Summary: Philosophy is the collective project of reaching a shared understanding of all philosophical questions. Its debates aim at answers grounded in reasons any reasonable person could accept, with those answers fitting together into one coherent picture. Private insights would need to be justified and publicly scrutinized before they are accepted in this shared understanding. The work of philosophy would be finished only when every genuine philosophical question was settled that way, or shown not to have been a real question at all.

Philosophy is for a shared understanding.

Why do we study philosophy? Why are you reading this? Why do we get into such heated debates over ideas posed by academics?

Philosophical debate ultimately aims to reach agreement, or even consensus, on how we understand philosophical questions. This isn’t a literal agreement, as if having all philosophers sign their names on a list of claims would somehow make them true.

This is a deeper form of agreement, where all philosophical truths are grounded in reasons so that any reasonable person could accept them on those grounds. All claims would have sufficient justifications so that anyone could accept them as true.

Once you have all the reason-based truths of philosophy, with conclusions grounded in true premises and sound reasoning, nothing is left. Every conclusion would be justified and therefore acceptable to all reasonable people.

To get to that state of universal agreement, we need a lot of dialogue.

Just like the purpose of engaging in a righteous war is to bring a stable peace, the purpose of any righteous debate on philosophical topics is consensus.

The goal is therefore a shared structure of thought, where philosophical questions are answered through reasons, and those reasons and answers cohere with one another.

In the end, philosophical completion would be the fulfillment of this task. All genuine philosophical questions would have their place within an intelligible whole, and that whole would be available to common understanding.

And if a philosophical question cannot be answered, then completion would at least require explaining why, such as by showing that the question is a category error or a contradiction that is unclear (like the contradictions I have attempted to reveal for the Liar’s sentence and Moore’s paradox).

Concepts like “consciousness,” “truth,” “reason,” and “morality” would each have their clear, coherent definitions that are consistent with all other philosophical definitions.

I am not yet arguing that philosophy could actually achieve completion. Only that completion, as a possibility, would represent the culmination of philosophy’s demand for sense and coherence. No genuine philosophical question would remain unanswered, and no answer would depend on unjustified assumptions.

It’s not a goal to dismiss out of hand, and if achieved, all of our philosophical debates would not have been in vain.

If philosophy is completed, everything else would become application, applying the a priori necessary truths of philosophy to interpret empirical information.

Reasons make agreement possible.

Why should giving reasons lead us toward agreement?

Because a reason is not just a private thought or explanation; reasons are not personal or idiosyncratic. On the metaphysical account adopted in this Substack here, a “reason” is an objective explanatory ground: an idea through which truth becomes intelligible.

We make sense of the world through reasons. Such reasons include explanations, logical inferences, physical causation, justifications for action, and any other thought that lets us make sense of the world.

The essay “What Is a “Reason”?” develops this conception of reasons as objective explanations, beyond one’s subjective, personal grounds for conviction. Rather, reasons stand for objective propositions that let us make sense of the world a priori through reason, rather than through any empirical observation.

Consider a basic mathematical question: why is the sum of two even numbers always even? We can answer this question without any actual examples, establishing as a necessary fact that the sum of any even numbers will always be even, no matter what numbers we use.

An even number can be arranged entirely into pairs. Combine two collections of pairs, and you still only have pairs. You can only have an even sum.

This mathematical truth can be grasped without ever seeing any data or examples. The conceptual truth is grounded in reasons, and anyone who grasps those reasons should be convinced of the conclusion.

The explanation does not ask us to adopt someone else’s perspective. It asks only that we recognize the same reason for mutual understanding.

Mathematics offers a clear model of the agreement philosophy seeks. Both fields study abstract entities and relationships. While math concerns numbers and operations, philosophy asks about concepts such as knowledge, causation, freedom, and responsibility.

Like mathematics, these concepts and their relationships must be coherent and supported by clear proofs. It’s logical and objective. Like mathematics, philosophy's truths are mind-independent.

Philosophy’s truths should be held to the same standard of justification as those in mathematics, as they both study the same metaphysical entities.

The truths in both fields must cohere, be grounded in proofs, and make sense to anyone who properly grasps them. These ideas must also be representable and shareable to allow for universal assent.

The aim is that an answer should not remain true only “for me” or persuasive only to people who already share my specific preconceptions. Its reasons should become available to others, so they can also understand them.

Dialogue uncovers the structure of reasons

An argument can present a conclusion and list its premises. But the list of premises we choose to include in a syllogism is never complete. There are always unstated reasons and unstated objections.

People are rarely convinced by a carefully drafted syllogistic argument. An analytic philosopher who lists their premises and conclusion will end up defending their argument using completely different premises and reasons that were demanded by the critiques of others.

Meaningful philosophical conclusions may require a significant number of reasons. If such a conclusion is actually true, then there should be no shortage of reasons to provide, since truth is nothing more than what arises out of reasons (as I argued here).

Yet in theory, if a philosopher did list out every premise for their argument, contemplated every possible objection and counterclaim, and made the argument airtight in the strongest sense of the word, then every reasonable person must accept it. A truly complete argument cannot be reasonably rejected. It would be too convincing.

Now scale that single, complete argument to every philosophical argument that can be successfully made, and we have philosophical completion.

Of course, no one can practically counter every objection in a single argument.

In reality, every philosophical argument is ultimately incomplete and subject to scrutiny, no matter how many premises it has. Interlocutors often demand further reasons to accept conclusions.

Philosophy is a team sport, where the goal is achieved through debate. As Robert Brandom put it, philosophy is the game of giving and asking for reasons.

Philosophical arguments depend on background commitments too. In philosophy, those background commitments would also be subject to critical examination.

We can even describe philosophy more generally as the set of reason-based background commitments we bring to interpreting scientific and empirical data. Remember that the scientific method is fundamentally a philosophical conclusion.

And we test such background commitments through debate and discussion, in an attempt to mutually grasp and understand an issue in philosophy.

As an example, let’s say someone argues that because a determined action cannot be free, free will cannot exist in a deterministic universe. A second person could then ask why determination necessarily excludes freedom, and the first could respond by defining freedom as requiring the ability to act otherwise, which is incompatible with determinism. The second would then scrutinize the “ability to act otherwise” requirement and ask precisely what it meant.

Each question targets another part of the structure needed for the parties to understand one another and make agreement possible. What initially appeared to be a single claim on free will depends on an account of agency, causation, and responsibility.

This is how the game of giving and asking for reasons works. We make a claim and subject it to public scrutiny and dialogue until we reject it or accept it as true.

Some ignore these background commitments in a debate, leading to an unproductive back-and-forth where both participants talk past one another. In philosophical debate, to fully grasp the other's position, we need to know what it rests on.

Philosophy’s goal is not simply to have the conversation for its own sake. The ultimate goal of discussion is to resolve what prevents understanding from becoming shared.

Philosophy seeks a systematic understanding

A philosophical answer cannot be sufficient if it contradicts other philosophical truths that we have reason to accept elsewhere. Such contradictory “truths” can’t both be true in the same respect, and one, the other, or possibly both would need revision to be reconciled.

An account of freedom must be reconciled with an account of causation and determinism, for instance. An account of moral responsibility must be reconciled with what we say about agency. You can’t say that humans are purely mechanical entities but fully responsible for their actions. You need to explain how those claims fit together.

And our judgments about each of these fields depend on a correct understanding of knowledge and justification (otherwise, how could we know we’re right?).

Philosophy therefore seeks a system, a structure of reasons adequate to the truths it must explain. And these truths wouldn’t just be acceptable to a select few, but to anyone who grasps the reasons. Truth is universal, true for everyone and at all times.

For any completed system of philosophy to be worthwhile and useful, its principles must be consistent and comprehensible. An account that both affirms and denies the same claim in the same respect cannot ever be grasped, as contradictions lack content.

Philosophical truths must both constrain and support one another. A philosophical question remains unsettled if it depends on an unanswered question elsewhere. Like a puzzle, everything must hang together in philosophy. Ideas can only come together on account of principle, not idiosyncrasies.

This concept of a unified, intelligible order that grounds reality has precedent among the ancient philosophers. Heraclitus’s logos, Parmenides’ undivided Being, Plotinus’s One, and Kant’s Transcendental Idealism each reflect this ambition, grounding reality in a single, objective understanding rather than in a collection of private understandings.

Philosophy needs to continue its search for complete, metaphysical structure.

What I’m arguing here is hopefully obvious, although ambitious. If philosophy really does hang together, then such a grand structure is at the very least conceivable.

From private vision to shared consciousness

Philosophy develops by philosophers making their private understanding, like a powerful intuition or insightful conclusion, public.

To do this, a thinker must transform what is privately grasped into concepts and arguments that others can understand.

Carl Jung describes this role of the genius philosopher:1

A man is a philosopher of genius only when he succeeds in transmuting the primitive and merely natural vision into an abstract idea belonging to the common stock of consciousness.

The point is communicability, not just personal genius. A private insight becomes philosophy only when it can be shared.

Once the philosopher’s insight is expressed, it would be subject to public scrutiny before it could be accepted into the public consciousness. Only once an insight survives this scrutiny can it hope to be a candidate for truth.

What starts as one person’s insight must become something others can understand (without having to become that person). If it can’t be communicated and/or understood, then the thought would be nothing more than a subjective sense, not eligible for entry into the structure of philosophy.

Genius discovers a powerful idea. Dialogue allows that idea to be made public. Systematic philosophy establishes how it belongs within the whole. That is how philosophy progresses and, in principle, finishes.

Philosophical completion

Philosophical completion would occur when this process had resolved all genuine philosophical questions within a shared structure of reasons, such that all objections to the structure can be addressed and the structure itself can be accepted by any reasonable person, for such a structure would be grounded on reasons.

Agreement would not mean that everyone had surrendered their judgment to the philosophical superstructure. It would mean that people could understand and recognize the reasons through the proper exercise of judgment.

What matters is that no genuine philosophical problem remains misunderstood. Under philosophical completion, any question in philosophy can be justifiably answered within the established framework, or else provide an acceptable explanation for why there is no answer.

Such completion would provide a philosophical framework for understanding everything. Once you have the a priori concepts prepared, everything else becomes only application.

You can just apply them to empirical data to understand such data properly.

Philosophy seeks a structured set of truths, justifies that structure publicly through reasons, and pursues agreement in understanding it. Its completion would be the point at which private insight and public reason converge in a common understanding of philosophy as a whole.

But as of now, philosophy is still under construction.

​

Summary: While we study and use philosophy to challenge other people’s arguments, we rarely use these tools of reasoning against the bad arguments we tell ourselves. This essay argues why philosophy is uniquely equipped to expose the lies and self-deceptions we use to guide our lives and justify our decisions, such that its most useful role is not making us harder for others to fool, but making us harder to fool ourselves.

I. Why study philosophy at all?

What is studying philosophy for? If you study a real profession like medicine, you learn to heal; if you study law, you learn to settle disputes. But what can studying philosophy do for you? Is it just intellectual self-satisfaction, reading texts written by long-dead thinkers about abstract matters without any definite purpose?

That’s a fairly typical view, as a philosophy degree has become a cliché for academic uselessness.

The usual defense is that philosophy teaches critical thinking. It lets us spot fallacies, discover hidden assumptions in arguments, and detect errors in reasoning. But it’s a fairly weak defense.

Other professions don’t entirely lack critical thinking, they just use critical-thinking tools more practically and adopt them when they serve a specific goal. They don’t spend their hours reading textbooks on the topic.

Yet the ancients romanticized philosophy, treating it as essential to self-realization.

Socrates claimed that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Seneca was just as direct, writing that philosophy “molds and constructs the soul; it orders our life, guides our conduct, shows us what we should do and what we should leave undone.”

So who is right? Is philosophy too abstract and general to be useful, or is it necessary for our lives? Will reading Hegel’s complete works really construct my soul and order my life? Let’s first be precise about Socrates’ and Seneca’s claims about philosophy’s enriching power.

Neither man was describing some university degrees or academic papers. Rather, they refer to philosophy as a discipline aimed at improving our lives through self-awareness and critical examination.

My claim is that this is philosophy’s most useful role. It detects deception in general, but above all it detects self-deception. No other discipline can do that, or is even capable of doing that. If we want to live a life free of our own lies, philosophy is indispensable.

Through the study of “reasons” (to be discussed below and across this Substack), philosophy uniquely equips practitioners to subject their own minds to critical examination and diagnose self-deception.

Take a wise sage who properly and fully grasps the essential thoughts of philosophy, including logic and reasoning, and has applied them honestly and consistently to their own life and mind.

A true sage could never be self-deceived, for applying consistent logic and reasoning to one’s thoughts can only eliminate errors in thinking. If they were deceived, they could not be an enlightened sage.

It would be a contradiction for the sage to be deceived himself, as such deception is entirely inconsistent with the clarity of thought that mastery of philosophy brings.

Psychology may examine the physical and cognitive causes of pain and fear, and can provide physical, causal explanations and even medication to treat certain forms of self-deception and neuroses.

But the philosopher’s metaphysical explanation examines self-deception on its own terms, using reason to analyze preconceptions and unjustified conclusions. Philosophy is not guided by hunches or popular opinion, but examines ideas objectively and on their own terms.

Keep in mind that philosophy was developed as a search for truth. To pursue that truth, philosophy has spent thousands of years focusing on how to think. Once we can think clearly, our knowledge of reality can only become stronger.

This practice has been adopted by the unsurprisingly successful cognitive behavioral therapy, where patients use logical reasoning and ancient philosophical principles (Stoicism in particular) to help identify and reframe irrational thought patterns to improve their mental health.

I previously discussed in an article here that philosophy’s greatest role is detecting evil, since evil exists as a metaphysical entity and metaphysics falls within philosophy’s domain.

But more practically, since not all of us will be hunting down evil-doers, philosophy’s most useful role is eliminating self-deception in ourselves. Not only is philosophy equipped to foster clear thinking and understanding, but it is also the only discipline focused on these goals.

While most other disciplines focus on events in the external world, philosophy focuses on the mind to address its illusions.

Philosophy’s study of “reasons” and reasoning is uniquely honed to move closer to truth and detect fallacies; since “reasons” are also metaphysical (as discussed here), philosophy is uniquely positioned to sharpen our understanding and guide our lives.

II. Why only you can do it

Other people can deceive us, and other people can expose others’ deception for us. Now we can even run things through AI to search for any hint of deception in the external world.

But self-deception is fundamentally different because the deceived has no deceiver to look out for. The same person hiding the truth also controls how we look for it. This is why it’s so easy to lie to oneself, since the only victim is the liar.

Richard Feynman said that “[t]he first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” Ludwig Wittgenstein even wrote that “Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.” We may go through the world confident in our view of the world. But self-deception is dangerous, not just because it leads us astray, but because it leads us astray without us ever realizing.

Our lives are too short to allow for self-deception. Take an example of why this matters.

Imagine a middle-aged man in a demanding, but well-paid profession. He tells himself he only stays for his family’s security. But when his savings go beyond any reasonable standard of security, he still stays, citing market uncertainty, his specialty, and that leaving would be irresponsible. Each one might be plausible on its face, but each is worthy of further examination, since they each point to the more comfortable conclusion.

What he needs to examine is whether “security” is a true reason for staying or an excuse not grounded in reality. He might stay because the job’s prestige has become his identity. Or perhaps he is afraid that whatever he would do instead might fail. These may not be false motives, but hidden motives that determine his life. Only by subjecting such motives to reason and critical scrutiny may we hope to get out of this position, and the middle-aged man can live a more enlightened life.

A friend can shake them, but they can’t wake them up. They can ultimately only wake themselves. You can explain something to a person lying to himself, but you cannot understand it for him. You can address self-deception only through critical self-examination.

And this doubt can come for us even if we’ve lived a righteous life. Leo Tolstoy, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, captured the terrifying self-doubt that can haunt even the best of us. On his deathbed, Ivan Ilyich had spent his entire life as a respectable man, but is then confronted by the question he had spent decades avoiding: “What if my whole life has been wrong?”

The person trapped in self-deception lacks nothing external that can be provided. No amount of money or technological development can help them. They are asleep within their own understanding and are the only ones who can help themselves.

We may be quietly marching toward tragedy without knowing it. And if we’d like to know if we’re tricking ourselves, how can we? It’s as though trying to look directly at our eyes, for the tools that allow for examination are precisely what is trying to be examined.

That is why we cannot delegate understanding. While I can still rely on a doctor’s diagnosis or an engineer’s calculation without knowing how they got there, no specialist other than myself can check whether I’m lying to myself. And we cannot hope to check ourselves without sufficient study in philosophy, as the very tools we use to audit our minds may be compromised. As Seneca stated:

Why will no man confess his faults? Because he is still in their grasp; only he who is awake can recount his dream, and similarly a confession of sin is a proof of sound mind.

Only you can solve your own self-deception. No one else can do this for you, which allows many who ignore philosophy to remain asleep for their entire lives, as the fallacious reasoning they use to make decisions goes unquestioned.

Philosophy’s value lies in individual understanding, not external projects or scientific research. As such, a philosopher who understands proper reasoning and can detect fallacious arguments is well positioned to detect any self-deception or motivated reasoning they may be subject to.

This doesn’t mean that reading the complete works of Immanuel Kant will bring automatic enlightenment. But the works of philosophers, as they use reasoning to study the mind and philosophy, do provide the tools needed for self-awareness and self-actualization, so long as we know how to use such tools. The true aim of philosophy is to know ourselves.

The real value of detecting self-deception is not simply a matter of having correct opinions, but living a life grounded in truth. Being wrong about a political or moral view is one thing, but being wrong about an essential element of ourselves can cost the whole direction of a life. To live confidently, knowing we are operating on true beliefs, studying philosophy is a necessity.

III. The Philosophical Tools

Philosophy gives this self-examination its proper tools. Training in logic and fallacies, as well as a well-developed set of critical-thinking concepts, gives the philosopher tools against bad arguments in their own mind. Below is a short list of logical fallacies with questions that we should ask ourselves when thinking.

• Begging the question. Do the reasons I use just assume the very conclusion they are used to prove?

• Ad hominem. Do I attack the argument or the person making it?

• Sunk cost fallacy. Am I continuing just because of what I lost, rather than what there is to gain?

• False dilemma. Have I considered all other options?

• Hasty generalization. Do my limited examples justify my very strong conclusions?

• Appeal to consequences. Do I treat a claim as true or false just because I like or dislike what would follow from it?

• Straw man. Is the idea that I’m arguing against actually stronger than I’m making it out to be?

Philosophy doesn’t just list out these fallacies for its practitioners to recite in a lecture hall. The fallacies should be second nature among seasoned philosophers who can critically examine an argument. While such reasoning is more often used on arguments made in academic lectures, they apply just as well to our own everyday thought patterns. We can ask the above questions when making decisions and check whether our reasoning is sound and whether our conclusions are derived from true premises and valid reasoning.

At the same time, this specialized strength of philosophy can also be its weakness. Training in fallacies and arguments makes a person better at seeing through rationalization. It also makes them better at producing it. A clever mind can build a more elaborate alibi. Some of the most ridiculous beliefs are held by intellectuals.

There have been plenty of philosophers who may have started from a love of wisdom, but later became bogged down as an academic through tenure and office politics. Philosophy practice doesn’t end when we get our degree, but is a lifelong project.

Take the sophists in Plato’s dialogues, who used their skills in logic and language to justify absurd conclusions. Seneca, mocking such language games, quotes the stock example of the word “mouse,” where the word “mouse” is a syllable, and because a mouse eats cheese, a sophist can conclude that a syllable eats cheese.

As an aside, much of sophistry is a verbal sleight of hand that exploits confusion over the distinction between sense and reference, discussed in this article.

So using philosophy to improve our thinking is not only an academic exercise. We must incorporate these tools and know-how into our thinking until they become second nature.

Yet some fallacies may be self-serving and even useful. For example, an irrationally high level of personal confidence may lead someone to take risks and act more boldly, even when true calculations wouldn’t justify it. Yet that irrational exuberance could still lead to success.

But this shouldn’t be an excuse to justify irrationality, for while fallacies may be helpful, particularly when we are lucky, they do not reflect truth. And while such self-deception may be helpful, it is deception nonetheless. A devotion to truth requires that we value it for its own sake, even more than worldly success.

If we want any hope of freeing ourselves from a false image of reality, we not only need a strong grasp of logic, but the self-awareness and lack of ego to apply these tools to ourselves.

To anyone who has succeeded in using the weapons of philosophy to destroy their opponents’ arguments, using such weapons on yourself is a scary prospect. But this is an important step towards self-realization and full self-awareness, what one can argue is the ultimate project of philosophy.

So what actually constitutes the philosopher’s tools to keep them from lying to themselves?

IV. Reasons as metaphysical explanations

Why is philosophy, and not psychology or therapy, uniquely able to address self-deception? To answer, we must understand what it is that philosophy studies, the proper unit of analysis of philosophy: reasons.

“Reasons”, as discussed in this article, are what we can understand as “objective explanations” - explanations that can reduce doubt for anyone who grasps such explanations.

“Reasons” are propositions that allow sense-making; they justify and explain things and actions, and “reasoning” is the act of thinking in terms of such reasons. In short, reasons are the ideas that justifiably reduce doubt.

Such explanations have a feature that matters here: they are objective. A reason in this sense is a fact that counts in favor of something. And anyone who understands the reason can see what it is that counts in favor and why, for “reasons” are objective, logical rationales.

Philosophy seeks to understand “reasons” as guides to truth, and to see which actions and beliefs are justified on the basis of such metaphysical reasons. Philosophers must separate the wheat of reason and truth from the chaff of fallacy and personal idiosyncrasies.

As such, all conclusions must derive from carefully structured premises. Critical thinking is done step-by-step. At every step, reasoning must be proper, and any flaws must be exposed. You start with self-evident truths and, from there, build until you reach grounded thoughts that strengthen your understanding.

Once you figure out what the right “reasons” are, and what logic demands, you can ignore everything else, including any self-serving fallacies and personal biases. “Reasons” are an objective standard that our minds can be held to - they are our compass, our north star to ensure we are “reasoning” correctly.

The philosopher Robert Brandom even describes philosophy as the “game of giving and asking for reasons”. “Reasons” are the light that illuminates truth, for truth is nothing more than a proper structure of such reasons.

With reason, you can see through any fallacies and biases, and then see truth more clearly, as is the purpose of philosophy.

V. Know thyself: from Socrates to Descartes

The whole tradition of philosophy can be read as an extended practice of developing self-awareness and eliminating self-deception, where the mind is critically examined under the light of reason to reveal the truth hiding among illusions.

Socrates has viewed philosophy as a discovery of thought and its limitations, seeking to dispel the illusion of knowledge. The Delphic command to “know thyself” became part of a larger project to develop true self-awareness.

Seneca, as the quotes above emphasize, also viewed philosophy as a necessity, stating that “...no man can live a happy life, or even a supportable life, without the study of wisdom.” The ancient Stoics still teach us today how to integrate philosophy into our daily lives.

In his Meditations, René Descartes contemplates an evil deceiver who can falsify all his beliefs. When asking what would survive, he recognizes that even deception requires someone being deceived. His radical doubt allows him to separate self-evident truths from his conventional beliefs. Descartes describes this project as freeing himself from “preconceived opinions” and searching for unshakeable ground for his beliefs.

Immanuel Kant pushed philosophy further inward, away from the external world and using reason to uncover deeper, hidden truth. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he argues that we never view the world as it is in itself (the noumenon) but only as it is filtered by the mind’s own forms and categories, including space, time, and causation (the phenomenon).

For Kant, philosophy’s purpose is to recognize how much of what we believe to be given reality is actually a construction by the believing subject.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morality, also refuses to accept appearances as given to morality itself. Nietzsche treats Western civilization’s moral values as products of human psychology, pushed on to serve hypocritical interests. Nietzsche critically examined the very idea of social standards and personal duties.

Socratic analysis, Stoic practice, Cartesian doubt, Kantian idealism, and Nietzschean metaethics are all variations on philosophy’s true objective: awareness of the true self.

VI. Conclusion: why philosophy is necessary

If self-deception is a failure to recognize one’s own reasons truly, then the only cure is to examine those reasons. We have to ask what they are, what grounds them, and whether they would hold for an objective observer. We can detect such self-deceptive reasons through analyzing whether they are grounded in fallacies, flaws in reasoning, or personal biases.

Philosophy is not limited to university buildings and academic papers. Rather, we must be philosophizing every day. There is no point in living a life if we are actually in a dream.

Other disciplines tell us how the world is. Only philosophy, through its study of reasons, asks whether we are telling ourselves the truth about why we believe what we believe and want what we want.

So the question we started with, what is philosophy for, has a deeper answer than “critical thinking.” Philosophy is for the moment before Ivan Ilyich’s deathbed, when we would not need to ask “what if I am wrong about my own life?” Studying philosophy does not guarantee we will ask it. Without philosophy, though, we have no way to ask it well or answer it.

The true test of a philosophical education is not only whether it has made us harder for others to fool. It is whether it has made us harder to fool ourselves, whether we can become self-aware enough to apply our critical thinking to ourselves, especially when it’s against our interests.

Summary: The problem of evil challenges the existence of God by asking how an all-loving, all-powerful God could permit a world with suffering. Yet a world with stable laws of nature and free beings necessarily permits harm, so no creator could make a world with freedom, natural laws, and no suffering, and evil alone does not disprove a good God. This essay further argues that evil can be part of the necessary structure of the only world that could exist, under the principle of sufficient reason, as evil is a natural decaying force for an imperfect world, and all events derive from reasons by necessity. Yet this defense of God against the problem of evil reveals a different issue: if God permits evil because he is bound by necessity, then necessity, not God, is truly all-powerful.

The problem of evil is often viewed as one of the most powerful objections to the existence of God. If God is both perfectly good and all-powerful, why does he permit evil? If God cannot stop evil, he is not omnipotent. But if he deliberately allows it, he is not perfectly good. After acknowledging that evil exists, theists must reconcile that fact with their understanding of an all-powerful, all-loving God.

But the argument is weak once you recognize that it holds the ultimate creator to the impossible standard of producing a world free from suffering.

If both the laws of nature and free will exist, such a world would be inconceivable, as natural processes cause (and even necessitate) harm and human freedom allows cruelty and ignorance. A free world without suffering would be impossible.

Our world is a material world of change and decay, not a divine world of eternity. God cannot make an inherently imperfect world perfect while preserving the conditions of such an imperfect world. If certain goods depend on those conditions, God cannot abolish the conditions and keep the goods.

My argument is that evil does not, by itself, disprove a good creator. Even readers who do not fully accept this defense should recognize that it gives theists a response to the problem that doesn’t necessitate giving up on God’s existence.

Yet the defense against the problem of evil raises an even more fundamental problem for the theist: if God permits suffering because he cannot overcome certain necessary constraints, how can he be said to be omnipotent? The problem of evil may not disprove God, but the problem of omnipotence may disprove omnipotence itself.

I. A Perfect God Is Not the Same Thing as a Perfect World

Our material world is subject to change and decay. Its inhabitants are subject to the physical laws of their environment, but they also have free will, as they can choose how to act rather than serve as God’s marionettes.

In this material world, decay is natural. In the Christian worldview, perfection and eternity belong to heaven, not to earthly, temporal life, which is subject to evil and destruction.

Consider fire, for example. Fire’s capacity to burn is useful when we cook and destructive when our home catches fire. A world with fire, ruled by natural processes, and with human freedom determines the opportunities for suffering and destruction.

The stable laws that explain how fire burns also allow intelligibility, for we cannot grasp the world without laws to understand it. We can learn how the world works because it behaves consistently. But consistency does not ensure our safety - in fact, consistency may guarantee our harm when we place our hand on a flame.

Fire can sustain life and destroy it, and we take both the good and the bad. In my view, God cannot create magic so that fire, by its nature, burns only when it’s useful and not when it’s harmful. A fire that could tell a useful burn from a harmful one would no longer be fire acting by its nature; it would be a constant miracle.

The world is governed by pre-made rules, rules grounded in logic, and logic, I hold, is itself grounded in the structure of the physical world (which is why physics can be expressed in mathematics). No true difference exists between physical and logical necessity, as both are necessary. And the rules of logic cannot be changed, even by God, on pain of contradiction. God cannot make a square circle, for example.

God could still intervene each time fire threatens harm, but constant intervention would both (1) undermine the natural order that makes the world intelligible and (2) leave little room for human reason and responsibility, reducing the value of God’s creation.

This does not mean that every conceivable protection against fire is contradictory. It means only that protection must develop logically, for God does not install smoke detectors and fire hydrants, but beings with the gifts of freedom and reason do.

Free will imposes a related limitation for heaven on earth. If people are free to act like Jesus, they must also have the possibility of acting like Satan. God cannot both determine a decision and leave that same decision undetermined. If he guarantees good conduct by controlling every choice, he has not created morally free beings. What would be the value of goodness enjoyed by zombies?

Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne have taken up this view of freedom, holding that morally significant freedom helps explain the possibility of wrongdoing, that the freedom to do right includes the freedom to do wrong.

Natural laws and free will show why suffering is possible. We cannot assume God could preserve everything valuable about a stable world while removing every bad consequence.

Yet if a world of suffering is necessary, how can God be said to be all-loving given he creates a world of known suffering? This judgment assumes the right standard for judging God’s love is each individual’s well-being rather than humanity as a whole, an assumption worthy of examination.

II. Providence Concerns Humanity, Not Just Individual Comfort

We often think of God as a being who ensures perfect justice in each of our personal lives, granting rewards and punishments corresponding to what we personally deserve.

But providence may be operating on a larger scale. God’s love for humanity need not take the form of guaranteeing each person’s earthly well-being. The standard by which to judge that love would then include the whole of human history, not simply the well-being of its individual participants.

Theologians have recognized this distinction. In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas distinguishes a person responsible for a particular thing from someone whose providence is universal:

a particular provider excludes all defects from what is subject to his care as far as he can; whereas, one who provides universally allows some little defect to remain, lest the good of the whole should be hindered.

The suffering of the individual may be justified for a higher goal. This does not mean that God treats individuals as merely a means. Each person is part of the whole, and it's for the good of that whole that God serves, even if suffering is part of that aim.

And how much blame can we give God for causing suffering, since we’d also need to give God the credit of creation?

In this view, God provides for the whole. The good of the entire order is not the same as protecting every single person. This idea may not comfort a devoted Christian who suffers despite his faith, but it helps explain how God’s goodness could still fit with individual suffering.

Consider Christianity’s relationship to slavery, a common argument from critics who point to biblical slavery and Christian slaveholding as evidence against Christianity’s moral authority.

The abolition movement has been closely tied to Christian activism, and most countries with the lowest levels of modern slavery are historically Christian societies. The problem of evil needs to explain how the long arc of history bends toward justice.

A Christian might see these struggles as part of humanity’s journey toward a better grasp of its moral duties. Providence does not mean God gives us a perfect world right away. Instead, people take part in a growing moral story, using their freedom and abilities given from God to fight evil.

The atheist who presses the problem of evil may not be satisfied, as this argument is only meant to show that the existence of evil is compatible with an all-powerful creator God. Yet we should next ask whether the atheist’s world without evil is even possible.

III. Is a Good World Necessarily a Painless World?

The problem of evil assumes that a perfectly good creator would prevent all suffering. But this assumes that a painless world is even possible for a being to create.

Why should we assume that created beings must receive a finished world in which nothing can go wrong? We are not entitled to treat every difficulty as evidence of a defective creator.

Theists could argue that evil was part of the “soul-making” process argued by John Hick, who views an environment subject to evil as permitting moral and spiritual development rather than ready-made happiness. And this makes sense, as what meaning does ready-made happiness really have when it did not arise from human free will? Goodness is something that humans develop under God’s guidance, the theists may argue.

We must learn how to fish, rather than simply expect fish.

This argument from an imperfect world challenges an overly simple expectation of a world where there is no suffering. But is the current level of suffering warranted by God? To accept this world’s current level of evil, we may need to accept a stronger argument of this world’s fundamental necessity.

IV. Sufficient Reason: Suffering in the Structure of the World

If a world with freedom and goodness but without suffering is possible, why does God not create it? One answer is that such a world is not possible. A more ambitious answer is that this world, considered as a whole, is the only world that could ultimately exist.

If everything has a sufficient reason for its existence, then perhaps there is only one fully intelligible way for reality to be.

Leibniz offers a systematic response to the problem of evil based on the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), which states that nothing exists without a reason why it is so rather than otherwise. As applied to creation, the principle asks why God made this world rather than another. Leibniz attributes God’s choice of this world to his wisdom, recognizing that this is the best among possible worlds. For Leibniz, other worlds remain possible - God chooses the best.

The world must therefore be judged as a whole, not as a collection of independently replaceable parts. We cannot simply assume that even one evil could be removed while everything else remained unchanged. We must consider the alternative world produced by that change (and whether such an alternative world is possible).

On this view, physical evils may be permitted because of their status within a better overall order. Suffering may be purposeful as part of a larger structure, not something humans have the authority to call truly arbitrary.

I’ll go further than Leibniz, as I believe God creates not just the best possible world, but the only necessary world. If everything occurs for a sufficient reason, then everything becomes necessary, as Peter van Inwagen recognized (who takes this as a claim against the PSR, whereas I accept the implication). This necessity belongs to the world as a whole, while free will remains with the agent’s own mind (how free will can exist within a necessary world is a question I will take up in a future essay).

To the extent that this defense is plausible, suffering is not evidence against God. It is necessary either to the goods God creates or to the only coherent world that can exist. Yet God being subject to the rules of possibility brings deeper concerns.

V. The Deeper Problem: A God Subject to Necessity

The problem of evil alone is not sufficient to deny the existence of a good creator. But the responses to the problem of evil discussed here reveal constraints that not even God could overcome.

God cannot determine a free choice. He cannot make contradictory conditions coexist. And if certain goods necessarily depend on conditions that permit suffering, he cannot preserve those goods while abolishing their necessary conditions.

The standard isn’t whether God can affect natural laws, but whether he can alter the structure of possibility itself.

If he cannot, then his power is restricted to necessary limits. Whether those limits are external to God or internal to his own nature is a distinction without a difference. God is powerless to structure in either case.

The standard theological response tries to define omnipotence as power over everything possible. God can do anything logically coherent, and since contradictions are not logically coherent, they are not a thing at all and therefore do not count as limits on his power.

But this re-conceptualization definition is not satisfactory. It grants that God cannot alter the structure of possibility and then asks us not to count that inability as a limitation.

To retort that a contradiction is not a thing at all, and therefore such a non-entity can’t be subject to God’s power, is just to state that there are some descriptions God cannot make true. If God can’t make a contradiction true, then God can’t change some metaphysical structures. And if, as I argued here, logical necessity is grounded in the structure of the world itself, then those structures are not empty non-entities. They are real features of reality that stand outside God’s control.

The theological definition may coherently conceive divine power, but it robs omnipotence of its meaning by imposing a limitation on limitless power.

Theists therefore face a serious conceptual issue. If necessity explains why a good God permits evil, necessity also explains why God cannot do otherwise. Whether we call those constraints logical or metaphysical truths, features of God’s divine nature, or natural laws of the best possible world, we still don’t have true omnipotence.

Evil may be compatible with a good creator acting through a structured world of physical laws and free beings. Why should human life be heaven from the beginning? And why do we believe we are entitled to demand an omnipotent being give us heaven? Change and free will are a part of our world, and as they give meaning, they create suffering, which no being can change.

VI. Conclusion

This article hopefully showed that evil itself is not enough to disprove God, but necessity is enough to disprove omnipotence. While the atheist need not be fully convinced of the argument made here out of necessity, this argument is only to show that the problem of evil isn’t a particularly strong strike against theism and that Christians have a coherent response to this concern.

Necessity shapes the laws of nature, of philosophy, and all of reality. Necessity rules even God. This Substack series will explore the necessary truths of philosophy, guided by this all-powerful structure to arrive at philosophical conclusions.

Summary: Philosophy must be systematic. All philosophical answers must be able to fit together within a unified theory, to stand consistent with other truths, rather than as isolated conclusions within separate academic subfields. Any position in ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, or aesthetics must be judged by a broader framework that can include all these fields, a holistic grand theory in which all philosophical claims hang together. Philosophy cannot be done piecemeal. It must be done all at once.

What is philosophy? Wilfrid Sellars described it as understanding “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” But what does this mean?

We recognize that there are philosophers who each do something called philosophy, but less recognized is that philosophy itself exists as an entity that has its own structure, one that philosophers must discover and systematize. Philosophy is a thing, an entity we can study. Philosophy has a logical structure in which deep and eternal truths hang together. Its academic subdivisions are only artificial and administrative, helpful for organizing students and offices, but should not be confused with inherent structure.

We can’t even start to do philosophy without first knowing what it is.

Philosophy is like a puzzle. It is a structured whole whose own pieces define and constrain one another. Its parts (epistemology, ontology, philosophy of language, etc.) fit together in particular ways. Each piece helps guide how the others are placed, with each philosophical truth playing an explanatory role in the whole. Some claims cannot be true together, while others must be true together.

What is true does not stop being true at the boundary of a subfield or PhD dissertation. Philosophy is not simply a menagerie of academic papers, but a principled structure of ideas.

Many mistakenly believe that philosophy is shaped from the university course catalog, as if ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology are completely segregated fields with their own practitioners and claims. Philosophers believe they can study the truths of one field that have nothing to do with any other.

Philosophical specialties might divide labor, but they cannot divide reality.

Any argument answering a narrow, specialized question relies on certain assumptions. Those assumptions, in turn, depend on answers to larger, more fundamental questions. And answers to these specialized questions may change our understanding of the fundamental questions, for the explanatory value need not go one way.

How can you answer a question in ethics without holding a position on ontology - the nature of being? Before you can assess an answer, you need some account of what would count as an answer.

To assess philosophical arguments, we must examine the background commitments that they rely on. No matter how many premises your argument has, there are always unstated premises.

Many philosophers, particularly graduate students seeking to add any sort of value, pursue just one narrow question at a time, as though specialization could guarantee one at least some small territory of truth. You can’t be wrong if you’re the only person writing a paper on it. But this mistakes uniqueness and expertise for truth.

You cannot think piecemeal in philosophy, for conclusions rely on more than just some chosen set of premises, but must fit in a broader structure of true claims. Every philosophical commitment relies on assumptions and claims made elsewhere in the system. If the assumptions change, then the conclusions must be re-examined.

Much of contemporary philosophy pretends this isn’t true, that philosophy is closed-universe for each particular subfield. But this is clearly wrong. To understand responsibility, you must have a view of agency, which in turn depends on a view of personhood and identity. An account of what moral claims even mean requires a philosophy of language. You can’t only do moral philosophy.

Certain claims may seem fine in isolation. However, their contradictions become much more visible once we examine them more closely and see what other commitments they imply.

Take moral philosophy, for example.

Moral philosophy asks what we ought to do.

Metaethics asks what kind of thing an “ought” claim is.

Metaphysics asks what kind of reality such a claim would describe.

Ontology asks what it is for anything to “be” or “exist” at all.

Metaontology asks what we mean when we discuss ontology.

Metaphilosophy asks how we could even answer these questions in the first place.

The study of evil puts these questions into greater context, for we cannot fully understand the true and the good without also identifying the wrong and the depraved.

It's not like we need to answer every philosophical question from the get-go. It's just the standard that we need to hold ourselves to: that all of our claims need to fit with all others. But whether you acknowledge it or not, you must take some position. Even if all you do is legal philosophy or epistemology, you have to have an ontological position or some view on metaphilosophy.

The best tool we have for this approach is a version of reflective equilibrium, where we test particular judgments and broader commitments against one another, revising either where necessary. We’d have to examine any conclusion against the background commitments it might challenge. Then, depending on that analysis, we’d have to revise the conclusion, the commitments, or both. Each conclusion you retain becomes part of the background against which you assess further conclusions. For a conclusion’s ultimate goal is to become part of the set of background assumptions.

For example, Gettier cases forced a re-assesment of our background conditions that justified true belief is sufficient for knowledge. It was not empirical evidence that forced this re-examination, but a conclusion derived from a thought experiment that changed epistemology.

This is why philosophy is, at bottom, the study of thought. Philosophy does not study anything physical, or even psychological, but examines the structure of abstract ideas. Philosophy doesn’t just study the ideas we happen to hold at a certain time, but eternally true ideas. And whatever is true must be consistent with everything else that is true. It makes no sense to say that a philosophical claim is only sometimes true.

For example, if your metaethics requires a specific theory of language, then that theory of language must apply throughout your other philosophical claims.

If you give different accounts of language in fiction and in morality, you need a shared principle explaining why the difference is warranted. If convenience or some other arbitrary rationale alone determines which account you use, with no objective reason behind it, then your philosophy is not a system but a patchwork of personal preferences.

Some fundamental background questions that ground our claims might include:

What is the essential nature of reality?

Where does meaning come from?

What is the nature of subjective experience?

How can we obtain knowledge?

Why should we be moral?

What is evil, and why does it exist?

You need not have settled all questions at once. But philosophical arguments depend on answers to foundational questions, even when they are never explicitly stated.

And the answers to these questions must hang together. Ontology concerns what exists. Metaphilosophy concerns how to do philosophy. Aesthetics relies on metaphysics to understand art, while the philosophy of fiction contemplates theories of meaning and truth. Consider the sentence “Sherlock Holmes lives on Baker Street.” How you assess that statement depends on what you think fictional characters are and how statements about them work.

These questions might seem too big. But philosophy is an ambitious project.

Practicing Systematic Philosophy

To practice philosophy systematically is to treat each claim as part of a greater whole.

Philosophical claims cannot be tested in isolation, without context. Too often, philosophical debates are language games, with participants talking past one another because their claims rest on different background commitments. Although participants may use the same words, they mean different things.

A materialist and an idealist may disagree about the nature of art and aesthetics, as they rely on different views of reality. A nominalist and a realist about universals may have different views, for example, in political and legal philosophy. If you have different views of reality, then everything else likely differs as well. Unless they bring those commitments into view, they cannot fully grasp one another’s view.

Only a grand theory of philosophy could unite philosophers within a shared framework needed to truly advance the field.

Those grand theories may draw ridicule and end up in the graveyard, but we should not be too sensitive to their deaths. They live and die for a greater goal, which we can call “systematic philosophy”, a unified system where everything hangs together.

We need systematic philosophy: ambitious grand theories that can deepen our philosophical understanding, the practice of original philosophers. This tradition of drive goes back to the first philosophers, Parmenides and Heraclitus, whose accounts of fundamental reality still shape metaphysics. Their contributions did not depend on their grand theories being complete or entirely right. So long as they provide insight, such theories have succeeded.

Lets take Immanuel Kant, for example. Kant’s aesthetic judgment in the Critique of Judgment could not have been written without the wider metaphysical framework of the Critique of Pure Reason. The later argument relies on the more foundational system, for philosophy is structured and analytic.

And a system cannot be judged by its most easily digestible or intuitive conclusions. You must also examine all of its other implications. What does one’s moral philosophy imply for one’s political or legal philosophy? Simply saying that they are unrelated cannot be an acceptable answer.

For example, if your philosophy includes Buddhist metaphysics but a Christian epistemology, you need shared principles that justify combining them. Otherwise, your philosophy is diffuse and unprincipled, as it rests on nothing more than personal preference rather than the true structure of philosophy.

If our grand theory doesn’t shed light on more specific questions (say, our metaphysics doesn’t help us understand epistemology or aesthetics), then we must scrutinize it, revise it where possible, and abandon it where reconciliation is hopeless (although see here for why it’s so hard for us to abandon our theories). All philosophical truths, without exception, need to fit within a unified framework.

Conclusion

The goal of this Substack is to build a systematic philosophy, holding all philosophical claims I’ve made to the standard I have argued for here. Each essay will seek to add to a larger whole. I hope you, as readers, can hold me to this standard and mark any possible inconsistencies.

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The system may fail, like all other theories. But there is no hope of doing philosophy at all without ambition. Systematic philosophy is not simply one way to do philosophy; it is the only true way.

TL;DR: This article argues that evil is not a physical phenomenon but a metaphysical one—its nature is logical, not material. Because of this, philosophy alone is equipped to recognize evil as it truly is, beyond the deceptive appearances through which it hides. Evil is the greatest threat to the good and can only be detected and understood through philosophical inquiry. Consequently, the philosopher’s highest purpose is to expose and comprehend evil, for in uncovering its nature, philosophy most profoundly serves the good. This article is part of a series on evil. See What Is Evil and Socrates Was Right: No One Can Knowingly Commit Evil.

1. Detecting Evil

What is the point of philosophy? Philosophy is often regarded as a useless intellectual pursuit with no real-world relevance, much less a necessity. Its debates are caricatured as meaningless semantics or regarding unrealistic hypotheticals.

But this is a misunderstanding caused by the dereliction of duty by those who call themselves philosophers but ignore the true questions that our world needs. One such question that modern “philosophers” have failed to address is, What is evil? And where is it?

Just as economists are blamed for missing financial bubbles and politicians are blamed for permitting injustice, philosophers should be similarly blamed for ignoring their review of evil.

The greatest role of philosophy, I will argue, is to detect evil. Evil is an existential danger to free beings, and it hides in appearances. Only the philosopher is properly equipped to see past appearances and uncover evil for what it is.

As evil is the greatest threat to the good, philosophy’s power to uncover it is the greatest way it can serve the good.

This is because “evil” is metaphysical by its nature. There is nothing you can point to that can be called evil. There are no “evil” particles or “evil” things. Rather, as recognized by Augustine and Aquinas, evil is a “privation” of the good, a corruption of what is.

Evil is destruction. It does not “exist” in itself but can only create non-existence. And as a metaphysical phenomenon, only philosophy is able to detect and analyze it, making it the philosopher’s duty to do so.

Philosophy’s role is a serious one; it is not just for debate or intellectual satisfaction. Philosophy is not just a hobby but a serious project that is capable of addressing humanity’s pressing concerns. The clearest concern is objective moral guidance.

Evil cannot be discovered in confusion, and confusion is the habitat where evil has room to flourish.

Evil rarely appears as itself. Rather, it hides its appearance and presents itself as beneficial. Evil lives in confusion, manipulating the weak and foolish. But among true philosophers, evil has nowhere to hide. This article is about the greatest duty a philosopher has in the good’s battle against evil.

2. Evil is philosophical

People often treat “evil” as an emotional word: a forceful way of saying “I intensely dislike this.” That reduction is itself part of the problem. It turns evil into an aesthetic reaction, and aesthetic reactions can be manipulated.

Evil is not primarily a feeling. The concept of “evil” has a logical structure (as I discuss here), specifically two prongs:

1. Serious Harm

2. Lack of Justification

Harm

The “harm” prong must be serious and material, not just immoral or illegal. It must threaten agency itself. For evil is freedom destroying freedom.

The “harm” prong is usually straightforward. Most people recognize the harm of murder, kidnapping, slavery, rape, and sadistic domination as clearly evil.

But just as we would not call chemotherapy evil for the serious harm it causes, we must analyze the justification of serious harms before labeling them evil.

Justification

For something to be evil, it cannot just be material harm but must lack justification. The “justification” prong is where philosophy has real value to add.

Determining what qualifies as a justification is where confusion enters, and confusion is where evil hides.

For something to be evil, it must lack any sort of “reason.” I do not mean reason as one’s internal motivations or subjective preferences, for, of course, all acts of evil operate on some personal reason.

I mean an objective reason—a reason that any reasonable agent could accept upon full understanding of the relevant facts and meanings. I discuss the nature of reasons here, but in short, they are objective explanations that can be universally comprehended.

What makes an act evil is not just the harm it causes, but that no such objective reason exists. Evil operates on “reasons” that no one can truly understand; its motivations can only remain in the mind of the evildoer.

For the evildoer can never convince us that their actions were just, no matter how much they truly believe them.

Because evil rarely presents itself as such. Evil does not go about announcing itself but instead takes on the appearance of the good.

Evil is parasitic. It attaches itself to the good to take its form, hiding undetected among the philosophical uninitiated. It learns the moral language and speaks it without meaning it.

Evil can dress itself up as necessity, as progress, as saving the children, as freedom from suffering, or as any lie it can say to get the foolish and emotional to open the door.

And philosophy is the discipline best equipped to unmask these disguises. Philosophers must know what evil is when it appears.

This is why evil is philosophical. Such justification that evil lacks must be grounded on “reasons.” And philosophers, being in the profession of asking for and giving reasons, are most equipped to analyze reasons.

3. Why a Justification?

Justification must be reasons that could be accepted by anyone who understands the relevant meanings and facts.

Evil is harm that lacks justification. Such justification is not subjective, but objective. Justifying a harmful act with “Because I feel like it” or “Because that’s my truth” is not an objective justification but a baseless subjective statement.

“Everything is subjective” is not a neutral metaphysical thesis. In moral practice, it functions as camouflage. Evil exploits this view to hide amongst the good.

Evil denies any meaningful distinction between good and bad, reducing both to subjective preferences, with neither being greater than the other. Useful idiots parrot this point until the word “evil” becomes a taboo. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing the world he does not exist, according to The Usual Suspects.

Some trust their emotions to uncover evil. But emotions can be manipulated, which evil takes advantage of. Emotions are not justifications, and we cannot comprehend such justifications through personal and fleeting emotions. Philosophy is the only true guide.

Without philosophy, grounded in reasons, appearances rule. And appearances are easy to counterfeit. Once we rely primarily on emotion and appearance, evil can manipulate us.

Only rigorous analysis grounded in reasons can cut through the disguise worn by evil.

4. Evil is a contradiction

G.K. Chesterton described the “ultimate evil” as the thought which destroys thought. This insight captures the nature of evil in its purest form. Such ultimate evil is a self-defeating contradiction. It destroys everything, including itself.

Evil is illogical; it is contradictory and self-defeating, ultimately chaotic. Evil is not a positive creation but a negative destruction of the good. Logical analysis by the philosopher is how they can detect such contradictions and determine evil.

This is because evil itself is unprincipled destruction. Evil does not create anything. It destroys itself as it captures everything.

Fundamentally, evil is the freedom that destroys freedom. Evil uses freedom to destroy the freedom of others. As a result, evil loses its justification for existence.

Moreover, there is no agreement that can be made with evil. It cannot be a member of any contract, including the moral contract. There is no honor among thieves. As I noted previously, any sort of agreement with evil is meaningless (think the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). It’s like an agreement with a wild beast.

Evil not only harms the victim but also corrupts the evildoer. It turns agency into a weapon against agency itself. To commit evil is to declare war on the world, as the destruction of evil would be justified by the world.

The evildoer must live in constant fear and distrust, as righteousness has placed a target on their back.

As an obvious example, consider Nazi Germany. Pre-war German society was in many ways highly “logical” and “rational,” with an advanced legal system and world-class engineering that were later harnessed for its war machine. The architects of the Final Solution relied on bureaucratic planning and careful analysis to carry out immense evil.

But the project of achieving national greatness through destruction was contradictory from the outset. A society built on domination and annihilation cannot produce flourishing or stability. Those who promised their people heaven instead dragged them into hell, leaving their country and its people in ruins. They could have used competent philosophers.

This is why Socrates’ claim, properly understood, holds true: No one ever knowingly does evil. Not because people never “know” what they are doing in a shallow sense, but because they don’t “know” in a deeper sense as they fail to grasp what their actions mean and how they destroy the good.

They fail to recognize what their actions truly mean. But philosophers can explain.

5. Evil is “infinite”

There is significant confusion about the nature of infinity. Infinity is not a quantity or a synonym for “a lot.”

Infinity means the absence of any limiting principle. To describe something as “infinite” is to say it has no logical stopping point.

There is no limiting principle capping the number of numbers there are or the number of possible sentences there are, meaning that there are infinite possible numbers and sentences.

And in the case of evil, there is no limiting principle on the amount of destruction that evil can create. As noted, evil is without reason, without justification. Once you act without reason in one instance, there is no true reason why you shouldn’t do so again.

One act of evil is as justified as an infinite number of acts of evil.

If you commit serious harm without justification, if you have truly stepped outside reason, why stop? Why do one act and not another and then another? On what basis do you draw a line?

There is no rational basis for evil to stop. The destructive power of evil is limited only by practicalities rather than principles.

This is why if you give the devil an inch, he’ll take a mile.

And this is also why trying to appease evil will always fail. There is no negotiating with evil. Evil does what it likes, when it likes. It has no regard for any binding commitment or covenant.

If evil doesn’t destroy you, it is not for lack of principle but merely lack of ability, convenience, or immediate desire (which is always subject to change for evil).

Evil has no rules, no code, nothing that can be understood or justified. Evil is chaos without order.

This doesn’t mean that evil can’t pretend to take the appearance of reasonableness. The wolf takes the sheep’s clothing for a reason.

Evil attaches to the good to take form. And then it consumes it.

This is why philosophy and analysis are equipped to detect evil, not emotions or preferences.

6. The Philosopher’s Duty

We are imperfect beings. All of us fall short of the divine and are therefore susceptible to evil.

But the mind provides a natural detection mechanism. We can analyze the world to uncover evil, both for ourselves and for the world. A true philosopher can see evil for what it is, looking past appearances.

There is a temptation to treat evil not as a threat, but as just misunderstood, as capable of being reformed, or even as non-existent. That temptation is comforting, and it is false. It is often held by the weak, who fear the fact that evil is to be destroyed and search for excuses to avoid duty.

But evil exists and must be named and analyzed, especially by philosophers.

Evil arises wherever freedom is misused, being unbound by reason. It lives in stupidity, with weak minds being blind to it. So long as there is both freedom and stupidity, evil will exist.

For freedom is the capacity to pursue one’s own conception of the good grounded on reason. But freedom is also the capacity to destroy the good without reason. Humans have the power to be superhuman or subhuman, depending on how they choose to use this freedom.

Which returns us to philosophy, the study that is uniquely equipped to detect evil. Because detection is not a mood. Detection is not a vibe. Detection is the critical examination of reasons to uncover truth. It’s analytic, it’s step-by-step, and it is squarely in the domain of philosophy.

Otherwise, without philosophy, we become swayed by bad arguments. And bad arguments are the grass that the snakes of evil hides in.

As Voltaire said, those who make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Evil is not addressed through emotion or empathy alone but requires the power of critical analysis.

Evil is fundamentally destruction, as any philosopher should know. As such, we have a duty to destroy evil before it destroys us. Philosophers have the honorable role of sentry.

Understanding and tolerance are virtues within a moral order. But evil operates beyond or against that order; to give it such credence would be a category error. To reintegrate it within the moral order would be to invite destruction of that order.

To do philosophy, then, is not merely to think and argue but to do so in pursuit of a goal. The goal is to clear the fog of appearance and spot the parasite through analysis.

Before we can secure and advance the good, we must identify and address evil. And it is philosophy that must tell us what evil truly is.

Summary: Evil is a complete breach of the moral foundation among humans grounded on freedom and reason: a material violation of another person’s agency without justification. Evil goes beyond immorality and illegality, as evil violates the very values that ground such frameworks to terminate it completely for the evil-doer. It is an existential threat to others’ freedom with complete disregard for reason. Because it stands outside the moral contract, evil can never be fully understood. Yet it can be identified through an objective moral and metaphysical framework, rather than treated as a matter of personal taste.

“Evil” is a term that gets thrown around often, usually without much precision. But what does it actually mean? Does “evil” stand for something definite, or is its meaning relative to the speaker?

A dictionary might define it as “profound immorality or wickedness.” But where morality itself is widely contested, “profound immorality” offers little real insight.

Even where we agree that evil exists, our moral consensus is fractured. We may agree on the easy questions, but otherwise reasonable people can have widely differing views on evil.

And in that confusion, “evil” risks becoming overused and then meaningless. This is more dangerous than it seems, since evil takes advantage and hides among the relativism.

Lack of clarity around evil, including denying that evil exists, is the best way for evil to hide. Snakes prosper in green fields left uncleared.

This article argues that evil does have a precise, analyzable meaning. Evil goes beyond just immorality or illegality. Rather, evil is wrongdoing that repudiates what morality stands for.

Evil exists, and if we are to confront it honestly, we must be precise with the term.

This concept of evil is grounded on the understanding that morality is rooted in freedom and reason, as I’ve discussed here, here, and here. Yet to summarize, morality can be understood as those principles which would be reasonably agreed to by free agents.

Can Philosophy Define Evil?

Is “evil” just a label we apply subjectively to reflect our own preferences? Or does it correspond to something objective in the world? Can philosophy clarify the concept, or is it shaped entirely by culture and instinct?

I argue not just that evil is objective, but that philosophy is uniquely suited to clarify and fully grasp the concept (although the acts of evil can never be fully understood). In fact, one of philosophy’s greatest contributions may be its capacity to discover evil.

At its core, moral evil is an existential harm to another’s freedom without justification, constituting a total breach of the moral contract.

To emphasize this point, the moral contract is grounded on the dual values of freedom and reason (as I’ve argued).

While immorality may involve violations within the moral framework, evil is a total collapse of the framework. In the metaphor of a social contract, an act of evil is how one terminates the agreement for oneself.

Yet just as important as the requirement that evil violate freedom is that evil violates such freedom without justification.

By “justification,” I do not mean a psychological explanation of evil’s motive. Whether someone does evil with pleasure, cruelty, indifference, or recklessness is not relevant, for none of those motivations could truly justify evil. Serious harm requires very good objective explanations to be warranted.

By “objective explanation,” I mean reasons that are publicly intelligible and defensible under impartial, third-party scrutiny (not just private motives). And when I say evil can’t be “fully understood,” I mean it can’t be rendered justified. We could explain it psychologically, but physical explanation isn’t true (or even partial) justification.

Someone may be justified in seriously threatening another’s freedom as part of war, state order, or defense of self.

This article won’t discuss the edge cases of evil, but the clear cases. I take paradigmatic cases of murder, torture, and enslavement without justification to be clear cases of evil.

As a rough heuristic, if an action could reasonably warrant life in prison or the death penalty (not necessarily that you would personally choose to give that punishment, but that such a punishment would not be totally unreasonable if administered), then we could call it an evil action.

Human Freedom and the Possibility of Evil

Evil requires agency and responsibility. There can be no evil act without the intention or mental state to do such an act. A serious harm to another’s freedom from pure accident or misfortune could not be evil, although punishment may still be appropriate.

Instead, it involves intentional or reckless conduct that results in such severe harm that one’s standing in the moral community would be open to question.

Humans have freedom. And with that freedom comes the possibility of acting toward the superhuman or the subhuman. Human freedom gives us the power to become either gods or monsters.

I don’t use “subhuman” or “monster” lightly or for rhetorical flourish, but certain actions so severely violate what morality stands for that the perpetrator effectively disqualifies themselves from the moral community.

Such acts would justify treating the perpetrator as unfit for human society. You cannot be fully human while lacking humanity. Evil reduces one’s state to that of a wild animal.

Once an evildoer fits this status, their rights of free movement and participation in a society are forfeited to the mercy of the community.

When someone demonstrates culpable willingness to destroy the agency of others, society may be justified in incapacitating such an agent’s freedom.

The Limits of Understanding

A paradox with evil is that while it can be defined, it could never be fully understood. Meaning we could detect evil, but we can never truly enter the mind of an evil person.

We could never truly explain an evil act. Evil is an existential threat to freedom without explanation. The direct motivations for such actions, whether hatred, indifference, cruelty, boredom, pleasure, or randomness, are ultimately irrelevant, for they could never justify evil.

And this is part of the horror of evil. It is acting outside of reason, outside reasonable intelligibility. We could accept people operating “outside intelligibility,” through quirks and personal idiosyncrasies, but not when such unreasonable behavior creates harms.

Although since evil is something we can’t fully grasp, what exactly is it?

What is Metaphysical Evil?

We’ve described what moral evil is, but what kind of “thing” is evil metaphysically? Is evil something physical in the world that we could isolate? Is it a state of mind?

Theological philosophers have offered some of the most sophisticated theories of evil through “privation theory.” Here it helps to distinguish moral evil (material wrongdoing) from metaphysical evil (privation, decay, suffering).

Augustine argued that evil is not a “thing” in itself. All things created by God are good in essence. Evil, then, is not a positive substance but a negative privation. It is a corruption of good, representing rot and decay. Evil is a negative, a non-being that acts to only corrupt and destroy what is good.

Aquinas expanded on this privation view, arguing that evil is a lack of due goodness in something that should have it. God does not create evil but permits it within the bounds of providence. A lower, physical world short of heaven may be inherently subject to imperfection, change, and entropy.

This is why I am not persuaded by the “problem of evil” challenge of theism. If evil is the natural entropy of a finite, imperfect world, then its existence does not contradict a benevolent, omnipotent creator. Evil can exist without malicious intent on the part of God.

In my view, the theologians offer the strongest account of evil. Modern philosophy has become confused with this concept, with many going so far as to deny that evil even exists.

The “Hitman Code” Spectrum of Evil

We can explore the precise boundary between immorality and evil by considering the different ethical gradations of fictional hired killers. I’ll call this the “Hitman’s Code” and describe it as different rules that such hired guns could operate on before being “evil.”

We might agree on certain codes where murder would be justified, and the more you relax this code, the more you move towards evil.

Let’s first imagine a hitman who only agrees to kill evil people who are known to be truly evil. We can imagine this as V from “V for Vendetta,” where V’s killings are extralegal, but only to overthrow an oppressive regime. Even if V’s actions fall short of our concept of morality, we wouldn’t call him “evil,” and some could reasonably argue that he is heroic.

Now imagine a hitman who only kills other killers. While his actions are illegal and immoral, they are limited by a code that aligns with a warped sense of justice. This is similar to Light Yagami from “Death Note,” who (when his killings were limited to only proven killers) acted at least intelligibly. This intelligibility prevents his killings (when so limited) from being entirely evil.

Now imagine a hitman who kills members of a criminal organization, whether or not they’ve personally committed violence. He won’t harm innocents but still targets people who have “signed up” for a life of risk.

This is morally worse, but perhaps still not evil, as some internal moral framework remains. Tony Montana from Scarface could fit this role, where he has no moral qualms with killing criminals but draws a hard line at women and children, even at the cost of his empire.

Next, take a hitman who willingly kills both criminals and innocents, but only if such actions serve the greater good. His logic is utilitarian, with the ends justifying the means. We can think of a similar example as Ozymandias from Watchmen, willing to kill millions to save billions. We may find his reasoning deeply flawed and his acts immoral, but they are still grounded in some ethical logic, however misguided.

The utilitarian hitman’s action may lack full justification, although the principle is at least somewhat intelligible. Such intelligibility of actions with some basis in reason prevents the hitman from being truly evil.

We could not fully grasp such actions as most of us don’t believe we’re warranted to take a life for the “greater good,” but the “greater good” is at the very least a partial justification that would temper immorality.

Finally, consider the hitman with no code at all. He abides by no moral laws and kills indiscriminately—men, women, children, even his own family, each for nominal sums. He gives no weight to the freedom of others and is willing to destroy them for no reason at all.

A cartoon example of this archetype is Krombopulos Michael from Rick & Morty, who cheerfully exclaims his willingness to kill indiscriminately (the joke being the irony between the cheeriness of his nature and evil of his actions).

This is the clearest instance of evil: a complete rejection of moral boundaries and disregard of moral obligations. This hitman goes beyond immorality and illegality but is a clear case of evil. We can call him the “evil hitman.”

And say you made a contract with the “evil hitman.” What would that evil mean? An evil person is already willing to breach the moral contract and exit the moral community. What weight could an agreement with such a person possibly hold? It would be like making an agreement with a wild animal.

It would be like Hitler’s and Stalin’s Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, utterly meaningless, held together by nothing more than immediate self-interest, and able to be dropped without justification. There is no morality, just opportunism. An agreement with evil could never carry any true weight. You cannot make an agreement with a wild beast.

Why Conceptual Clarity Matters

Philosophy seeks conceptual clarity on all our most important concepts, including evil. Without it, our responses to evil are emotionally driven and become inconsistent and untargeted. Good intentions are not enough. Without precision, emotional mob-driven persecutions of evil take the form of witch trials, mob justice, and kangaroo courts.

Yet with analytic rigor, we can understand evil and respond to it precisely. Take the Nuremberg Trials for instance, a landmark in prosecuting evil through law and due process to assign punishment.

The prosecutors in the trials gave structure to “crimes against humanity” and applied those rules through principles of justice. These are far better tools against evil rather than mob or so-called “victor’s justice”. Evil is applied under an objective standard.

We cannot try to understand evil emotionally or reactively. Blind intuition and outrage breed error of both overenforcement and underenforcement. And falsely persecuting someone as evil can itself be an evil. “Evil” isn’t just something that is bad or cruel. Only by defining it precisely, as the repudiation of reason and freedom, can we hope to recognize and restrain evil.

TLDR: Physicalism has been smuggled into philosophical discourse, resting on the mistaken belief that reality can be described from a perspective independent of experience. However, this view ignores the independent truths of experience that cannot be explained physically. Moreover, there is no view from nowhere: all facts, including physical facts, are only intelligible through subjective experience, and its this experience that our model of reality is grounded on (not the physical). Thought experiments such as Mary’s Room and the Chinese Room show that experience is not reducible to its physical causes and that subjective facts form a distinct and irreducible class of truths. Once this priority of the subjective is recognized, reductive physicalism loses its claim to be a foundational explanation of reality.

Physicalism is an Assumption, Not an Argument

Physicalism is often assumed rather than argued. It aligns with our basic intuitions and serves as a practical way to navigate the world. But philosophy demands that we question our assumptions. And once we do, we find that there are few compelling arguments for physicalism itself.

Many beliefs may themselves be grounded in physicalism, but that doesn’t mean that reductive physicalism itself is grounded.

If philosophy has any strength, it lies in questioning the foundations on which physicalism rests. Thought experiments like the “Chinese Room” and the “Brain in a Vat” challenge our trust in experience and urge skepticism toward the seemingly obvious.

Broadly speaking, philosophy offers two paths: physicalism and non-physicalism. Physicalism seeks to interpret philosophical concepts, such as truth, consciousness, justice, reality, and knowledge, through naturalistic and often biological frameworks. It reduces metaphysics to science, aiming to explain the mind entirely in terms of the brain.

In contrast, non-physicalism allows us to understand experience on its own terms, using reason without necessarily appealing to scientific explanation.

Once we are clear on the priority of the subjective, we can build philosophy on this basis, without being misled by the false assumptions of naive physicalism.

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The Physical Is Grounded in the Subjective

Mary’s Room is often (wrongly) presented as an argument against physicalism. Physicalists can rightly point out that the thought experiment does not necessarily imply a separate ontology, since subjective experience could simply be a different mode of presentation of fundamentally physical events.

But as I’ve argued, this response fails to recognize the priority and independence of subjectivity, which has its own truths and truth-makers, independent of any physical causes or correlates. Physicalists attempt to understand the subjective through the tools of science. But reducing experience to physical is failing to recognize the autonomous truth of experience.

In the thought experiment, Mary knows every physical fact about color, particularly red. But because she is in a black and white room, she has never actually seen red. When she leaves and sees red for the first time, she learns what it is like to see red.

Physicalists can respond that Mary does not learn a new fact but merely acquires a new ability or a new way to look at color. But even this reply already attributes some existence to red itself as an independent experience.

Redness is not some detached decoration to an otherwise complete physical account of red; redness is red. Something is red if and only if it generates the experience of red. If you subtract the experience, you haven’t described red at all. You can describe wavelengths, neural processes, and behavioral dispositions, but not the actual phenomenon that those facts generate.

The experience is constitutive of the fact, with its truth being independent of its causes.

Subjective Facts Are a Distinct and Irreducible Class of Facts

When we analyze fine art (whether a film, poem, or painting), we don’t look at its physical causes or the materials used. Rather, we examine the experience of engaging with it.

We don’t view movies as illusions of some physical filmmaking process but as experiences that present their own facts. The truths of The Godfather have nothing to do with the actors’ biology, the technology used, or other physical aspects of production. Nor can The Godfather be reduced to neuroscience.

To understand The Godfather, we don’t need to look at the biology of the actors, the physical mechanics of the film’s production, or the pixels on whatever screen we’re looking at. In fact, doing so would be irrelevant to understanding the film as a film.

Rather, The Godfather is a story about family, loyalty, and retributive justice set within New York City’s criminal underworld. None of this is revealed by examining the particles of its original film reel.

The movie could have been completed through a different process, even if it was fully animated or AI-generated, and still convey the same powerful story with the same deep themes. What we analyze in film is the experience it evokes, not the mechanics of its production. It’s this experience that we analyze to appreciate art, which focuses on the art’s meaning, not its material substrate.

Experiences are not private illusions or indirect data caused by physical events. They provide their own set of facts.

That someone is in pain, that something appears red, that an experience has a particular phenomenal character—these are all facts. We can speak of their quantity, intensity, duration, and so on. And these experiential facts can be determined solely by reference to the experience itself.

They are not reducible to third-person descriptions without remainder, because third-person descriptions presuppose the very experiential framework they attempt to replace.

The physicalist is not wrong in claiming that experiences have physical causes. But their error is in treating subjective facts as epistemically secondary or ontologically derivative from such physical facts, failing to recognize their independence.

Mary’s Room shows that this ordering is backwards. “Redness” is only red because of the subjective experience of red, without any regard given to wavelengths or optics. The subjective is not explained away by the physical; it is what makes physical explanation possible in the first place.

There Is No “View from Nowhere”

There is a misconception that physicalists assume that there is a stance-independent “view from nowhere,”1 which reveals a true, objective reality. But a view from nowhere is a contradiction, and therefore meaningless.

Proponents of reductive physicalism claim that their standard of reality mirrors this mind-independent framework (revealing a lack of self-awareness for the mind’s role in constructing reality). But nothing can be said about an objective, mind-independent reality without presupposing a mind doing the saying.

Whatever can be understood can only be understood through the mind. This inversion becomes clearer once we abandon the fiction of a perspective-free description of reality.

All knowledge is mediated by experience. There is no access to “pure” physical facts that bypass subjective interpretation. Every physical fact we understand is ultimately grounded in conscious experience.

The notion that we could first describe the world objectively, subtracting all subjectivity, is itself nonsense. It’s like seeing without eyes, touching without skin. There is no detection of reality without a detector.

There is no view from nowhere. There is only a world as encountered, structured, and interpreted by subjects. It is the subjective that is the true grounds of our reality. We don’t have direct access to the territory, but we have direct access to the map.

Confusing Causes for Events

An especially naive physicalist would sometimes bite the bullet and equate the subjective with the physical. Color is just wavelengths. Pain just is C-fibers. Math is just neural firings correlated with math-like thoughts. They begin with the belief that all events must be grounded in something physical, so they dismiss experience and focus solely on the physical.

But confusing pain with C-fibers is like confusing the meaning of these words with just the pixels on the screen. Sure, the pixels represent words. But I could convey the same meaning in print, handwriting, or even spoken aloud. The meaning of these words carries a meaning independent of their physical manifestations.

The same applies to all mental events. This argument is known as “multiple realizability,” and it’s the primary reason why so many philosophers abandon identity theory, a naive view that equates physical tokens of a concept with the type of concept it is. A naive version of physicalism says a concept or experience is nothing more than its physical causes.

There is, in principle, no reason that the same experience, like seeing red, must always have the same physical basis. In fact, every experience of red has different physical causes. No one could ever have the exact same brain state as someone else, even though they both could be experiencing the same phenomena.

Again, the causes of a phenomenon should not be confused with the phenomenon itself.

To ignore the experiential aspect in favor of the physical is to throw out the baby to keep the bathwater. It dismisses the fundamental for something arbitrary.

Yet identity theory still persists as a kind of naive zombie belief among those who take physicalism too literally.

The Chinese Room Thought Experiment

There is nothing inherent in physical explanation that grants it the power to explain mental phenomena. The same physical behavior can admit of fundamentally different explanations depending on the presence or absence of mentality. This point is illustrated by John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, where an operator in a room is manipulating symbols pursuant to rules to express Chinese, without at all knowing Chinese.

A fluent speaker of Chinese and an operator mechanically manipulating symbols according to rules may exhibit indistinguishable outward behavior, yet their actions are explained in different ways. In the first case, the behavior is explained by understanding; in the second, by syntactic rule-following alone. Same behavior, different explanations—distinguished by the presence (or absence) of genuine mental grasp.

Hopefully, this also shows why the behavioral competence of LLMs does not at all establish the existence of understanding or mentality.

Objective Facts Must Be Explained Through Subjective Evidence

Once we acknowledge the autonomy of the mental and how it grounds the physical, the explanatory grounding direction reverses. Physical facts are not self-justifying, but only become so through experience. Such experience is then measured, analyzed, and compartmentalized to provide a map of reality. And while we have true direct access to this map (we made it), this map is not reality, but our conceptual organization of it.

This does not collapse objectivity into relativism. It only means that we cannot say anything about reality except through the medium of experience. The best we can do is structure and map our experience in ways that allow for shared understanding and agreement, what we call “objectivity.”

This is relatively straightforward in the physical sciences, which can standardize experience under the scientific method to give it universal comprehensibility. Any scientific theory that passes a sufficient number of tests is eventually placed into the map of reality, at least until a competitor is able to take its place.

But not even science has been able to fully escape subjectivity, as Niels Bohr emphasized in his interpretation of quantum mechanics. Scientific explanation cannot be divorced from an observer.

“Mary’s Room” and the “Chinese Room” show that experience itself isn’t necessarily its physical causes or manifestations. Experience is the self-evident, autonomous starting point, and it is through experience that we come to understand the physical world at all.

Conclusion

Physicalism has been wrongly smuggled into philosophical discourse. While seemingly self-evident, its premises are flawed, and it fails to do the explanatory work that its proponents claim. Once we recognize this, reductive physicalism can be disqualified as an explanation for ultimate reality.

The subjective is not a problem for our picture of the world. In fact, the subjective is the only way in which any picture of the world is possible at all.

Are there only physical facts, or can non-physical facts exist? If they do exist, in what form? And are our experiences just brain states, or something more?

These questions target fundamental aspects of existence. We can’t do philosophy without first wrestling with these questions.

Frank Jackson’s Mary’s Room thought experiment is a widely discussed scenario meant to challenge the physicalist hegemon. With science’s ability to explain experiential phenomena, the most fundamental facts of reality seem to have underlying physical causes.

It shows that if physical facts don’t capture all there is to know about something like the color red, then there must be non-physical facts associated with that experience. This is known as the “knowledge argument.”

But Mary’s Room is not a paradox. It has a clear answer, and physicalists have an easy response. Sure, Mary’s Room illustrates how there must be non-physical facts. However, the physicalist can easily reply by stating that a sensory experience does not imply a different ontology.

In fact, this is why Frank Jackson later rejected his own Mary’s Room thought experiment on the very basis that epistemology doesn’t necessitate ontology, and experience can simply be a representation of physical events.

Seeing something in a particular way doesn’t imply the existence of a different kind of entity; it could be just a different form of presentation.

But physicalists are still mistaken, although not because of Mary’s Room. Their standard response assumes that non-physical facts supervene on physical facts. Yet this is backwards.

Non-physical facts like personal experience are foundational (I am certain that I’m having the feeling of typing right now); they exist as their own truths independent of physical causation, and it’s the physical that supervenes on the non-physical. I’ll argue that experience is not a non-physical addition to the physical world or just a “mode of presentation” but is a foundational source of knowledge that needs no further justification or explanation.

Mary’s Room still shows us something important, but not because it defeats physicalism directly. Rather, because it highlights how strongly we recognize our experiences as fact.

Mary’s Room, Briefly

To review the thought experiment, Mary is a brilliant scientist who knows all the physical facts about the color red, including about light wavelengths, visual processing, optics, etc. If all facts about color were only physical facts, then actually seeing red would convey no additional facts about the color red.

However, because she has lived her entire life in a black-and-white room, she has never actually seen the color red. So, when she finally leaves the room and sees red for the first time, does she learn something new about red?

Philosophers have given a plethora of answers to this question.

Mary doesn’t learn “propositional” knowledge.

Mary gains only an ability, but she doesn’t learn anything.

Mary does learn something, and therefore dualism must be true.

The thought experiment is supposed to pump your intuitions to suggest that there exists non-physical facts, since how can someone see red for the first time without also learning something new about red?

Clearly, seeing red for the first time would give a viewer some type of knowledge of “redness.” In fact, as color sensation is fundamentally experiential, being perceived as red is what it means for something to be red.

Experiencing Red Is a Fact About Red

Mary clearly learns something about redness when she first perceives it. To argue otherwise is to fail to understand what “red” is.

The central mistake is the assumption that subjective experience is not itself a fact about the phenomenon in question. But the experience of red, the way red looks and presents itself to consciousness, is not some ancillary fact about red. The experience of seeing red is red.

If the same wavelengths and physical patterns that we describe as creating “red” generated a different sensation entirely (say “blue”), then those physical patterns would no longer be red.

Red is not merely a wavelength or a neural activation pattern, but a perception. To exclude the perception of red from the set of “facts about red” is to not understand what redness is.

What is “Sweetness?”

To say that Mary knows all the facts about redness without ever seeing red is like saying someone knows all the facts about sweetness without ever tasting anything sweet.

Yes, you can know the recipe for all sweets.

Yes, you can know the chemical composition of sweet things.

Yes, you can know how sweetness stimulates taste receptors.

But if you have never tasted something sweet, then there is a clear sense in which you do not know everything about it. Sweetness is not an extra, mysterious property floating beyond sweet food. It is the fundamental property of sweet foods. It can only be properly understood through taste.

In fact, we only care about the physical process of sweetness because of this subjective experience. If sweetness were instead caused by an alternative physical process altogether (say, by salt rather than sugar), then we would care about that physical process instead. The physical facts of sweetness are downstream of the subjective experience of sweetness.

“Red” and “Sweetness” are fundamentally experiential. To know everything about an experience without ever having that experience is nonsense. It would be like claiming to know everything about a math problem by just recognizing the numbers and symbols it uses, but without knowing how to solve it. Unless you simply “get” the problem as a whole, not just recognize its individual parts, then you don’t know everything there is to know about that problem.

Why This Does Not Disprove Physicalism

Even if Mary learns something new upon seeing red, it does not follow that physicalism is false. A physicalist can consistently maintain that subjective experience is fully explained by physical facts, even if those facts can only be grasped in certain ways.

So physicalists can grant subjective facts, but they would only be a sense, a mode of presentation, a fiction even, of a physical fact. On this view, experiential facts are not additional facts over and above the physical story, but descriptions we find useful—a kind of representation generated by the underlying physical processes.

For example, we can talk meaningfully about “Homer Simpson,” a nuclear safety inspector in the town of Springfield, but none of these are facts about the world. They are narrative constructs grounded in drawings, scripts, and pixels that actually make up Homer Simpson. Likewise, the physicalist may argue that experiences such as “redness” or “pain” are not ontologically basic, but convenient ways of referring to complex neural activity.

On this view, knowing a fact from the inside is simply a different way of being related to an underlying physical fact, not evidence for a distinct kind of entity.

As humans, we are susceptible to illusions. But this epistemic difference does not entail a metaphysical difference. The experience of red may appear to us as a certain visual, but it is nothing more than a physical process in the brain.

Physicalism is a claim about what exists, not a claim about how all knowledge must be acquired. Mary’s acquiring a new way of knowing does not entail the existence of a new kind of fact. It can just show that certain facts present themselves as non-physical, despite their physical ontology.

Mary’s Room only reveals an epistemic limitation rather than a real metaphysical category. Yet, while Frank Jackson is right that the “knowledge argument” fails to disprove physicalism, physicalism is still wrong.

Subjective facts are not in the shadow of physical facts—rather, subjective facts stand on their own.

Subjective Facts as Foundational

Physicalists assume that subjectivity must be grounded on physical causes, for what else could create our experiences? However, grounding is not determined by causation, but by how it is explained. Concepts like redness and sweetness cannot be explained or understood with only physical facts; you need to experience them to truly understand them.

For example, physicalists might argue that all the facts about pain can be explained by the facts about the body’s functioning and C-fibers. The experience of pain itself is just an illusory presentation of C-fibers firing.

But this represents a misunderstanding of the nature of pain. Pain is pain, whether it’s caused by C-fibers, B-fibers, or AA-fibers. Utilitarians aren’t seeking to minimize firing C-fibers, but a particular type of conscious feeling.

Our pain apparatus could have been programmed differently entirely and still convey the same experience. If C-fibers were to fire without causing pain, then C-fibers would not be pain—something else would be. If someone said that your C-fibers were firing, but you didn’t experience pain, then you wouldn’t be in pain. Pain can exist only as an experience.

We only care about the physical processes of pain because they are downstream from the fundamental experience of it. But we shouldn’t confuse the physical causes of an experience with the experience itself.

We may be able to map out physical facts about redness, sweetness, or pain, but these physical facts could never fully explain red or sweetness, which are fundamentally experiential and true, independent of whatever physical process caused them. They have their own meaning.

This does not mean subjective facts are mysterious extra stuff of the universe. Rather, we are directly “acquainted” with subjective facts, knowing them with 100% certainty. They are facts that we have direct access to.

Our experience of “red” needs no explanation; it is known with the highest level of certainty. We take experiences as a given, independent of its physical causes or correlates.

Conclusion

Mary’s Room does not show that physicalism is false. It shows that our perception allows us to separate the description of red from the experience of red, and then mistake that separation for an ontological gap.

But the gap is not necessarily metaphysical. Physicalists can respond by stating that non-physical facts, like experience, supervene on physical facts. However, experiencing “red” is not an ineffable extra fact added onto an otherwise complete account. It is fundamental to what it means to be red. And any account that excludes it is, by definition, incomplete.

Physicalism may survive the knowledge argument, but it cannot escape the fact that experience is the first and most undeniable datum of reality. Any metaphysics that treats it as ancillary has lost sight of what to explain.

The above argument makes certain ontological assumptions that are not discussed here, but have been and will be made throughout this Substack. I will address these assumptions in the following article and the comments, in case there are any concerns with this position.

Socrates claimed that no one chooses to do evil knowingly.

This seems wrong. Of course, people choose evil. A serial killer or a genocidal dictator can commit atrocities deliberately and through their own rational faculties. They may clearly explain the steps of their actions after the fact, without any regrets.

They might even choose to perform an evil act because it is evil. Evil acts might just be one of the set of actions that any rational agent with free will can perform.

Yet, Socrates's claim still holds true. To truly know evil is to recognize it as arbitrary destruction—something no reasonable person could ever freely choose.

The Meaningless View of Evil

There is a mundane way that Socrates is correct, shown below.

1. All people pursue the good.

2. “Evil” is, by definition, not good.

3. Therefore, no one pursues evil.

But this syllogism is useless. We can imagine someone pursuing evil and knowing that evil. Such evil might be deemed “good” for the person performing it, but it doesn’t change the fact that they are still pursuing evil, contra Socrates.

Yet by its nature, evil is something that no one could ever choose if they understood what evil is. An evil act is to freely choose to threaten the freedom of another outside of the bounds of reason. It transforms a conscious, moral being into something like a cancer within the moral community.

Try to imagine a wise sage choosing to become a wild beast. Such a choice would logically contradict what it means to be wise. But to see this more clearly, we should know what evil is.

What Is Evil?

Evil is the unjustified destruction of the freedom of others.

This proposed definition has two essential elements:

1. Destructive: Evil is seriously harmful and incompatible with others’ freedom.

2. Unjustified: Evil is without reason, or without an objective explanation, such that it could never be warranted or understood.

Evil is more than just inconvenience or simple harm. It is inherently an existential threat. The freedom of others is intrinsically incompatible with evil, for evil cannot coexist with others, as it’s a destructive force.

By “freedom” I mean the capacity to act and pursue one’s values. We are free to act under the reason-based rules of the moral order, but we can also act outside this framework by choosing to commit evil.

Evil is not only destruction, but morally unjustified destruction, for it lacks a true objective explanation. For instance, killing someone in an accident or while unconscious are not “evil.” These types of killings are still an existential harm to others, but they have explanations. They’re deadly actions, but not evil.

Yet killings motivated by factors like malice or cold indifference are not objective justifications. If someone murdered someone because they didn’t care or even enjoyed it, no moral person could ever accept or even understand such “explanations.”

True evil can never be explained. It rests on no principle or reason that others could recognize.

People may act irrationally, but harmlessly. They might have their own personal quirks or eccentricities. But evil is different: it is destruction without an objective explanation. Evil is not merely harm, but serious destruction entirely outside the bounds of reason

We might understand that people act based on their own impulses or idiosyncrasies, but performing a destructive act for essentially arbitrary destruction makes the act incomprehensible and, therefore, evil.

Let’s take an example. Suppose someone owns a venomous snake and fails to secure its cage. The snake then escapes and kills a child. This is negligence. It’s harmful, criminal, and a threat to the freedom of others, but still not evil. We can understand negligence. A person failed to satisfy their duty for the safety of others. We can hold them morally accountable, but not condemn them as evil.

Now, say someone instead intentionally released the snake to kill the child. Then, that would be evil. Such an act could never be justified. Even if the perpetrator tried to explain this action by claiming they enjoyed watching the child die, or that they felt no concern for the child, these explanations could never be accepted as reasons. No amount of utility could ever warrant acts of evil.

There is a debate on whether evil requires something like sadism or psychopathy. But it doesn’t matter what explanation evil actions have; for it to be evil, they require no objective explanation—no free, conscious person could ever understand them. Evil doesn’t require malice, cruelty, or indifference, for evil is just the absence of a reason.

Evil and the Moral Community

As I’ve argued, morality is that set of principles that is grounded by reason, which would be agreed to in the original position by free parties who accept reason.

To perform an evil act is to breach this moral agreement. It is effectively an act of contractual termination, where one has abandoned the foundations of morality (freedom and reason). As a result, an evil person isn’t dealt with like a free, conscious person is, but as a cancer.

For by committing an act of evil, one threatens the freedom of others without reason. And by such evil, one’s freedom becomes incompatible with the freedom of others. Therefore, the freedom of one who commits evil is itself unjustified—it has no right to exist, since it cannot co-exist.

To freely commit evil is to forfeit one's right to freedom; it is to warrant being expelled from the moral community.

While it seems that people can choose to do evil, if someone truly knew the nature of evil, they could never choose to commit it. No one who knows what evil is could ever perform it, for that would contradict the nature of a rational being.

How Philosophy Can Detect Evil

Evil can never be understood. It is a contradiction; it is a destructive action without explanation. Socrates was right; no one can truly choose to perform a mindlessly destructive act. We can only know the nature of evil choices by understanding what evil is.

Philosophy’s task is to understand and unmask evil. To judge whether an act is evil, we need to ask two questions:

1. Does this person’s freedom threaten the freedom of others?

2. If so, can that threat be morally or rationally justified?

If no, then the act is evil. And when evil is given freedom, we invite chaos. For freedom unbound by reason is chaos.

Evil thrives outside of reason. Philosophy can destroy it by subjecting evil to reason. In fact, the greatest value of philosophy is understanding and defeating evil. If anyone were to ask what philosophy is good for, stopping evil is a worthy answer.

Summary: This article explores the nature and purpose of philosophy. It argues that philosophy is about discovering synthetic a priori truths—truths that are necessary yet informative and prior to experience. These truths form the foundation for understanding reality and are built using reasons. Philosophy itself is the practice of giving reasons (objective explanations) to develop a structure of such synthetic a priori truths that can be grasped by the mind and mapped onto reality for greater understanding. It's about developing the best set of concepts to interpret our experiences through giving and asking for reasons. This is part of an ongoing series on meta-philosophy. See the prior article here.

What does it mean to “philosophize”? Is philosophy something we just do, or is there something we can produce from it? And if something can come out of philosophy, then what is it?

In my previous article, I argued that philosophy’s inherently intellectual nature limits its feedback mechanisms and thereby hinders progress. There are no “philosophical predictions” or “philosophical inventions” that can test our theories.

Yet because of this, philosophical truths can be discovered in the armchair, and reality doesn’t determine philosophical claims like it does for the sciences.

For all we know, someone had already figured out all the deepest truths of philosophy, and we’re all just trying to catch up to the already discovered truths.

We can’t practice philosophy until we know what it is. This article will describe the nature of philosophy, using the concepts developed in this Substack.

In short, philosophy is the practice of giving reasons in pursuit of a coherent structure of synthetic a priori truths used to understand the world. This claim covers a lot of ground, so a warning for abstraction and density in this article. I’ll unpack the points introduced here in future articles.

1. What Philosophy Studies: Synthetic A Priori Truths

Philosophy seeks to discover the fundamental concepts of understanding. It is inherently meta because it seeks to understand understanding itself. This article on meta-philosophy is even more meta because, by asking what philosophy is, it’s about understanding the understanding of understanding.

These fundamental concepts of understanding include “existence,” “abstractions,” “propositions,” “reality,” “knowledge,” and “consciousness.” The truths about these concepts are true for all time and all universes, as they are true a priori (or known through rationalist deduction rather than empirical induction).

These concepts are not determined by experience. Rather, they shape how we experience in the first place. Philosophy is, in this sense, inherently pre-empirical. For instance, the Principle of Sufficient Reason’s proposition that "every truth has a reason" is not confirmed by experience but by the structure of how we interpret experience. This structure is made up of synthetic a priori concepts.

Similarly, space, time, causation, and gravity are not things out there in the world. Rather, they are our tools for interpreting the world—they are intrinsically pre-empirical.

With a proper and coherent understanding of these concepts, we can build a firmly established foundation for understanding anything. These concepts are then expanded into more specialized fields of study. Whether it's social sciences or natural sciences, all must be grounded on conceptual truths before they can understand anything.

This is why philosophy is for practitioners in highly specialized fields of knowledge through PhDs (a Doctorate of Philosophy). Philosophy is the basis of every possible academic discipline. There is no understanding anything without philosophy.

Let’s take the example of “knowledge.” Philosophers have struggled to come up with a concept of knowledge ever since Edmund Gettier showed the failure of “justified true beliefs” (JTB) to qualify as knowledge.

Importantly, actual Gettier cases don’t need to exist for Gettier’s critique to apply. This is because the definition of “knowledge” is conceptual, not at all empirical. If a JTB is possible without knowledge, then JTB isn’t knowledge, full stop. And it's this concept of knowledge, something that can be developed in the armchair, that can help us better understand “knowledge” out in the world.

Moreover, if we come up with an agreed and sound conception of “knowledge,” then it must be true in every possible world. It needs to be a necessary truth. But it also can’t be a tautology—for we can just say that “knowledge” is “knowledge; it cannot be analytic. The definition of “knowledge” needs to expand our understanding of the nature of knowledge—it must be synthetic.

So the definition of "Knowledge," as all the truths of philosophy, must be both synthetic (useful) and a priori (necessary). Whoever claims that philosophy contains no truths hasn’t read enough Kant.

Now that we discussed the nature of philosophical truths, let’s look into the nature of philosophy itself.

2. The Nature of Philosophy

Let’s review the concepts developed over this Substack and see how they relate to our understanding of philosophy.

1. “Thoughts” are logically coherent and defined mental contents. They are non-temporal, non-spatial, non-causal. However, they are coherent and can be identified.

2. “Reasons” are a type of thought that is an objective explanation. Moreover, these “reasons” can be mapped onto the world, serving as actual explanations for truths.

3. “Beliefs” are thoughts which we give the property “true” to.

4. “Truth” is the totality of all reasons. As per the PSR, “truth” is everything that has a reason.

5. “Knowledge” is a true belief that is justified by awareness of the reason for that truth.1

First, we must acknowledge that we do not have direct access to reality. The “brain in the vat” thought experiment casts legitimate doubts on our perceptions, which evolutionary theory has further validated.

And there is no getting out of the skeptical challenge. There is no non-question-begging argument we can make that would justify our perceptions of reality. The truths we can figure out in our minds have nothing to do with the truths in reality. No a priori arguments can give us a basis to accept a posteriori truths.

However, we do have direct access to thoughts. If anything is within the grasp of our minds, it’s our own thoughts.

While there are “subjective thoughts” like emotions and experiences that cannot be conveyed, there are “objective thoughts” like propositions and images that can be conveyed, often using language and pictures. While subjective thoughts (e.g., experiences, emotions, deep-seated values) can only be grasped by a single mind, objective thoughts (e.g., propositions) can be grasped by any mind.

It’s these latter forms of thought, thought that can be represented through language and images, that are the subject matter of philosophy.

One category of such objective thoughts is “reasons,” which we can map onto the world to understand. They serve as “objective explanations” for reality, allowing anyone who understands a reason to better grasp reality and experience reduced doubt.

As will be discussed below, reasons exist both in the head and in the world. Reasons are how we grasp reality, making reasons part of reality itself.

We can also assign some thoughts as “true” by believing them. For a “belief”, as argued, is nothing more than a “truth-giving” relationship between a thinker and a thought.

And “truth” itself is nothing more than the totality of all reasons.

While we can believe in whatever truth we want freely, philosophy requires us to believe only what we have reasons to believe as true. Sure, people are free to believe ideas arbitrarily, but then they would not be practicing philosophy.

To practice philosophy, one would require obtaining knowledge of philosophical truths. Yet, as philosophy recognizes, “knowledge” isn’t only about believing true propositions. We can’t just sign on to the conclusions of the best philosophy. Rather, we must believe those propositions to be true for the right reasons. It is these reasons that constitute all truth.

Ultimately, philosophy aims to match the reasons in our heads with the reasons in the world (or the best way to understand the world). That way, we can assign truth to what is actually true. The end result is knowledge of truth.

There is one essential element that makes up all the truths of philosophy. It is also a philosopher’s primary tool, a guiding compass, one and only dance move, the very meat and potatoes of all philosophy. It is a certain subtype of proposition called a “reason”—or an objective explanation.

Reasons are the one and only currency that philosophy accepts. Claims with reasons are rich. Claims without reasons are worthless. No reasons, no philosophy.

I’m fully on board with changing the meaning of philosophy from “love of wisdom” to “love of reasons.” “Wisdom” is too vague, whereas “reasons” can be understood as “objective explanations.” "Philosophy” can be renamed to “philologos.” Now let’s explore the role of reasons.

3. The Role of Reasons

Robert Brandom calls philosophy "the game of giving and asking for reasons.” Reasons are fundamental to philosophy. One cannot understand philosophy without understanding the role of reason.

Are reasons internal thoughts in the head or external features of reality? They are both.

“Reasons” connect our minds with the world. We may not have access to the world directly, but we have access to reasons.

While “reasons” can be grasped by the mind, they are not purely mental phenomena. True “reasons” can be mapped neatly onto the world. These reasons include “causes”, “logic,” and “laws of nature” —concepts which explain the events of reality.

They are how we understand reality. And there is no separating our understanding of reality from reality itself. Reality is always filtered.

For instance, our scientific models posit space, time, causation, mathematics, and gravity. Yet how do we know whether these concepts exist as part of the fabric of reality or are part of our understanding of reality? We can’t. Yet they are fundamental features of our understanding. Whether they are real in any greater sense than that is irrelevant.

Take the contents of this article. There is no separating the content of these very words you are reading from your interpretation using the English language. Your interpretations of these words are the words themselves, for to strip out your interpretation would strip out all meaning and make the words a collection of lines and dashes.

There is no way to know what I am saying without a method of interpretation—and that interpretation would be the content of the words themselves.

And just as in language, there is no separating the contents of the world from our understanding of it—for to do so would still be to impose some understanding of it.

Our interpretation of everything is mediated by thought. A “view from nowhere” is a contradiction.

Galileo had stated that the universe is written in the language of mathematics. The universe isn’t literally made up of equations, but if we can represent it using mathematical equations, then it exists.

Galileo’s theories were built on the understanding that sense data can be misleading. But we can see how reality exists once we are able to model reality. Similarly, we can view the world as made up of “reasons,” with these objective explanations serving as the joints of reality. And philosophy’s job is to find the joints for the structure of understanding itself.

David Deutsch carries on Galileo’s understanding, similarly arguing that the universe is made up of explanations (or “reasons” as I call them here).

These reasons are grasped using the intellect—the primary sense of philosophy. All our other senses, like sight, hearing, touch, smell, etc., are suspect.

These reasons map onto the world so neatly that, until David Hume, we had assumed that causation and laws of nature were mind-independent features of reality. For example, someone might assume that a banana “has yellow” rather than giving off invisible wavelengths that create the subjective experience of yellow.

Similar to the subjectivity of color, the “laws of nature” are similarly subjective. Yet still, these reasons structure how we come to understand and explain the world.

Seeing isn’t believing in philosophy. Only once we understand the reasons for an argument are we in a position to accept it.

Reasons is where truth, justification, logic, meaning, and normativity all intersect. It's how we interpret reality, but it’s also reality itself. It’s the heart of philosophy that ties everything together.

While science tests predictions or inventions against reality, philosophy tests reasons against reasons. That’s why Brandom calls it the game of giving and receiving reasons.

All philosophy provides and rejects reasons in search of truth. Once we have all the right reasons, truth arrives as a matter of consequence.

So in philosophy, these reasons form the building blocks of our most fundamental concepts. And just as reasons can build them up, they can also knock them down.

Let’s go back to the example of “knowledge.” A possible world where there is a Gettier problem gives us sufficient reason that knowledge cannot be a JTB. Anyone stating that “knowledge” is only a JTB is objectively wrong.

A definition of knowledge must explain all possibilities of knowledge. If there is any “knowledge” that the definition can’t explain, then the definition doesn’t work. A single counterexample, like a Gettier case (even if one never happens), can invalidate an entire theory of knowledge—no matter how many supporting arguments it has. This is the nature of the a priori.

Moreover, this a priori concept must be synthetic—it must expand understanding, not just restate it. It’s not enough for your idea of knowledge to be technically correct; it must be a platform for further truths. See my proposed definition of knowledge here.

4. The Goal of Philosophy

The ultimate goal of philosophy is to ensure that our beliefs accurately reflect the truths of fundamental concepts. Because truth is the set of all reasons, philosophy seeks to uncover the nature of these fundamental concepts by discovering the reasons that compose them.

If your concept of morality, truth, knowledge, or reality doesn’t apply to every possible world, then it’s wrong. This is because these concepts are a priori; there are truths about them before we even apply them to the world.

As a priori truths, they need to be true in every possible world. And to give us meaningful insight, the concepts must be coherent. Coherent concepts will always work better than incoherent ones.

If you have a favorite definition of knowledge—whether it's causal theory, reliabilism, no false lemmas, or defeasibility—it just takes a single Gettier-type case to defeat it.

For instance, no matter what universe we are taking, 1=1 is true. Imagine a world where we are in a simulation, where we are brains in vats being deceived by demons, where people are exhibits in alien museums, where we are all just random Boltzmann Brains. In all of these worlds, 1=1.

There is no possible set of facts that you can give that can make 1 equal anything other than 1. Even in a world where nothing exists, 1 would still equal 1.

If my proposed definition of “Knowledge,” like “justified belief that is justified by the reason for that truth,” has a single possible world where it cannot apply, then my definition is wrong. Like I said, you have given 1,000 reasons for why your theory works, but it just takes 1 to kill it forever. It just takes one inconsistency, one good reason against, one loose screw, to collapse the entire structure.

Even if we are all brains in vats, we can discover philosophy that is still true at all levels of the matrix.

5. What If I’m Wrong?

Without a proper understanding of philosophy, all of one’s philosophical claims would be suspect, for philosophical claims only have meaning in the context of what philosophy is.

This is true for me, too. If the above conception of philosophy is wrong, then the claims lying on such a foundation would be vulnerable. That is why, in the philosophical search for building a structure of concepts, philosophy must first introspect and understand its own nature.

Failure to properly understand philosophy is part of why philosophy has failed to make progress. Philosophers try to do philosophy piecemeal, missing important points and foundations, leading them to sketch philosophical structures that crumble at the first push of criticism.

We must be careful as we build up, stress testing throughout. I hope you, as a reader, can help with this project. I invite you to participate in this construction of philosophy.

And I hope you read the above not as headstrong conclusions that must be either killed or defended, but as open frameworks that depend on others' feedback to become fully fleshed out.

There is a lot in the above, and I don’t expect my premises to be undisputed. I intend to unpack many of these claims in later installments. But I’m happy to address and defend any of them in the comments, for the structure that will be built on this meta-theory of philosophy needs to be correct before doing any philosophy.

Let this view of philosophy guide us in our philosophical project and construct it together.

Please leave as much criticism as possible to serve as building material in this structure. This way, they may be addressed in the next installment.

Why is philosophy so hard? You’d expect that a field that could be practiced in an armchair would have solved philosophy’s greatest puzzles by now. No lab, equipment, or even special training is needed. So long as you can think, you can philosophize.

But in a field with such low barriers to entry that thousands of brilliant minds have practiced over centuries, why has there been so little progress?

Some might argue that philosophical progress has been made. Yet people mean different things by “philosophical progress.” Sure, philosophy has “progressed” in discovering new questions. Whether or not it has provided any answers is still up for debate. Maybe progress takes the form of ways not to do philosophy, like Thomas Edison describing his success in discovering 10,000 ways not to create a lightbulb.

So, how hard is philosophy, if it's so easy to do, but apparently impossible to accomplish?

What makes philosophy easy is that it is a purely intellectual activity. What makes philosophy hard is that it is a purely intellectual activity.

It’s easy to build a philosophical theory, and it’s easy to destroy a theory. But it's very hard to accept that the philosophical theory you built has been destroyed. Let's diagnose this problem.

1. Philosophy Favors Destruction Over Creation

Philosophy is like drafting a blueprint of an invention entirely in your mind and insisting that it could actually work. But you can never build it.

The physical world doesn’t referee philosophical claims like it does scientific ones. If a scientific claim doesn’t have predictive power or practical applications, then it can be discarded. Reality gets the final say over all scientific truths. But who has the final say over philosophical truths?

All you can do is argue that your philosophical blueprint works, while someone else must show that it doesn’t. You can make 1,000 arguments for your innovation, but it just takes 1 to kill it entirely.

Moreover, there are no clear rules in philosophy. While it's easy in fields like mathematics and economics to have clear conceptual answers, it's more difficult in philosophy, where the rules are often subject to doubt.

Yet philosophy’s strongest opponent to progress is its participants’ failure to course-correct through criticism.

Knowledge relies on feedback. You can’t know you’re running a successful business until you look at your profits, you can’t know your scientific hypothesis is successful until you have made successful predictions, and you can’t know your mathematical formula works until you test its validity.

However, nothing stops a philosopher from ignoring or rationalizing a clear contradiction in their favorite theory, effectively killing the feedback mechanism necessary for true knowledge. Philosophy doesn’t have true objective tests since the parameters of the test are always subject to scrutiny. A lot of trust is placed in good-faith discussion and revision, which has proven to be misplaced.

I’ve seen (as I’m sure many have) very respected academic philosophers suddenly get defensive when faced with pushback over their pet theory. Rather than addressing criticisms head-on or at least expressing curiosity about a different perspective, they dodge through sophistry, bending over backwards because they are unwilling to look at an obvious flaw.

This is a dereliction of duty, for any philosopher must confront and take ownership of errors, either providing a clear defense or admitting the fault. Philosophy debates must be fought to the death.

As part of the philosopher’s defense mechanism, they assume that if they hide the contradiction through wordplay, it will go away, or they imagine they will discover an argument to make it come back to life. The (misattributed) George Orwell line, "Some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals believe them," rings true because we know how intellectuals can rationalize the nuttiest ideas.

Even if a theory lacks intellectual merit, nothing prevents an intellectual from believing it. It's like dressing up a corpse and parading it around in the hopes that the illusion will trick others (and yourself) into thinking that what is forever dead is still alive.

If their theory isn’t true, the problem is with truth itself. They would much rather abandon truth than their failed theory.

This is how philosophers have deceived themselves over the centuries, and this irrational attachment to their theories only makes the field more divisive and blocks true progress—the progress of a unifying philosophical framework. The biggest obstacle to this goal is philosophical schools, which are treated less as useful frameworks and more as holy denominations that serve as the source of one’s identity.

We mustn’t take attacks on our preferred philosophical approaches personally. Rather, we should see these approaches as tools to adapt and revise our theories. Yet the field shouldn’t cannibalize itself either.

2. Philosophy’s Internal Crisis

Academia rewards controversy and novelty, not always long-term construction. Its incentives don’t always align with building a cumulative philosophical framework. In fact, they more often foster division than collaboration.

That level of mutual cooperation is entirely foreign to self-interested philosophers, who care much more about securing tenure, a prestigious academic position, or general personal comfort.

From the perspective of a philosophy professor, reward is earned through carving out a personal niche and even taking a controversial position. They aren’t rewarded for how true their theories actually are, but for how strong a personal domain they can carve out. This is more easily done through critique rather than construction, pointing out that one theory is false rather than discovering that another is true.

Rather than make progress in the field itself, philosophers have given up and found it easier to wage internal battles for personal glory.

Imagine officers in a war who are rewarded not for the progress they make in attacking the enemy but for the small fiefdoms they can carve out for themselves.

We may read about Rome’s Crisis of the Third Century and be baffled at how, in a time of the empire's existential danger, generals would rather fragment the empire than save it. Instead of putting their personal glory aside, officers would rather fight each other than join together to address external threats.

And philosophy is always in war, the war of conquest over truth. But instead of battling on the front lines, academics have found it easier to make a name for themselves by attacking one another. Even worse, they give back the truth we have discovered to create controversy by denying what the great philosophers before them have discovered.

In a field where there is no consensus and an entire career can be made from critique rather than construction, philosophers have debated one another at the expense of the field itself.

Philosophy is a collective endeavor. While there is plenty of room for criticism, any criticism should be for the higher goal of pursuing truth. We should also avoid the destructive theories of relativism, skepticism, and anti-realism, which deny such truth.

3. Retreat Into Relativism, Skepticism, and Anti-Realism

Without a solid foundation, philosophers have taken a pessimistic attitude toward philosophy, adopting either a skeptical, relativist, or anti-realist attitude. Because they failed to find the philosophical truth and every theory they approached had considerable flaws, they assumed there must be no philosophical truths. The relativist perspective is a good tool, but it is never a point to end. It's critical by nature, and philosophy can never be built on it.

This is not to say that relativism, skepticism or anti-realism are always misguided, but they come at a cost. Relativism, anti-realism, and skepticism are inherently destructive forces. They surrender our claims to truth and subject our view to inward critique. Yet philosophy suffers if these tools aren’t used strategically for the ultimate aim of conquering truth, rather than the personal glory of an academic.

For many, it's much easier to critique than to construct. They may argue that the “war” is hopeless to justify their actions. Philosophy contains no real “truths,” only perspectives and arguments. This relativist mindset is the most self-destructive force of all philosophy.

There aren’t just truths in philosophy, but great truths—as anyone who has read and understood the works of Plato, Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Rawls can attest.

Denying such philosophical truths is to deny philosophy's very goal. To reject philosophy's ultimate aim is not to be a philosopher. It fails to take philosophy seriously as humanity’s intellectual project, reducing it to a language game.

In addition to the self-defeatism of relativism, skepticism, and anti-realism, we should also be wary of the seduction of factionalism.

4. The Danger of Philosophical Camps

In the war for the conquest of philosophical truth, philosophers must be open to criticism and not join these different camps. They should learn from their enemies, particularly in defeat.

Schools like utilitarianism, functionalism, or pragmatism too often become tribal identities rather than just another set of ideas subject to testing. These camps are a good place to start, but they are rarely a place to stay. The search for truth is a journey.

Yet so many philosophical arguments start and end with “I am a [philosophical school], so I believe [that an opposing school is wrong],” or “As a [camp member of this theory], I believe in [all the propositions of this theory without question.]”

These philosophical labels are treated as part of one’s tribal identity rather than a set of tools. But philosophy isn’t about one camp forcing its scripture onto others. Philosophy is about discovering truth. At times, this might require abandoning the philosophical views we hold as sacred, viewing them as imperfect and subject to change.

Unfortunately, too many develop a dependency on their ideas. It’s as if each night, philosophers write down the philosophical ideas they accept and say, “This is my philosophy! There are many like it, but this one is mine! Without me, my philosophy is useless! Without my philosophy, I am useless!” We obsess over our favorite scholars and philosophers as if it’s a personality rather than what we would reasonably consider true.

5. What about Me, Thesmara?

You might wonder how my writing differs from this cognitive blind spot plaguing philosophers. Unfortunately, there is nothing I could say to convince you of my immunity. I can only invite you to stress test the ideas developed in this Substack and see whether they stand up to scrutiny or remain unshaken. For this, the Substack is titled “Ethics Under Construction.”

My views may be taken as a dogmatic assertion of the truth, but I hope they are taken as a challenge to push back on these rather than as overconfidence. I hope you all can keep me honest in my attempt to address the foundational questions of philosophy. Even from the armchair, our thoughts are always bouncing off the thoughts of others.

6. Conclusion

There are deep truths in philosophy. But we must be self-aware of the nature of these truths and the dangers of attachments to what we only believe to be these truths. Anyone can come up with a philosophical theory or criticize another theory. But the mark of a philosopher is the ability to stress-test a theory, discard it if it fails this test, and keep it once we understand its truth.

We should also not take negative arguments to the extreme. Philosophers should not retreat into excessive skepticism, anti-realism, or relativism. We should be wary of philosophy’s tendency toward critique rather than creation. We should seek to foster creative destruction, rather than simply destruction.

That is why, when you see stable ground in philosophy, which you cannot destroy, follow it. You never know when the ground will collapse beneath you, and many times, you might never realize that it actually has.

This approach reveals truth and reason as co-dependent. By understanding how truth is grounded in reasons, we can clarify how the principle of sufficient reason is self-evident. Truth is not a mystical property beyond our access but the structured outcome of reasons—the justifications of our knowledge. While truth is beyond our direct access, we have such access to our justifications. Through these justifications, our minds can grasp truth.

1. On Truth (and why we should care)

What is truth? A big question. But a better one might be: Why do we care? Even if a philosopher blesses us with an airtight definition, does it matter? Isn’t this just semantics?

People apparently seem to know what truth is. It’s what’s objective, or what corresponds to reality, or what is “mind-independent.” But these descriptions are devoid of content, too literal to be helpful.

Moreover, these common definitions suggest that truth is something over and above our subjective minds—as if our subjectivity were one thing, and truth, something entirely separate.

What is the relationship between our minds and truth? How do our minds relate to the objective, and how can we access it? Correspondence theory doesn’t say. And its somewhat more meaningful competitors (coherence theory, pragmatism, and deflationism) have earned their own share of criticism.

You would expect philosophers to have come to some satisfying concept of “Truth.” However, for hundreds of years, philosophers have only discovered faults with proposed definitions of “Truth,” failing to reach a consensus on any of them. This is part of why some feel defeated in the goal of a meaningful concept of “Truth,” and they retreat to common intuition.

This skepticism toward philosophy is understandable. However, we shouldn’t be cynical about what we’ll find when we craft better definitions.

It’s by understanding the nature of belief, as I’ve defined it here, that we can understand Moore’s paradox. Decades of literature on this supposed paradox can be laid to rest by simply defining our terms.

This article will attempt to provide a coherent and meaningful concept of truth that unlocks further insight into philosophy, specifically the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). Once we affirm the PSR, we can explore the furthest depths of philosophy.

Before we can build a system, we need to lay the foundation. We’ll start, as philosophy always must, by precisely defining our terms.

2. Defining Truth (Truth as Reasons)

Truth is the totality of reasons. Nothing more, nothing less. And by “reasons,” I mean objective explanations that reduce doubt and are universally comprehensible (as I’ve described here).

Each domain has its own type of “objective explanations” for the truths it discovers:

1. Mathematics: Logical relationships and deductive proof.

2. Science: Observation, experimentation, and predictive power.

3. History: Evidence from artifacts, documents, and records.

4. Philosophy: Conceptual coherence and intuitive plausibility.

Any worthy academic field that lays claim to any “truth” (economics, linguistics, psychology, etc.) offers truths grounded in its own kinds of reasons.

Truth depends on reasons, regardless of the type of truth. Truth exists because there is a reason for it. We can even frame “truth” as the set of all propositions that follow from the set of all reasons.

We can think of truth as a puzzle. All of these reasons—provided that they are logically coherent and sensible—can fit together to present a clear picture. The more pieces we put together, the clearer the image becomes.

Once we have all the reasons structured like a neat puzzle, truth is revealed. Truth emerges from the puzzle. Truth is somehow over and above the puzzle, yet nothing more than the actual puzzle.

Just as a building is nothing more than its materials, truth is nothing more than the reasons that support it.

These reasons, in turn, must also be true and supported by further reasons. This leads us down a chain of reasoning until we reach foundational, self-evident truths.

Some truths are self-justifying, like “1 = 1” or “I feel hungry.” These are self-evident, foundational truths that serve their own reasons. In philosophical terms, this is foundationalism. It is these foundational reasons that ground the truths that rest on them.

A reason is valid only if it explains a truth. A truth is valid only if it has reasons supporting it.

This interdependence shows that truth and reason cannot be separated. To prove a proposition is true, one must offer sufficient reasons. To disprove it, one must show that the claim lacks reasons.

In summary, truth and reasons are co-determinate—two sides of the same equation.

While this may sound like a theory of justification, that’s exactly the point: All truth is justified.

Although we may not have direct access to truth, we have access to reasons —the justifications for truth. For us to know something, we need to know the reasons for that thing (what I call “connectors” in this linked definition of knowledge). And these reasons must actually relate to truth.

Truth being grounded in reasons is exactly what the PSR asserts. By defining Truth, we can hopefully see more clearly why the PSR is self-evident.

3. Truth and the PSR

The PSR affirms that all truths must have a reason. As applied here, that means that reasons must support every truth. Everything comes with an explanation. Otherwise, what use is there in trying to understand the world? If there are no underlying reasons, it would be useless to try to make sense of anything. Yet in studying the world, we search for explanations that we know must exist.

Epistemology is the study of how we discover and come to know reasons. Specialized fields in the sciences are dedicated to certain domains of “reasons” and “truths.”

As I’ve shown when defining “knowledge” (another useful definition that isn’t just semantics), we can’t claim to know something if the evidence we have doesn’t actually relate to the fact in question.

Charles Sanders Peirce’s epistemic approach to truth describes it as the conclusion we arrive at through evidence-based inquiry.

More precisely, it is “concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief.”

As Peirce affirmed, evidence and truth are not separate. Just as truth follows from evidence, it is evidence that leads us to truth.

If our theory of truth is sound (that truth is just what is justified by reason), then the PSR follows naturally. Just by defining truth, we can see that the PSR is, again, self-evident.

In the next installment, I’ll discuss how this theory of truth relates to its other theories (correspondence theory, coherence theory, pragmatism, and deflationism) and how it takes the best aspects of each while discarding their limitations.

But in the meantime, hit me with your hardest criticism. Let’s give this conception of truth a serious stress test.

4. Conclusion

While truth is beyond our direct access, truth isn’t some mystical property floating beyond our grasp. It is nothing more and nothing less than the sum of all reasons.

Rather, “Truth” is grounded in objective and justifiable explanations. We may not have access to the truth directly, but we have access to reasons. To have knowledge of the world is nothing more than having a correctly structured set of reasons.

When we understand truth this way, the PSR doesn’t just make sense—it becomes inevitable. This isn’t merely semantics. The definition of “Truth” is part of the foundation for taking on the hardest questions in philosophy.

A belief is an attribution of “truth” to a thought. I defended this definition in a prior article and used it to show how “Moorean Sentences” are meaningless. Here, I aim to clarify the idea further and address common criticisms and misunderstandings with this definition.

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First, we need to understand the nature of language, particularly the difference between semantics and pragmatics. The abstract definition of “belief” and its specific uses are not the same, but the abstract definition of “belief” determines what “belief” means in every context.

Next, we’ll look at what it means to say something is “true.” A common misunderstanding is that saying something is true means referring to something in the objective world. But the objective world is true without us saying that it is. Attributing truth to truth is redundant.

Statements of fact do not refer to reality. In language, we don’t claim that certain facts are true. The facts of the world are true without anyone else saying so. Statements would be completely useless if they were directed to the world.

Rather, our truth claims are directed at propositions (or thoughts). By believing certain propositions, we give them the property of “true.” And these propositions are only objectively true or false depending on how they happen to correspond with reality. When we say what is true corresponds to the world, we understand that there is a difference between propositions that can have the property of “true” and the world itself.

Last, we’ll look at the nature of logic to fully appreciate why Moorean Sentences (ex: “It is raining. I do not believe that it is raining”) are nonsense. Like the Liar’s Sentence, Moorean Sentences are illogical and are therefore meaningless.

Illogical statements like “This sentence is false” or “This square circle is red and blue all over” can have pragmatic, subjective meanings but not semantic, objective meanings. People can interpret these sentences in a way they want. And I’m sure people can attribute different meanings to nonsensical statements.

However, the fact that people interpret these illogical sentences differently is exactly why these statements lack objective meaning. When there is no shared ground, people make up their own ground. Moreover, everyone thinks their own interpretation of illogical statements is *the true* meaning. And you wouldn’t be able to prove them wrong, because nonsense sentences don’t have an objective meaning.

All objective thoughts must be logical. A thought that isn’t logical isn’t a thought at all. So, our sentences must be rational to convey meaning. If statements were illogical, no one would truly know what something means. Take the sentence “This sentence is false.” Because this sentence is logically incoherent, it has no objective meaning. And because it has no objective meaning, people give it whatever meaning they want—i.e., subjective meaning. Since it is subjective, it has no mind-independent truth.

Without logic, there is no objective meaning. And without objective meaning, there is nothing we can direct our truth claims to.

By understanding the nature of language, truth, and logic, we can comprehend why a “belief” is an attribution of truth to a proposition.

2. Language

As previously argued, language is a tool for conveying thoughts. To transfer thoughts from Abby to Bob, Abby needs to use the language both she and Bob use. Moreover, Abby’s thoughts must be comprehensible; she can’t convey an illogical thought since Bob couldn’t understand it.

But although thoughts must be logical, language doesn’t need to be. Language is pragmatic, not logical. So long as a language can convey a thought, then that language has done its job. You can convey meaning with semantically illogical sentences. Metaphors like “Your silence is deafening” may seem like contradictions but are still comprehensible.

To understand Moore’s Paradox puzzle, it's helpful to distinguish between semantics and pragmatics. Semantics concerns the meanings of individual words and statements. Pragmatics, meanwhile, deals with how meaning is actually expressed when these words and statements are used.

Semantics are the abstract rules, and pragmatics are the real-world application. To oversimplify, semantics is objective and pragmatics is subjective. Our words can mean whatever we want them to mean subjectively and in context, but under the rules of semantics, words have an objective meaning.

This definition of “belief” is about semantics, not pragmatics. We can use the word “belief” however we want in a specific conversation. But in the abstract, the rule is that the word “belief” means an agent attributing truth to a certain thought. The fundamental meaning of “belief” grounds its specific uses.

We can even use the word “belief” in ways that appear to contradict its meaning. "I believe" can signal doubt rather than an assertion. The sentence “I believe that the meeting starts at 3 p.m,” expresses less certainty than the more assertive “The meeting starts at 3 p.m.” But this is a feature of pragmatics. The formal definition of “belief” deals with semantics, which is the attribution of truth.

The sentences “I believe that the meeting starts at 3 p.m.” and “The meeting starts at 3 p.m.” both relate to the attribution of truth to a claim, but they mean different things pragmatically.

The core basis of a “belief” is attributing truth to a proposition. How much truth we attribute to a proposition can vary pragmatically based on the circumstances. As a “belief” is only an attribution of truth, there are no semantic differences between the phrases that begin with “I believe that...” and “I believe to be true that...”.

This is a dull but important point to clarify that a term's definition is not the same as its use.

3. Truth

The common perception of “truth” is that it is something external to the world that is immediately present to us. Our minds are simply presented with “truth” through our sensory systems. It is just assumed that our sensory systems track truth. If it were that simple, it would be easy for us to come to the same conclusions about what the truth is.

In language, our beliefs represent truth—beliefs are an attribute of “truth” onto a thought. Our “beliefs” are not truths themselves. They are propositions that we give the property “true” to.

We do not impose truth on the world. The world is already true, regardless of our beliefs. It doesn’t need us to give it truth, for that would be redundant. We impose truth on “thoughts.” And those “thoughts” can be true or false based on their correspondence to the world. Just keep in mind that the thoughts and the world are separate. Beliefs relate to the former, not the latter.

In short, we impose truth on thoughts through beliefs, and our thoughts are only true if they correspond to reality. We do not make truth. However, we can give the property of “truth” to propositions through our beliefs. But what is the truth? That big question will be explored in the next article.

4. Logic

While language doesn’t always need to be logical, our thoughts do. It is our thoughts, or propositions, that our truth claims are directed at. If a proposition isn’t logical (ex: “This square circle is both red all over and blue all over”), then it can’t be truth-apt.

We can easily understand seemingly illogical sentences like “My day was good and bad” or “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” At first glance, these may appear contradictory, but pragmatically, they convey coherent ideas, such as “My day had both good and bad moments” or “Our fear itself is the real danger.”

In fact, some of the wisest statements are, on the surface, contradictory, but still carry profound meaning. Phrases like “I know that I know nothing” and “The self is not the self” contain a deeper meaning buried in their paradoxical structure. Zen koans like “What is the sound of one hand clapping,” push us into a different mode of understanding beyond the literal words.

But not all nonsensical statements are deep Zen koans. If we were conversing with someone who kept making contradictory statements (like if we were catching them in a lie), then their use of language would likely be in error. Trying to find deeper meaning in illogical stories would be futile. This is the case with “true contradictions,” statements that are the logical equivalent of “both A and not A.” They wouldn’t be making sense.

Sentences can be illogical, but thoughts can’t be. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” may seem logical, but it doesn’t convey a thought. It's semantically and grammatically sensible, but pragmatically meaningless.

While anything can mean anything pragmatically or semantically, “Moorean Statements” are contradictions. If someone were to say, “It is raining, but I do not believe that it is raining,” we’d assume that the person is misspeaking. We certainly wouldn’t spend a century analysing it. It wouldn’t convey any information, neither about one’s subjective mental state nor about the objective state of the world.

People could convey meaning through Moorean Statements by agreeing with others that it has some pre-determined meaning. But that meaning would still have to be something logical, even though the sentence is illogical. If it wasn’t logical, it could never be true.

5. Conclusion

Beliefs are those propositions we’ve assigned as “true.”

This is what a belief fundamentally is, and it would factor into determining its meaning in all its instances. A definition of “belief” is not the same as the uses of the word “belief,” but the definition grounds its usage.

Truth claims are directed at propositions, rather than reality itself. We can give propositions in different degrees of truth under other circumstances. But to have a belief, you need to give a proposition some truth.

And all objective meanings must be logical. An illogical sentence can convey logical thoughts, but an illogical thought is no thought at all, even if expressed by a logical sentence. Language might be contradictory, but meaning never could be.

The next article will go deeper and discuss: What is truth?

Consider the sentence:

“It is raining, but I don’t believe it is raining.”

At first read, this statement appears coherent. But what does it mean? If it conveys meaning, then what is it? If it has none, then it’s meaningless. But how could such a coherent sounding sentence be meaningless? This problem is known in philosophy as “Moore’s Paradox”.

Moore’s paradox (or “Moorean sentences”) arises when a proposition is said alongside a speaker’s belief that they don’t believe that very same proposition. Many have tried to resolve this paradox by shifting the context of each clause, either forcing coherence or dismissing the sentence as absurd (but not contradictory).1 It should make sense, so it should be read in a way that makes sense (silly, but could still make sense). But forcing a meaning onto a sentence is clearly misguided.

Yet to understand the paradox, we need to know what a “belief” is. Once we do, we can see that Moore’s paradox is a straightforward contradiction, and its proposed “solutions” are just inserting meaning where none exists.

In summary, a belief is just a relationship between a thinker and a thought, where the thinker gives the property of “true” with respect to that thought. That thought doesn’t actually have to be true for the subject to believe that thought as so. So long as a thought is considered true, then it’s believed.

This article isn’t motivated by semantics. It’s not an exercise in definition-making solely for the sake of analytic philosophy; the concept of “belief” plays a broader role.

With a clear understanding of what “beliefs” are, we can take a peek at the relationship between “thoughts” and “truth.” You can’t understand “truth” without first understanding what a “belief” is. And we can’t yet understand the PSR's self-evidence without understanding truth itself, as these next few articles will make clear.

2 What is a Belief

To repeat, belief is a mental state in which a subject assigns a thought the property of “true.” When we believe, we, as thinkers, have " truth-giving” relationships with a thought, regardless of whether the thought is actually true. 

How much “truth” must a thinker assign to a thought for it to qualify as a belief? That depends on the standard of truth in a given context. It’s an annoying answer, but there is no objective amount of “truth,” we need to give to beliefs. Different situations have different “belief” confidence level requirements.

The fact that a subject assigns some degree of truth to a thought is enough for it to count as a belief in some contexts, depending on how the term “belief” is used.

Beliefs have two defining properties:

1. Mental State: A belief exists within the mind.

2. Truth Assignment: A belief attributes a truth value to a thought.

To preview this Substack, “truth” itself is grounded in reasons. However, we are still free to assign the property “true” to whatever thoughts we so desire. We can even believe every proposition, as trivialists do. We may not be able to give “reasons” for such truth properties when pressed by others, but we can still “believe” them nonetheless.

Beliefs don’t even need to be grounded in reasons. A belief without justification is still a belief. Just take a thought and add “true,” and you got a belief.

But I expect there are questions and hesitations about reducing beliefs to a subjective truth assignment onto thoughts (including partial or implicit truth assignments). Like any definition, we may believe this account to be too broad or too narrow, especially one that is foundational in philosophy as “beliefs.”

I’ll discuss the below potential objections (but more are welcomed in the comments):

1. Contradictory Beliefs: The fact that people can hold contradictory beliefs at the same time.

2. Assumptions: We can assume some thoughts to be true for certain purposes, without actually believing them to be true.

3. Degrees of Truth: A truth assignment does not have to be absolute; beliefs can exist along a spectrum of certainty.

4. Unconscious Beliefs: We can hold beliefs without them being in conscious thought.

But first, why is a belief a mental state about thoughts?

3 A Belief is a Mental State

It’s nearly self-evident that “beliefs” relate to internal mental states rather than external physical states. Beings without mental states can’t have beliefs.

We could ascribe beliefs to them based on their actions (e.g., anthropomorphization), but beliefs can only ever exist in the conscious mind. If a thing lacked consciousness, it couldn’t have beliefs.

Meanwhile, humans in mental states can have as many beliefs as possible. We don’t even have to act on our beliefs. Our internal beliefs and external actions can be completely out of line. 

We can sometimes ask, “What do you really believe?” because we understand that beliefs are internal and can be concealed. 

Some try to reduce beliefs to only external dispositions or actions. But this is deeply unintuitive and at odds with the term's common use. Defining a “belief” as something physical is more of a bullet the materialists are forced to bite, while the metaphysical stance I take here allows for the existence of mental states.

Moreover, “beliefs” are not with respect to reality itself, but with respect to our thoughts about reality. Reality is true by definition. It doesn’t need us assigning truth to it.

And we don’t need direct access to “reality” to have beliefs. Rather, as we have direct access to our “thoughts” (propositions, abstractions, forms, senses, etc.), these are the units to which we can assign truth values. Even brains in vats can have beliefs.

This is because, as I've discussed previously, our access to reality is mediated by “thoughts.” This lens of reality is in the form of beliefs that we take as true. These beliefs and truth values are always subject to change based on new information (at least, they should be). 

In sum, “beliefs” can be described as a “truth-giving” relationship between a thinker and a thought. But why is a belief truth-giving?

4.1 A Belief is a Truth-Assignment

Belief is inherently tied to truth. When we hold a belief, we assign a truth value to a thought—however justified or unjustified that assignment may be. An assertion of one’s belief and one’s truths are practically identical (the problem with Moore’s Paradox, to be discussed below).

Of all possible thoughts, only the ones taken are true can be beliefs. The mental states no one takes as true could not count as beliefs for anyone.

And because certain true things cannot be true along with other true things (i.e., there are no true contradictions), there are sets of beliefs that have contradictions. And people can hold these sets of contradictory beliefs, which is how we are able to describe some people as irrational, as we’ll now turn to.

4.2 The Role of Contradiction in Beliefs

Take a vegan activist who believes that consuming animals is unethical but finds nothing unethical about himself eating meat.

In fact, some might even defend this vegan activist on utilitarian grounds. If the negative effects of his meat-eating are outweighed by the lessened animal suffering from his activism (and he would only be a vegan activist if he could still eat meat), then the utilitarian could have no critique.

Yet, from a reason-based standpoint, we could still criticize the activist for bad reasoning. It's illogical to hold two inconsistent beliefs in mind. The vegan activist can be reprimanded as unreasonable, rather than immoral.

However, hypocrisy isn’t the only way we can be irrational; human cognition has its limits. We might hold certain beliefs that we aren’t even aware don’t go together. Instead of trying to force coherence into our beliefs, we should accept that they are sometimes illogical and revise our belief set accordingly.

However, sometimes, it’s rational to hold inconsistent beliefs. We don’t routinely update our knowledge to remove contradictions. Reconciling our internal inconsistencies may require too much effort. So, at times, our beliefs can be contradictory without us noticing.

The limitation of human cognition gives context for our irrationality. But it doesn’t make certain contradictory beliefs any less contradictory. We can spot the contradiction objectively without assuming blame.

4.2 Belief vs. Assumption

Sometimes, we just “assume” certain things to be true without actually believing them. But these wouldn’t be “beliefs " but “assumptions.” We don’t need to believe our assumptions. 

We can assume something is true without actually believing it.

For example, a lawyer representing a guilty client would still assume that his client’s innocence when he speaks to the court. 

A moviegoer would describe events in a movie, on the assumption that they happened, without believing that they really did.

And we may assume certain religious myths as true during religious events, regardless of whether we actually take these myths to be true.

How we act on the outside may not reflect what we truly believe. To qualify as a belief, the truth assignment must be genuine, rather than purposeful. And we’re free to act in a way that doesn’t reveal our true beliefs.

This is the problem with Eric Schwitzgebel's “dispositional” view of beliefs. Humans can hold and play with certain ideas without accepting their truth. Beliefs exist only in the mind and don’t have to align with actions. Our dispositions don’t necessarily determine our beliefs. 

4.3 Degrees of Truth

Truth assignments aren’t binary. In fact, we can give beliefs degrees of truth. Probabilities represent just this. We can still believe things to be true and have different confidence levels.

And we can also believe things with certainty. Analytic truths like 1+1=2 could be true with maximum confidence. Meanwhile, synthetic truths (i.e., “truths about the world”) may carry a lower degree of certainty depending on the probability assignment.

We can make statements of beliefs about events in the world like, “It will rain today,” “My Amazon delivery will arrive by 9pm,” and “There will be heavy traffic into the city today,” with different confidence levels based on relevant circumstances.

Truth as probability confidence isn’t new. It was notably discussed by Frank Ramsey’s “Truth and Probability” back in 1926, referred to as “degrees of belief.”

And our level of confidence would vary based on the relevant facts and circumstances.

If I don't care too much about making the bus, I could say, “I believe the bus will come at 5:00 p.m.,” based on my review of bus schedules from some months prior. 

But if I have an important flight to catch, I could still say, “I can’t say that I believe the bus will come at 5:00 p.m., so I should look at the latest schedule before I believe anything.”

Probability is a massive topic, as is only being discussed in passing here.2 Yet, as long as we understand probability as subjective confidence levels rather than objective entities, we can see how this definition accommodates beliefs of different degrees.

4.4 Unconscious Beliefs

Another possible challenge is whether unconscious beliefs could still count as beliefs.

In short, yes. Beliefs don’t have to be immediately present in working memory. We can be ascribed beliefs that are in our long-term memory. Most of our beliefs are “stored” in long term memory.

Consider someone who grew up in a community where cooperation was highly valued. Even if they never consciously reflect on this fact, they might unconsciously hold the belief that "people are generally trustworthy and willing to help one another." This belief, while stored in their long-term memory, nonetheless influences their behavior (being cooperative, honoring contracts, being polite, etc) even though they're not actively thinking, "I believe people are trustworthy." In this case, the belief exists unconsciously, yet it still guides their actions and judgments.

It doesn’t matter whether a belief is in our conscious or unconscious minds. So long as they contain a positive truth value for a subject, they count as beliefs.

5 Understanding Moore’s Paradox

Now that we have a definition of “belief,” we can return to Moore’s paradox.

"It is raining, but I don’t believe it is raining."

On initial review, while both prongs appear contradictory, they still seem consistent. Yet once we apply the above definition of “belief,” we can see the contradiction more clearly.

Now let’s remember that “truth” qualifiers to statements are useless (as discussed in my article on the Liar’s Paradox). In language, adding “truth” as a property to a proposition would not change its meaning.

"Snow is white,” and “It is true that snow is white” both mean the same thing (see the deflationist theory of truth).

Just prefacing all of our statements with “It is true that,” would be totally redundant.

So “it is true that it is raining,” has the same meaning as “it is raining.”

And because a belief assigns “truth” to a proposition, statements of belief and of propositions are logically equivalent.

So “I believe that it is raining” = “It is true that it is raining” = “It is raining.”

Therefore, if you say that it is raining, you must also believe that it is raining (“belief doesn’t include assumptions, as discussed above”).

See the below to clarify. Let’s label each clause of the statement of: "It is raining” as P (as in proposition) and “I don’t believe it is raining” as B (as in belief).

1. Moorean sentences state B and P.

2. P’s meaning is equivalent to “It is true that P.”

3. B is equivalent to “It is not true that P.”

4. Moorean sentences state both “It is true that P” and “It is not true that P” (or both P and -P)

5. If a statement contains a contradiction (both P and -P), then the statement is meaningless.

6. Therefore, because Moorean sentences that both P and -P, Moorean sentences are meaningless.

Moore’s paradox has been nonsense this whole time.

“Solutions” to Moore’s paradox have been all over the place. Some interpret the statement in entirely different ways or find it to be merely absurd rather than straightforward contradictions.

Yet the fact that the meaning of a Moorean sentence is so subjective, such that no one can agree to it, is proof of its subjectivity. Moorean sentences fail to convey a thought on account of contradiction. As discussed previously, contradictions have no objective meaning since their language can only be private.

If everyone has a different, subjective, interpretation of what a statement means, then the statement doesn’t convey a thought. It lacks an objective mind-independent meaning, making the statement meaningless. It’s not an intelligible thought.

However, like the Liar’s Paradox, it only takes a bit of analysis to see the contradiction clearly.

6 Implications

“Beliefs” help explain the relationship between our minds and truth. As skeptics rightly point out, we don’t have direct access to truth. There is no “truth” label on things in the world. Rather, our minds assign truth using beliefs and we decide what beliefs to have (and at what degree of confidence) using reasons.

Explaining what “ beliefs” mean may seem like a pedantic exercise in analytic philosophy, as everyone just knows what a belief is. But a clear definition is vital for a systemic philosophy and a proper understanding of truth.

Of course, our beliefs aren’t directed at the world but at thoughts or “propositions,” those non-spatial, non-causal, non-temporal entities whose existence is self-evident, as I’ve discussed here.

Our model of truth is built with thoughts that we label with “truth,” and we use “reasons” to make these assignments. As reasons and evidence shape our beliefs, our beliefs can be subject to rational inquiry.

The next articles will spell out more clearly the relationship between reasons, beliefs, and truth. But if anything is unclear, do not hesitate to raise it or else criticize it. A philosophy is only as strong as its foundations and the definition of “belief” is an important part of that foundation.

Conclusion

A belief is nothing more than a thought that a subject assigns the property of “true.” Under this definition, any sentence that contradicts its own truth assignment—such as a Moorean sentence—is inherently meaningless. And with this definition, we can see how truth is something our minds impose on thoughts.

As we continue to explore how beliefs ground objective truth, we must base our analysis on clear definitions and logical consistency, including an analytically true definition of “beliefs.”

To understand why the PSR is self-evident and why its criticisms are self-defeating, we need to understand precisely what "reasons" are. Many have one of the misconceptions that "reason" is just a subjective value judgment, a useful tool of manipulation, or just another debate tactic. It's nothing more than a piece of personal equipment whose value is judged on its practicality.

These types of views are horrendously misguided and prevent us from recognizing the PSR's blatant self-evidence. This post seeks to correct these views by first positing a definition of "reason.” You can interpret the below as my reasons for "reason."

A "reason" is an objective explanation for something. "Objective" here means a mind-independent, universally comprehensible thought (see here for a discussion on objective thoughts).

And "explanation" means a ground for a truth—an explanation must solve a mystery, shed light on darkness, make what was opaque transparent, and familiarize us with the unfamiliar. Whatever ever other metaphor you have for “make more clear” is perfectly acceptable.

When you discover an explanation, you comprehend what before you felt was incomprehensible. You see things in a way that makes sense. And when an explanation is "objective," anyone can similarly see this way. As an analogy, an "objective explanation" is like a set of glasses that not only lets you see things more clearly but that you can give to anyone else to wear for them to see the same. And its best feature is that you can still keep the glasses you're wearing even after letting someone else wear them. We can keep on giving out these “reason” glasses to one another to make truth clearer.

Simply put, a "reason" is a way to understand, that anyone could understand.

Congratulations if you have fully understood what I mean, in which case you may stop reading here. But for those who need further convincing in order to wear this set of glasses on the definition of “reasons”, see the more detailed explanation below, along with the "comment" button, to have any questions addressed.

Can “Reason” be Defined?

Some have doubted whether there is a central concept in the term "reasons", and if not, they may take either a primitivist (basic fact) or pluralistic view (“reasons” can have separate definitions).1 A "reason" may, therefore, mean entirely different things in either the epistemic, normative, or scientific domains. Philosophers have tended to retreat into a "family resemblance" view of reasons because of how far-reaching and seemingly unconnected the different uses of “reasons” are.

However, "reason" is too foundational of a concept for such a pathetically half-assed and cowardly answer. We rightly demand precision. "Knowledge" supposedly lacked a universally applicable conceptual condition, yet one exists (notwithstanding Gettier problems). The same is true of “reasons,” which is also definable. Once we sufficiently grasp "reasons," we will be better equipped to understand how the PSR is a fourth law of thought.

This article will offer a universally applicable core concept of a "reason,"—that of an "objective explanation." Each of the “objectivity” and “explanation” requirements are defended below.

Objectivity

Philosophers in different fields of study have distinguished “objective reasons” from “subjective reasons.” They would consider the former as holding mind-independent significance, whereas the latter would only be mind-dependent.2 Some reasons are universal, whereas others are just personal, as some philosophers have discovered in their own field, like normativity, epistemology, and logic.

However, because different domains of philosophy have different conceptions of what constitutes "reasons," philosophers falsely assume that “reasons” are purely contextual, lacking any unifying core concept. We can show how this “subjective” vs. “objective” delineation can be generalized to “reasons” generally.

As I've argued, what makes a thought objective is that it is a mental product that can be universally communicated and comprehended, at least in principle. A mute person can, of course, still have thoughts, and they could communicate them in principle; they just happen to not express them. Our thoughts aren't any less "thought-like," because we keep them in our heads. It doesn’t matter whether some worldly restriction prevents a thought from being communicated (like a vow of silence, disability, or personal preference). So long as we can convey our personal ideas to others, in principle, that idea is an "objective thought."

For a “thought” to be “objective,” it must be universally comprehensible. To illustrate with a metaphor, to be able to have a conversation, we need to throw thoughts to our partner and catch thoughts when our partner throws thoughts back. If we don’t understand our partner, we ask for clarification or to rephrase in order to properly grasp their thoughts and logically follow up with our own. If "thoughts" were only subjective, then they would be only "ideas,"—stuck in the mind and impossible to transmit.3

Subjective ideas include first-person experiences, personal memories, and private ideas that we cannot share with others. Meanwhile, objective thoughts consist of all concepts we can express through symbolic representation, like language and mathematics. We can't transfer everything in our heads to someone else's, but we can communicate the ones we can transfer using the representational systems of language and logic.

To tell whether a mental entity is objective or subjective, we would need to know whether that “thought” is universally comprehensible or only personal.

For example, the chair I'm sitting on can be sat on by anyone, which is why it’s an "objective" chair. Yet if I had a "chair" that only I could see and feel (for example, I was a mime and sat on an imaginary chair whose boundaries I determined myself), then that chair would be a "subjective chair." The former chair is mind-independent, and the latter chair is mind-dependent.

The same applies to thoughts. If any “reasonable person” could understand a certain thought, then that thought would be objective. However, if I had a "thought" that only I could have and couldn’t communicate to others, such a mental entity could only ever be an "idea.”

But, what does "reasonable person" mean exactly? In the legal setting, if a law were to adopt an “objective standard” for judging a person's actions, it would adopt what is known as the "reasonable person" standard. This standard requires that a court examine what a “reasonable person” would do under similar circumstances, regardless of any personal facts about the actual person in question.

This is opposed to a "subjective" standard, which would take a holistic view of one's personal facts and relevant circumstances.

A "reasonable person" is informed by objective reasons anyone could grasp. Meanwhile, a “subjective standard” looks at what reasons each of us personally grasps, focusing on our unique personalities and the actual facts.

As with the "reasonable person" standard, which our legal system relies on, whether a "reason" is objective can be measured against whether a "reasonable person" could understand it or whether its comprehension would be contingent on one's personal attributes and background beliefs.

For example, if I was talking about the Sears Tower, I could never convey my personal memories and experience to any "reasonable person," about the Sears Tower. However, I can still give the "reasonable person" objective thoughts about the Sears Tower, such as facts about its location, interior, and height. These thoughts may be true or false based on whether they correspond with reality. But a wrong thought is still a thought. We're only able to judge a thought because we can understand it and determine whether it matches up with reality or not.

If you want a hard image, whatever I can and cannot convey to a "reasonable person" can serve as a standard here for what makes a thought "objective,"

We can even be more precise about "what a reasonable person could understand" by creating a rule that any "objective thought" must obey the "laws of thought."

Laws of Thought

For a thought to exist objectively, it must obey the laws of thought, meaning it must be logically coherent. Nonsense statements like "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" and "This sentence is false" fail to contain a thought because they contain contradictions. Each of those sentences can mean different things to different people, as they fail to stand for any objective concept.

Once you have a contradiction, you don't have an objective thought, for no one can understand a true contradiction.

A "square circle" can mean different things to different people, making its meaning truly subjective. "Square circle" is a meaningless symbol, and whatever meaning that term can possess could only exist in someone's head in their own "private language."

Meanwhile, terms like "red circle" or "blue square" are comprehensible, since any reasonable person could comprehend them. They exist in our "public language.”

Now that I hope we understand "objective," let's explain "explanation.”

Explanation

An explanation is a ground of a truth. "Truths" themselves derive from explanations. In philosophy, we don't accept a proposition as true if we don't have an explanation for its truth. We don't go handing out truth cards to propositions, they need to earn it through an objectively acceptable explanation (i.e, a “reason”). So, to the extent you'd like to accept truths, you need to also have their explanation.4 “Explanations” are like a proposition’s ticket into the “set of all true statements.” Accepting a truth without explanation is arbitrary, and “arbitrary” is the only crime a philosopher can charge anyone of.

This broad "explanation" requirement can apply to all domains of truth: physical, metaphysical, mathematical, causal, psychological, social, etc. Every domain that has truths also has explanations. If a domain has only truths without explanations, we would dismiss that domain as ungrounded.

For an explanation to be an explanation, it should remove a mystery about a truth, resolving a puzzle of the explanandum.5 Other metaphors might help. An explanation must shed light, lift the fog, resolve confusion, unlock a secret, peel back a layer, or answer a riddle. Fundamentally, an explanation must create order out of chaos—the entire purpose of philosophy. Our minds cannot grasp truth directly, but we can discover reasons. And from reasons derive truth.

Because explanations ground truths, they exist objectively. Yet, we cannot see or touch these "explanations." But while philosophers have largely accepted the "explanation"-based property of "reasons," they have largely overlooked the need for "reasons" to be objective. We don't understand pure explanations out there in the world. We can only understand them through thought. This is where the "objective" requirement matters for defining “reasons.”

"Explanations" are packaged into thoughts, often in the form of a digestible metaphor (like this one), and conveyed to other minds through language. Although explanations aren't necessarily "thoughts," we can still contain and structure explanations within thoughts to make them universally digestible, and therefore objective.

Furthermore, we can only judge explanations as true or false if we first understand them. An explanation can't just exist in our heads; it needs to be comprehensible to others so that they can also test their truth. And we can only understand explanations that are in the form of thoughts. If an "explanation" is incomprehensible as a thought (like by violating the laws of thought through the existence of a contradiction), then the explanation would be meaningless. Thoughts need to be presentable in a “meeting of the minds.”

For example, take the contradictory explanation: “The plant is growing because it is in complete darkness, and plants only grow in the sunlight.” This can’t be an explanation since it is also a contradiction. This statement would only serve to confuse your interlocutor and they wouldn’t understand it in a “meeting of the minds.”

If the above isn't clear enough, we can use a simple test. Is it an explanation that only a person with specific prejudices and personal biases can understand and accept? If so, it is a subjective reason.

Is it instead an explanation that any reasonable person can understand and accept, regardless of such subjective prejudices and biases? If so, then it is an objective reason.

Under this framework, the supposed "reasons" we give can be right, wrong, or incomprehensible, depending on whether the explanation is connected to reality and whether the thought itself is coherent.

A "reason" must therefore both be "objective" and an "explanation" for it to a reason. The reason could be right or wrong, but those are the only two requirements it must satisfy to count as a reason.

Conclusion

A “Reason” is an objective explanation.

"Objective" means mind-independent, which, as applied to a “reason”, means whatever thought that is created and conveyable by the mind (i.e., obeys the laws of thought and which any reasonable person could understand).

"Explanation" means a ground for a truth. To the extent a truth is grounded on anything, that ground must be an explanation.

“Objective explanations" are, therefore, conveyable thoughts whose contents are the grounds of a truth.

There are a few versions of the PSR, but for clarity, this article will defend the version of the PSR which states that all contingent facts have reasons for their existence. For every contingent fact ("X"), there is a sufficient condition ("Y").

A mathematical truth like (1+2=3) is a necessary truth rather than a contingent one, as for (1+2) to equal anything else would be impossible. Meanwhile, a truth like "Paris is the capital of France" is only a contingent truth, since whether Paris became the country's capital or another French city would have depended on prior events in reality. Marseille or Lyons could have become the capital if events played out differently.

While necessary truths exist in all possible worlds, our contingent truths exist only in this one—but everything still could have turned out differently, so we believe. Yet this assumption of possibility is one we impose on the world. If the PSR is true, then everything would be necessary. And because the PSR is self-evidently true, everything is necessarily true. People dislike this conclusion of the PSR, but if the PSR is true, we shouldn't avoid it by denying the self-evident.

Why the PSR is Self-Evident

How can you argue against the PSR? Well, you'd need arguments or reasons for rejecting the principle. Yet this approach accepts the PSR already. Any good argument requires that one provide reasons for others to accept it. And by giving reasons against the PSR, one is giving reasons for the PSR by accepting the PSR. Once we subject the PSR to reason, we need sufficient reasons to determine whether we need sufficient reasons! The PSR is self-evident and axiomatic.

For us to require that our truths be grounded on sufficient reasons is just to accept the PSR. Aristotle was able to prove that rejections of the law of non-contradiction (LNC) themselves required accepting the LNC in order to say anything definite. Similarly, rejections of the PSR on the basis of reasons are just as self-defeating. The PSR is as axiomatic as the LNC.

The PSR serves as the very basis of our judgments of reality. And because of the PSR, we can critique positions in philosophy that rest on unfounded assumptions.

But if you want some harder evidence, see here, here and here for findings on how fundamental the PSR is in all of our ordinary judgments. You may say you "reject" the PSR, but in reality, you aren't going to accept brute facts (contingent facts that are true without dependency) either. If you can't find your keys, you don't consider the "brute" possibility that your keys grew legs and walked away. Rather, you'd know your keys will be where you last left them (the sufficient reason for their place in the world).

Whenever we ask a question, we don't accept answers like "That is just how it is," or "It's just a brute fact." We demand explanations. In fact, the whole reason we ask questions is to discover these underlying explanations, which we already presume to exist.

Deniers of the PSRs resemble so-called "global skeptics," who may say that they doubt their knowledge on paper—however, if you were to examine their lives, you'd see they, too, operate under the assumption of having (or not having) knowledge—no different than anyone else. They will never say as much, which is why actions count more than words.

The same goes for the PSR. People may say that the universe is fundamentally random and physical events lack true explanation, but they will still navigate through life by asking "why?" questions and would never accept "just cuz its brute," as an answer. In fact, all of science presumes the PSR. The search for fundamental explanations operates on the assumption that those explanations exist. The PSR is how we see the world.

You might try to argue that even though reasons against the PSR are self-defeating, there still can be contingent truths that lack an explanation, independent of whether or not we accept the PSR. We cannot be forced to accept the PSR just from clever equivocation.

Yet, the PSR is not empirical, it is axiomatic. Whether or not we accept the PSR will determine how we will examine the world, not the world itself, and we cannot see the world outside our axioms of examination (the “laws of thought”). And to establish the possibility of ungrounded contingent truths (i.e., "brute facts") would first require rejecting the PSR. If we can't first reject the PSR, then, in principle, all contingent truths must have sufficient reasons.

But if, in principle, contingent facts require sufficient reasons, then no fact can be classified as truly brute. So although we don't know the specific sufficient reasons for a certain contingent truth, those sufficient reasons would still have to exist—we just wouldn't know them yet. The PSR lets us be intellectually humble by putting the burden of a missing structure on our own model rather than reality itself.

Criticisms

I feel justified to stop writing here. The PSR is truly undeniable. So much so that I view the PSR as equally self-evident as the law of identity (i.e., 1=1). But I can address the popular counter-arguments against the PSR.

Quantum Indeterminacy: One argument is that quantum indeterminacy in physics has questioned our assumption of an underlying logical structure to the universe, leading some to conclude that the physical is fundamentally random. But it's more parsimonious to just conclude that our model of the physical universe is incomplete, and axiomatic truths shouldn't suffer due to this incompleteness.

It would be surprising to find that millenniums of human advancement and understanding of the physical world would end in the conclusion that everything is just brute and random and that all of our supposed "explanations" were pure, fortunate, accidents.

We should reserve judgment on true quantum randomness and still posit the existence of a structure that we haven't fully grasped. Its self-evident that there is more science to do. Otherwise, science wouldn't be worth doing, as it's futile to search for underlying explanations of the world when those explanations aren't actually there.

Neccesititarianism: Peter Van Inwagen is credited for his critique of the PSR by flagging its implications for necessitarianism. His argument, oversimplified, is that if all contingent facts are necessarily created out of sufficient reasons, then all contingent facts would have to be "necessary facts." Therefore, there cannot be any contingent facts, only necessary ones.

I've had no problem with this application and am surprised by the weight its received, leaving some to drop the PSR entirely. But this supposed critique ignores that philosophers have already accepted some sense of determinism, per the 2020 Phil Survey showing that "soft determinism" (i.e., compatibilism) is the most dominant view in the free will debate.

“Soft determinists" posit that a series of necessary events nonetheless allows for free will—just as the PSR still allows for contingent truths. So like how philosophers can reconcile free will with determinism, contingent truths can similarly be made compatible with necessitarianism.

The supposed "necessitarian" critique is also a feature, rather than a bug, of the PSR. Necessitarianism is consistent with science's presumption of fundamental explanations for the universe, or laws of nature (otherwise, what would be the purpose of searching for explanations if they aren't there)? Whenever we examine and study the world for answers to our "why" questions, we accept the PSR.

Infinite Regress: Another criticism of the PSR is that its demand for sufficient reasons is infinite. The PSR may lead us to require a never-ending chain of contingent facts, and because infinity can't exist in the physical world, the PSR can't be true. No one truly believes that there are infinite turtles; why then believe in infinite reasons?

But this infinite chain argument ignores necessary truths. Necessary truths, such as the truths of mathematics and logic, are self-evident and axiomatic. They don't need a reason to exist, as they are "givens" in every possible world. Physics is dedicated to mapping contingent physical events onto necessary truths through mathematics. Once you create the necessary model of reality, everything else becomes derivative.

Any other criticism: Even if you don't subscribe to any defense of the PSR I provided above, arguments against the PSR are still self-defeating. Using reasons not to accept the PSR is to accept the PSR. I'll summarize with the following:

1. To criticize the PSR is to give a reason against the PSR.

2. To give a reason against the PSR is to ground truth is reason.

3. To ground truth in reason is to accept the PSR.

4. So any criticism of the PSR must accept the PSR.

5. Therefore, all criticism of the PSR must be self-defeating.

The reasoning might be annoying, but it works. Try disproving reason without a reason.

The PSR is a powerful tool for any philosopher. The fact that only 35% of philosophers in the PhilSurvey accept the PSR is unfortunate. The PSR allows one to question ungrounded claims and seek underlying truth. And as I've argued here and here, the PSR even lets us disprove an omnipotent God.

Conclusion

We can believe in the PSR until we have a reason not to believe it, in which case we will be believing the PSR. It seems safe to just make the PSR a self-evident fourth law of logic, until given reasons otherwise.

Philosophers have been debating the existence or non-existence of abstractions since at least Plato’s Theory of Forms, creating a whole slew of different views along the way, including Platonism, Universalism, Nominalism, Fictionalism, Pragmatism, and Meinongianism. Only 37% of philosopher respondents in the 2020 PhilPapers Survey even "lean towards" Platonism, the view which states abstract objects exist. Notwithstanding the weight we give to its namesake, Platonism is a minority view. Occam's razor places the burden on the Platonist to explain how abstract objects exist, who have provided diverse yet unsatisfying answers.

And the lay feels similarly about the lesser existence of abstractions. We might even call something "abstract" as an epithet for fake (example: “The politician was just making abstract statements, rather than promising concrete results.”), as opposed to something “real” and “physical.” Abstract entities, even if they were to exist, still tend to be placed on a lesser plane of existence than the physical. Physical objects are those self-evident things that we can know with our five senses. Whereas if something is "abstract," we have difficulty grounding it to reality. It's stuck in our heads—if it exists, it feels subjective rather than objective.

Why Thoughts Exist: An Argument for the Existence of Thoughts

As I've argued, thoughts, not matter, are the true subjects of the laws of logic (which are more appropriately dubbed the laws of thought) and are the proper unit of analysis for philosophy. Philosophers don't run experiments in the world but instead run "thought experiments," on thoughts.

However, many have falsely equated physical with the real, leaving meta-physicians ill-equipped to explain the existence of the non-physical. Without an explanation, then how can we even say that "holes" exist?

I will defend the view that, similar to Platonic forms and Fregeian senses, "thoughts" are objective, above and beyond the physical, to which our minds provide access.

First, let's establish one important premise: "I think therefore, I am," popularly known in its original Latin as "Cogito, ergo sum," an affirmation made famous by Descartes (this statement can be called the "Cogito" for short). The Cogito hasn’t been free from critics, particularly those who reject its dualist implications. However, anyone who rejects the Cogito would still have the burden of proving existence without thought. And it is impossible to deny the subjective experience of thought. 

The Cogito is convincing. If we were to doubt all of our experiences, we could at least still say with 100% certainty, that we are nonetheless thinking; our act as thinking counts as certainty for “something,” so “something” must exist. Therefore, I exist as this something thinking thing. The act of thinking is proof of my existence. And for thinking to be proof of existence, thinking itself must exist.

Thinking cannot be proof of my existence if thinking itself doesn't exist. And if thinking exists, thoughts must also exist as the product of my thinking.

You might respond that "thoughts" and "thinking" are in different categories altogether, as the former refers to a noun and the latter a verb. But this view fails to recognize their essential identity. There cannot be thinking without a thought that becomes generated, and there cannot be thought without thinking that has occurred. Try "thinking" without having a "thought." "Thinking" and "thoughts," are necessary and sufficient conditions of one another, one cannot exist without the other.

Once thinking gives you certainty over subjective experience, anything within that experience must exist with certainty, including thoughts, because something that doesn’t exist can’t then be used as evidence for existence. Take the premises below as a summary.

1. If I can think, I must have thoughts.

2. For my ability to think to be proof of my existence, thinking must also exist.

3. If thinking exists, thoughts must exist.

4. I know that I am because I can think (Cogito).

5. Because my thinking is proof of my existence (Cogito), proof of existence must also exist (P2), and thinking necessitates thoughts (P3), thoughts must therefore exist.

Although the above argument doesn't reveal how thoughts exist, only that thoughts exist. Once we accept that "thoughts" exist, we can see how entities that are outside of time, space, and mind (i.e., abstract objects) exist as these thoughts.

How Thoughts Exist: A Positive Account of Abstract Objects

Arguments for “abstract objects” have been met with skepticism, a major point of criticism being their purely negative definition. If abstract objects are non-spatial, non-temporal, non-causal, non-mental, then they must be non-anything. But of course, we mean something when we describe our abstractions—as these abstractions exist in the form of thoughts.

In reference theory, if a word fails to refer to a thing in reality, then the word is false/meaningless for a failure to refer. So if the meaning is grounded in referent, and statements about abstract objects have no referent, then statements about abstractions lack meaning.

But we can clearly have thoughts, and convey those thoughts, without the need for a referent to exist. When I say that I "thought" of a Batman, a person who doesn’t exist in the world, you still know what I mean; Batman exists as a "thought” and we can take about our shared objective “thought” of Batman. Nerds don’t engage in pure “gibberish when they discuss events in Batman comics, they can both talk on the same objective playing field.

So if abstract entities exist as "thoughts," then what are "thoughts"?

I will define a “thought” as something that a mind can create and understand. I'll justify the "created" and "understand" requirements below.

Thoughts are Created by Mind

Thoughts are a product of the mind. A mind is only a mind so far as it can produce thoughts. This requirement is obvious enough.

But we shouldn't confuse thoughts as a product of the mind with being mind-dependent, at least not in the most ultimate sense. The number 84313158935150 may have never been thought of in the history of humanity, but assuming it hadn't, I didn't just "create" that number. It would be more appropriate to understand that I had “picked” it out to use as an example, which presumes its mind-independent existence. 84313158935150 was a thought that I had, but it wasn't a thought that I independently created.

84313158935150 had existed before humanity had thought of it, and it will continue to exist well after humanity, for anyone else to pluck out.

To use an analogy, our minds might be the retailers of thoughts, but even after our retail store goes out of business, thoughts will still exist with the manufacturer. They may not be "consumed" by anyone, but they will still be in storage.

Yet thoughts can't be just any mental product. For thoughts to exist objectively, they must be comprehensible to others. They must be able to exist in other minds to qualify as truly objective.

Thoughts are Understood by Mind

Most can agree that a thought needs to come from a mind. But why must a thought also need to be comprehended?

Thoughts aren't just anything we can describe. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," or "This sentence is false," may be products of the mind, but other minds can’t then understand them. They are meaningless phrases that fail to convey a thought.

Objective thoughts are like food. Like thoughts, food can't just contain physical substances, but to qualify as food, it must be digestible. If other minds can't digest thoughts, they would be purely private mental experiences that could never go beyond our own skulls. Someone could have an "idea" of what the statement, "This sentence is false means", but unless they can explain that meaning to others (i.e., have only a "private language"), then that ""idea" couldn't be a "thought."1 It would be subjective rather than objective.

And for a thought to be understood, it cannot be a contradiction. It needs to be coherent and sensible. Anyone else should be able to grasp that thought for themselves, at least in principle. 1=2 is not a thought, for what would that even mean? In fact, everyone could have their own interpretation of what 1=2 could mean in our their private language. However, we use only one standard interpretation for 1=1, making it an objective thought, and we have dubbed it the "law of identity".

Thoughts can take the form of a proposition, command, belief, memory image, concept, etc. And they can be conveyed through methods like language, art, gestures, interpretive dance etc. If you can think of something and can (at least in theory) convey that idea to others, you have an objective thought.

Objective and Subjective Thoughts

Thoughts aren't purely subjective. For thoughts to be truly objective, they must be capable of being independently understood by others. While methods of communicating our thoughts are clearly imperfect (just see errors in language, physical gestures, social media, etc.), in principle, a thought must be intelligible to others. If you think of something that no one else could possibly understand, then it cannot be a true thought that can be shared with others. It would be like a private language where you are free to change the rules of that language at will. How can anyone know the meaning of a purely subjective system? That kind of idea would be purely subjective.

Meanwhile, a thought can be said to be objective and can be grasped through any act of thinking. If someone else, at the very least, could understand an idea, that idea is an objective thought and can be shared as one. 1=1 is a universal truth whose meaning anyone could grasp, so it is a thought. Although "1=1" couldn’t refer to anything in the world (for numbers exist only as thoughts), we know what it means, and we know that its true.

Now that we have positively defined thoughts, showing both (1) why they exist and (2) how they exist, we will apply this ontology to counterfactuals, fictions, and contradictions later in this series.

Conclusion

Abstract entities exist with 100% certainty. Because my existence is evidenced by thought, thoughts must therefore exist. Otherwise, thoughts (or thinking) cannot be evidence of existence.

A “thought” is created and comprehended by minds. If the mind does not produce an entity, then it's not an "idea". And if the "idea" cannot be understood by others, then it's not a "thought." Abstract entities exist as thoughts, and thoughts are produced and conveyable by the mind.

Next, we’ll put this general theory into practice.

If there is any doubt that a truly omnipotent God does not exist, please let me know if there are any arguments I may have missed. Yet otherwise, we can continue philosophy without an all-powerful God and successfully move past the fictional being that has preoccupied far too much of humanity’s mental energy.

As a reminder of the prior argument, you can only choose 2!

(1) The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) is true.

(2) There are no true contradictions.

(3) An omnipotent God exists as a brute fact.

If you choose (1) and (2): God is powerless (if the world is structured, God cannot control it, making him powerless).

If you choose (1) and (3): God is meaningless (If there are true contradictions, then all randomness can exist, making God's truth trivial and meaningless since God cannot control a truly random world).

If you choose (2) and (3): God cannot exist (Because (2) and (3) can never both be true, God could not exist).

The Argument

Like everyone else, God cannot do the impossible. He can only perform actions that are logically possible because logic (not God) governs all. When God's will and logic conflict, logic always prevails.

Theists often respond by acknowledging that God cannot change necessary truths of logic, arguing that Omnipotence is limited to the ability to change contingent truths. However, everyone can affect contingent truths. While God may be capable of changing many contingent truths, these changes must still be grounded in logical truths. To use a metaphor, God may be a powerful player in the game, but like all players, He must obey the rules.

Yet God cannot create a contradiction, and all of His powers to change the world must have an explanation. He is not truly "magic," and any unexplained abilities would be inexplicable. If God's powers were genuinely brute and ungrounded by explanation, such powers would present a contradiction—which even God cannot create.

Every one of these powers must have an explanation; otherwise, they would lead to a contradiction, which we have established God cannot create. God's powers must comply with the laws of nature, and if they were to "amend" those laws, God would be obligated to provide a logical explanation for that amendment. God must always operate within a system.

God's power is not entirely infinite. He is completely powerless with respect to necessary truths and is bound by what is logically possible—just like all of us. God can only perform actions within His capability, just as we can. Therefore, God's powers, in this sense, are rather trivial.

For example, I cannot jump to the moon, teleport to another galaxy, or travel back in time without encountering a contradiction somewhere. The physical limitations of my body make such actions logically impossible. Similarly, since God can only do what is possible, He cannot perform true miracles without providing an explanation for His actions, or else it would lead to a contradiction.

Under the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), contingent truths supervene on necessary truths. Therefore, if God cannot change necessary truths, He cannot change contingent truths either.

In summary, since necessary truths govern contingent truths and God has no power over necessary truths, it follows that God would have no power over contingent truths. Because God lacks power regarding both necessary and contingent truths, God is powerless.

The following premises clarify this argument further:

(P1): Reason exists as a necessary truth (true by the facts of logic).

(P2): Reason exists independently of God.

(P3): True contradictions do not exist.

(P4): God exists as an omnipotent being.

(P5): "Omnipotent" means either (a) holding all power or (b) holding all possible powers.

(P6): The ability to change Reason is a power.

(P7): God cannot change Reason.

(C1): Therefore, God cannot be omnipotent according to (P5)(a).

(P8): "Omnipotence" should be understood in terms of (P5)(b).

(P9): All contingent truths are explained by causation.

(P10): Causation can be explained by Reason.

(C2): Thus, contingent truths are explained by Reason (Principle of Sufficient Reason).

(P11): A coherent universe without God is conceivable.

(P12): Because of (P11), God's existence is contingent.

(C3): Consequently, based on (P2) and (P12), God's existence is explained by Reason.

(P13): Because of (C2), God cannot change contingent truths.

(C4): Therefore, God is powerless because He cannot change either necessary or contingent truths.

The Counterarguments

The responses I have received to the above argument are discussed below, with the hope that they will be taken in good faith. I welcome the opportunity to address and build on any responses based on what has been provided.

(A1): "God is a necessary being. Your argument assumes that He is contingent, which Theists do not typically believe."

My argument claims that God can only exist as a brute fact. Some have objected to this claim by asserting that God exists necessarily rather than contingently. However, assuming that God is "necessary" begs the question. We cannot answer the question "Does God exist?" simply by asserting His necessary existence. The Theist must first demonstrate that God is necessary, meaning that He must exist in every possible world. If God is necessary, then even the possibility of His non-existence would be a contradiction. However, as I hope to demonstrate, it is the possibility of His existence that is contradictory.

If we accept that the truths of logic are necessary (i.e., those truths that arise from the laws of thought, such as 2+2=4), they would exist in every possible world and could not be changed by anyone. Regardless of how powerful a being may be, it would be incapable of changing these necessary truths, as worlds in which 2 plus 2 equals anything other than 4 are truly inconceivable (in the most literal sense, not in the “The Princess Bride” sense).

God is not necessary because it is conceivable that a world could exist without Him. Therefore, God does not have to exist, implying that He cannot be considered necessary. If God's existence is dependent on something higher, then He cannot be truly omnipotent. A true "God" would not be contingent.

Thus, the only way to salvage the concept of God would be to consider Him a brute fact—contingent, yes, but not explained by anything else, as that would make Him a subject. By definition, a truly omnipotent being cannot be the subject of anything. This is why God could only exist as a brute fact. However, under the PSR, brute facts do not exist—so, neither can God.

(A2) "God's nature is logical. He cannot change logic because he cannot change his nature."

Many accept that God has limitations regarding logical truths, such as mathematics. They may say, "God can't alter the laws of thought because they reflect His nature."

However, this already concedes that God has a "nature" that He cannot change. God is unable to will anything that is illogical; He is restricted by logic and operates only as an agent of eternal truths. It is generally acknowledged that God Himself is subject to the same laws of logic as we are. Like us, God has a nature that He was born with and laws that He must follow in relation to that nature.

If God cannot perform an act because it is immoral, it implies that morality exists independently of God. For instance, God cannot torture babies for fun, nor could He even desire to do so. While this may suggest that God is moral, it does not imply that He is omnipotent, since the higher truths of morality still bind him. Asserting that God would never torture babies addresses the Euthyphro dilemma, indicating that metaphysical properties such as "piety" and "morality" exist outside of God's will and are binding upon Him. If God lacks the power to change their will, we also admit that such God is subject to Reason.

(A3) "Sure, God can be subject to a logical system. But logic is merely a system. God is the author of our system, even though He Himself is subject to a higher one."

Some may accept that God is simply part of a larger set of system—he is the author of our current system, the system he is on is authored by an even “greater God” and we might author systems below us and become their “God.” However, for all practical purposes, He is still considered God because He is the immediate authority over us, the creator of this particular system. This acknowledgment means He is subject to a higher authority, and therefore, He is no longer the "ultimate" being. If a greater system dictates God's nature, then He is not omnipotent. Even though He has control over our system, that "control" actually stems from His being governed by this larger system.

We should not deceive ourselves into believing that the author of our system is omnipotent, as that author himself is subject to still a higher system. It is merely a series of systems all the way up, with a "God" just above each one. The meta-rules of these systems govern everything, not "God."

(A4) "Violating logic isn't a power within Omnipotence. Omnipotence means the ability to do all logically possible things, not all things."

Premises (P5) and (P8) of my above argument each use both definitions of Omnipotence.

God can do all things" or God "can do all possible things" in P5 and P8, respectively. In either case, God is powerless because these definitions aren't truly distinct once we accept the PSR.

Assuming the PSR, if you can't change logic, then you cannot change causation, and therefore you cannot change contingent facts.

Allow me to use an illustration to show how, without the ability to change logical (necessary) truths, God cannot alter contingent truths, for what I'll call the "Chain and Lock Scenario."

Imagine that God is bound by chains that restrict his movement. However, if God were omnipotent, then God could break out of that chain, as an omnipotent being's movement cannot ever be restricted.

Yet these chains are themselves bound by locks. These locks bind God to the chains, and even the chains themselves are "grounded" by the locks. The locks determine the movement of both the chains and God. The chains and God cannot move without any slack the locks give to this movement— otherwise, the chains can't move outside of the fixed boundaries established by the locks.

God could, therefore, only break the chains by first breaking the locks that bind the chains. However, if God cannot break these locks, then he cannot break the chains. Sure, if these chains didn't have locks on them, God may be able to break them. But because the chains do have locks, God's actions cannot affect the chain. God may be able to move the chains to the extent the locks allow it, but God can't free the chains (or himself) from the locks. Since God can't break the locks, he can't break the chains, and therefore cannot move unless the locks let him.

For this analogy to apply to God's power over the physical world, we’d need to answer the following questions: (A) Do these metaphorical "locks" exist? (B) Can God break these locks? (C) Do these locks control the "chains"? (D) Can God control the chain without having to break the locks?

We have already established (A) in the affirmative because necessary truths exist (1+1=2), and these truths govern the “chains” (i.e., contingent truths), and we have established (B) in the negative because God cannot change these truths (God can't make 1+1=3). We have also established (C) in the affirmative since causation is logically structured under the PSR. To summarize, these locks exist in the form of Reason, God can't break these locks, and these locks govern the chains (contingent truths). So can God control the chains notwithstanding the locks?

Theists may be tempted to argue yes. But under the PSR, all causation is logical, and brute facts can't exist. God can't control the chains without controlling the locks. So by accepting the PSR, we can establish (D) in the negative. We can think of God as being bound by the locks of logic—if he can’t break these locks of logic, he can’t truly do anything.

Theists try to exclude God's powerlessness over necessary truths from the definition of "omnipotence," which is limited to God's control over contingent truths. But as shown by the "Chain and Lock Scenario", God cannot actually control contingent truths without first controlling necessary truths.

This argument often fails to be appreciated because we can imagine that God can do the impossible. But once we understand what "doing the impossible" means, imagination is revealed to be a poor guide into Omnipotence. Because "doing the impossible" actually means violating the laws of logic, and because we accept that God cannot violate the laws of logic, we'd have to conclude that God cannot do the impossible.

For instance, we can imagine me teleporting to the Andromeda galaxy or becoming a character in "The Simpsons" by running headfirst into my TV screen. Yet, notwithstanding their possibility in imagination, given the nature of my physical state, these actions are logical impossibilities. They are just as logically impossible as making 5+7=13, for to do those impossible acts would imply a contradiction somewhere along the chain of causation, as logic could not explain such an inconsistency.

Theists may respond by stating that God can change the laws of nature, yet this is to misunderstand these laws. Laws of nature aren't governed by an omnipotent agent or by physical things that the agent manipulates. Rather, the physical world is governed by a set of principles of causation that we can even explain with algorithms. It's possible to change this algorithm, but this would require an algorithm of its own. It's algorithms all the way down.

The lowest unit of analysis that governs the cosmos isn't the atom or the quark but the principles and rules of logic, or "Reason," as I have been calling it. As we've already established, God can't change "Reason."

Just because we can imagine a God who re-arranges the laws of physics (so that such acts are conceivable) doesn't mean that its logically possible to change these laws, any more than the conceivability of me teleporting into a fictional TV show makes that cartoon-like ability possible. We may be able to imagine God changing the boiling point of water from 212°F to 212,000°F, but God can only do so within the laws of logic. If that action were logically impossible, then God would have no power to do it. Otherwise, there would be a contradiction, which would be impossible to create (even for God).

The same principles of Reason apply to both us and God. If God changes the laws of physics, then such a power would need an explanation bound by Reason on pain of contradiction, which is also true for all of us.

(A5) "Are you saying that Reason causally explains the physical world?"

No! Reason doesn't play a causal role for contingent facts, but an explanatory role. The facts of the physical world are grounded in causation, and causation is grounded in logic, as provided by the PSR. Causation isn't a sequence of randomly occurring events, but a logically structured series of events where cause X necessarily causes the effect Y.

As soon as you flip a coin, whether the coin lands head or tails has already been determined because the established present facts logically entail future facts. The forces imposed on the coin would logically fix what side it will land on, and the physics can even be expressed mathematically, allowing the future event to be accurately predicted. Since the physical world can, in theory, be explained through the logic of mathematics, the physical world is grounded in logic.

Just because we do not understand all physical phenomena at this point doesn't mean that it is theoretically impossible to express the events of the universe through mathematics.

(A6) "But what if causation is not logical, as suggested by [insert unresolved issue in physics], so that logic can’t explain the physical world?"

Unexplained phenomena in physics may question the belief that the world is grounded in logic. Couldn’t it be possible for events to occur that truly lack any explanation?

There are multiple problems with this response. First, it assumes we understand the world completely, to the point that we can judge unexplained events to be unexplainable, rather than simply undiscovered. Over history, many believed they lived in a time when all the universe's questions were known. This response is to repeat this same naivete and the “God of the Gaps” fallacy.

Second, we shouldn’t confuse not having an explanation with there not being an explanation. When I see a magic trick I can't explain, I don't suddenly believe in magic and throw out what I understand to be fundamental about the world. Moreover, I don't even update my belief that magic is true, because I have another background belief that says "Magicians are in their line of work because they can create illusions which appear to be magic, but this has nothing to do with the existence of magic."

Similarly, when we have unexplainable events in science, we should be mediated from denying logical truths by our background belief that "Past researchers also made radical conclusions from events that they didn't yet fully understand. So I should reserve judgment on such conclusions like the world being random until I understand it better."

David Hume argued that just because we see a miracle doesn't mean we should discard all of our developed experience. A single data point doesn't justify discarding the laws of nature. The same is true for unexplained events. Just because we aren't able to explain phenomena doesn't mean we're warranted discarding our logic. Let's hold off until we fully understand the matter before making radical conclusions.

The very goal of science is to develop coherent explanations to understand the physical world. We should never admit that a feature of the world is beyond explanation just because we don't yet understand it. The limitations of our knowledge should be viewed as challenges for us to overcome, rather than proof of the futility of knowledge. We should continue studying the world and searching for explanations until we have very good evidence that this assumption is untrue. And if this assumption is false, then we'd have to abandon science entirely, as what good is science's search for explanations that do not exist? As long as we believe science is worth pursuing, we assume underlying explanations exist and are discoverable.

(A7) "You are still changing the definition of Omnipotence. It cannot mean the ability to do all things, or even logically possible things, but only all possible things. Doing the impossible is meaningless."

This argues that requiring God to be capable of changing logic isn’t part of the definition of Omnipotence, since such acts are impossible. While He can't change logical truths, His ability to do the possible and change contingent truths still makes Him God, as it is impossible to change necessary truths. For instance, when responding that God can't make a "square circle," a Thiest may state that a square circle is simply inconceivable and would fall outside of true “omnipotence.”

While a common response, this argument has a few major problems. First, we recognize that the ability to do the impossible is still an ability. Reason is a limitation from doing the truly impossible, like creating a square circle or a "married bachelor." If someone could do the impossible, being unbound from the laws of logic, then we'd call that ability a power. In fact, the "only" power God could have that would make him God is the ability to do the impossible (anyone can only do the possible). As this article argues, if God can't do the truly impossible, then he is not God, just another subject of the logically possible.

Second, we do not accept this redefinition argument in other contexts. If an ability is incoherent, but someone still claims to possess this incoherent ability, then the burden is still on them to show that they truly have this ability (you can't redefine an impossible trait, just because its impossible).

For instance, being "all-knowing" requires disproving global skepticism (by proving that one is not a brain in a vat or is being manipulated by an evil demon). But if it is not logically possible to be “all-knowing” (as the debate around global skepticism has proved) we can’t just lower the standard for being truly omniscient.

Take the below dialogue between the “Know-it-all” and the “Skeptic” as an illustration:

Know-it-all: I am omniscient! I know everything! My mind contains all the truths of reality, which I know with 100% certainty!:

Skeptic: OK, then are you a brain and in a vat? And, how do you know?

Know-it-all: That is not what omniscient means! Omniscient means knowing all the truths that it is possible to know. I can't possibly know that I'm not a brain in a vat because all knowledge is compatible with the truth or falsity of being a brain in a vat. I'm still omniscient!

Skeptic: The imposibility of knowing whether you are a brain in a vat is your problem, since you're the one claiming to be omniscient. If (1) you're the one saying that you're omniscient and know all the facts of the world, and (2) whether you're a brain in a vat is a fact of the world, you should be able to confirm whether you are or you are not a brain in a vat since you know everything.

Know-it-all: How could I possibly know whether I'm a brain in a vat? There is no actual evidence I can point to which would affirmetly determine my "brain in vat"-ness. Even if I was somehow able to see I am a brain in a vat, even seeing a brain in a vat labeled “Know-it-all's brain,” and I was given evidence that the actions of this brain determined my experience, such visual "proof" could just be an illusion and I still wouldn't know with 100% certainty that I'm a brain in a vat. And you certainly can't confirm you're not a brain in a vat since any such evidence would be consistent with being a brain in a vat. It's not a possibility that could ever be ruled out. No one can know that.

Skeptic: This is to only demonstrate that true omniscience is nonsense, for there are truths that we cannot possibily know. And the burden is still on you to prove that you're omniscient, which you've shown is an impossible task.

Know-it-all: That's a meaningless requirement of omniscient then. I can't even conceive of evidence for not being a brain-in-vat. You're redefining knowledge to include logically impossible things for me to know. I'm still all-knowing since being able to know that I'm not a brain in a vat, or being controlled by an evil demon, isn't knowledge. But fine, I know all things that it is possible for me to know. Happy now?

Skeptic: So you admit you can't rule out the possibility of a brain in a vat, but still claim certainly over the facts in the world. How could you know all those possible facts without first ruling out the possibility that you're a brain in a vat? You can't say you know anything with 100% certainty because there is always that possibility hanging over all your supposed "knowledge" that you're only a brain in a vat and everything you think you know are only from illusions in your head. To know anything about the world, you'd need to first know you're not a brain in a vat. Since you don't know you're not a brain in a vat, you don't know anything!

Know-it-all: Knowing that I'm not a brain in a vat is nonsense, I don't even know what evidence for that fact would even look like since everything is consistent with being a brain in a vat. And we have no problem claiming knowledge without first proving that we are a brain in a vat. Especially since proof that one is not a "brain in a vat" is conceptual nonsense. Again, I don't even know what that would be. It's like a square circle, it just doesn't exist.

Skeptic: The fact that it doesn't exist is, again, your problem, as well as for anyone else who claims to be truly omniscient. All your knowledge is now suspect because you cannot prove that you are not a brain in a vat. You try to separate the fact that you don't know you're a brain in a vat from the other knowledge you claim to have, as if the former is unrelated to the latter. But really, you can't possibly know anything about the external world without first concluding that you aren't a brain in a vat. Ignoring this connection would be actually to redefine knowledge.

We can’t just lower the standard only because the standard set was impossible to begin with. If (1) one claims to know everything and (2) knowing that one is not a brain in a vat is to know something, then (3) an "all-knowing" being must be able to show that he is not a brain in a vat. If knowing that one is not a brain in a vat is impossible, then too bad for whoever claims to be omniscient.

But even if we reject the Skeptic's characterization, we are relegated to omniscience redefined as meaning "knowing everything that one can possible know," which is a tautology. For not knowing everything it is possible for you to know would be a contradiction. You can only know what it is possible for you to know; you cannot know anything more or less than that.

We can apply this paradox of omniscience to that of omnipotence. If one claims to do everything and if holding the ability to change Reason is an ability someone can do, then someone who claims to be able to do anything should be able to change the laws of logic. If you can’t change the laws of logic, you aren’t omnipotent.

Moreover, it is the Theist who is redefining the term "Omnipotence." Once you use Omnipotence in the most ultimate sense possible (a supreme deity who controls all truths), then any contradiction involved with that most ultimate level of power becomes the Theist's problem.

And even if the Theist's definition of "omnipotence" is adopted and we define it as "the ability to do anything that's possible for one to do," then we've just made a tautology—the Theist's redefinition of Omnipotence would be meaningless. God wouldn't be any more "omnipotent" than we are, as we also could only do what is logically possible.

I can only do what's possible for me to do, for being able to do anything more or less than that would imply a contradiction somewhere in the chain. And it would be impossible for me to do what's beyond my possibility. God may have more possibilities than me, but he is ultimately still bound by the possible.

Overall, either necessary truths control the world, and God is bound by necessary truths, in which case God is powerless. Or the world is chaotic and God is also subject to this chaotic state, in which case God is powerless.

(A8): "The world isn’t logical or structured, it’s all random and under God’s control."

This response believes that an omnipotent God and true randomness can exist. But true randomness would make God just as impotent as true structure. And there is no space in between fundamental randomness or structure where God could exist.

To adopt the "Chain and Lock Scenario" used above, if the chains aren't bound by the locks, such that the movement of the chains would be purely random, then the chains can only break due to randomness. God wouldn't be able to break the chains here either, since his chains are also subject to randomness. God would be powerless over true chaos unless his powers somehow impose logical structure. And, in this case God's power would still be restricted to the logical. Like in the free will debate, neither deterministic causation nor randomness can count as agency.

Let's say causation is truly random; the structure of the world can never be explained because the foundations of reality are in unpredictable flux. Then it can't be controlled by an omnipotent being because if it could, it would not be truly random. So either the world is structured, and God is powerless, or the world is random, and God is powerless. So the unexplained cannot save omnipotence, since a true lack of explanation would also mean that omnipotence can’t then be an explanation.

(A9) "But God can change the laws of thought. God can make 1+1=3."

This response asserts that true contradictions exist and the laws of thought are wrong. But if true contradictions are possible, then so would everything. Both God existing and God not existing would be possible, as would every other proposition. Just a single contradiction comes with an explosion of possibilities (and the Liar's Sentence offers no protection for this view), making the possibility of God’s existence trivial (i.e., meaningless).

(A10) "God can make true contradictions without the principle of explosion."

You cannot create a contradiction without explosion. Any being who is claimed to do so cannot exist. Accepting a contradiction without explosion for the sake of God is to abandon logic for the sake of God. A God who can create contradictions without explosion could never be grounded in reason.

(A11) "God is beyond our understanding, and speaking of any of his qualities is misguided."

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

Final Thoughts

If God is bound by Reason, then he can't do the impossible. If he can't change necessary truths, and these necessary truths govern the contingent world, then God does not govern the contingent world. Necessary truths rather than God would govern contingent truths.

Moreover, God wouldn't be able to change necessary truths. These include the truths of mathematics, logic, and philosophy, which must exist independently of God. If God can only change contingent truths, like features of the physical world, his power is the same as ours.

God's power differs from our own only as a matter of degree rather than kind. We all have the power to affect contingent truths, and some of us can change more contingent truths than others, but God can only affect a large number of contingent truths.

The omnipotence paradox has not been fully appreciated. Once you understand the implications of God's inability to violate the laws of logic, then you can see how Omnipotence is impossible.

If you accept the PSR, then you’d have to accept that the PSR would bind God, as all of his actions and even his very existence would owe logic an explanation. Otherwise, you accept a contradiction if you don’t accept the PSR.

While the PSR does have necessitarian implications (which some are uncomfortable with), necessitarianism is generally consistent with the deterministic implications of science-based physicalism.

Even if you aren't sold on the principles of causation governing the natural world, only note that we have come to understand the physical world because of these principles. All of our advances in knowledge and technology have come about from applying the fundamentals of nature, rather than random trial and error. We haven't just been lucky, but owe our progress to humanity's discovery of the laws of nature.

The world is already ordered. Therefore, God cannot impose order onto the world, which then becomes the subject of his mind. As such, God's mind must be bound by Reason. If God's mind is not bound by Reason but is instead chaotic, then he's powerless over himself as he lacks control over his own being. Admitting a chaotic world is admitting God's lack of omnipotence.

Although "omnipotence" is a meaningless concept, we mean something when we refer to "God," as I had explained when discussing the "meaning paradox." The next article will discuss the nature of non-existent beings like God.

You can only choose two!

(1) The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) is true.

(2) There are no true contradictions.

(3) An omnipotent God exists as a brute fact.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), represented as (1) above, which states that everything has a reason for its being, along with (2) above, that there are no true contradictions, are both true. As such, this article will show how, as a result of those two beliefs, (3) cannot be true because an omnipotent God cannot change the necessary truths of logic, and these necessary truths of logic allow the PSR to play an explanatory role for all truths. Because the PSR asserts an underlying logic to all truths, and God cannot change logic, then God cannot change truth, making God powerless. Therefore, the existence of an omnipotent God would be a contradiction, violating (2) above. And if (2) and (3) above are both true, God would be meaningless. God, therefore, either does not exist, is powerless, or is meaningless.  

This article will argue that because God cannot change the necessary laws of logic, he cannot truly be omnipotent. And more than that, because the necessary laws of logic govern the physical world, God can't govern the physical world. If everything has an explanation, then God's actions and even his very existence would require an explanation. God cannot change either logical or physical truths since physical truths are subject to logical truths. Where God and logic conflict, logic always wins. For God to truly have any abilities would be a logical contradiction. And if such logical contradictions are true, everything, including God, would be meaningless.

Theists are often the ones to put into play arguments for God's existence, forcing atheists to go on the defense. In contrast, atheists' arguments against God are frequently lacking and can be dispelled by a committed enough theist. Atheists tend to be more agnostic rather than atheistic, failing to posit positive arguments against God and instead remaining open to his possibility based on future evidence.1

The "Problem of Evil" is often viewed as the strongest argument against God's existence, which states that the current evil in the world is incompatible with a benevolent, all-powerful God. But even this argument falls short. The theists' creator can be said to work in complex enough ways that are beyond human understanding, which nonetheless still create a moral universe. But what is logically incompatible with God is logic itself, as this article will explain.

Is God Compatible with Necessary Truth?

An unstoppable force and an immovable object cannot both exist. Either the force can move the object (making the object movable), or the immovable object can stop the force (making the force stoppable). But their mutual existence would be a contradiction—only one or the other can be actualized. Therefore, the existence of one would prove the non-existence of the other.

Analogously, an omnipotent being and unchangeable truths cannot both exist. If we understand omnipotence to mean "having unlimited power; able to do anything," and if we understand necessary truths as "those truths that exist necessarily," then either God can change or eliminate these necessary truths (in which case these truths wouldn't be necessary), or God can't change these truths (in which case God isn't omnipotent). God is the alleged unstoppable force, whereas necessary truths are the immovable object. Therefore, if we show that necessary truths do exist, which can't be changed, we can show that an omnipotent God doesn't exist, necessarily.

"1+1=2" is necessarily true. There is no possible world where 1+1 could equal anything other than 2. Creating such a world would be beyond God's capabilities, as would creating a “square circle” or a “married bachelor.” Hopefully, this facetious demonstration conveys that "having unlimited power" is contradicted by God's "not having the power to change some truths." Even though these are truths of logic, it is important that we first accept that God lacks the power to change logic.

But some try to salvage God by defining "omnipotence" as having unlimited powers except for those unchangeable truths (still admitting that these truths are beyond God's power). God has power over everything physical (i.e., contingent truths), but not in anything logical (i.e., necessary truths). We imagine God as a magical giant who can create or destroy any aspect of existence.

This creates a dichotomy between truths under God's complete power and those completely outside of God's power. We are meant to care about God's power over the former rather than the latter.

Yet, this dichotomy between God's absolute power over truths of the universe (we can call these "contingent truths") and powerlessness over truths of logic (we can call these "necessary truths") is a false one. Contingent truths are grounded in necessary truths, as affirmed by the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), which states that all contingent truths have an explanation (to use its weaker version). And because the structure of causation is logical, these contingent truths can be explained by the necessary truths of logic.

There is a logical structure to reality's causation that we could even express as algorithms. If the logic of this causal logic can't be changed, then neither can its causal effects. Once we accept that the physical world is deterministic and we understand "causation" as being the logical entailment of events, we can understand how reality has a logical structure. Not even God can make this structure illogical. This is why the laws of physics can be explained through the logic of mathematics.

As Galileo Galilei said, "The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics." The foundations of reality aren't physical, but mathematical. The rules of Reason govern our world.

The physical makeup of reality doesn't matter, either. Why would we care about the lowest level of physical matter when higher-order rules of logic govern anyway? We can imagine universes composed of barticles, marciles or schmarticles (whatever name we give to the smallest unit of matter). But no matter what, those universes must contain logical, necessary truths. 5+7=12 must be true in that world, and the events in that world can be explained using logic. Logical rules, not tiny materials or God, govern reality. Necessary truths determine contingent truths.

By understanding that these truths govern everything, as provided by the PSR, we can conclude that God is powerless. He cannot control necessary truths, so he cannot control contingent truths; therefore, God does not control any truths. God would be subject to the same laws we are, making him our equal in our shared slavery to the logic of necessity.

There are many types of these “necessary truths.” In no universe could there be a colorless red object. In no universe could there be an even prime number greater than 2. In no universe could a sadistic torturer be morally upright.2 These would violate the necessary truths of language, mathematics, and morality, respectively. We couldn't even imagine any of these universes where the above statements are true. I'll refer to such necessary and truly universal truths of logic as "Reason."

In summary, the unchangeable truths of Reason are true in all possible worlds. A truly omnipotent God would have all powers, including the power to change these truths, but God cannot. Therefore, God cannot be omnipotent. Even more so, because Reason exists in all possible worlds, an omnipotent god cannot exist in any world! Omnipotence is antithetical to logic (at least, not without contradiction). The truths of Reason then govern the physical world, not God.

As God cannot change Reason, and Reason governs the world (according to the PSR), then God cannot change the world. God is powerless.

This argument is a form of the "Omnipotence Paradox," and it's the strongest argument that would show either God's non-existence or impotence. But it's also the most misunderstood atheistic argument. This article seeks to clarify it properly.

To simplify the Omnipotence Paradox: God cannot be truly omnipotent, as he lacks power over Reason. God could never make 5+7=11, no matter how hard he willed.3 Not only could God not change Reason, but his actions are governed by Reason. Therefore, God is subject to the same truths of Reason that we all are.

This argument is horribly misunderstood by those who are familiar with it. "Can God create a stone that he cannot pick up?" These questions are often dismissed, usually due to a misunderstanding of the argument as trivializing God's limitations. Its detractors can ignore it as a “troll” atheist argument. But we should understand the true implications of God's powerlessness to Reason.

The PSR states that everything has a reason or cause that explains it. Accordingly, there are no true "brute" facts—all facts have some kind of explanation.

So God cannot do the impossible and change the necessary truths of Reason. Reason exists necessarily—we cannot imagine a world where Reason does not exist. Just try imagining a world where 1+1=3. You may be able to imagine people saying "1+1=3" and being told they are correct, or university-level textbooks printing that "1+1=3," but you couldn't really imagine a world where 1+1=3.

Reason must exist in all possible worlds, but God doesn't have to. It's easy for us to conceive of a world without God, as even committed theists could admit that such a world is possible, at least in theory. And because God is only a possibility, God is only a contingent truth (not a necessary one), and God's ability to change contingent truths requires a logical explanation. As the PSR states, he (like us) owes us a logical explanation for his actions. Not even God can violate the laws of logic.

This is not to say that Reason itself has causal powers over the physical world. This argument only states that "causation" can be explained through Reason. There is a logic to causation that allows Reason to play an explanatory role. And an explanatory role is a grounding role—Reason is fundamental to the world because the world possesses logical consistency (as our discoveries on the laws of nature are confirming). There is, according to the PSR, an explanation for everything. A logically consistent universe may seem like a bold claim in this overly skeptical age where truly every premise in philosophy is subject to question, but it is a fundamental truth that should inform philosophy.

We tend to believe that there is some explanation for the phenomenon of our physical world. And our science operates under this assumption (otherwise, why would science bother to look for explanations).

True contradictions are never fully accepted when we study the world. Not even the most committed dialetheist would be satisfied when asked, "Am I pregnant?" with a response saying, "Both yes and no." The same goes for all facts in the world. We continue to seek explanations for mysterious phenomena until we stumble upon their logic. What appears to be a mysterious contradiction today can be entirely explained tomorrow.

Without contradictions, we can fully accept logical, necessary truths. If necessary truths govern contingent truths, and God has no power over necessary truths, then God would have no power over contingent truths. Because contingent truths do supervene on necessary truths, God has no power with respect to either necessary or contingent truths, making him powerless.

The premises below hopefully clarify this argument further:

(P1): Reason exists as a necessary truth (true by the facts of logic)

(P2): Reason exists independently of God

(P3): True contradictions do not exist

(P4): God exists as an omnipotent being

(P5): "Omnipotent" means holding all power

(P6): The ability to change Reason is a power

(P7): God cannot change Reason

(C1): God cannot be omnipotent

(P8): "Omnipotence" instead means "all possible powers."

(P9): All contingent truths are explained by causation

(P10): Causation can be explained by Reason

(C2): Contingent truths are explained by Reason (Principle of Sufficient Reason).

(P11): A coherent universe without God is conceivable

(P12): Because of (P11), God's existence is contingent

(C3): Because of (P2) and (P12), God's existence is explained by Reason

(P13): Because of (C2), God cannot change contingent truths

(C4): God is powerless because God cannot change either necessary or contingent truths.

The above argument shows that an omnipotent being is not logically possible and that God is powerless even under a limited definition of omnipotence.

Reason is the only true "brute fact" of the world because Reason is self-justifying. The logical truths of Reason are true by necessity (mathematics and logic) and do not require any further grounding. These fundamental truths structure causation so that all contingent truths are determinable through Reason. Without Reason, contingent truths wouldn't have explanations, and we would only have brute facts, ungrounded and without foundation. But Reason does exist, and God has no power over it.

Separately, it doesn't even matter whether God was in fact the first mover. Because Reason grounds all, God's initial movement must have been grounded in Reason. If God simply "popped" into existence, with all the powers over the universe he is claimed to have, then this would be violating the PSR and accepting a true contradiction, since you have an action without a logical explanation.

The assumption of God's unexplained movement may seem innocent enough (it is only "one" violation of the PSR), but it is nevertheless a contradiction—you would be accepting inconsistency. True brute facts and the PSR cannot both be true. One or the other has to give.

Rejecting the PSR and Accepting Contradictions

As argued above, believing in God requires rejecting the PSR and accepting true contradictions. If things do not need an explanation, then neither do God or his powers. God wouldn't be subject to Reason because nothing would be. We can allow the world to have logical inconsistency.

However, by rejecting the PSR, we not only allow for the existence of God, but also the existence of everything. Once you allow contradictions, everything is allowed. This is known as the principle of explosion. Because contradictions are allowed to be true, which not only allows for the existence of God but of everything, leading to trivialism. God's existence would be true, but so would everything else, making the truth of God's existence meaningless.

Without the PSR, we are left with "brute facts"—facts that do not need a logical explanation. When contradictions are allowed, we can have unlimited brute facts, even when these facts contradict one another (this is why some have described the PSR as a fourth law of logic).

The thiest is left trying to explain certain "brute facts," or how things can exist without explanation, while also establishing a limiting principle to prevent “explosion.” But once you accept true contradictions, this goal becomes impossible. Any sort of limiting principle to limit explosion rests on sand, as the possibility of that principle's opposite is still in play.

Some have tried to use the uncertainty of quantum mechanics to show the existence of true contradictions and, therefore, the possibility of God. But this argument rests on two faulty assumptions.

First, it assumes that we have all the available information and understanding where we would be able to make such a powerful conclusion—that just because we do not understand a phenomenon, we conclude that it cannot be understood. More likely, our understanding of quantum mechanics is limited, and we shouldn't make radical conclusions based on this incomplete knowledge. We should reserve judgment until our understanding improves and admit that we're not so much more enlightened than those who have come before us (and who were similarly confident in their knowledge).

Second, and more importantly, citing quantum mechanics' indeterminacy does not help support the conclusion of God's powerlessness. If truly chaotic action exists, then God is equally subject to these truths and would still have no power over any truths. Randomness can't free God from causation, even chaotic causation.

The Thiest would need to believe that things "pop" into existence, which, if true, would allow for the existence of anything. No explanation needs to be given for anything since everything can exist without an explanation; only pure randomness would exist.

And just because an action is conceivable doesn't make it logically possible (a popular misunderstanding). I can conceive of myself jumping onto my TV screen and becoming a character in the show I'm currently watching ("The Simpsons"). Such an action may be conceivable if we could imagine it (we may have seen that "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" scene of that happening), but it would be logically impossible. The same is true for other actions that we could conceive but which are still logically impossible, like a physical being traveling faster than the speed of light or backward time travel—but that doesn't stop these events from being imagined and illustrated in popular media.

A proponent of PSR could understand that such conceivable actions (even if they are shown to have taken place on a TV screen) are nonetheless impossible based on logic. However, a denier of the PSR could not accept the impossibility of anything, as unbelievable events could be a brute fact. Once you reject the PSR, you're forced to accept everything, regardless of any explanation—demanding an explanation for your beliefs is akin to admitting the PSR.

We can conceive of God violating the laws of nature. However, if the PSR is true, God cannot truly violate such natural laws. He may be able to amend them, but these amendments must still be logical. God's actions must obey the rules and remain logical in some fundamental sense, even when performing "miracles,” as even miracles must obey the PSR. We can imagine God as only a player in a game governed by Reason. He may be the most valuable player, but like us, he is still only a player and must abide by the game’s rules, as set by Reason.

As a summary, the PSR argues that causation is bound by logic. An event must not only have a cause but be logically warranted from that cause. Therefore, if God cannot change logic, he cannot affect causation. If Reason did not apply, God would still have no control because the world would be truly chaotic; he would only be a part of this chaotic world and not a true agent.

All events have logical explanations grounded in Reason, which no agent can change. God can't make 2+2=5 any more than he can repeal the second law of thermodynamics. If God creates two apples and then makes two more, he can't do anything to prevent four apples from being created. Two apples and two apples necessarily cause four apples. All physical world actions can be explained by Reason, and science and mathematics aim to discover those rules of Reason that explain our world.

Conclusion

God, like us, is a subject of Reason. Whereas Reason exists in all worlds, God can only exist if allowed to by Reason. But being a subject is antithetical to being a truly omnipotent God. Moreover, because Reason governs all, there is no room for God's power. Once we accept the PSR, an omnipotent God becomes inconceivable. God's actions and even his very existence must be subject to the laws of Reason and causation. And even if we say that Reason doesn't govern, implying that the world is chaotic and full of contradictions, then God would be subject to such chaos and would become meaningless. A contradiction would create an "explosion," where all becomes true and, therefore, trivial.

The next article will discuss possible counterarguments to this argument and how they fall short of proving even the possibility of an omnipotent God.

If we accept that matter is changing and language is illogical, as I have argued, then why should we accept thought as absolute and definite? Why are thoughts so special?

Thoughts1 are definite, unlike reality or language. As such, they are subject to what are known as the "Laws of Logic." Yet this article will refer to these laws as their alternative name, the "Laws of Thought." For a thought to qualify as a thought, it must satisfy the three "Laws of Thought." These are the Law of Identity (LI), the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), and the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM).

The LI states that each thing is identical to itself. “A = A.” The LNC is the logical equivalent of the LI, which states that two contradictory propositions cannot both be true. Certain propositions necessarily exclude propositions they are in conflict with. Therefore, we can think of the LNC as stating that each thing is not what it is not. “Not A = Not A.”

The LEM only affirms that what something is and what it is not exhausts how that thing can be defined. Therefore, either “A” or “not A” must be true; there is no third possibility. As an illustration, if “A” is a defined space, there is an area only inside its boundaries and outside the boundaries of that space. There is no further space with respect to “A” (not so long as “A” is defined); there are no "gluts" or "gaps."

These laws don't apply to things in the world. As "Liebniz's Law," states, there are no true identicals in the world. No two things out there have all the same properties as one another.

These laws do not apply to language either. The "Liar's Sentence" is not a counterargument to the Laws of Thought. As I had argued, a grammatical sentence like the Liar's Sentence doesn't have to convey a thought; it can still be meaningless gibberish.

Thoughts are not undefined or shadowy. Thoughts have a specified nature. Every thought you have has certain properties and lacks others. If a thought you had was vague, or unclear, then it was definitely vague or unclear. We couldn't even call a thought unclear unless it clearly possessed that property.

This is not to say that people don't hold contradictory beliefs. People often hold incompatible beliefs. For example, someone may say that it's wrong to kill animals but say that it's acceptable to eat them. Each belief is definite in itself—the contradiction arises only when they are combined. We know each thought separately but can’t make sense of a person’s stance on animals with these thoughts together.

Just because they are mutually incompatible and in the same head doesn't make them less clear. But they would fail to convey a clear thought when they are expressed together.

This idea is uncomfortable for many who view the physical world as the only definite entity, as they may dismiss thoughts as too subjective and not publicly observable. However, thoughts are the unit of analysis in philosophy. We can't understand philosophy without understanding thoughts.

My previous article argued that because the world is changing and language is illogical, neither of these domains is absolute. This article will now show why thoughts are definite. So let's first examine why we should care about thoughts.

Thoughts in Philosophy

The units of analysis in philosophy are thoughts, not language or even the world. We express our thoughts through language, and we use our thoughts to understand the world. However, thoughts, language, and the world are separate domains, each belonging to different fields of study. Philosophy lays claim to thoughts, and its aim is to develop thoughts that let us analyze the world best.

Many have asserted that philosophy is for learning about the world or analyzing language. Yet, as I've argued, the world is fragile, and language is conventional. They are each the domains of the sciences and linguistics, respectively. Philosophy studies thoughts, particularly those that can apply in all possible worlds (i.e., not contingent on the physical world).

Thoughts let us understand the world and give meaning to our language. Philosophy is about what thoughts we can use to understand the world, and what thoughts we express when we use language.

These proposed answers to big questions will be discussed later in this newsletter. Yet, for now, this article will only discuss why the Laws of Thought apply to thoughts.

To recap my prior article, thoughts are representations of the world and language is a representation of thought.

We can have different thoughts about the same physical entities (like "the Ship of Theseus"), and other thoughts can be represented by the same words (like the word "heap," as described in the Sorites paradox).

There is no direct relationship between language and the world. Both are mediated through thoughts. Failure to understand this relationship has created a lot of confusion in philosophy.

As an aside, this is the problem with semantic externalism, the family of views that argues that meaning is determined by features external to the mind. Once we take meaning as something external in the world, we face a skeptical challenge.

By accepting meaning as purely internal—in the form of a thought, we can better understand the nature of meaning as a type of thought. And these thoughts have a nature.

The Nature of Thoughts

Thoughts, in this article, refer to any mental content that can be coherently identified. This includes propositional beliefs, images, mathematical ideas, memories, imaginations, and even emotions. So long as they are internally consistent and definite, they qualify as a thought.

Thoughts are not merely words, and they do not require public expression. They are definite representations, even when only partially specified. The only requirement for thought is that it be logical; it must obey the three Laws of Thought. I can't think of colorless green ideas sleeping furiously or a sentence that is both true and false.

Language (and communication broadly) is how we can transmit these thoughts. There are no limiting principles to "thoughts." There can truly be infinite thoughts. So long as something is logically possible (adhering to the LI and LNC), then it exists as a thought. Logical possibility isn't limited to anything in the world.

Thoughts can include all possible truths about the game Chess and all truths about the games Chmess (to use Daniel Dennett's example), or Chmmess, or Chmmes, or Chmmesss, ad infinitum. And all of these thoughts are definite. Useless, but definite.

Although a thought can't be contradictory, it doesn't mean we can't hold contradictory thoughts. For example, say we believed that "All birds can fly," and "Penguins are birds and they cannot fly." These statements are contradictory, but to understand them as contradictory, they must at least be definite.

Each of those beliefs expresses a clear thought—but when that clear thought is paired with another conflicting thought—the two clear thoughts taken together become incoherent. If you were to state both beliefs in the same sentence, for example, you wouldn't be expressing a thought on whether or not all birds can fly.

Nonetheless, these conflicting beliefs are still definite and can still be used to express a thought—so long as they're not used together. In other words, the fact that we hold contradictory thoughts doesn't mean that thoughts themselves are not definite.

Definite thoughts may not always fit coherently in a set of beliefs—but to even judge a belief as incoherent, it must at least be definite. Otherwise, there is no thought, and a non-thought is compatible with anything (since "nothing" doesn't conflict with the existence of anything).

A thought must still obey two laws: the LI and the LNC. Satisfying both would then imply the LEM.

The Laws of Identity and Non-Contradiction

The LI and LNC are two sides of the same coin. A definite entity is what it is, and is not what it is not.

The LI and LNC are the intrinsic and relational properties of all definite things, respectively. The two laws are logically equivalent.

The LEM then follows from this feature of definitions as an implication, which states that either a proposition or its negation is true. A proposition and its negation exhaust all the possibilities with respect to a thought; there is only space within the thought and outside the thought. All the possibilities are exhausted, and one or the other must be true.

"Thoughts" that violate the "Laws of Thought" could not exist as thoughts. You may be able to say the words "This sentence is false" or "married bachelor," but those words don't express a thought.

To summarize, the LI defines absolutes by what they are. The LNC defines absolutes by what they are not. If an entity is not definite, it violates the Laws of Thought and, therefore, cannot exist as a thought. And the LEM affirms that either the thought or its negation must be true, as there is no other space that is not within the thought or outside the thought.

It is strange to see some people accept one or two of these laws but not all three. Really, once you accept just the LI, then the LNC and the LEM naturally follow. A thing couldn't be identical to itself if it was a contradiction. The LI, LNC, and, the LEM all go together.

If one "Law of Thought" is violated, then all the laws would be violated. In those cases, the issue would be with the violator—not the laws. Otherwise, they wouldn't be "laws." I'll now go into more detail about the LI and LNC.

Law of Identity

The LI only states that everything is equal to itself. But what use is this law? You may think that describing something "as itself" is a meaningless tautology, as noted by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Moreover, there are no true identicals out in the world. You'd be hard-pressed to find two separate objects in the world that have all the same properties (according to Leibniz’s Law).

But LI doesn't apply to things in the world. Rather, it applies to the properties of things in the world, which are thoughts.

A property is only a way of understanding a thing. And properties are the adjectives we're all familiar with (soft, blue, quiet, etc. - which are all “thoughts” about things). They are the senses or "modes of presentation" of things. While some things can share some of these properties, they can't share all of them. Otherwise, they wouldn't be separate.

For instance, take two separate white cats who are identical in all possible respects. They share the same anatomy, genetics, and even personality. However, because the cats don't share all the same properties (being in separate places, for one), the cats themselves are not true identicals. They nonetheless have identical properties: their anatomy, genetics, and personalities are the properties of the cat by which we understand each cat.

Although the physical cat and its physical genes are not actually identical (they are in separate bodies), we still understand the cats as being physically and genetically identical. Again, the LI doesn't apply to things in the world, it applies to properties or ideas we have about things.

We can explain thoughts through a visual metaphor. Cartoons often illustrate a character's thoughts by placing an image in a “thought bubble.” Whatever appears inside the bubble is definite; it has boundaries, properties, and limits.

The audience has a clear sense of the image that the character is thinking. This image could be anything—a memory, a counterfactual, an imagination, etc. The image is definite; the audience can see it and comprehend it.

Now, imagine our thoughts as visuals in thought bubbles. It is clear what the thought is and what it is not. It's subject to the LI and the LNC. Yet, this metaphor is incomplete.

Thoughts are more expansive than just pictures. They include words, sounds, abstract ideas, and even emotions. Anything produced by the mind is a thought, and each of these thoughts obeys the LI, the LNC, and the LEM by consequence.

Some may argue that thoughts are still undefined. The contents of these thoughts may be vague, ambiguous, or unclear—even to the thinker herself. How can a thought satisfy the LI if it's so unspecified?

Yet these are definite features of the contents of one's thoughts. A blurry thought is still a thought, and it has the property of "blurry." Importantly, for the LI, the "thought bubble" still has boundaries that separate the thought from its non-thought counterpart. The LI encompasses the thought bubble. That specific thought bubble has certain properties and lacks others. It's definite. And when we both have this definite thought, we can say that our thoughts are identical, as if we're sharing the same thought.

Law of Non-Contradiction

LNC states that two contrary propositions cannot both be true. There cannot be both "A" and "not A." If you expressed both "A" and "not A," you wouldn't be expressing any thought about A. Saying both "A" and "not A" is equivalent to gibberish in ordinary language.

This is why statements like the "Liar's Sentence" are meaningless; they fail to express a thought because they assert two contradictory propositions.

The LNC is the flip side of the LI. Where the LI says something is what it is, the LNC says something also is what it is not. You can define a thought by both the properties it has and the properties it lacks.

Of course, we can have contradictory thoughts. And each of those conflicting thoughts is definite, obeying the LNC. However, the thought that both contradictory statements relate to would not exist.

For example, if I say both, "The car is red all over and is a Honda," and "This car is blue all over and is a CR-V," I have expressed definite thoughts about a car's make and model. However, I have failed to express a thought about the car's color since "red all over" and "blue all over" are contradictory properties.

While each of these statements is definite (as we only understand them to be contradictory because they are each a thought) together, they fail to express a thought on the car's color.

The "thought" on the car's color has no identity. Is it blue all over or red all over? Because, logically, it can't be both. And if you can't identify a thought, it can't exist. So, although saying that the car is both entirely blue and entirely red appears to express two thoughts about the car, they don't express even a single thought!

Meanwhile, the two statements on the car's make and model were each both (1) definite and (2) not contradicted by any further statements. Each statement expressed a clear thought about the car's make and model, without contradiction.

While the two statements are contradictory overall, they still express thoughts outside of the contradiction (the contradiction being about the car’s color). These thoughts are definite and not contradictory (I’m still able to express thoughts on the make and model).

Again, this is not to say that two contradictory thoughts are not thoughts. The point is that we only understand such thoughts as contradictions because they are definite. However, two definite but contradictory thoughts together fail to express even a single thought. If so, what identity could this thought have? Take "square circle." We may think of a "square," and we may think of a "circle," but we can never think of a "square circle."

Absolute Thoughts and Fungible Reality

The number "1" is definite and absolute. Nothing in the world may exemplify the property of being "1," but this would have no consequence to "1" being a clear thought.

Whether something is "1" can vary with circumstances. We can even think of several real-world instances where 1 plus 1 does not equal 2. If I added a heap of sand to another heap of sand, I would still only have 1 heap of sand, even though I started with 2. But does this mean 1 + 1 = 1? No, because a "1 heap of sand" is an undefined property. Heaps of sand don't come with labels in the real world. "1 heap of sand" can mean however many grains of sand we say it means.

Meanwhile, basic arithmetic operates with defined variables (or thoughts). Whether or not a true absolute number "1" exists in the world is irrelevant. The laws of mathematics don't depend on the world; they depend on thoughts. The organization of the thoughts contained in mathematics helps us understand the world.

The truths of trigonometry are also not contingent on triangles being out in the world. If we live in a world with only heaps of sand, trigonometry would still be true and comprehensible. These geometric thoughts exist independently of reality. Trigonometry may not be very useful in a world without triangles, but that doesn't make them any less true even in that world.

In math, the idea of "1" is absolute. 1+1=2 is true because 1 is absolute, a definite thought with firm boundaries. 1 plus 1 could not equal 2 if 1 did not equal itself. The symbols in math must stand for definite ideas, abiding by the LI and the LNC. However, this absoluteness of thought does not necessarily have to correspond to reality. As mentioned above, adding two piles of sand together will create only one pile of sand.

The world is not clearly defined. It’s in constant flux. Reality is akin to a series of events rather than absolute properties. But our thoughts about the world—our representations of reality—must be definite.

Partially Defined Thoughts

An undefined thought is a contradiction. Something must be defined for it to be a thought. But a thought doesn't have to be fully defined (defined in all respects). Only reality is fully defined, which is why we can get caught in a lie but not in a truth. Fictions have contradictions that can be discovered, whereas truth only has complete explanations.

The universe contains a built-in order and reasons for its existence.2 Thoughts, meanwhile, are self-contained. They only need to make sense in the particular thought bubble in which they occur.

Fictional characters may not have every property defined. For instance, a character’s birthday might never be specified, although every person who exists must have an actual birthday. But a character with incomplete information is still a coherent thought.

And if there is an inconsistency in the story, like Bart Simpson having two separate birth dates, then the date of the character’s birth would also be undefined. Having two separate birthdays is a logical impossibility, so no thought is expressed about the date of Bart Simpson’s birth.

There are necessary facts in reality that don't necessarily track onto fictional worlds, making such features in fictional worlds unspecified properties. While all persons have birthdays, and having a birthday is a necessary aspect of personhood, we can still imagine a person without also imagining their exact birthday. Because this is still conceivable and obeys the Laws of Thought, a birthday-less character is still a defined thought.

This is a response to Gilbert Ryle's example of imagining a speckled hen (as a critique of sense-datum).

We can think of a speckled hen, but our image of a speckled hen may have an indeterminate number of speckles. We can still have a general picture of a hen covered with speckles, without imagining how many.

Although every speckled hen that exists in the real world has a defined number of speckles, that doesn’t stop us from imagining a hen with an indeterminate number of speckles.

This thought is undefined concerning the number of speckles, but defined with what the image represents—a speckled hen. Therefore, we can understand this image as partially defined. Not fully defined, but still defined.

Having a thought that is only partially defined doesn't make it any less of a thought. A thought may define certain properties and not others (even necessary properties). Yet this thought still has an identity—things it has and lacks.

Take emotions. They may not be fully explained by language or by physical manifestations in behavior and psychology, but they're real and definite, regardless of their not being publicly observable.

In a way, all of our thoughts are only partially defined. If I ask you to imagine a "woman," we may imagine a person with feminine qualities like soft features, curves, long hair, and a dress for clarity. However, this thought may not include that woman's interests, life history, or emotional state, even though all women have such qualities. We only imagine a physical model of a woman—but leave the remaining features unspecified.

Again, this is why it’s so easy to get caught in a lie. When telling the truth, you can just take the facts of the world as they are. But when telling a lie, you're creating a new world that you haven't fully defined and may, therefore, contain contradictions, allowing for the discovery that your world doesn't exist.

Our thoughts are specified in some ways, but not others. How defined our thoughts should be is context-based, depending on how useful more definition would be. Thoughts are only maps of reality to help us understand reality; thoughts are not reality themselves. Maps do not correspond one-to-one to the physical world. To do so would make the map useless.

Conclusion

The Laws of Thought apply to thoughts. Every thought is at least partially defined and is, therefore, absolute. The Laws of Thought are often misapplied to reality and language, and therefore, thoughts are misunderstood. If we want to speak of things that are truly definite, we only have thoughts to refer to.

With this view of thoughts, we can now understand the mystery of meaning. Yet the next article will disprove the existence of God, and prove the existence of something higher.