugging along regardless of your opinions. Anti-realism points out, inconveniently, that all your access is wildly mediated. Perspectivism adds humility. Constructivism chastises you for overconfidence. Analytic Idealism sweeps matter off the table entirely, until you ask why consciousness spits out such stubbornly consistent patterns.

I’ve been through all of them.
Realism*—asterisk for “but what about mediation?”
Idealism*—asterisk for “but what about resistance?”

Everything almost worked.
And “almost” is the metaphysical kiss of death.
“Almost” is where the asterisks live.

Perspectival Realism is the first position I can hold without planting that apologetic little star in the margins.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast summary on this topic.

The Asterisk Journey (Brief, Painless, Necessary)

This isn’t a conversion narrative. It’s a salvage operation. Each station on the journey left me with tools worth keeping.

Layer 1: Iconography (Hoffman, minus the metaphysics)

Perception is not a window. It’s an interface. A species-specific dashboard designed for survival, not truth. Evolution gave you a set of icons—colour patches, contrast edges, looming shapes—not an accurate rendering of reality’s architecture.

Uexküll called this the umwelt: every organism inhabits its own perceptual slice of the world. Bees see ultraviolet; snakes sense heat; humans see embarrassingly little.

This is Layer 1 mediation:
Reality-as-filtered-for-primates.

Layer 2: Instrumentation (Kastrup, minus the leap)

Consciousness is the instrument through which reality is measured. Measuring instruments shape the measurements. That doesn’t make the world mind-shaped; it just means you only ever get readings through the apparatus you’ve got.

This is Layer 2 mediation:
Your cognitive architecture—predictive priors, attentional limitations, spatial-temporal scaffolding—structures experience before thought arrives.

Where I leave Kastrup behind is the familiar leap:
“Because consciousness measures reality, reality must be made of consciousness.”
That’s the instrumentality fallacy.

You need consciousness to access the world.
That tells you nothing about what the world is.

Layer 3: Linguistic–Cultural Carving (Your home field)

And then comes the mediation philosophers most reliably ignore: language.
Language does not describe reality. It carves it.

Some cultures divide colour into eleven categories; some into five. The Müller-Lyer illusion fools Westerners far more than it fools hunter-gatherers. Concepts feel natural only because you inherited them pre-packaged.

This is Layer 3 mediation: the cultural-linguistic filter that makes the world legible—and in the same breath, distorts it.

You mistake the map for the territory because it’s the only map you’ve ever held.

The Hard Problem, Dissolved — Not Solved

When English splits the world into “mental” and “physical,” it accidentally manufactures the “hard problem of consciousness.” Sanskrit traditions carve reality differently and end up with different “mysteries.”

The hard problem isn’t a revelation about reality.
It’s a conceptual knot tied by Layer 3 mediation.

Changing the ontology to “everything is mind” doesn’t untie the knot.
It just dyes the rope a different colour.

The Triple Lock

Put the three layers together and you get the honest picture:

  1. Your senses give you icons, not the thing-in-itself.
  2. Your cognition structures those icons automatically.
  3. Your culture tells you what the structured icons mean.

And yet—despite all of this—the world pushes back.

Gravity doesn’t care about your interpretive community.
Arsenic does not negotiate its effects with your culture.
Your beliefs about heat won’t keep your hand from burning.

This is the fulcrum of Perspectival Realism:

Reality is real and resists us, but all access is triply mediated.

The realism remains.
The universality does not.

Why Perspectival Realism is Not Relativism

Relativism says: “Everyone’s perspective is equally valid.”
Perspectival Realism says: “Everyone’s perspective is equally situated.”

Very different claims.

Some perspectives predict better.
Some cohere better.
Some survive reality’s resistance better.
Some transfer across contexts better.
Some correct their own errors faster.

You don’t need a view from nowhere to say that.
You just need to notice which maps get you killed less often.

What This Framework Enables

1. Progress without foundation myths

Science improves because reality resists bad models. Mediation doesn’t prevent progress; it’s the condition of it.

2. Critique without arrogance

You can rank perspectives without pretending to hover above them.

3. Cross-cultural dialogue without imperialism or despair

Cultures carve experience differently, but they’re carving the same underlying world. Translation is hard, not impossible.

4. Honest metaphysics

No glamourised escape from sensory embodiment, cognitive bias, or cultural inheritance.
Just the patient business of refining our mediated grip on the real.

What Perspectival Realism Actually Claims

Let me make the commitments explicit:

  1. There is a world independent of our representations.
  2. All access to it is mediated by perception, cognition, and culture.
  3. Perspectives can be compared because reality pushes back.
  4. No perspective is unmediated.
  5. The asymptote—Reality-as-it-is—is unreachable.

This isn’t pessimism.
It’s maturity.

Why This Is the First Ontology Without an Asterisk

Every worldview before this needed the quiet, shamefaced footnote:

  • Realism*: “But access is mediated.”
  • Idealism*: “But resistance is real.”
  • Perspectivism*: “But we still need to rank perspectives.”
  • Constructivism*: “But the world’s invariances aren’t constructs.”

Perspectival Realism eats the objections instead of dodging them.
There is no asterisk because the worldview is built from the asterisks.

No promises of transcendence.
No pretense of universality.
No linguistic sleight-of-hand.

Just embodied beings navigating a real world through fallible instruments, shared practices, and cultural grammars—occasionally catching a clearer glimpse, never stepping outside the frame.

The realism remains.
The universality does not.
And for once, metaphysics isn’t lying to you.

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 very article – the first 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.

Could I have improved on these articles if I had rewritten or polished them? Maybe. What’s the purpose? This is all a result of my concepts and inquiries. I endorse the output. I may return to make edits in future, or I may restate this information in my own voice, but for now, let this serve as notice that I am not afraid of generative AI; I am not afraid that it is going to supplant my thinking. I find that whilst I can prompt GPTs to make connexions or to query who else might be relevant to a topic, it doesn’t generally offer its own initiative, what we term Agency.

As for this particular post, it reads more like a listicle. I could have rendered it more expositional, but the structured thinking is all here; why should I reinvent the wheel just to put skin on these bones? As I said, perhaps I’ll flesh this out for elaboration or publication in future, for now, let this serve as a waypoint and a record of how I got here. This supplants my prior position, the asterisked Analytic Idealism, published in 2022, which supplanted my asterisked Realism. Perhaps I’ll finally be able to settle for an ontology and epistemology with no stars.

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The Great Substitution: From Metaphysics to Metaphysics

Posted in language, modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

(Now archived on Zenodo and PhilPapers)

Video: “Maintenance” Midjourney render of the cover image for no reason in particular.

As many have been before me, I find metaphysical claims to be incredulous. I read these people tear down edifices, yet they seem to have a habit of replacing one for another – as if renaming it makes it disappear. Perhaps Lacan would be curious how this persists at this stage of our supposed development.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing the underlying essay, The Great Substitution: From Metaphysics to Metaphysics

Because of this, I performed a survey – and then a genealogy – to trace the history of substitution. It began as a side note in The Discipline of Dis-Integration, but the pattern grew too large to ignore. Every time someone proclaims the end of metaphysics, a new one quietly takes its place. Theology becomes Reason. Reason becomes History. History becomes Structure. Structure becomes Data. The names change; the grammar doesn’t.

This essay, The Great Substitution: From Metaphysics to Metaphysics, tracks that recursion. It argues that modern thought has never killed its gods – it has merely rebranded them. Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Harari – each announced emancipation, and each built a new altar. We like to imagine that progress freed us from metaphysics, but what it really did was automate it. The temples are gone, but the servers hum.

The argument unfolds across ten short sections: from the limits of knowing, through the linguistic machinery of belief, to the modern cults of scientism, economics, psychology, and dataism. The closing sections introduce Dis-Integration – not a cure but a posture. Maintenance, not mastery. Thinking without kneeling.

If the Enlightenment promised illumination, we’ve spent the past three centuries staring directly into the light and calling it truth. This essay is my attempt to look away long enough to see what the glare has been hiding.

The Great Substitution: From Metaphysics to Metaphysics

A part of the Anti-Enlightenment Project corpus. More here.

The full text is archived here:

📄 Zenodo DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17576457
📘 PhilPapers entry: Under review

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Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Psychology of Totalitarianism

Posted in philosophy, psychologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I finished Mattias Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism, which I mentioned the other day. Unfortunately, my initial optimism was premature. Everything I enjoyed was front-loaded: the first four chapters set up a promising critique of mechanistic rationality and the collapse of shared meaning. Then the book turned into a long, therapeutic sermon. I should have stopped at Chapter 4 and saved myself the sunk-cost regret.

It isn’t that nothing follows; it’s just that what follows is so thin that the cost-benefit ratio goes negative. Once Desmet moves from diagnosis to prescription, the argument collapses into a psychologist’s worldview: an entire civilisation explained through mass neurosis and healed through better intuition. He builds his case on straw versions of reason, science, and modernity, so his ‘cure’ can look revelatory.

The trouble is familiar. Having dismantled rationalism, Desmet then installs intuition as its replacement – an epistemic monarchy by another name. His appeal to empathy and connection reads less like philosophy and more like professional self-promotion. The therapist can’t stop therapising; he privileges the psychological lens over every other possibility.

The result is a reductionist parascience dressed as social theory. The totalitarian mind, in Desmet’s telling, isn’t political or structural but psychological – a patient waiting for insight. I don’t doubt his sincerity, only his scope. It’s what happens when a discipline mistakes its vocabulary for the world.

Desmet’s project ultimately re-enchants what it claims to critique. He wants rationalism redeemed through feeling, order reborn through connection. Dis-Integrationism stops short of that impulse. It accepts fracture as the permanent condition – no higher synthesis, no therapeutic finale. Where Desmet sees totalitarianism as a collective pathology awaiting treatment, I see it as reason’s own reflection in the mirror: a system trying to cure itself of the only disease it knows, the need to be whole.