I think your reply helps make the divergence between us very clear. You’re treating phenomenal character as something like an epistemic instrument - a reading from which we infer how the world is, much like a thermometer reading. To be fair, this is how many direct realists treat it as well. My point is that the thermometer analogy already builds in the representational role that I’m denying. On the view I’m defending, phenomenal character is not a “reading” at all. It is not truth-apt, not accurate or inaccurate, and not something whose reliability is assessed independently of judgment.

That’s why I don’t think the epistemic question is “can we trust that the world is as it appears?” Appearances don’t make claims, so they aren’t candidates for trust or distrust. Judgments make claims. Error and skepticism arise at the level of judgment, not at the level of experience as such.

For that reason, I don’t accept the biconditional tying direct realism to P2. My view doesn’t require that phenomenal character be explained by an object’s qualitative property manifesting itself in experience. What matters for my approach to realism is that the intelligible structures grasped in understanding and affirmed in judgment are the very structures instantiated in the world. Once that is in place, rejecting P2 doesn’t entail indirect realism - it entails the rejection of a particular kind of direct realism that is based on (what I consider to be) a faulty account of how experience secures knowledge.

In other words, I'm rejecting one of the key assumptions that the traditional dilemma is based on.

I agree with you that (1), (2), and (3) can all be true, and I also agree that in that context “red” and “orange” refer to phenomenal character rather than wavelength. Where I part company is with the claim that phenomenal character thereby functions as an epistemic intermediary.

On the view I’m defending, "phenomenal character" is not what John or Jane are making inferences about. Phenomenal character does not assert anything about wavelengths, nor does it justify any belief. What does the epistemic work is their background understanding of light, screens, and illumination conditions, together with a judgment about what is the case. Jane’s mistake is not located in her sensory experience - it is located in a false judgment about wavelength.

If phenomenal character were itself an epistemic intermediary, then error would have to be traced back to it as being inaccurate or misleading. But in your own example, nothing is wrong with the experience as such; what is wrong is the judgment made on its basis. That’s exactly why I resist treating phenomenal character as representational in the epistemic sense. It conditions inquiry, but it is not what our judgments are about.

The point I am making is that even if the environment has properties that resemble the properties that manifest in sensory experience (as naive colour primitivists would claim), and even if English grammar describes the interaction between the body and the environment as "seeing the environment", if there is such a thing as sensory content distinct from the environment then it's still indirect realism. — Michael

I see what you are saying, but I would argue that indirect realism has traditionally claimed something a bit narrower than that. I don't think indirect realism follows from the mere fact that "something" mediates the connection between mind and world. It seems to also require that this "something" has the following characteristics:

(1) It represents some aspect of the world
(2) It is itself the direct object of perception

In other words, this "something" needs to act as an epistemic intermediary rather than a merely causal intermediary, irrespective of how that epistemic role is theoretically cashed-out (e.g. representation, resemblance or something else).

For my part, I would deny both (1) and (2). Inherent to my denial of (1) is the denial that sensory qualities as-such ("redness", "sweetness", "loudness") represent or resemble features of the world. I don't think they need to. Instead, I would say that sensory qualities simply need to provide enough data for the intellect to grasp the structures, patterns, unities and dependencies that exist in the world. These are relational rather than qualitative, and the point is that the very same relations grasped by the intellect are instantiated in the world itself. That is my understanding of what it means for the mind to make direct contact with reality.

To push this a little farther, we could argue that this is what makes science possible. It enables us to accept that sensory qualities are not "out-there" in any naive sense while still maintaining that science has some theoretical purchase on the world.

You say: "What is judged to be the case and the presupposition are the very same."
I say: "The judgment and the fact that satisfies it are still distinguishable in kind."

You say: "Now how can one be in error about your reading this, here, now? There seems to be no such possibility."
I say: "Error is only impossible in this case because answerability is immediately fulfilled, not because it has disappeared."

You say: "Calling it a limit case is special pleading."
I say: "Calling it a limit case is correctly identifying it for what it is."

As explained in my previous reply, it is a limit case precisely because the answerability relation is immediately fulfilled - not eliminated. I explained how the representational gap widens again as you move away from the limit case. This is precisely how we would expect a limit case to function.

You say: "If you were right, truth would be normatively grounded in reality, not practice."
I say: "Norms of truth are constituted in practice as norms of answerability to reality."

Norms are made by practice, but are about getting things right - which is why practice can fail.

Practice and reality are not competitors here. They play different roles.

Thank you for the clarifications with regard to the existence of mental imagery. I think this will help us hone in on the core issue.

My view is that in the hallucination case I am perceiving mental imagery, whereas in the good case I am perceiving a mind-external object. I take it that our minds can copy good-case perceptual experiences and store these copies (and we call upon these copies in memory and imagination). And as these are copies, they - these mental images - can create in us an experience indistinguishable from perceiving the object they are depicting. — Clarendon

Thanks for confirming your view on these matters. You say that in cases of hallucination we perceive a mental image; in cases of veridical perception it is the external object itself that we perceive. So the difference between hallucination and veridical perception is the object of perception, not the perceptual relation itself. This makes sense.

Where I think you may still have an issue is in your treatment of indistinguishability. Your account requires that an external object and a mental image can lead to the same phenomenal experience. So what we have is:

Step 1: Hallucination case
Object of perception = mental image
Phenomenal experience = X

Step 2: Good case
Object of perception = mind-external object
Phenomenal experience = X

So on your own account, the same phenomenal experience (X) can be generated by both a mental image and an external object. The indirect realist will ask: "if hallucination achieves X via a mental image alone and veridical perception adds an external object without altering X in any way, then mental images are sufficient to explain X in all cases. If mental images are sufficient to explain X, what explanatory work is the external object doing in producing X?".

In other words, your account of direct realism does not rule out indirect realism or the "improper" forms of direct realism you were concerned to distinguish your view from, since the these others can leverage your own explanation of indistinguishability in support of their model.

Now, this doesn't show that your account is incoherent, nor does it show that you are forced to accept indirect realism. It only shows that the indirect realist can happily accept your account and, if they wish, eliminate direct perception in the veridical case on grounds of parsimony.

You might not want to describe the latter as "seeing a mental representation" but it would still be the case that sensory content is a mental representation, and I would say that that's all it takes for indirect realism to be true. — Michael

I don’t think it’s correct to say that sensory content is a mental representation. Representations, in the epistemic sense relevant here, have a normative valence - they can be accurate or inaccurate, correct or incorrect, better or worse. Sensory content does not function this way within cognition. It does not assert, refer, or purport to get things right. Representation, in that sense, is the job of judgment.

We then have an epistemological problem to address. If sensory content is a mental representation then can we trust that it is accurate, in the sense that the sensory content resembles the distal object. — Michael

You’re right that if sensory content were a mental representation, then we’d face the epistemological problem you describe. But if sensory content is not a representation in that sense, then it’s not the kind of thing that can be inaccurate or misleading to begin with. It is only it judgments that can be accurate or inaccurate. And while those judgments are conditioned and motivated by sensory contents, they are not about sensory contents, but about how the world is.

Then isn't a veridical experience the experience of imagery plus a true judgement? I believe Clarendon is just saying that the imagery (mental phenomena) that occurs when we hallucinate is indistinguishable from the imagery that occurs when we have veridical experiences. — Michael

Yes, and I agree. Where I would push back is on the idea that imagery itself is the object of judgment.

Take the example of hallucinating a ship. We have (at least) two acts on the part of the subject: sensation and judgment. While the judgment is dependent on the sensory content, it is not about the sensory content.

Furthermore, sensation is not truth-apt: it does not refer, assert, or commit. It does not make a claim about whether anything does or does not exist. That is what judgment does. Insofar as perception makes such a claim, I would say it includes a judgment of existence, and in that respect is distinct from mere sensation.

So it may be that the sensory content is the same in both veridical and non-veridical cases. What distinguishes them is the correctness of the judgment, which is determined by the way the world is, not by the sensory content. In the hallucinatory case, the judgment fails not because it is about a non-existent object, but because nothing in the world satisfies it.

I think it is a problem for @Clarendon specifically because the way that he leverages them in his model undermines his commitment to direct realism.

More generally, though, I agree with you - I don't think that we can sensibly reject the existence of mental images. But I do think we need to be careful about the epistemological and ontological roles we assign to them.

I can't claim to have this all sorted out, but I am wary of reifying mental images into objects of perception rather than treating them as features of experience that condition our judgments. Once images are treated as perceptual objects, they begin to play exactly the mediating role that indirect realists have historically relied on, which is a move that I am resistant to.

For that reason, I would tend to say that a hallucination is not the perception of an image, but the experience of imagery plus a false judgment.

I'll take a stab at this, since I think that @Richard B's critique is on the right track.

You've introduced "mental images" into your model in order to explain hallucination. This introduces an instability within your position that indirect realists have been capitalizing on for centuries in order to show that direct realism is untenable.

The problem is that you appear to be explaining indistinguishability in terms of identity within phenomenal experience (I.e. identical “appearing object”). This is ambiguous. If by "appearing object" you just mean an object within phenomenal experience - i.e. an object directly present to consciousness - then you've already collapsed into indirect realism since now the direct object of perception in both veridical and non-veridical experience is a phenomenal object.

If, on the other hand, the “appearing object” is not what is directly present to consciousness (i.e. objects within phenomenal experience), then they cannot secure identity within experience at all, and so cannot explain why hallucination and perception are indistinguishable as experiences. In that case the appeal to mental images does no explanatory work.

So, either you must give up on explaining indistinguishability in terms of the identity of "appearing objects" within experience, or you must give up on direct realism.

If we say "Rational inquiry", I think I can agree. — Philosophim

I think that’s a helpful way of putting it. If we restrict the discussion to rational inquiry - inquiry aimed at truth rather than persuasion, expression, or validation or anything else - then I agree that we’re talking about something governed by norms of rational correctness. That’s the sense of inquiry I’ve been trying to isolate.

I think your reply helps move the discussion forward, so thank you for spelling it out.

I don't think the “reading” case provides a counter-example to my claim that judgment presupposes answerability to how things are. On the contrary, even here the judgment is true because things are a certain way, and would be false if they were not. What the example shows is that there are cases where answerability is immediate - leaving no room for representational error - not that answerability is absent altogether. I take these as a limit-case, not a counter-example.

As soon as we move beyond such limit cases to claims about past events, theoretical entities, or explanations of why things are as they are, the distinction between misusing words and misrepresenting reality explicitly reasserts itself. In those cases, practice can fix criteria for correct application, but it does not itself make the judgment correct.

You could argue that all discourse can be inferentially grounded in limit-case claims, but since inference preserves only entailment rather than fulfillment of conditions, this wouldn't address worries about the regress of conditions.

My point is that inferential articulation does not exhaust the normativity of judgment. Inferential articulation explains how judgments are connected; it does not explain what it is for an inferentially licensed judgment to be wrong about the world.

That is why I resist the claim that practice can exhaust the notion of truth. The “reading” example merely shows what judgment looks like when answerability is transparently fulfilled, not that answerability can be replaced by practice. Inquiry in general presupposes that there is a way things are that judgments answer to or fail to answer to, and it is such failure that we mean by "error".

I agree with most of what you said here, especially at the level of psychology and development. People clearly differ in temperament, in how much they question their judgments, and in how they experience the relation between themselves and the world. And it’s also true that much of our engagement with the world is unreflective and action-oriented rather than constantly critical.

The distinction I am trying to draw is a little different. It’s not about the different ways that people can come to recognize the independence of reality, or the temperamental and development differences that lead them to engage with reality in different ways. It’s about what commitments are implicitly presupposed in the act of inquiry itself.

Consider the act of asking a question. It might seem at first that there’s not much to such an act, but I would argue that there is a lot that is implicit within it. For example, asking a question presupposes that there is something to ask about. It presupposes that we already know something about it, but also that we don’t yet know everything about it—otherwise there would be no point in asking.

In other words, there is a logic and a set of commitments that are implicitly presupposed in the act of asking a question. To say that these things are “presupposed” is to say that the act of asking a question would be incoherent without them; they are constitutive of what it means to ask a question. To say that they are “implicit” is to acknowledge the fact they generally remain out of conscious awareness while performing the act. It is only through philosophical reflection upon what it is we are doing when we ask a question that these presuppositions are made explicit.

So what I am arguing is that robust notions of truth, error and reality are implicitly presupposed within inquiry as norms governing correctness, and that these are not reducible to weaker notions such as endorsement, misuse or coherence without loss. When we engage in inquiry we are intrinsically oriented toward a reality that is determinate independently of our beliefs. If we weren’t, notions like truth, error and reality would lose their meaning and inquiry would become unrecognizable in comparison to what we actually do and say in practice.

If this is still unclear, no worries. I have really enjoyed our conversation. It has given me plenty to think about, and I hope it has for you as well.

I think you’re right about contradiction doing real work here, and I agree that it shows our judgments are not sovereign over reality. Where I’d want to press a little further is on what makes contradiction count as error in the first place.

My point isn’t just that we can be contradicted, but that when contradiction occurs, we take it to show that our judgment was wrong about how things are, not merely overridden by a new experience. That normative force doesn’t come from the contradiction itself, but from the fact that judgment already aims at a determinate way things are.

Put differently: contradiction doesn’t create objectivity; it reveals a failure relative to an objectivity that judgment already presupposes. Even in cases where no contradiction ever shows up, we still take our judgments to be answerable to how things really are, not merely to what has survived so far.

So I think we’re actually very close on this issue. I’d just want to say that the possibility of contradiction has its significance only because judgment is already oriented toward a reality that is determinate independently of our beliefs, not merely because we sometimes get corrected by experience.

So what I'm looking for in your response is "what judgment itself presupposes" so that a judgement can be true or false. — Banno

I’ve already addressed this point several times. Briefly: judgment presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error. I don’t think restating this again in detail will move the discussion forward.

Is this concerning the branch of Agrippa’s trilemma that results in an infinite regress? — Banno

No. I’m not concerned with an infinite regress of reasons, but with an infinite regress of conditions—conditions of being right rather than reasons we happen to give.

So now you have two notions of truth... — Banno

I’m not introducing two notions of truth or explanation. What I’m saying is that if we deny that truth involves answerability to how things really are, or that explanation aims at getting things right about how things really are, then what remains is no longer recognizable as truth or explanation. Instead we are left with weaker surrogates (endorsement, acceptance, coherence) that cannot carry the same epistemological weight within inquiry.

Let's start with an example. I think that if I ask you if you are reading this post, here, and now, you would quite rightly judge that you are....So here, the condition and the judgement are the very same — Banno

I don’t think that follows. The condition is a state of affairs; the judgment is an act of affirming that state of affairs. They may coincide extensionally in this case, but they are not identical in kind.

I'm not suggesting that your judgement is based on some observation of yourself reading, but that what you are now doing counts as reading. — Banno

Practice determines what would count as being right, but it does not (and cannot) itself make a judgment right.

So someone who denies that you are reading isn't mistaken as to the facts, but as to the words we use to set them out. — Banno

That may be right for this particular case, but it doesn’t generalize. In many cases of disagreement—scientific, historical, or ordinary—we treat people as mistaken about how things are, not merely about how words are used. Reducing error to misuse doesn’t capture that distinction.

And here we have avoided the picture of "conditions all the way down". Our justification is this is just what we do. — Banno

Appealing to “what we do” avoids conditions all the way down only by treating truth as exhausted by acceptability within practice. But acceptability cannot do the same epistemological work as truth.

Notice also that it's not some "fact of the matter" that settles the discussion. — Banno

If no fact of the matter ever settles anything, then the distinction between misrepresentation and mere misuse disappears. That distinction is doing real work in inquiry and cannot simply be set aside.

The pattern here should be familiar. There's the intuition that there must be something firm - absolute, necessary, unconditional - upon which we build whatever it is we are building. — Banno

This mischaracterizes my position. There’s an important difference between (1) trying to build inquiry on an absolute foundation and (2) reflectively identifying what inquiry itself presupposes in order to function as inquiry.

Perhaps this should not surprise us, since we know that at least for the case of a simple formal system that is capable of doing counting, it might be consistent but it can never be complete... — Banno

I agree that we shouldn’t expect completeness, and I haven’t suggested otherwise. But invoking Gödel here actually cuts against a practice-exhaustive conception of truth rather than supporting it. Gödel’s result shows that (1) truth outruns formal derivability, (2) consistency does not collapse into completeness, and (3) there are truths that hold even though they cannot be proven within the system. Notably, this presupposes a notion of truth that is not exhausted by system-relative coherence.

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I think we have reached the point in the discussion where further clarification is unlikely to be productive. Thank you for the interesting discussion.

Forgive me if you're already replying to my last post. I figured this would be a good summary. — Philosophim

Not at all! I'm glad that you jumped in with a response.

I don't think there's any possible way to know what is true outside of ourselves, but it is true to know our own experiences in themselves. I hope that summarizes the point I was trying to make in my last post. — Philosophim

Yes, it does, thank you. I actually agree with you on this; we do not have access to a god's eye view that would enable us to exhaustively answer all possible questions. But the notion of a "fact-of-the-matter" that I’m working doesn't require this. It requires only that judgments be answerable to how things are, independently of whether we ever fully grasp them. When we say that a claim about the world is wrong (not merely incomplete or misapplied) we are presupposing that there is a determinate way things are that the claim fails to answer to.

So it’s not a question of whether the results of inquiry are always provisional or contextually-scoped in practice, but whether the act of inquiry (especially in acts of judgement) itself presupposes that reality is unconditionally determinate independent of our provisional conclusions about it, thereby preserving robust notions of truth and error.

Modal semantics can only function as semantics if it is embedded in practices of judgment that distinguish getting things right from merely playing a consistent formal game. — Banno

Yes.

To say of some sentence, that it is true, is to make a commitment, to take responsibility. — Banno

Yes.

This commitment is to something's being the case, and not otherwise. That given what I take to be the relevant conditions, denying p would be an error? — Banno

Yes.

But "Given the conditions, it cannot be otherwise" here is not modal, so much as epistemic. — Banno

The move to the unconditioned is not made by upgrading epistemic necessity into modal necessity, It is made by reflecting on what judgment itself presupposes in order to be truth-apt at all.

If our operating notion of reality were such that reality is conditioned all the way down, then for any claim, further conditions could always be demanded such that no fact, state of affairs or claim could ever be counted as truly settled.

This is not the same as saying merely that we are finite and fallible, or that inquiry is ongoing. It implies something much stronger - namely, that there is no fact of the matter that could ever settle a judgment as finally correct, because any purported settlement is always relative to a context, stage or set of conditions that could always, in principle, be revised.

Now consider what it means to assert that the denial of a claim is truly wrong. It means something like “even given all relevant considerations, ¬p fails to answer to how things really are”. That requires an implicit commitment to (1) their being such a thing as “all relevant considerations,” at least in principle and (2) that p is settled by how things really are, not just by where we happen to be currently situated within inquiry.

If we say that there is always a further relevant condition that could overturn p, then we must also accept that denial is never truly wrong, but only premature. But this implies that denial can never be truly incorrect in the robust sense that we all presuppose when we tell someone that their claim is really-and-truly wrong (much as we all are constantly doing to each other in this very forum).

To give a concrete example, suppose we judge that “Water is H₂O”, and suppose someone here on the forum denies this. Why do we treat the denial of this claim as wrong, not just awaiting further data? It’s because we take ourselves to have reached a point where all the relevant conditions have been satisfied and no further conditions would overturn the claim. By contrast if our operating notions of reality and truth were radically unconditioned, we could never say that the denial is wrong in the robust sense, because we would have to presuppose that every fact always depends on further, undisclosed conditions; indefinitely.

One might respond “Okay, maybe ‘final truth’ disappears, but why does ordinary truth go with it?”. The robust notion of truth implicit in every act of judgment is not just “what we currently accept”, “what fits in a framework” or “what is best so far”. Implicit within the robust notion of truth is the idea that “this is how things really are, and denying it misrepresents reality”. But if reality itself is understood to be such that it can never settle anything without remainder, then the very notion of “misrepresenting reality” has no determinate content, and the robust notion of truth itself becomes indistinguishable from provisional endorsement.

But this is not an apt characterization of what we are doing when we engage in authentic inquiry. The way we talk about such things betrays the fact that the very act of judging each other's claims to be true or false carries within it an implicit commitment to robust notions of truth and reality and, thus, to reality itself being unconditioned (and intelligible) without remainder.

@Banno @Joshs @Philosophim

There has been a lot of drift in the discussion since the opening replies to the OP, so I'm going to try to recapitulate my stance by gathering the loose threads and tying them back to the original question asked by the OP. Sorry for the length, but there's a lot to consolidate.

In my exchange with @Joshs I've been trying to clarify a persistent misunderstanding. I’m not treating norms, intelligibility, or truth-conditions as items in the domain, nor confusing formation rules with what those rules are about. The issue isn’t ontological inflation. The point is that modal semantics already presupposes truth-apt judgment; the distinction between being right and merely being coherent within a framework. My original objection to Meillassoux’s “absolute contingency” was that it relies on that distinction while denying that anything non-optional obtains at the level of reality itself.

So @Banno, I was not asking modal logic to generate metaphysical necessity, nor claiming it forces a necessary being. I was questioning whether modal frameworks can underwrite the metaphysical thesis that nothing whatsoever must be the case (per Meillasoux), given what they presuppose in order to function. That’s a methodological disagreement about what modal structure tracks, not a confusion about grammar or model theory.

I think part of the difficulty here is that we’ve been talking a lot about norms and practices, but not enough about the act of judgment itself. In inquiry, there’s a real difference between continuing to ask questions and reaching a point where no further relevant questions remain without undermining the reasons already in play. To judge that something is the case is not merely to conform to a practice or stabilize commitments; it’s to take responsibility for the claim that the relevant conditions have been met. That’s why judgment is truth-apt in a way that rule-following alone isn’t.

While judgment doesn’t require a metaphysical guarantor in the sense of an external foundation, it also isn’t neutral with respect to necessity. When we judge that something is the case, we commit ourselves to the claim that, given the relevant conditions, it cannot be otherwise without error. That is a minimal but genuine sense of necessity; one that arises from inquiry itself rather than being imposed from outside it. Practices can explain how we arrive at judgments; judgment explains why certain denials are no longer optional once understanding has been achieved.

If we take judgment seriously in this way, it doesn’t just commit us to particular necessities (“given these conditions, this must be so”), but raises a further question about the totality of conditions themselves. Inquiry doesn’t only ask whether this or that claim is adequately grounded, but whether reality as such is intelligible or merely a brute fact. If everything were conditioned without remainder, then the responsible affirmation of any claim as finally true would be undermined in principle, since further conditions could always be demanded. Yet inquiry does make such affirmations, not dogmatically, but as answers to questions that have been adequately satisfied.

That commitment points beyond any particular conditioned object or causal explanation to something unconditioned; not as an entity within the universe, nor as an empirical cause among others. This “beyond” is not introduced as a further hypothesis or item in the domain, but as what inquiry already relies on when it affirms that its judgments are answerable to how things are, rather than to nothing at all. To deny this would not simply revise our ontology, but would undercut the very distinction between getting things right and merely going on coherently. In that sense, the unconditioned is not merely thinkable or regulative, but real; not by possessing existence as a further attribute, but by not being the sort of thing whose existence could be contingent on conditions. Its reality is inseparable from its role as the ultimate term of judgment, rather than an object among objects. My suggestion is that inquiry can bottom out here without incoherence, without a priori posits, and even without appeal to a cosmic mind/subject.

That characterization is neither an accurate representation of the argument I'm making, nor an apt framing of the state of the discussion in general.

A residual metaphysics of grounding in your position can be put into question. Despite your rejection of Kantian a priori form and Hegelian closure, you continue to assume that normativity must be underwritten by something more fundamental than the practices in which it is exercised. You suggest that intelligibility’s norms must be explained in order to be binding, that unless non-contradiction, coherence, and explanatory sufficiency are grounded in something non-contingent, their authority becomes inexplicable. But from a Wittgensteinian point of view, norms are not the kind of thing that gain authority by being grounded in something else. Their authority consists in their role within practices of giving and asking for reasons. To ask for a further ground is not to deepen the explanation but to change the subject. — Joshs

I agree that norms don’t gain their authority by being “grounded” in something else in the way empirical claims are justified. I’m not suggesting that non-contradiction or explanatory sufficiency need an external metaphysical backing in order to be binding. My question is different: what are we already committed to when we treat these norms as binding rather than merely operative within a practice?

Practices of giving and asking for reasons don’t just apply norms; they also criticize explanations as inadequate, confused, or insufficient. That critical stance presupposes that norms function as standards by which practices themselves can be assessed, not merely as habits internal to them. My worry is that if normativity is exhausted by practice-description alone, it becomes unclear how this critical dimension (distinguishing genuine understanding from merely stabilized discourse) remains intelligible rather than merely procedural.

So the issue isn’t whether norms need a further ground to have authority, but whether a practice-only account fully explains why inquiry continues to treat sufficiency and adequacy as more than local conventions.

Normative authority isn’t a causal force that needs metaphysical backing; it is a status conferred within a space of reasons. To demand a further metaphysical explanation is to assimilate normativity to the wrong explanatory model, one appropriate to causes, not commitments. Chess rules are binding even when nothing practical is at stake; their bindingness does not require an ontological ground beyond the practice of chess. Anything that purports to ground the norms of intelligibility would already have to be articulated and assessed under those very norms. The grounding project therefore generates an infinite regress or a pseudo-foundation. — Joshs

I agree that normative authority is not a causal force and does not need metaphysical “backing” in the way explanations of events do. I also agree that any attempt to ground norms would already presuppose those norms, and that a foundational grounding project would either regress or collapse into pseudo-foundation. That’s not what I’m trying to do.

Where I think we still diverge is on whether a practice-only account fully captures the scope of normative authority involved in inquiry. Chess rules are binding conditionally—if one is playing chess. By contrast, the norms of intelligibility do not present themselves as optional in that way. Even critiques that historicize, deconstruct, or pragmatize reason rely on coherence, non-contradiction, and sufficiency as standards that cannot simply be suspended while inquiry continues.

My question is not what grounds these norms, but why inquiry treats them as unavoidable once questioning is underway. That reflective question is not an attempt to step outside the space of reasons or assimilate normativity to causality; it is inquiry turning back on the commitments it finds itself unable to disavow without self-defeat. If normativity is exhausted by practice-description alone, it’s not clear how this non-optional, critical dimension of inquiry is anything more than a contingent feature of a particular language game.

Unrestricted intelligibility isn’t a coherent ideal. The demand that intelligibility be grounded “without remainder” is not simply reason being faithful to itself; it is reason overreaching its own conditions. Finitude isn’t a defect to be compensated for by grounding, but a constitutive feature of understanding. For instance, Robert Brandom argues that the force of norms like non-contradiction arises from their role in inferential articulation. To contradict oneself is not to violate a metaphysical law but to undermine one’s own standing as a reason-giver. That is a genuine error, not a mere inconvenience, but its seriousness is pragmatic in the space of reasons, not metaphysical in the space of being. The normativity is real, but it doesn’t point beyond itself to a necessary existent; it points sideways, to the social and inferential structure of discursive commitment. What drops out isn’t truth, but the idea that truth needs a metaphysical guarantor.

Transcendental reflection can clarify what we are committed to when we reason; it cannot deliver an account of what must exist in order for those commitments to be valid. From this vantage, your appeal to necessary existence is unnecessary. — Joshs

I agree that finitude is constitutive of understanding and not a defect to be overcome, and I’m not committed to an ideal of exhaustive or remainder-free intelligibility. By “unrestricted,” I mean only that inquiry does not acknowledge a principled boundary beyond which further questioning is illegitimate; not that it ever achieves total understanding.

I also agree with Brandom that norms like non-contradiction function through inferential articulation, and that contradiction undermines one’s standing as a reason-giver. What I’m less convinced by is that this exhausts the normativity involved in inquiry. Inferential role can explain how commitments and entitlements are tracked within the space of reasons, but it does not by itself explain why inquiry is answerable to truth rather than merely to discursive propriety or mutual score-keeping.

The fact that we can criticize entire practices, communities, or inferential frameworks as mistaken suggests that correctness outruns social endorsement, even ideally regulated endorsement. That “beyond” need not be a metaphysical guarantor in any crude sense, but it does mean that intelligibility cannot be fully accounted for by sideways reference to practice alone.

In that light, my appeal to necessary existence isn’t meant as an extra metaphysical posit, but as a way of naming the fact that inquiry treats intelligibility as finally answerable to what is the case, not merely to the conditions under which reasons are exchanged. If that orientation is illusory, then truth itself becomes internal to practice; if it isn’t, then intelligibility points beyond practice, even while being exercised within it.

- I've been enjoying our exchange very much, so let's continue on. By the way, I do try to tie this back to the question of grounding and necessity at the end, but if you think that my reply here will take us too far afield then just let me know and we can move our discussion to a separate thread.

We've defined intelligibility within the context of a discrete experiencer not being contradicted by the application of their discrete experience. Therefor a correct application is one that passes this, while an incorrect application does not.

It is incorrect in terms discrete experience application. The failure state for being incorrect might not be punishing in this particular instance, but the person still did not correctly create applicable knowledge. — Philosophim

My sense is that, given all that you’ve said so far, you would be willing to say that normativity is reducible to instrumental success. Assuming this is an accurate portrayal of your position, the consequence is that it places a substantive restriction on what your theory can accomplish. Specifically, it cannot now function as a standpoint from which to make claims about the structure of inquiry as it really is. This, in turn, has the effect of deflating its normative authority over competing epistemological theories, even those that make use of thicker accounts of normativity, truth and grounding. Once this deflation is acknowledged, the disagreement between us is no longer about which theory is true in a thick sense, but only about which stance one is prepared to adopt relative to their own internal criteria of success.

If you are asking if there is some universal apart from the discrete experiencer and contradiction of one's actions by reality, I don't know. Such a question is very like asking if we are a brain in a vat. You can only know what is within the scope of knowledge, not anything outside of it. — Philosophim

I take your point, but here's my difficulty: that very claim - “you can only know what is within the scope of knowledge, not anything outside of it” - presents itself as unscoped with respect to any particular context. When you say we cannot know anything apart from the scope of discrete experiencers, you’re (presumably) not offering that as one more application that might be contradicted tomorrow, but as a reflective insight into the intrinsic structure of knowledge as such; one that you expect me to grasp as unconditionally valid, not merely as your particular contextual commitment. If I asked "could that claim be contradicted by reality?" I don't think you'd say "perhaps, let's wait and see." You'd say something like: "No, because any contradiction would itself presuppose discrete experience, so the point stands necessarily."

But if that's right, then you're already operating in a register your framework doesn't officially acknowledge; what is typically called transcendental reflection, or reflection on the conditions that make any knowledge possible at all. And once that register is admitted, the question becomes whether other transcendental claims might be equally legitimate, thereby dropping us back into our discussion of grounding and necessity.

Where do you stand with respect to Kant and Hegel? — Joshs

I would place my position as neither Kantian nor Hegelian, though it takes something from both. Against Kant, I don’t think intelligibility is imposed by fixed, ahistorical subjective forms set over against an unknowable reality; the norms of knowing are discovered in inquiry itself, not legislated in advance. Against Hegel, I’m not convinced that intelligibility can be unconditioned simply by being self-conditioning through dialectical development, since conceptual self-mediation explains how intelligibility unfolds but not why inquiry is answerable to reality rather than merely to its own coherence. Where I differ from both is in locating the issue primarily in the structure of inquiry rather than in the structure of concepts: inquiry is historically conditioned in its unfolding, but it is driven by an unrestricted demand for understanding that implicitly appeals to a standard of sufficiency no merely conditioned or purely self-reflexive process can finally supply from within itself. Intelligibility, on this view, is neither an externally imposed framework nor a closed dialectical system, but something that unfolds in response to reality while always pointing beyond any given set of conditions.

I think you’re right that “nothing” isn’t a genuine option. In my opinion, absolute nothingness isn’t just empty, it’s unintelligible. The real contrast isn’t between something and nothing, but between what exists conditionally and what exists without conditions.

Where I’d draw a line is in how we understand the role of that unconditioned ground. I don’t think it should be treated as a kind of ultimate physical stuff that rearranges itself into electrons, fields, or other entities. Those belong to empirical explanations, which already presuppose conditions, laws, and structures. The point of an unconditioned ground isn’t to compete with those explanations, but to explain why any such conditioned explanatory order exists at all.

For that reason, I’d also be cautious about applying theories of time like eternalism or presentism to the unconditioned. Those theories concern temporal realities. Presumably, the ground of existence wouldn’t be “spread across time” or “located in the present,” but not temporal in the first place.

So I'd likely agree with you that explanation must terminate in something simple and unconditioned. I just don’t think that termination belongs to the same explanatory level as particles, fields, or models of time.

An excellent and thought-provoking reply. I think it succeeds in clarifying your position even more sharply than before, and that helps a great deal.

I want to begin by acknowledging and briefly recapitulating what I take you to have shown successfully. You’ve given a detailed and coherent anthropological and pragmatic account of intelligibility. On your view, intelligibility arises from the capacity for discrete experience and the need to avoid contradiction in order to survive and pursue desired ends. Within that framework, deduction is necessarily preferable to induction when accuracy is the goal, and norms of reasoning are justified by their success relative to those goals. I don’t think that picture is confused or incoherent, and I agree that it explains a great deal about how inquiry functions for creatures like us.

Where I think the remaining disagreement lies is not about whether intelligibility works, but about whether its norms are merely useful or are genuinely binding.

You consistently explain the authority of intelligibility (i.e. why contradiction matters, why better reasoning should be preferred) in terms of motivation: survival, comfort, social pressure, or desired outcomes. That explains very well why people care about intelligibility. But my question has been about something slightly different: why incoherence counts as error rather than merely inconvenience, even when nothing practical is at stake.

To put the point as cleanly as I can: suppose a discrete experiencer knowingly affirms a contradiction in a case where there is no survival cost, no practical downside, and no motivational penalty whatsoever. Is the judgment simply impractical, or is it incorrect? If it is incorrect, then intelligibility has a normative authority that is not fully exhausted by its usefulness. If it is merely impractical, then what drops out is truth as such, not just metaphysical grounding.

This is why I continue to think the question of grounding reasserts itself. You have shown that intelligibility is not necessary for all forms of life, and I agree. But the issue was never whether intelligibility is universally instantiated; it is whether, when intelligibility is operative at all, its norms are contingent products relative to particular forms of life, or universally undeniable constraints built into intelligibility as such. From my side, the binding force of contradiction, coherence, and explanatory sufficiency points beyond instrumental success to a non-negotiable (transcendental) condition of inquiry itself.

If we differ there, then I think we’ve probably reached a genuine and irreducible philosophical divide; not about induction, causality, or even necessity in the abstract, but about what reason is and what ultimately obliges assent. I’m happy to leave it there, with much appreciation for the care you’ve brought to the exchange, unless there’s anything further you’d like us to address with respect to these topics. I'm content either way.

I think your description of intelligibility as temporally enacted and internally differentiated is right as far as it goes. It captures something essential about how understanding actually unfolds: we never encounter meaning as fully present, fully settled, or immune to revision. At the level of experience and even at the level of insight, there really is a play between recognition and novelty, presence and absence. I don’t want to deny that, and I don’t think inquiry could even get started without it.

Where I hesitate is when that play is treated as sufficient on its own. My concern isn’t that experience is never absolutely coherent (that seems obviously true) but that inquiry is more than the mere description of experience. In practice, we don’t just undergo intelligibility; we assess it. We ask whether an account is adequate, whether it explains more than it leaves unexplained, whether it’s better than its alternatives. Those questions don’t arise from play itself; they introduce a further irreducibly normative dimension to it.

So while I can agree that intelligibility maintains itself only through change, I’m not convinced that this exhausts what it means for intelligibility to be binding. The fact that understanding is always provisional doesn’t remove the orientation toward saying this is so, however revisably. And without that orientation, it’s hard to see how philosophical disagreement remains anything more than a contrast between different enactments rather than a rational engagement over what is actually the case.

So I don’t take judgment to abolish play or excess. Rather, judgment iteratively perfects it by securing what has been authentically understood and making it available for further, and often more imaginative, insight and inquiry. Judgment is not the end of play but the condition of its cumulative depth.

Finally, acknowledging the reality of play and excess doesn’t settle the metaphysical question of whether intelligibility itself is conditioned or unconditioned; it only describes how intelligibility is encountered, not what ultimately makes it possible. This is where I think we may ultimately diverge.

Thank you!

Let me begin by saying that I continue to be impressed by the care and effort you’ve put into your essays. You’ve clearly thought through your position in a systematic way, and I don’t think our disagreement is due to vagueness or oversight. Rather, I think your essay on knowledge and induction brings even more clearly into view where our philosophical commitments genuinely diverge, especially with respect to grounding and necessary existence.

What follows isn’t a point-by-point rebuttal (that would take more time than I can reasonably invest), but an attempt to explain how I understand your position, how it responds to my concern, and why I still think the central metaphysical issue remains open. That said, I also want to apologize for the length of what follows. I’ve really done my best to try to understand your perspective and, in the process, have probably spent more time on this than I should have :smile: .

1. How I understand your account of knowledge
As I read you, your framework rests on several key claims.

First, you explicitly frame knowledge as instrumental rather than truth-constitutive. Knowledge, on your view, does not aim at grasping reality “as it is in itself,” but at arriving at the most reasonable orientation toward reality given our goals, limitations, and need to act. Rationality is therefore practical before it is metaphysical.

Second, you ground knowledge internally in what you call the “discrete experiencer.” Instead of beginning with a claim about existence or truth, you begin with the indubitable fact that experience can be partitioned into identities (this rather than that) and that thoughts, memories, and distinctions arise within that partitioning. This capacity is taken to be deductively certain because any attempt to deny it already presupposes it.

Third, you distinguish between two kinds of knowing. What you call distinctive knowledge is simply awareness of discrete experiences as experiences. Applicable knowledge arises when those distinctions are applied to experience in such a way that, given the current context and available distinctions, they are not contradicted by reality. The sheep, goat, and hologram examples are meant to show that identities depend on chosen essential properties, and that knowledge is always indexed to a context of application.

Fourth, you treat induction as unavoidable once deduction, so understood, reaches its limits. You accept Hume’s critique but argue that inductions can still be ranked by cogency: probability being strongest, then possibility, then plausibility, and finally irrational belief. Rationality, on this view, consists in managing these inductions responsibly rather than eliminating them.

Finally, you extend this framework to social knowledge by introducing negotiated “distinctive contexts.” Language, mathematics, and shared standards allow multiple subjects to coordinate their distinctions and applications. Objectivity becomes a matter of convergence within agreed contexts, rather than correspondence to a context-independent ground.

I take all of this to be internally coherent, and I don’t think it collapses into skepticism or trivial relativism.

2. How this reframes the question of necessary existence
Where I think our disagreement sharpens is when this epistemological framework is brought to bear on the question of necessary existence.

My original concern was not simply whether we can justify claims about necessity in practice, nor whether science or everyday reasoning can proceed without positing something that exists necessarily. It was whether intelligibility itself - the fact that there is a stable, law-like, and explanatory order at all - can be ultimate yet ungrounded without remainder.

Your response effectively answers a different question: how a finite subject should reason once deductive justification runs out. From that standpoint, positing a necessary being or necessary ground appears either (i) inapplicable, (ii) merely plausible, or (iii) unjustified relative to available distinctions. That is a coherent epistemic verdict.

What remains unclear to me is whether this epistemic verdict is meant to settle the metaphysical issue, or whether it simply brackets it.

If intelligibility is treated as a brute feature of reality - that is, something we manage, but do not explain - then the denial of necessary existence is not so much argued for as presupposed. The framework shows why we cannot establish necessity deductively (as you have defined it) within experience, but it does not show that necessity is unnecessary.

3. Where the grounding question reappears
This becomes especially clear when we consider several features of your account that seem to rely on what they officially set aside.

3.a “Contradiction by reality” presupposes a non-derivative norm
Your framework repeatedly appeals to the idea that beliefs must submit to contradiction by reality. But the authority of contradiction is not itself explained in instrumental terms. To say that belief ought to yield to reality is already to invoke a norm that is not merely convenient, but binding.

In the context of grounding, this matters because binding norms suggest something non-arbitrary at work. If intelligibility were wholly brute, it becomes unclear why contradiction should have this authority rather than being just another contingent feature we happen to accommodate.

3.b Elective distinctions sit uneasily with necessary structure
You emphasize that the selection of essential properties and identities is up to the subject, and that distinctive contexts are not dictated by reality itself. Yet the success of application, the hierarchy of induction, and the very notion of “better” or “worse” reasoning presuppose a stable background structure that constrains which distinctions work and which fail.

From my side, this looks like a tacit appeal to something like necessity: not a necessary entity perhaps, but a necessary order or intelligibility that is not reducible to choice or practice.

3.c Redefining deduction deflates necessity rather than refutes it
By treating deduction as “what cannot be contradicted given current distinctions,” necessity becomes a local epistemic status rather than a metaphysical one. But that redefinition does not show that there is nothing that exists necessarily; it shows only that necessity cannot be established by the methods you allow.

That is an important result, but it does not settle the ontological question. It changes the standards of admissibility rather than answering the original demand.

3.d The dynamism of inquiry points beyond brute fact
Your account presupposes an ongoing drive to refine distinctions, improve applicability, and prefer explanations that are more coherent and comprehensive. This dynamism is difficult to understand if intelligibility is merely accidental. It suggests that inquiry is oriented toward something more than survival or local success, but toward understanding as such.

If that orientation is legitimate at all, then the question of whether intelligibility has an ultimate ground reasserts itself.

4. Bringing this back to necessary existence
With that contrast in view, the issue can be stated more precisely.

Your framework shows, convincingly, that if deduction is understood as you understand it - namely, as what cannot be contradicted within a given context of distinctions and applications - then we cannot arrive at the conclusion that something exists necessarily from within finite experience. On those terms, necessity cannot appear as an admissible conclusion, since it cannot function as a candidate alongside contingent possibilities. But this limitation follows from how deduction is defined, not from the structure of inquiry itself.

The question of necessary existence, as I understand it, is neither empirical nor hypothetical. It is transcendental: it asks what must be the case for intelligibility itself to be possible. It does not arise from extending classifications further into experience, but from reflecting on the conditions that make any classification, correction, or application intelligible at all.

On your account, deduction is essentially contextual and negative: a belief counts as deductive insofar as it is not presently contradicted by reality, given a chosen set of distinctions. That is a coherent and useful standard for managing belief within experience. But it is not a standard designed to address metaphysical sufficiency. It tells us when a claim is undefeated; it does not tell us whether intelligibility itself is ultimately grounded or merely assumed.

A necessary judgment, as I am using the term, is not reached by adding premises or narrowing context. It arises when reflection shows that denying a certain conclusion undermines the very norms one relies on in inquiry. The issue is not whether necessary existence can be applied without contradiction, but whether treating intelligibility as wholly contingent is coherent given the binding role intelligibility plays in reasoning.

This is why I think your framework, while successful on its own terms, does not close the door on necessary existence. It shows that necessity cannot be established by contextual deduction; it does not show that necessity cannot be known through reflection on the conditions of intelligibility itself. The binding force of the norms you rely on (non-contradiction, rational preference, hierarchical evaluation) already presupposes that intelligibility is not merely accidental.

If intelligibility were brute all the way down, its normative authority would be inexplicable. Contradiction would lose its force, coherence would become optional, and better or worse explanations would collapse into preference. Yet your epistemology depends on the opposite: that intelligibility obliges assent when conditions are met.

So when I resist the claim that intelligibility can be ultimate yet ungrounded, I am not proposing a rival empirical explanation or a speculative add-on. I am making a transcendental claim: that finite intelligibility, precisely as conditioned and corrigible, points beyond itself to something non-derivative. That “beyond” is what I mean by necessary existence, not an object within experience, but the ground that makes intelligible experience possible at all.

5. Divergent accounts of inquiry
Before closing, I think it may help to explicitly thematize the fact that we are working with two very different conceptions of inquiry. On your account, inquiry is fundamentally corrective and managerial: it begins with distinctions, applies them where possible, and revises them when contradicted by reality. Its norms are procedural, context-relative, and justified by their success in navigating experience. On the view I am working with, inquiry is not merely corrective but also intrinsically oriented toward being in-itself: questioning itself carries an unrestricted demand for intelligibility, and the norms of coherence, adequacy, and sufficiency are immanent in the act of understanding. I think the disagreement about necessary existence may ultimately turn on which of these conceptions is taken as prior.

6. Where that leaves us
At this point, I think the disagreement is clear: you offer a powerful epistemology of how inquiry proceeds under constraint and uncertainty. I’m asking whether that epistemology presupposes, rather than replaces, a deeper transcendental/metaphysical account of intelligibility itself.

If reason is merely a tool, then necessary existence will always look like an overreach. If reason is intrinsically normative and oriented toward unrestricted intelligibility (being in-itself), then the question of grounding (and with it, the question of necessary existence) cannot be dismissed without cost.

That, I think, is the real point of divergence, and it explains why we’ve been circling the same issue from different sides.

Thanks for clarifying. I think we’re circling a deeper disagreement that’s worth naming. It’s not really about becoming, difference, or performativity, but about what counts as an intelligible explanation in the first place.

From my side, reason is intrinsically normative. Inquiry involves judgments of coherence, adequacy, and sufficiency, and those norms are internal to questioning itself. On that view, asking “why?” isn’t a metaphysical excess but an expression of an unrestricted demand to understand. If that demand is legitimate at all, then a purely groundless intelligibility, one that can never answer whether it is sufficient even in principle, looks unstable.

From your side, as I understand it, that very demand for sufficiency already presupposes a metaphysics of grounding or presence that you want to resist. Intelligibility is enacted in use, difference, or repetition rather than secured by an underlying ground, and the refusal of a final ground is a principled stance, not a failure of explanation.

My concern isn’t that such accounts are incoherent, but that they remain descriptive with respect to the normativity we rely on when we argue. Even to say that repetition both generates and destabilizes meaning presupposes criteria for recognizing when meaning is generated rather than lost.

So the real question may be this: are the norms implicit in inquiry (coherence, adequacy, explanatory sufficiency) themselves intelligible and binding, or are they contingent products of practice with no further warrant? I don’t expect that to settle things, but I think it names the divergence more precisely.

Bitbol is not trying to establish normative limits on reality in the Kantian sense of legislating what can or cannot be the case tout court. Rather, he is diagnosing a performative incoherence in a specific epistemic stance —namely, the assumption that consciousness (I actually prefer ‘mind’) can be treated as a fully objective explanandum from inside the very practices that presuppose lived experience. — Wayfarer

Quite right. However, in order to diagnose the purported performative incoherence, Bitbol must presuppose universally binding normative standards of judgment (correctness, error, and order) that he then withholds from metaphysical inquiry. If the standards are universally binding, then reason has authority beyond any particular stance, and it becomes unclear why that authority should suddenly stop at metaphysics. If they are not universally binding, then Bitbol’s charge of incoherence loses its force because the diagnosis is only valid from within the (non-universal) scope of the framework from which it is made.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think this clarifies the disagreement quite a bit, and I appreciate the acknowledgment that the move to panentheism is an hypothesis rather than a forced conclusion.

Where I still want to push back is on the claim that, absent such an Intellect, intelligibility must be either brute or a matter of coincidence. From an Aristotelian standpoint, intelligibility is neither a coincidence nor an unexplained remainder, rather it is grounded in the very structure of being itself as intelligible relations (form, order, lawfulness) that do not depend on being understood in order to be what they are.

Of course intelligibility is relative to intellect in the sense that it is what the intellect grasps. But that does not entail that intelligibility is ontologically dependent on an intellect in order to exist. The relation is asymmetric: intelligence is ordered toward being because being is intelligible, not the other way around.

At some point, explanation has to bottom out. My suggestion is that it can bottom out in being in-itself without incoherence, rather than requiring a further appeal to a cosmic subject. The latter may well be a reasonable metaphysical hypothesis, but I don’t yet see an argument that shows the former to be unstable, self-undermining, or equivalent to brute facticity.

So I think we’re now at a more precise question: is intelligibility a fundamental feature of being itself, or must it be further grounded in a non-contingent intellect? That seems to me a genuinely open metaphysical choice, not one settled by the antinomy as such.

Happy new year to you and to all!

Also, I have to compliment your mastery of the written word. Your use of higher level vocabulary in intelligible and clear in ways beyond my crafting capability, and its both impressive and fun to read. — Philosophim

Thank you for the generous compliment! I admire the clarity and sincerity of your writing as well. It's been a pleasure reading through your replies.

I think you’ve articulated your position clearly and consistently. I don’t think the disagreement is due to misunderstanding, but to a genuine philosophical divergence.

First, I agree that your view is internally coherent. You’re explicit that existence as such is accidental, while intelligibility is local and conditional. Once something exists, it has determinate properties and stable relations. That position does not undermine science or everyday reasoning, and your appeal to Hume makes clear that you’re comfortable accepting limits on justification without succumbing to irrationality, which is a serious and well-established philosophical posture.

Second, I also agree that appealing to infinity can deflate certain intuitive improbability worries. On an infinite scale, long-lived stable structures are not mathematically shocking. So I don’t think your view collapses into obvious absurdity, nor do I think it’s refuted by simply pointing at order and saying “that seems unlikely.”

Where I think the issue remains, however, is that your response declines a particular explanatory demand rather than answering it. My question isn’t whether brute contingency is coherent, or whether we can live with it pragmatically. It’s whether it is explanatorily sufficient once we take intelligibility itself as an explanandum.

In particular, appeals to probability, infinity, or randomness all presuppose a stable framework within which those notions apply. Infinity can explain why something occurs given a space of possibilities, but it doesn’t explain why there is a persisting possibility space, or why law-like regularity rather than total non-repeatability is instantiated at all. Treating that framework as brute is consistent, but it is exactly the move I’m questioning.

Similarly, I don’t think the regress worry touches the position I’m gesturing at. I’m not proposing another conditioned cause or another link in the chain. The claim is that causal explanation and metaphysical grounding are different kinds of explanation, and that running out of the former doesn’t show that the latter is illegitimate, only that it isn’t causal.

So I think the disagreement now turns on the following question: is intelligibility something that can be ultimate yet ungrounded, or does its very presence place a demand for a non-derivative explanation? You’re comfortable saying the former; I’m not persuaded that doing so leaves intelligibility fully intact rather than merely assumed.

That’s where I still see the question as open, not because your position is incoherent, but because it seems to me to stop one step earlier than the explanatory demand itself invites.

Another excellent post, thank you. I don’t think you’re being naive, but I do think there is still a gap that hasn’t been closed.

You’re proposing a two-level view:

(1) Existence as such is accidental - there is no reason why anything exists.
(2) Once something exists, it has determinate properties and behaves intelligibly.

I agree completely with (2). My worry is that (2) silently presupposes more than (1) can support.

Saying “once it exists, it is what it is” explains why given an oxygen atom, it behaves like oxygen. It does not explain why there are enduring, repeatable, law-governed entities at all rather than momentary, non-repeating flashes.

Appeals to infinity don’t solve this. Infinity guarantees abundance, not structure. An infinite range of brute possibilities does not explain why stable probability spaces, mathematical describability, and persistent laws are instantiated rather than not.

This is especially clear in your appeal to probability. Probability only makes sense relative to a stable sample space and enduring rules of combination. But on your view, there is no reason for the sample space itself to persist, or for its rules to remain fixed from moment to moment.

So the question isn’t “why do oxygen atoms behave consistently once they exist?” The question is “why is there a reality in which consistency itself is instantiated rather than not?” Saying that we are adaptations to a rare pocket of stability explains our survival, not the intelligibility of the pocket itself. Anthropic reasoning explains selection, not grounding.

This is why I keep pressing the grounding question. You’re not denying intelligibility, you’re localizing it. But the existence of localized intelligibility without any intelligible ground still makes intelligibility as such accidental. And that is the worry: can intelligibility be ultimately grounded in what is itself unintelligible without undermining intelligibility altogether?

I’m not claiming that this position is incoherent. I’m claiming that it leaves the success of explanation (including probabilistic and mathematical explanation) as a cosmic coincidence. That’s the precise point where I think the metaphysical question remains open.

It may be that we've reached a principled stopping point here, as I think the issue has boiled down to a question regarding the criterion of adequate explanation. I would frame this in the following way:

(1) If the highest criterion is coherence and parsimony, then I think your position holds
(2) If the highest criterion is explanatory adequacy and intelligibility, then I think my position is stronger

Obviously, I feel that my position is on firmer ground overall (or I wouldn't still hold it), not because yours is indefensible by any means, but because I think yours leaves too much unexplained while still subtly relying on what it refuses to ground.

What do you think?

What exactly is he discerning in this essay? Bitbol is not claiming that he can determine what reality is like independently of experience. Notice at the outset, he says 'no alternative metaphysical view is advanced.' He is claiming that reason can notice when it has overstepped its bounds by mistaking the conditions of experience for objects within experience. That critique does not establish an alternative ontology - it is ameliorative rather than constructive. — Wayfarer

Indeed, and this point is well taken. However, there's a real tension in Bitbol's position. The issue is not that he wants to engage in a critique of reason, but that his critique relies on a normatively binding use of reason to establish limits, while simultaneously denying reason any standing to make normatively binding claims about reality. In contrast to Nagarjuna, Bitbol's critique is not merely therapeutic. He makes claims about correctness, error and order which raises the question: are these claims themselves unconditionally valid, or merely perspectival? If they are unconditionally valid, then reason seems to have precisely the kind of authority Bitbol denies it in ontology. If they are not, then it becomes unclear why his critique binds anyone who does not already share his stance.

There's a Buddhist metaphor that comes to mind. This is that the Buddha's teaching is like the stick used to stir a fire to help get it burning. But when the fire is burning, the stick is tossed in. There's another simile, the 'simile of the raft'. This compares the dharma to a raft 'bound together from fragments of sticks and grasses' (hence, nothing high-falutin') which is used to 'cross over the river' but which is discarded when the crossing is accomplished (Alagaddupama Sutta.) This has been compared to Wittgenstein's 'ladder' metaphor, that philosophy is like a ladder that is discarded after having been climbed. — Wayfarer

Yes, this is philosophy as therapy. People can (and do) find real value in such an approach, but the persistent worry is that if reason is simply discarded along the way (e.g. ladder, veil, raft, etc.), what is left to adjudicate insight from delusion, depth from emptiness, transcendence from regression?

I think this is where we bottom out. You’re treating metaphysical necessity as defined by invariance across admissible worlds, so that necessity is entirely a function of model-theoretic structure. I’m treating modal invariance as something that tracks deeper explanatory or grounding facts rather than constituting them. Once necessity is defined modally, your stipulation point follows; that definition is exactly what I’m not accepting. At that point the disagreement is methodological rather than technical, and I don’t think there’s much more to be gained by pressing it further here, so this where I will leave it. Thanks again for the discussion.

But I think the subsequent discussion of "intelligibility" goes astray, perhaps confusing the map with the territory. I don't know what it would mean for the reality to be intelligible (or necessary, or contingent, for that matter), except in the obvious sense that making the reality intelligible to us is what we as intelligent creatures do. This framing already implies that a world in which intelligent creatures thrive exists, and is perforce intelligible to those creatures. Fair enough. But if we go on to ask whether it is necessary that such a world exists, the question loses its meaning. Necessary in relation to what? What is the framing theory and whence it came from? — SophistiCat

Thanks for the incisive reply. To clarify, I don’t mean “intelligibility” as a feature of our representations but as a condition of the possibility of inquiry itself. If reality were not intrinsically intelligible (i.e. constrained independently of our cognitive activity) then the distinction between correct and incorrect explanations would collapse.

When I speak of an unconditioned ground, I’m not asking what is necessary relative to a theory, but whether a totality of conditioned explanations can be intelligible without something unconditioned. A ground that is itself contingent on the explanatory structure is not a ground but another explanandum.

So the issue is not anthropocentric but structural: contingency presupposes intelligibility, and intelligibility cannot be wholly contingent without undermining explanation itself.

I don't know if that fully addresses your questions, but I'd be happy to try to clarify further if necessary.

Appealing to grammar doesn’t really answer the point. Grammar explains how judgments are expressed, not what makes them meaningful or truth-apt in the first place. The norms grammar presupposes - correctness, sense, truth - already belong to intelligibility at the level of judgment. My concern isn’t metaphysical hypostatization but the performative fact that universal claims about contingency still rely on those unconditioned norms.

I must be misunderstanding you. — Banno

Yes, that’s a misunderstanding. I’ve already clarified the distinction I’m making a few times now, so I don’t think there’s much more to add. Thanks for the discussion.

I’m not denying that metaphysics requires a framework; I’m denying that metaphysical necessity is itself a framework stipulation (language, logic, modality) rather than an explanatory conclusion.

I’m not reifying intelligibility or invoking Platonic Forms. The point is transcendental: conceivability presupposes intelligibility as a condition of judgment, not as a metaphysical entity. That X can be conceived as ~X shows only a lack of logical necessity, not metaphysical contingency. “Only contingency is necessary,” when asserted universally, already relies on the unconditioned intelligibility it claims to exclude.

Again, I'm not challenging accountability. I'm challenging reducibility. Metaphysical conclusions as to the existence of necessary beings (if there be such) are reached by inquiry and argument, not by stipulation.

Thank you, this helps clarify your position a great deal. You've covered a lot of ground and introduced some interesting and unexpected (in a good way) considerations. I still have a lingering concern, and it turns on one specific inference you’re making.

First, I agree with your first two points: (1) Accepting a metaphysical limit does not shut down scientific inquiry, and (2) we may never know whether we’ve reached the ultimate explanatory limit.

Where I think the argument possibly breaks down, is here:

If there was no reason for existence to be, then there is no reason for any existence not to be. — Philosophim

The absence of a reason for why anything exists at all does not entail the absence of intelligible constraints within existence. You are moving from “no ultimate explanation” to “no internal intelligibility,” but I'm not sure that follows.

In fact, the model you propose depends on there being constraints. You introduced theoretical constructs such as an infinite plane, spatial dimensions, time units, probability distributions, etc. But these aren't neutral, they already presuppose a highly structured and law-governed reality.

My worry is that if existence were genuinely unconstrained in the way you suggest, then there would literally be no reason for persistency over time, stable entities, probabilistic regularities rather than total chaos, or even the continued existence of the probability space you are modeling.

Furthermore, saying "anything could happen" immediately raises a new question: why in fact does almost nothing happen that could happen? Appealing to brute contingency does not answer these questions, it intensifies them. The stability of reality that we manifestly experience becomes radically inexplicable.

This is why I’ve been insisting on the difference between exhausting causal explanations and providing a metaphysical one. Reaching “the limit of causality” only tells us that a certain kind of explanation has ended. It does not show that what remains is self-explanatory or unconstrained. An infinite regress of contingent explanations, or a probabilistic model of unconstrained possibility, does not explain why there is an intelligible order rather than none. It simply assumes that order while denying any ground for it.

So the issue isn’t whether inquiry continues, I agree that it does. The issue is whether intelligibility itself is ultimately grounded or ultimately accidental. And if intelligibility is accidental, then the success of explanation becomes a coincidence — which undermines the very probabilistic and mathematical reasoning your proposal relies on (and on which science itself is based).

To state my worry more cleanly: can we ground the intelligibility of being in a radically unintelligible foundation without undermining intelligibility itself?