Excellent job on the OP, as usual.

I think your critique of the “pre-history” objection is largely successful. In particular, I agree that appeals to cosmology often assume, without argument, that temporal succession is simply given as a fully determinate framework, independently of the conditions under which “before” and “after” have any sense. Your insistence that physics presupposes, rather than explains, temporal passage seems exactly right.

That said, I wonder whether the antinomy you describe really forces us to treat temporal succession as dependent on an actual standpoint or observer. There may be a middle position here, one that avoids both brute temporal realism and observer-dependence.

In a broadly Aristotelian tradition, the world is understood to be intrinsically intelligible. That is, it need not be thought of as intelligible because it is taken up by a mind; rather, minds are possible because the world is already ordered and determinate. On that view, structure and sequence are not imposed by understanding, but are what make understanding possible in the first place. This does not reduce order to mere physics, but neither does it make order depend on experience.

If something like this is right, then it seems important to distinguish physical change, lived temporality, and temporal order as such. Your argument shows convincingly that lived duration - in the Bergsonian sense - cannot be reduced to physical change, and that clocks and equations do not by themselves yield passage or continuity. But I would argue that it does not follow that temporal order itself requires an experienced point of view in order to be real.

One might say instead that the world prior to observers was not timeless, but unexperienced. The sequence of events was ordered and determinate, even though that order was not taken up or reflected upon by any subject. What emerges with consciousness is not temporal order itself, but the explicit presence of that order as order.

Framed this way, the tension you identify remains genuine, but it may not mark a final antinomy. Scientific accounts of a long pre-history and phenomenological accounts of temporality would then be addressing different aspects of the same reality: one describing ordered succession, the other describing how that succession comes to be experienced as passage.

But direct (naive) and indirect realism, as traditionally understood, are concerned with what sorts of things are phenomenally present to the mind (and the epistemological implications). — Michael

Yes, and I’ve acknowledged that. I’ve also acknowledged that my own view does not count as traditional naïve realism. My point is that it does not count as traditional indirect realism either.

…newer brands of “direct realism” … have fabricated a dispute with indirect realists that isn’t really there… — Michael

I agree that these other views don’t adhere to the traditional rendering, but that doesn’t mean their disputes with indirect realism are fabricated. Rather, they reject a set of core assumptions that have often driven both direct and indirect realism as traditionally understood, such as:

(1) Sensory content is the direct object of perception
(2) Sensory content misrepresents the world
(3) Knowledge of the world is inferred from sensory content
(4) (Therefore) our knowledge of the world is deeply uncertain

These are all claims that have come up in this discussion, and my responses have simply been directed at those assumptions as they’ve arisen.

I see what you mean, but I’d suggest that the position you describe differs from indirect realism as it was classically articulated by Locke, Hume, and later sense-datum theorists. Traditionally, sense contents were taken to be mental items that represented the world in some way, and knowledge of the external world was understood to be inferred from them in an epistemically basic way.

Your view seems to reject the representational aspect while still treating experience as epistemically primary, whereas I would want to reject both.

Best response I have read yet. — unimportant

That's interesting. I was thinking along opposite lines. While I agree that it gets many things right, I think it has some substantial problems. Here are some issues I see with 's post:

(1) Reduction is not explanation
To say “survival instinct explains why we go on living” is not the same as saying “survival instinct exhausts the reasons for living”. This collapses reasons into causes. While it may be that I am causally disposed to avoid death, it doesn't follow that my normative reasons for living are illusions. Calling reasons "cope" merely assumes, rather than argues, that reflective endorsement adds nothing over brute causality.

(2) Conscious choice cuts both ways
Niki wants consciousness to do two incompatible jobs. On the one hand, consciousness is dismissed as a post-hoc rationalizer ("cope"). On the other hand, consciousness is elevated as the faculty that allows us to override biology and choose death. You can't have it both ways. If reflective agency is real enough to negate survival instinct, then it is also real enough to generate reasons, commitments, and meanings that are not reducible to instinct.

(3) "Nothing matters cosmically" is a category mistake
This sounds deep, but it trades on equivocation. The absence of cosmic meaning does not entail arbitrariness unless one assumes - without argument - that value must be cosmic to be real. Sure, nothing matters to galaxies or black holes, but meaning was never supposed to matter at that scale in the first place. Meaning is agent-relative, but not arbitrary, and the demand for cosmic endorsement is a pseudo-standard. Meaning lives at the level of agents, practices and commitments - precisely where humans actually exist.

(4) The "ants" analogy fails
The analogy erases the very feature that is doing the argumentative work: self-interpretation. Ants do not ask whether their lives are worth living or frame their suffering as tragic or unjust. The moment suicide becomes a question, the ant analogy collapses. As Camus saw clearly, the absurd does not eliminate meaning, it forces the question of meaning into explicit consciousness.

(5) Perfomative nihilism is self-undermining
Niki's post is itself not neutral. It frames all positive valuation as illusion, but exempts its own evaluative stance from that diagnosis. Calling everything "cope" functions no less as a coping strategy, one that protects the speaker from vulnerability, disappointment, attachment and loss. This is not a moral criticism but a philosophical one. The stance tries to cut a "view-from-nowhere" that human agents cannot actually inhabit.

Yes, that’s broadly how I see it. Phenomenal experience is particular and non-conceptual, and for that reason it isn’t the kind of thing that can represent the world accurately or inaccurately. Representation, justification, and inference all belong at the conceptual level. Experience can condition and constrain judgment, but it doesn’t itself do representational or justificatory work.

Thanks, that’s helpful. I think where we still differ is that the argument you quote builds in a phenomenological notion of “direct presence” from the outset. On the view I’m defending, epistemic directness is not a matter of what is phenomenally present to the mind at all.

I don’t accept (1), but not because I think mind-external objects are phenomenally present. Rather, I reject the assumption that perceptual justification must be grounded in phenomenology in the first place. Directness, on my view, concerns what our judgments are about, not what appears in experience.

So I’m not accepting the Indirectness Principle; I’m rejecting the framing in which it is formulated. That’s why I don’t see my position as either naïve realism or indirect realism as characterized here.

Thanks for the clarification. I should just note that my earlier point wasn’t meant as a defense of indirect realism of any sort, nor as an argument that we never perceive external objects. The claim was narrower: given your own explanation of indistinguishability, an indirect realist can accept everything you say about mental imagery and hallucination while declining to posit direct perception in the good case on grounds of parsimony.

In other words, given your explanation of indistinguishability, mental imagery is sufficient to explain the phenomenal character in the hallucination case, and the presence of an external object makes no difference to that phenomenal character in the veridical case. That is what gives the indirect realist a foothold: they can accept everything you say while treating the external object as explanatorily superfluous with respect to phenomenal experience.

Yes, I’m familiar with Davidsonian triangulation, and I agree it’s crucial for explaining how content and interpretation get off the ground at all, so I wouldn't wish to deny its power or relevance. My worry isn’t that triangulation leaves the world out of the picture, but that it treats world-involvement as exhausted by the interpretive nexus itself. Triangulation explains how beliefs acquire content and stability, but it doesn’t fully explain how a belief that is perfectly triangulated, charitable, and norm-governed can nevertheless misrepresent how things are. When a paradigm collapses, is the old paradigm abandoned simply because we decided to chose new norms, or because reality itself made the old norms untenable? Triangulation explains error and correction in terms of re-stabilization of practice, but (in my opinion) fails to capture the full import of what it means to say "we were wrong about this". That’s the asymmetry I’m trying to preserve. In that sense, I see triangulation as presupposing answerability rather than replacing it — which is why I think it doesn’t yet settle the issue between us.

Then perhaps I haven't explained myself clearly, because indirect realism is the position that because perception of the world is not direct (i.e. its features do not manifest in phenomenal experience) the phenomenal character of experience doesn't justify our knowledge of the world, hence there being an epistemological problem of perception. — Michael

My understanding is that, traditionally, indirect realism has held that phenomenal experience (1) does not justify our knowledge because (2) it functions as an inaccurate representation of the world and (3) the rest of our knowledge is inferred from it. From this, (4) the problem of skepticism arises.

I accept (1) but reject (2), (3) and (4), so I wouldn't classify my view as indirect realism.

By contrast, my view is that phenomenal experience does not justify our knowledge because it does not function as a representation of the world at all. As a result, our knowledge is not inferred from it, and the skeptical problem you've described does not arise.

That's a nice reference. Perhaps we could say the debate here turns on how one interprets the role of the "favour of Nature" within regard to knowing.

That said, in light of some recent exchanges elsewhere, I suspect that @Banno and I may be closer in substance than it initially appeared, even if our vocabularies and points of emphasis differ. Terminology is always a challenge, and I’ve spent most of the last few years working in a more Continental register, which no doubt shows. I’m trying to correct for that in recent posts.

:up:

I’m glad to see that we agree on something. It makes sense to me that you would also reject any appeal to the phenomenal as epistemically foundational given how you've argued in other threads.

I also take your point about “judgment” lining up closely with what you call intent. In both cases, what matters is that we’re talking about norm-governed, world-directed acts rather than inner episodes. The Anselmian point about direction of fit seems especially apt here: judgment isn’t a matter of mirroring appearances but of committing oneself to how things are.

As you might have guessed, while I agree that our classificatory practices (“this counts as a ship”) are indispensable for discourse I’d also want to say that such judgments are not merely stipulative. But on the main point — that skepticism doesn’t arise from rejecting phenomenal foundations — it sounds like we’re very much on the same page.

Your proposal is something like, reality → judgment. I'm not proposing judgment→ reality, so much as judgment ↔︎ reality. This mutual dependence does not collapse misrepresentation into misuse — Banno

I agree that our practices are world-embedded and constrained by reality. My worry isn’t about whether reality plays a role, but about how. On your picture, reality constrains judgment only through the evolution of norms internal to practice. On mine, judgment is essentially answerable to how things are in a way that allows us to say that a practice-embedded, norm-governed belief nevertheless misrepresented reality. That’s the asymmetry I’m trying to preserve. If one accepts mutual dependence, that asymmetry disappears, and with it the distinction between being wrong about the world and merely revising our norms. At that point, the disagreement really is about whether truth outruns even world-embedded practice.

I think we can proceed by looking at the best theories we have of truth. And that's Tarski. We know that the semantic theory of truth is coherent. It also holds for any of the other more substantive theories. '"p" is true IFF p' is pretty much undeniable without a loss of coherence. — Banno

I don’t disagree about Tarski or Davidson. The semantic theory of truth is indispensable and coherent, but it answers a different question than the one I’m raising. Tarski tells us how “true” functions in a language, but he does not explain what it is for a judgment to misrepresent the world rather than merely fall out of favor within a practice. If I recall correctly, even Davidson explicitly acknowledged this gap: semantic theories of truth explain meaning, not epistemic success.

Rejecting a heavyweight correspondence theory doesn’t eliminate answerability; it only eliminates a particular metaphysical picture of it. My concern isn’t with “matching” reality as an external comparison, but with preserving the asymmetry that makes shared error intelligible. That judgments answer to how things are in a way that practices themselves do not exhaust. If that asymmetry is rejected, then error collapses into norm change. If it’s preserved, then truth outruns practice. That’s the divide I’ve been pointing to.

It is both the case that (a) the phenomenal character of experience is not truth-apt and the case that (b) we use the phenomenal character of experience to make inferences about the environment. (b) is exactly what John and Jane do in the example I gave; their assertions about the wavelength of light emitted by the screen are not made apropos of nothing — they derive their conclusion from the phenomenal character of their experience (coupled with their knowledge of the wavelengths of light that are usually responsible for such an experience). — Michael

Let me push this a little further. I would argue that not only is phenomenal experience not truth-apt, it is not even conceptually articulated. Raw phenomenal character — redness as-seen, loudness as-heard, sourness as-tasted — is not the kind of thing that can directly participate in inferential relations, whether to ground them or otherwise. Inference requires intelligible, conceptual content. Phenomenal qualities can only figure in inference once they have been conceptualized through an act of reflexive understanding, but the resulting conceptualization is not identical with the phenomenal qualities themselves.

Once phenomenal experience has been conceptualized, we can make judgments about it (e.g. “there is a red patch in my visual field right now”). These judgments can participate in inferential relations, but at no point do phenomenal qualities themselves participate in inference. So you are right that John’s and Jane’s assertions are not made apropos of nothing, but it is not correct to say that they derive their conclusions directly from the phenomenal character of their experience. Phenomenal experience can condition and constrain the formation of judgments in a causal and heuristic sense, and judgments about phenomenal experience can certainly play a justificatory or explanatory role within reasoning — but that is not the same thing as phenomenal experience itself functioning inferentially.

But at least with respect to colour (and other secondary qualities, à la Locke), the world just isn't this way. — Michael

I agree that color does not exist “out there” in the way the naïve realist insists, and in that sense I do not count myself among their number. I do consider myself a kind of direct realist, but only in the broader sense I’ve described in previous replies.

Any inference about the mind-independent nature of the world from these secondary qualities is open to scepticism. That's really all there is to indirect realism. — Michael

I don’t agree that this is all there is to indirect realism. Aside from the two required characteristics I pointed out in a previous post, I would also say your framing above seems to assume that our knowledge of the world is inferred from phenomenal character, as though phenomenal experience — or judgments about it — provides a justificatory foundation for all other knowledge. That is one of the assumptions I’m pushing back on. Phenomenal experience is not the kind of thing that can play a justificatory role, and even judgments about phenomenal experience are not epistemic bedrock.

Indirect realism, as you are presenting it, seems to depend on the idea that knowledge of the world is justified by first securing knowledge of phenomenal character and then inferring outward. Once that picture is abandoned — once experience is seen as conditioning inquiry rather than grounding justification — the skeptical pressure you associate with secondary qualities never arises.

I think your last reply makes the disagreement as clear as it’s going to get. On your view, certain judgments are constitutive of what is the case, norms and reality are mutually dependent, and truth is exhausted by what survives within practice. On that picture, error is ultimately a matter of deviance from shared criteria, not failure to answer to how things are independently of those criteria.

My resistance isn’t to circularity, constitutive cases, or practice-based explanation — I accept all of those. It’s to the consequence that misrepresentation reduces to misuse and that inquiry no longer answers to anything beyond its own norms. That’s a coherent position perhaps, but it’s one that reshapes the notions of truth and error in a way I ultimately can’t accept.

At that point, the disagreement isn’t about regress, limit cases, or examples like “EQV is reading.” It’s about whether truth is exhausted by practice or essentially involves answerability to how things are. I don’t really see a neutral way to adjudicate that any further.

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.

------------------

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!