Socio-political philosophical musings
Wait for it… This parodies the use of language to sidestep Constitutional inconveniences. In the game show format, we learn what is and isn’t a war. Wittgenstein would be proud.
Watch this and build up your English language vocabulary.
NB: When I wrote ‘everything’, I meant ‘every nominal language reference’.
Philosophers have long comforted themselves with a tidy distinction: some language is literal, and some language is metaphorical. Literal language names things as they are; metaphor merely dresses thought in rhetorical clothing.
The trouble begins when one looks more closely at how language actually works.
Two very different thinkers – George Lakoff and Ludwig Wittgenstein – approach the problem from opposite directions. Yet taken together, their ideas produce a rather awkward conclusion: the category of metaphor may collapse under its own success.
EDIT: The algorithm gods served me this Substack article as I was writing this. I share it now because the author and I exchanged thoughts. Check it out.
George Lakoff’s work on conceptual metaphor starts with a deceptively simple claim: metaphor is not merely a stylistic flourish. It is part of the structure of thought itself. We do not merely speak metaphorically. We think metaphorically.
Consider a few familiar examples:
Lakoff’s point is not that these are poetic expressions. Rather, these metaphors organise how we reason about abstract domains. They structure cognition itself. So far, so interesting.
But once one notices how pervasive such mappings are, a problem begins to appear. If abstract reasoning depends on metaphorical projection from embodied experience, then metaphor is not a special case of language. It is the normal case. Literal language starts to look suspiciously rare.
The miracle is not that language fails sometimes. The miracle is that it works at all.
Wittgenstein arrives at a similar discomfort by a different route.
In the Philosophical Investigations, he dismantles the idea that words gain meaning by pointing to fixed essences. Instead, meaning arises from use within human practices.
His famous example is the word game. Board games, sports, children’s play, gambling, solitary puzzles. Try to identify the essence shared by all games and the category dissolves. What remains are overlapping similarities – what he calls family resemblances.
The word functions perfectly well in practice, yet no clean boundary defines its referent.
The implication is unsettling: even apparently straightforward nouns do not correspond to neat natural categories. They operate as practical shortcuts within forms of life.
Language works not because it mirrors the world precisely, but because communities stabilise usage long enough to get through the day.
Place Lakoff beside Wittgenstein and something odd happens. Lakoff shows that abstract reasoning depends on metaphorical structure. Wittgenstein shows that even ordinary categories lack fixed essences. The combined result is difficult to ignore: the supposedly literal core of language begins to evaporate.
Take a simple word like cat. It seems literal enough. Yet the world does not present us with tidy metaphysical units labelled CAT. What we encounter are patterns of behaviour, morphology, and recognition. The word compresses a complex set of experiences into a convenient symbol.
In practice, cat functions as a stand-in for a stabilised pattern within human life. It is a conceptual shortcut — a linguistic token that represents a distributed cluster of features. In other words, even the most ordinary noun already behaves suspiciously like a metaphor.
If Lakoff is right that much of thought is metaphorically structured, and Wittgenstein is right that categories lack fixed essences, the traditional contrast between literal and metaphorical language becomes unstable.
Push the reasoning far enough and the distinction collapses:
If it is everywhere, the category ceases to distinguish anything. It becomes like describing fish as “wet creatures.” Accurate, but not especially illuminating. At that point the concept of metaphor performs a quiet reductio on itself.
Fortunately, the collapse of the literal–metaphorical boundary does not render language useless. It merely changes how we understand it.
Words are not mirrors of reality. They are tools for coordinating experience. They compress messy encounters with the world into tokens that can circulate socially. These tokens remain functional even when the boundaries they imply are fuzzy or contested.
Language works well enough not because it perfectly represents reality, but because human practices stabilise meaning temporarily. Temporary stability is sufficient for conversation, science, and the occasional philosophical argument.
Lakoff reveals the metaphorical scaffolding beneath abstract thought. Wittgenstein shows that even ordinary categories rest on shifting ground. Together they suggest something rather humbling.
Language is not a system of precise mirrors reflecting the world. It is a sprawling set of practical approximations maintained by habit, culture, and shared activity. The miracle is not that language fails sometimes. The miracle is that it works at all.
This video uses the gender debate to help explain how ontology and grammar render discourse incommensurable, based on my essay, Grammatical Failure: Why Liberal Epistemology Cannot Diagnose Indoctrination.
I’ve been thinking through dozens of use cases to explain how some polemic positions are intractable via language. When they are resolved through power, at least one ontological cohort is left wanting. In a compromise, likely both sides feel they’ve lost.
I’ll post a separate announcement presently, but I want to share my new Legibility GPT to assess concepts for ontological and grammatical commensurability.
In conventional (read: orthodox Enlightenment thinking), communication and negotiation are supposed to bring groups together. This is only true for intra-ontological conflict; it’s never been true for inter-ontological issues. There are edge cases where differing ontologies might be satisfied with an inter-ontological agreement, but this is likely accidental and certainly differently motivated. Not all such disagreements can be mediated, and this is where power politics steps in – not to ameliorate but to force the matter. This happens in politics, law, and many other power-oriented domains.
These two words qualify as my words of the month: legibility and ontology.
I’ve been using them as lenses.
I picked up legibility from James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, which is really a book about how well-intentioned schemes fail once reality is forced to become administrable. Ontology is an older philosophical workhorse, usually paired with epistemology, but I’m using it here in a looser, more pragmatic sense.
When I write, I write through lenses. Everyone does. Writing requires a point of view, even when we pretend otherwise.
In this post, I want to talk more informally about my recent essay, Grammatical Failure. I usually summarise my work elsewhere, but here I want to think out loud about it, particularly in relation to social ontology and epistemology. I won’t linger on definitions. They’re a search away. But a little framing helps.
Ontology, roughly: how reality is parsed.
Epistemology: how knowledge is justified within that parsing.
Much of my recent work sits downstream of thinkers like Thomas Sowell, George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt, Kurt Gray, and Joshua Greene. Despite their differences, they converge on a shared insight: human cognition is largely motivated preverbally. As a philosopher of language, that pre-language layer is where my interest sharpens.
I explored this in earlier work, including a diptych titled The Grammar of Impasse – Conceptual Exhaustion and Causal Mislocation. Writing is how I gel these ideas. There are several related pieces still in the pipeline.
When I talk about grammar, I don’t mean Saussure or Chomsky. I mean something deeper: the ontological substrate beneath belief. Grammar, in this sense, is how reality gets parsed before beliefs ever form. It filters what can count as real, salient, or intelligible.
Let’s use a deliberately simplified example.
Imagine two ontological orientations. Call them Ont-C and Ont-L. This isn’t to say there are only two, but much of Western political discourse collapses into a binary anyway.
Ont-C tends to experience people as inherently bad, dangerous, or morally suspect. Ont-L tends to experience people as inherently good or at least corrigible. These aren’t opinions in the usual sense. They sit beneath belief, closer to affect and moral orientation.
Now consider retributive justice, setting aside the fact that justice itself is a thick concept.
From Ont-C, punishment teaches a lesson. It deters. It disciplines. From Ont-L, punishment without rehabilitation looks cruel or counterproductive, and the transgression itself may be read as downstream of systemic injustice.
Each position can acknowledge exceptions. Ont-L knows there are genuinely broken people. Ont-C knows there are saints. But those are edge cases, not defaults.
Now ask Ont-C and Ont-L to design a criminal justice system together. The result will feel intolerable to both. Too lenient. Too harsh. The disagreement isn’t over policy details. It’s over how reality is carved up in the first place.
And this is only one dimension.
Add others. Bring in Ont-V and Ont-M if you like, for vegan and meat-based ontologies. Suddenly, you have Ont-CV, Ont-CM, Ont-LV, and Ont-LM. Then add class, religion, gender, authority, harm, and whatever. Intersectionality stops looking like a solution and starts looking like a combinatorial explosion.
The Ont-Vs can share a meal, so long as they don’t talk politics.
The structure isn’t just unstable. It was never stable to begin with. We imagine foundations because legibility demands them.
Grammatical Failure is an attempt to explain why this instability isn’t a bug in liberal epistemology but a structural feature. The grammar does the sorting long before deliberation begins.
More on that soon.
In any case, once you start applying this ontological lens to other supposedly intractable disputes, you quickly realise that their intractability is not accidental.
Take abortion.
If we view the issue through the lenses of Ont-A (anti-abortion) and Ont-C (maternal choice), we might as well be peering through Ont-Oil and Ont-Water. The disagreement does not occur at the level of policy preferences or competing values. It occurs at the level of what counts as morally salient in the first place.
There is no middle ground here. No middle path. No synthesis waiting to be negotiated into existence.
That is not because the participants lack goodwill, intelligence, or empathy. It is because the ontological primitives are incommensurate. Each side experiences the other not as mistaken but as unintelligible.
We can will compromise all we like. The grammar does not comply.
Contemporary discourse often insists otherwise. It tells us that better arguments, clearer framing, or more dialogue will eventually converge. From this perspective, that insistence is not hopeful. It is confused. It mistakes a grammatical fracture for a deliberative failure.
You might try to consider other polemic topics and notice the same interplay.
I recently shared a post calling out mystics, trying to fill spaces I deflate, but I am self-aware enough that I can be guilty, too. I worry about Maslow’s Law of the Instrument. Deflationary philosophy likes to imagine itself as immune to excess. It dissolves puzzles, clears away bad questions, and resists the urge to add metaphysical upholstery where none is needed. No mysteries, thank you. No hidden depths. Just conceptual hygiene. This self-image is mostly deserved. But not indefinitely. This post is an attitude check.
Because deflation, like anything that works, can ossify. And when it does, it doesn’t inflate into metaphysics. It hardens into something more embarrassing: a ritual of refusal.
Deflation begins as a method:
At its best, this is liberating. It frees us from chasing shadows and mistaking grammatical artefacts for ontological puzzles. The trouble begins when the gesture outlives the job.
What was once a diagnostic move becomes a stylistic tic. Refusal becomes automatic. Silence becomes performative. ‘There is nothing there’ is delivered not as a conclusion, but as a posture. At that point, deflation stops doing work and starts doing theatre.
I am often charged with being negative, a pessimist, a relativist, and a subjectivist. I am sometimes each of these. Mostly, I am a Dis–Integrationist and deflationist, as it were. I like to tear things apart – not out of malice, but seeing that certain things just don’t sit quite right.
Another thing I do is to take things at face value. As I came up through the postmodern tradition, I don’t trust metanarratives, and I look for them everywhere. This is why I wrote A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH), and even more so, the Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW). Some words carry a lot of baggage and connotation, so I want to be sure I understand the rawest form. This is why I rail on about weasel words like truth, justice, freedom, and such.
I also refrain from responding if I am not satisfied with a definition. This is why I consider myself an igntheist as opposed to an atheist. Functionally, I am the latter, but the definition I’d be opposing is so inane that it doesn’t even warrant me taking a position.
There is a quiet prestige attached to not answering questions. Refusal sounds serious. Restraint sounds wise. Silence, in the right lighting, sounds profound. This is not an accident. Our intellectual culture has learned to associate verbal minimalism with depth, much as it associates verbosity with insecurity. Deflationary philosophers are not immune to this aesthetic pull.
When ‘I reject the question’ becomes a default response rather than a considered judgement, deflation has slipped from method into mannerism. The absence of claims becomes a badge. The lack of commitments becomes an identity. One is no longer clearing space, but occupying emptiness.
This is how deflation acquires a style – and styles are how rituals begin.
Mysticism has its negative theology. Ritualised deflation develops something similar.
Both rely on:
The difference is meant to be procedural. Mysticism stops at the silence. Deflation is supposed to pass through it. But when deflation forgets that its silence is provisional, it starts to resemble the thing it set out to criticise. Absence becomes sacred again, just without the cosmology. The metaphysician worships what cannot be said. The ritualised deflationist admires themselves for not saying it. Neither is doing conceptual work anymore.
This is where Ludwig Wittgenstein inevitably reappears, not as an authority, but as a warning. Wittgenstein did not think philosophy ended in silence because silence was holy. He thought philosophy ended in silence because the confusion had been resolved. The ladder was to be thrown away, not mounted on the wall and admired. Unfortunately, ladders make excellent décor.
When deflation becomes ritual, the therapeutic move freezes into liturgy. The gesture is preserved long after its purpose has expired. What was meant to end a problem becomes a way of signalling seriousness. That was never the point.
There is a simple question that separates disciplined deflation from its ritualised cousin:
And affects, once stabilised, are indistinguishable from rituals.
The corrective is not to abandon deflation, but to remember its scope.
Deflation should be:
Some questions need dissolving. Some need answering. Some need rephrasing. Knowing which is which is the entire discipline. Deflation is not a worldview. It is not a temperament. It is not a lifestyle choice. It is a tool, and like all tools, it should be put down when it stops fitting the task.
There is a temptation, once a room has been cleared, to linger in it. To admire the quiet. To mistake the absence of furniture for the presence of insight. But clearing space is not a vocation. It is a task. Once it is done, staying behind is just another way of refusing to leave. And refusal, repeated without reason, is no longer philosophy. It is choreography.
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.
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.
The struggle is real. There is an odd occupational hazard that comes with writing deflationary philosophy: mystics keep turning up to thank you for your service.
This is always mildly bewildering. One spends a great deal of time dismantling metaphysical furniture, only to discover a small group lighting incense in the newly cleared space. Candles appear. Silence thickens. Someone whispers ineffable. Nope. The filing cabinet was just mislabeled.
It is tempting to think this is a simple misreading: I say this concept breaks down here, and someone hears you have glimpsed the ultimate. But that’s too kind. What’s really happening is more interesting. Mysticism does not merely misunderstand deflationary work; it feeds on the same linguistic moves and then stops too early.
Both mysticism and deflation rely on negative gestures:
Up to this point, they are indistinguishable. The fork comes immediately after. The mystic treats conceptual failure as an endpoint. The silence itself becomes the destination. Something deep must live there, humming quietly, just out of reach.
The deflationist treats the same failure as a transition. The silence is not sacred. It’s a signal. It means: this tool no longer fits; pick another or move on. Same breakdown. Entirely different posture.
Much deflationary philosophy clears space. It removes assumptions that were doing illicit work and leaves behind something quieter, simpler, and occasionally disappointing.
Mysticism has a standing policy of consecrating cleared space. An empty room is never just empty. It must be pregnant with meaning. Absence becomes depth. Silence becomes revelation. The fewer claims you make, the more cosmic you must be.
This is not a philosophical disagreement so much as a difference in temperament. One side sees subtraction. The other experiences loss and rushes to compensate. Modern intellectual culture strongly prefers addition. New layers. Hidden structures. Further depths. Deflation feels like theft. So it gets reinterpreted as a subtler form of enrichment: Ah, fewer words, therefore more truth.
There is also an aesthetic problem, which I increasingly suspect does most of the damage. Deflationary philosophy, when done well, tends to sound calm, patient, and restrained. It does not shout. It does not posture. It does not perform certainty. Unfortunately, this is exactly how profundity is supposed to sound.
Quiet seriousness is easily mistaken for spiritual depth. Refusal to speculate reads as wisdom. Negative definition acquires an apophatic glow. This is how one ends up being mistaken for a mystic without having said anything mystical at all.
This is not a new problem. Ludwig Wittgenstein spent a good portion of his career trying to convince people that philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. He was not pointing at a deeper reality beyond words. He was pointing back at the words and saying: look at what you’re doing with these.
Unfortunately, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” has proven irresistible to those who think silence is where the real action is. Wittgenstein meant: stop here. Many readers heard: kneel here. This is the recurring fate of therapeutic philosophy. The cure gets mistaken for a sacrament.
Another contributor to the confusion is tone. Deflationary work tends to be charitable. It explains why certain intuitions arise. It traces confusions to their sources. It does not sneer. This generosity is often misheard as validation. When you say, “It makes sense that we think this way,” some readers hear, “Your intuition is pointing at something profound.” You are offering an explanation. They are receiving an affirmation. At that point, no disclaimer will save you. Any denial is absorbed as further evidence that you are brushing up against something too deep to articulate.
The disagreement here is not about reality. It is about what to do when explanation fails.
Mysticism treats failure as revelation. Deflation treats failure as diagnostic.
One sanctifies the breakdown. The other changes tools.
Once you see this, the repeated misfire stops being frustrating and starts being predictable.
There is, admittedly, a risk on the other side as well. Deflation can become mystical if it turns into ritual. If refusal hardens into identity. If “there is nothing there” becomes something one performs rather than concludes. Even subtraction can acquire ceremony if repeated without purpose. The discipline, such as it is, lies in knowing when to clear space—and when to leave the room.
When a metaphysical idol is removed, someone will always ask what god is meant to replace it. The deflationary answer is often disappointing: none. This will never satisfy everyone. But the room is cleaner now, and that has its own quiet reward—even if someone insists on lighting incense in the corner.
I Am a Qualified Subjectivist. No, That Does Not Mean ‘Anything Goes’.
Make no mistake: I am a subjectivist. A qualified one. Not that kind of qualified – the qualification matters, but it’s rarely the part anyone listens to.
Here is the unglamorous starting point: all human encounters with the world are mediated. There is no raw feed. No unfiltered access. No metaphysical lead running directly from ‘reality’ into the human mind. Every encounter is processed through bodies, nervous systems, cultures, languages, technologies, institutions, and histories.
Whilst I discuss the specific architecture of this mediation at length in this preprint, here I will keep it simple.
If you are human, you do not encounter reality as such. You encounter it as processed. This is not controversial. What is controversial is admitting the obvious consequence: the subject is the final arbiter.
Every account of truth, reality, meaning, value, or fact is ultimately adjudicated by a subject. Not because subjects are sovereign gods, but because there is literally no other place adjudication can occur.
Who, exactly, do critics imagine is doing the adjudicating instead? A neutral tribunal floating outside experience? A cosmic referee with a clipboard? A universal consciousness we all forgot to log into?
There is no one else.
This does not mean that truth is ‘whatever I feel like’. It means that truth-claims only ever arrive through a subject, even when they are heavily constrained by the world. And constraint matters. Reality pushes back. Environments resist. Bodies fail. Gravity does not care about your personal narrative.
Solipsism says: only my mind exists. That is not my claim. My claim is almost boring by comparison: subjects are situated, not sovereign.
We are shaped by environments we did not choose and histories we did not write. Mediation does not eliminate reality; it is how reality arrives. Your beliefs are not free-floating inventions; they are formed under biological, social, and material pressure. Two people can be exposed to the same event and encounter it differently because the encounter is not the event itself – it is the event as mediated through a particular orientation.
At this point, someone usually says: ‘But surely some things are objectively true.’
Yes. And those truths are still encountered subjectively. The mistake is thinking that objectivity requires a ‘view from nowhere’. It doesn’t. It requires stability across mediations, not the elimination of mediation altogether. We treat some claims as objective because they hold up under variation, while others fracture immediately. But in all cases, the encounter still happens somewhere, to someone.
The real anxiety here is not philosophical. It’s moral and political. People are terrified that if we give up the fantasy of unmediated access to universal truth, then legitimacy collapses and ‘anything goes’.
This is a category error born of wishful thinking. What actually collapses is the hope that semantic convergence is guaranteed. Once you accept that mediation is unavoidable, you are forced to confront a harder reality: disagreement is often structural, not corrigible. Language does not fail because nothing is true. Language fails because too much is true, incompatibly.
Interpretation only ever occurs through subjects. Subjects are always mediated. Mediation is always constrained. And constraint does not guarantee convergence.
That is the position. It is not radical, fashionable, or comforting. It is simply what remains once you stop pretending there is a god’s-eye view quietly underwriting your arguments. Discomfort is simply a reliable indicator that a fantasy has been disturbed.
If all this sounds suspiciously familiar, that’s because it is. Heidegger had a word for it: Geworfenheit – usually translated as thrownness.
The idea is simple, and deeply irritating to anyone still hoping for a clean start. You do not enter the world as a neutral observer. You are thrown into it: into a body, a language, a culture, a history, a set of institutions, a moment you did not choose. You do not begin from nowhere and then acquire a perspective. You begin already situated, already oriented, already implicated.
This is not a poetic flourish. It is a structural claim about human existence.
What my qualified subjectivism insists on – without Heidegger’s ontological theatre – is the same basic constraint: there is no view from nowhere because there is no nowhere to stand. The subject does not float above mediation; the subject is constituted by it. Thrownness is not an accident to be corrected by better theory. It is the condition under which any theorising occurs at all.
Seen this way, the demand for pure objectivity starts to look less like a philosophical ideal and more like nostalgia for an impossible innocence. A wish to rewind existence to a point before bodies, languages, power, and history got involved. That point never existed.
Geworfenheit matters here because it dissolves the caricature that subjectivism is about arbitrary choice. Being thrown is the opposite of choosing freely. It is constraint before reflection. Orientation before argument. Salience before reasons. You do not decide what matters from a neutral menu; what matters shows up already weighted, already charged, already resistant.
This is why appeals to “just be objective” always ring hollow. Objectivity does not mean escaping thrownness. It means achieving relative stability within it. Some claims hold across many thrown positions. Others fracture immediately. That distinction matters. But none of it happens outside mediation.
So when I say the subject is the final arbiter, I am not crowning the subject king of reality. I am pointing out the obvious: adjudication happens somewhere, to someone, from within a situation they did not author. Thrownness guarantees that there is no cosmic referee waiting to overrule the encounter.
If that makes you uncomfortable, good. It should. Discomfort is often just the sensation of a fantasy losing its grip.
I published A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis this month, and this is one of a series of videos summarising the content. In this segment, I’m discussing Chapter 1: A Genealogy of Insufficiency
In this video, I touch on Plato to Barthes and Foucault. Derrida gets no love, and I mention bounded rationality, but not Simon. I discuss Steven Pinker’s dissent in more detail in a later chapter.
Below, I’ve included some artefacts from the book.
And always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you.
— Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography
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.
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:
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.
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 