Forward And Introduction
A Tacitly Metamodern Guide For Reflecting On Our Sensemaking Frameworks
WE DRIFT AMIDST A RISING TIDE OF MISINFORMATION, CONSPIRACISM, AND BULLSHIT IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE
...and it's becoming increasingly difficult to navigate. While it's a hard truth that we're only able to control our own attitude and beliefs, and not the attitudes and beliefs of others, we can learn to cultivate a healthier relationship with the attitudes, narratives, and beliefs that orient us to the world. Doing so involves giving up our insistence on absolute truth, while not getting lost in paralyzing relativism. Instead, the aim is to cultivate a more flexible stance that’s better adapted to the messy complexities of the everyday world. Between rigid certainty and formless doubt lies a ‘middle path’ where we can learn to hold on to our ‘truths’ more provisionally, while still acknowledging their lived significance.
Rather than getting lost in abstract theory that's disconnected from day-to-day life, this ‘middle path’, which goes by the name of ‘Enactivism’, is instead grounded in our embodied interactions with the everyday world. No ‘grand theories of everything’ here: our aim is instead to develop a pragmatic stance that's useful for navigating the messy complexities of the everyday world. In contrast to a ‘view from nowhere’, we’ll explore how meaning is co-constructed from the interplay of between mind, body, and world.
To that end, 7 PROVISIONAL TRUTHS is a 'guided tour' of how our minds make sense of Reality, through the lens of this Enactivist framework. Unlike works of academic philosophy that are largely written for other professional philosophers, or pop-philosophy which just scratches the surface of the ideas it references, this work will strive to make advances in philosophy of mind accessible to a wider audience - without compromising the philosophical depth where the real revelations - ones that can profoundly reshape your perceptions of reality - actually reside.
THE 7 (PROVISIONAL) TRUTHS
1.) MINDS DISCLOSE WORLDS
2.) KNOWLEDGE IS MOSTLY SITUATED COPING
3.) CATEGORIES ARE ALWAYS CONTEXTUAL
4.) ALL PERSPECTIVES ARE PARTIAL
5.) INTELLECT SERVES INTUITION
6.) MOTIVATED REASONING IS THE NORM
7.) BELIEFS SERVE US BEST WHEN HELD LIGHTLY
INTRODUCTION
A Little Bit of Philosophy Can Be a Dangerous Thing
In 7 Provisional Truths we’ll be taking a ‘guided tour’ of how minds acquire valid knowledge about Reality. The basic insight that will guide us on our journey is the importance of the living body to what minds are and how thought works. And the underlying intuition which we’ll be exploring is that a more sophisticated understanding of what knowledge is can help us relate to our sensemaking frameworks in healthier ways.
So if that’s what we’re aiming at, let’s take a brief moment to lay out what this book is not. What this book won’t do, dear reader, is try to convince you that you should learn to think like a philosopher. If it were my goal to add yet another volume to the pop-philosophy sphere, I might have opened this book by challenging you to take up the mantle of Socrates and admit that you know nothing. Or alternatively, I might have gone on to outline a laundry list of specific difficulties that individuals and societies face, and suggest that this or that set of ideas has the power to heal the world’s many problems.
Well for better or worse, that’s not going to be the approach of this book. Not because philosophy can’t be relevant to the real world (quite the opposite in fact, as we’ll be exploring throughout our journey), but because philosophy can end up distorting our understanding when applied to the real world in overly simplistic ways. Perhaps one of the best examples of this can be found in the infamous Trolly Problem thought experiment, which has become a staple of both Intro to Philosophy courses and pop-philosophy.
If you’re already familiar with the Trolley Problem feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph, but for the uninitiated the exercise involves imagining an out of control trolley that’s on a deadly collision course with a group of people down the track. The hypothetical choice that you’re offered is whether you’d be willing to pull a lever to divert the trolley onto an alternate path with just one person on it, in effect sacrificing one person to save the many. The thought experiment then asks if your decision would remain the same if instead of pulling a lever you’d be willing to shove an extremely fat man onto the tracks to stop the trolley.
The simple scenario presented by this thought experiment is meant to pose questions about the reasoning behind our ethical decisions (i.e., why does pulling the lever not feel like murder when pushing the fat man onto the tracks does?) And as an engaging and accessible way to spark someone’s curiosity about ethics, the Trolley Problem works well enough. The only problem is that it’s about as far removed from how ethics is actually practiced in the real world as controlling a video game character is from learning a martial art. For it gives the mistaken impression that ethics is primarily a form of detached intellectual reasoning, rather than an emotionally grounded capacity that one cultivates through practice. Consequently, this has the unintended consequence of painting a highly distorted picture of the domain that the Trolley Problem thought experiment is meant to illuminate. And the Trolley Problem is far from the only offender when it comes to how the misapplication of philosophy can leave us more rather than less ignorant, a subject we’ll be exploring in some depth over the course of our journey.
In addition, because you know the emotional intricacies of your own life far better than I ever could, this is also not going to be a self-help book. The self-help sphere is already well populated by people far more qualified than I, and also by a motley crew of quacks and grifters. For myself, I have no desire to throw my own hat into that crowded arena.
What this book will offer you is a window into more sophisticated ways of understanding your own mind, along with some practices to begin cultivating more flexible ways of knowing and being. To that end, another one of the aims of this book is to do my small part to help relegate if-only ways of thinking to the trash bin, for their eventual destruction at the city incinerator.
We’ve all come across this sort of if-only framing whenever we’ve encountered black and white thinking about a particular subject. And if we’re being honest with ourselves, just about all of us have fallen into the if-only trap at various points in our life. I know I certainly have on occasions where my emotional investment in a particular viewpoint has made it difficult to see the partiality of my own perspective. The recipe for if-only ways of thinking tend to go like this: you’re presented with a complex issue that has many root causes and several potential avenues for ways that it could be addressed. Then you attempt to squeeze the issue at hand down to the more emotionally satisfying confines of an if-only framework.
“If-only organized religion were to go away…,”. Or: “If-only we could finally throw off the shackles of global capitalism”. Or: “If-only our nation would go back to embrace its traditional values…”. Or: “If-only we could expose the activities of the nefarious cabal that’s actually ruling the world…”
You get the picture. The common thread being something along the lines of: “If-only everyone else had the good sense to see things from my perspective, then the world would be sane and just.”
Problem is, the real world usually doesn’t work this way, as it’s quite rare for large societal problems to have just a single root cause. Rather, complex problems tend to be the result of a confluence of interrelated factors. This is itself a consequence of living in a world that works through evolving systems which interact with one another in complex and non-obvious ways. What makes if-only ways of thinking misguided and potentially dangerous is that they tempt us into thinking that we know far more than we actually do about the world, which can blind us to the unintended consequences of the actions we take.
That’s all very well and good, you may be thinking, but what does any of this have to do with how our minds work?
Well, part of my motivated reasoning for writing this book (more on motivated reasoning later) has to do with the ways that an inability to see the partiality of one’s own perspective feeds into these one-dimensional ways of thinking. While it's not difficult to come up with examples of perspectives that are dangerously disconnected from Reality, what’s far more challenging is the recognition that perspectives can be true but partial. When we say that something is true but partial, what we mean is that it may be true in a limited or qualified sense while misconstruing what’s relevant for the issue at hand; either by leaving out something that’s important, or by bringing in and treating as important something that’s irrelevant.
To use an example from science, Newtonian mechanics are true in the sense that they give a good approximation of how the macroscopic objects that we interact with in our daily lives behave. But it is also partial in the sense that it doesn’t help us make sense of the subatomic world, or why objects gain mass as they approach the speed of light.
Fortunately a more nuanced understanding of perspectives can be cultivated, and it begins by learning how to understand the partiality of one’s own perspective. Which lends itself to a more sophisticated understanding of how minds work; in particular, how your own mind works.
While the discipline of philosophy has had much to say about what minds are and how thought works, unfortunately, much of what the Western philosophical tradition has to say on this topic has been very partial indeed. This broad trend towards partially also includes how philosophy as a discipline has come to be understood in the broader culture, insofar as it paints a misleading picture of what philosophy, when it’s at its best, is all about. Far too much attention is usually given to the ideas and works of long dead great thinkers within the tradition, at the expense of philosophy as a living practice that one actively engages in. Or to put it another way: philosophy isn’t just something you read or listen to, it’s something you do.
Mind you, this isn’t a problem that’s intrinsic to philosophy everywhere it’s been practiced. In Eastern wisdom traditions such as Buddhism and Vedanta, philosophical theory has always been coupled to living practices designed to cultivate insight, such as meditation and yoga. Furthermore, these practices would typically take place among a community of practitioners, which emphasizes the ways that philosophy is also a social activity that’s meant to be engaged in with other people. Without a similar tradition of practice to ground one’s theorizing, much of what philosophy is in the West has largely been a form of abstract theorizing; which is a remarkably partial approach to philosophy.
Throughout the course of our journey we’ll be emphasizing how the accretion of one layer of abstract ideas on top of another can hinder rather than facilitate understanding. We’ll also be investigating how an overemphasis of our rational faculties at the expense of the emotions that our rationality is grounded in paints a highly misleading picture of how we use our minds to navigate Reality. Needless to say, abstract theorizing divorced from the directness of our lived experience is not the approach we’ll be taking in this book. Rather, the themes we’ll be exploring have been crafted with an eye towards our interactions with the everyday world, in all its wonder and mundaneness.
Instead of theory crafting, we’ll be starting with our subjective, moment to moment experience and carefully scrutinizing the implicit assumptions we attach to that experience. In doing so, we will be drawing upon the insights of a subset of philosophy known as phenomenology, which seeks to understand how our minds interface with Reality by scrutinizing the assumptions we attach to our direct experience. The domain that we’ll be exploring with this approach is known as epistemology, which concerns itself with theories of knowledge, particularly with what constitutes valid knowledge.
The overall structure of this book is organized around seven central themes, with each theme being built atop the structure of the ones beneath it, like the floors of a seven story building. The executive suite which resides on the top floor is all about how to cultivate a healthier relationship with our beliefs, but the metaphorical elevator we’ll be using to get there will need to pass through all of the lower stories first.
In addition, each central theme will be introduced with an orienting metaphor that ties the ideas which are under consideration to a relatable everyday context. It’s my hope that this will provide a gentle onramp for those who are interested in understanding more about how the mind works, but haven’t had the time or patience to delve into books that have been written with very little consideration for non-specialists.
One last point, but it’s an important one. While it’s my sincere hope that you’ll find this book valuable and useful, the flipside of that is that nothing in this book should be taken on faith. Rather, my intention is that you test these ideas out for yourself in the laboratory of your direct experience, and see if they hold any validity for you. As such, the ongoing theme in this work that all perspectives are partial also applies to the perspective of this book.
An iconoclast is a term used to describe someone who tears down holy idols, and demonstrates that the sacred beliefs which others have invested themselves in are false. My own ambitions aren’t nearly so grandiose. If this book sparks your interest enough to want to cultivate more sophisticated ways of understanding some of your taken for granted beliefs, and if you’re able to relate to the world with a bit more flexibility as a result, I’ll take that as a win.
Brandon Watson,
2024