Yesterday 04:51 PM
(This post was last modified: Yesterday 05:07 PM by Magical Realist.)
Big fan of Rorty's here. Here's one of my favorite quotes of his:
"Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths."---Richard Rorty
https://iai.tv/articles/even-if-truth-is...5eBH4E7gQg
"As science, philosophy, and politics collide, the idea that we can truly know the world is under mounting pressure. From radical pragmatism to object-oriented ontology, leading thinkers now question whether truth is something we discover, construct, or abandon altogether. Anticipating the upcoming HowTheLightGetsIn festival on 25th May and the questions permeating so many of the upcoming debates, IAI Contributing Editor Omari Edwards argues that what is at stake is not just knowledge, but whether inquiry itself can survive without it."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Imagine you are standing at the shoreline of a vast ocean. You can see as far as the horizon, but you know that the horizon is not the edge of the world. It is merely the edge of what your height allows you to see. Is the ocean beyond the horizon real? Of course, but what else lies hidden beyond that edge?
So much of our world relies upon our ability to overcome uncertainty, and yet the more we learn, the greater the ocean of knowledge beyond the horizon. This expanse reaches into the foundations of science, politics, and the quiet assumptions we make every time we say the words “I know.”
For centuries, the Western intellectual tradition operated on a kind of promissory note. Enlightenment figures insisted that reason was the master key. Given enough time, better methods, more rigor, every mystery would yield. The limits of knowledge were merely temporary, edges of a map waiting to be filled in. The universe was, in principle, legible.
The map doesn’t correspond to the territory because there is no territory. Only other maps.
That confidence has taken a battering. Heisenberg showed that at the quantum level, the act of observation disturbs the thing observed. Hawking spent decades confronting the limits of what any theory of everything could actually tell us. And in the humanities, a quieter but no less devastating critique was building. Wittgenstein suggested that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. Kuhn argued that science doesn't accumulate truth so much as periodically overturn its own frameworks. Feyerabend went further still, insisting that methodology itself is a kind of mythology. Across every domain, progress is being made, but like Zeno’s paradox of the man crossing a room, to reach the truth, each step reveals that there are many more steps between us and that final account.
Before turning to the figures who will try to resolve some of these questions in Hay, we should look back to Richard Rorty, one of the last century’s principal theorists of this question of the limits of our knowledge.” In his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty argued that knowledge is not a matter of mirroring an objective reality, but rather “a matter of conversation and of social practice.” Building not only on the American pragmatists and critically minded analytics but a wider mood in philosophy outside the Anglosphere, Rorty argued that the mind is not a faithful reflector of a world “out there.” Instead, it is a tool for coping, a generator of useful fictions. “Truth,” he wrote with characteristic provocation, “is what your contemporaries let you get away with.” And if that weren’t enough: “There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.”
Rorty’s position represents the terminus of a long road away from Enlightenment confidence. If he is right, then the question the festival poses—have we moved from a world where knowledge has limits to one where there is no knowledge at all?—must be answered with a bleak yes. The map doesn’t correspond to the territory because there is no territory. Only other maps.
It is against this backdrop that I want to consider three speakers joining us in Hay. Graham Harman arrives into this fractured landscape with something genuinely unusual: a position that refuses both the exceptionalism of the old Enlightenment and the vertigo of total relativism. Harman, the philosopher most associated with Object-Oriented Ontology, has spent his career arguing that perspective doesn’t merely color knowledge—it constitutes it. But crucially, he does not take this to mean that knowledge is therefore groundless. As Harman puts it, “to think a reality beyond our thinking is not nonsense, but obligatory.” The world, for Harman, is real and densely populated with objects, forces, and relations that exceed any single account of them. Yet those objects are never fully available to us. “If the human perception of a house or a tree is forever haunted by some hidden surplus in the things that never become present, the same is true of the sheer causal interaction between rocks or raindrops.” Nothing, in other words, is ever really available; we get just a sensation, a sensual touch of what is out there.
This leads Harman to a striking and somewhat uncomfortable conclusion about the nature of knowledge itself. Rather than celebrated as our highest faculty, he treats it with suspicion: knowledge, for Harman, is best understood as “justified untrue belief,” a useful but ultimately reductive enterprise, a form of “mining” that flattens the inexhaustible depth of objects. What gets us closer to reality, paradoxically, is not more rigorous description but art, metaphor, and allusion, the sideways orthogonal glance rather than the direct stare.
This is a philosophy for a post-Enlightenment age that has not yet given up on the real. But it still relies upon a notion of efficiency, or better yet, the capability to be useful.
To abandon the distinction between truth and fiction is not a liberation. It is a very particular kind of trap.
Set against Harman stands post-realist philosopher Hilary Lawson, and the contrast is clarifying. Lawson does not merely suggest that knowledge is perspectival—he argues that the very concept of knowledge, as something that accurately captures the world, must be abandoned. “I sometimes describe humans as closure machines,” he has said. “That’s how we’ve evolved—to make closures. We look around our environment, and we somehow think we see reality. But we hold things in these ways in order to achieve things.” In place of knowledge, Lawson offers what he calls “closure”: the idea that our frameworks don’t represent reality but close over it, creating workable fictions that allow us to act. As he puts it, we see the world as divided into things, characteristics, and relationships “not because that is how it is but because this is the structure of human thought.”
This is a bracing thought. And in certain moods, it feels undeniable. All that certainty, built on frameworks all the way down. And yet this could be said to once again sidestep the issue. The problem is that “does this work?” must mean something. Work for whom? Toward what end? If I say that a framework “works better” than another, am I not smuggling in a standard of truth through the back door? Lawson’s position risks a kind of performative contradiction: the claim that there is no knowledge seems to ask us to know something rather important about the nature of the world. In this sense, he is perhaps Rorty’s most committed heir—and inherits all of Rorty’s vulnerabilities along with his insights.
It is here that Cheryl Misak, and most especially her rich analysis of pragmatism, becomes essential. Misak, drawing on the American pragmatist tradition—particularly Peirce and the not-quite-American Frank Ramsey—argues that giving up on truth is not a philosophical sophistication but a philosophical catastrophe. For Misak, a true belief is “one upon which inquiry could not improve, a belief which would not be defeated by experience and argument.” Truth is not a metaphysical absolute hovering above human inquiry; it is what inquiry, conducted rigorously and honestly, converges on over time. It is not found but earned. As she puts it with admirable economy, “truth is that property of beliefs that enables us to succeed in our actions.”
And without the willingness to say that some claims are better supported, more reliable, more honest than others, we lose something irreplaceable. Not just in epistemology, but in ethics, in politics, in the basic functioning of a society that must make decisions together. To abandon the distinction between truth and fiction is not a liberation. It is a very particular kind of trap. And given the world we inhabit, one of weaponized misinformation, algorithmic bubbles, and epistemic tribalism, this trap has teeth.
Misak is, in a sense, the direct answer to Rorty. Where he insisted that truth is merely whatever your contemporaries let you get away with, she insists that this is precisely the kind of thinking that gets people killed. Not because truth is simple or easily accessed, but because abandoning the aspiration to it abandons us to power. Both an ethical and epistemological perfectionism, my chosen philosophy (though a cursory search to find fellow travellers leaves me in poor company), an attempt to reach the unattainable leaves me at least hopeful that we can, in fact, keep searching higher to see more of the horizon.
What emerges from placing these three views in tension is something more interesting than a simple debate between believers and sceptics. Harman is not defending the old Enlightenment dream. Misak is not naively asserting that science has all the answers. Lawson is not celebrating nihilism. All three are grappling with the same underlying fracture: the realization that our inherited picture of knowledge, with its clear, cumulative, framework-independent view, is flawed. The question is what to fill the map with now.
The real danger is not that we have reached the edge of knowledge. It is that we give up on the enterprise altogether.
Misak’s answer, I find, has the most to offer, not because it is the most reassuring, but because it is the most honest about what is actually at stake. To say that a true belief is one that inquiry could not improve is not a return to naïve Enlightenment certainty. It is something harder and more demanding than that: a commitment to keep testing, keep revising, keep submitting our frameworks to the pressure of experience. The limits of knowledge are real. But they are not a reason to abandon the enterprise. They are the very conditions that make inquiry worth pursuing at all.
A cartographer who knows their map is imperfect does not burn it. They keep surveying, keep correcting, keep submitting their lines to the resistance of new terrain. There is something in this that Lawson and Harman both grasp. Lawson is right that our frameworks are not windows onto reality, but instruments we wield, and the best of them are the ones that continue to open onto new experience rather than close it down. Harman is right that the world exceeds any description we give it, and that this excess is not a failure but a feature. But neither of these insights requires us to abandon the aspiration to truth. If anything, they sharpen it. A framework that refuses to be tested is not a closure; it is a dead end.
This is where Misak’s pragmatism feels not like a retreat but like a discipline. The real danger is not that we have reached the edge of knowledge. It is that we give up on the enterprise altogether; retreating into frameworks not because they are illuminating but because they are comfortable, confirming, and ours. That would be the true epistemic surrender. The debate at Hay offers necessary resistance.”
Join Cheryl Misak for the panel Closer to Truth, and Hilary Lawson and Graham Harman at HowTheLightGetsIn Hay 2026 for The Edge of the Known and ask yourself whether, from where you’re standing, you could ever have seen it differently."
"Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths."---Richard Rorty
https://iai.tv/articles/even-if-truth-is...5eBH4E7gQg
"As science, philosophy, and politics collide, the idea that we can truly know the world is under mounting pressure. From radical pragmatism to object-oriented ontology, leading thinkers now question whether truth is something we discover, construct, or abandon altogether. Anticipating the upcoming HowTheLightGetsIn festival on 25th May and the questions permeating so many of the upcoming debates, IAI Contributing Editor Omari Edwards argues that what is at stake is not just knowledge, but whether inquiry itself can survive without it."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Imagine you are standing at the shoreline of a vast ocean. You can see as far as the horizon, but you know that the horizon is not the edge of the world. It is merely the edge of what your height allows you to see. Is the ocean beyond the horizon real? Of course, but what else lies hidden beyond that edge?
So much of our world relies upon our ability to overcome uncertainty, and yet the more we learn, the greater the ocean of knowledge beyond the horizon. This expanse reaches into the foundations of science, politics, and the quiet assumptions we make every time we say the words “I know.”
For centuries, the Western intellectual tradition operated on a kind of promissory note. Enlightenment figures insisted that reason was the master key. Given enough time, better methods, more rigor, every mystery would yield. The limits of knowledge were merely temporary, edges of a map waiting to be filled in. The universe was, in principle, legible.
The map doesn’t correspond to the territory because there is no territory. Only other maps.
That confidence has taken a battering. Heisenberg showed that at the quantum level, the act of observation disturbs the thing observed. Hawking spent decades confronting the limits of what any theory of everything could actually tell us. And in the humanities, a quieter but no less devastating critique was building. Wittgenstein suggested that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. Kuhn argued that science doesn't accumulate truth so much as periodically overturn its own frameworks. Feyerabend went further still, insisting that methodology itself is a kind of mythology. Across every domain, progress is being made, but like Zeno’s paradox of the man crossing a room, to reach the truth, each step reveals that there are many more steps between us and that final account.
Before turning to the figures who will try to resolve some of these questions in Hay, we should look back to Richard Rorty, one of the last century’s principal theorists of this question of the limits of our knowledge.” In his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty argued that knowledge is not a matter of mirroring an objective reality, but rather “a matter of conversation and of social practice.” Building not only on the American pragmatists and critically minded analytics but a wider mood in philosophy outside the Anglosphere, Rorty argued that the mind is not a faithful reflector of a world “out there.” Instead, it is a tool for coping, a generator of useful fictions. “Truth,” he wrote with characteristic provocation, “is what your contemporaries let you get away with.” And if that weren’t enough: “There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.”
Rorty’s position represents the terminus of a long road away from Enlightenment confidence. If he is right, then the question the festival poses—have we moved from a world where knowledge has limits to one where there is no knowledge at all?—must be answered with a bleak yes. The map doesn’t correspond to the territory because there is no territory. Only other maps.
It is against this backdrop that I want to consider three speakers joining us in Hay. Graham Harman arrives into this fractured landscape with something genuinely unusual: a position that refuses both the exceptionalism of the old Enlightenment and the vertigo of total relativism. Harman, the philosopher most associated with Object-Oriented Ontology, has spent his career arguing that perspective doesn’t merely color knowledge—it constitutes it. But crucially, he does not take this to mean that knowledge is therefore groundless. As Harman puts it, “to think a reality beyond our thinking is not nonsense, but obligatory.” The world, for Harman, is real and densely populated with objects, forces, and relations that exceed any single account of them. Yet those objects are never fully available to us. “If the human perception of a house or a tree is forever haunted by some hidden surplus in the things that never become present, the same is true of the sheer causal interaction between rocks or raindrops.” Nothing, in other words, is ever really available; we get just a sensation, a sensual touch of what is out there.
This leads Harman to a striking and somewhat uncomfortable conclusion about the nature of knowledge itself. Rather than celebrated as our highest faculty, he treats it with suspicion: knowledge, for Harman, is best understood as “justified untrue belief,” a useful but ultimately reductive enterprise, a form of “mining” that flattens the inexhaustible depth of objects. What gets us closer to reality, paradoxically, is not more rigorous description but art, metaphor, and allusion, the sideways orthogonal glance rather than the direct stare.
This is a philosophy for a post-Enlightenment age that has not yet given up on the real. But it still relies upon a notion of efficiency, or better yet, the capability to be useful.
To abandon the distinction between truth and fiction is not a liberation. It is a very particular kind of trap.
Set against Harman stands post-realist philosopher Hilary Lawson, and the contrast is clarifying. Lawson does not merely suggest that knowledge is perspectival—he argues that the very concept of knowledge, as something that accurately captures the world, must be abandoned. “I sometimes describe humans as closure machines,” he has said. “That’s how we’ve evolved—to make closures. We look around our environment, and we somehow think we see reality. But we hold things in these ways in order to achieve things.” In place of knowledge, Lawson offers what he calls “closure”: the idea that our frameworks don’t represent reality but close over it, creating workable fictions that allow us to act. As he puts it, we see the world as divided into things, characteristics, and relationships “not because that is how it is but because this is the structure of human thought.”
This is a bracing thought. And in certain moods, it feels undeniable. All that certainty, built on frameworks all the way down. And yet this could be said to once again sidestep the issue. The problem is that “does this work?” must mean something. Work for whom? Toward what end? If I say that a framework “works better” than another, am I not smuggling in a standard of truth through the back door? Lawson’s position risks a kind of performative contradiction: the claim that there is no knowledge seems to ask us to know something rather important about the nature of the world. In this sense, he is perhaps Rorty’s most committed heir—and inherits all of Rorty’s vulnerabilities along with his insights.
It is here that Cheryl Misak, and most especially her rich analysis of pragmatism, becomes essential. Misak, drawing on the American pragmatist tradition—particularly Peirce and the not-quite-American Frank Ramsey—argues that giving up on truth is not a philosophical sophistication but a philosophical catastrophe. For Misak, a true belief is “one upon which inquiry could not improve, a belief which would not be defeated by experience and argument.” Truth is not a metaphysical absolute hovering above human inquiry; it is what inquiry, conducted rigorously and honestly, converges on over time. It is not found but earned. As she puts it with admirable economy, “truth is that property of beliefs that enables us to succeed in our actions.”
And without the willingness to say that some claims are better supported, more reliable, more honest than others, we lose something irreplaceable. Not just in epistemology, but in ethics, in politics, in the basic functioning of a society that must make decisions together. To abandon the distinction between truth and fiction is not a liberation. It is a very particular kind of trap. And given the world we inhabit, one of weaponized misinformation, algorithmic bubbles, and epistemic tribalism, this trap has teeth.
Misak is, in a sense, the direct answer to Rorty. Where he insisted that truth is merely whatever your contemporaries let you get away with, she insists that this is precisely the kind of thinking that gets people killed. Not because truth is simple or easily accessed, but because abandoning the aspiration to it abandons us to power. Both an ethical and epistemological perfectionism, my chosen philosophy (though a cursory search to find fellow travellers leaves me in poor company), an attempt to reach the unattainable leaves me at least hopeful that we can, in fact, keep searching higher to see more of the horizon.
What emerges from placing these three views in tension is something more interesting than a simple debate between believers and sceptics. Harman is not defending the old Enlightenment dream. Misak is not naively asserting that science has all the answers. Lawson is not celebrating nihilism. All three are grappling with the same underlying fracture: the realization that our inherited picture of knowledge, with its clear, cumulative, framework-independent view, is flawed. The question is what to fill the map with now.
The real danger is not that we have reached the edge of knowledge. It is that we give up on the enterprise altogether.
Misak’s answer, I find, has the most to offer, not because it is the most reassuring, but because it is the most honest about what is actually at stake. To say that a true belief is one that inquiry could not improve is not a return to naïve Enlightenment certainty. It is something harder and more demanding than that: a commitment to keep testing, keep revising, keep submitting our frameworks to the pressure of experience. The limits of knowledge are real. But they are not a reason to abandon the enterprise. They are the very conditions that make inquiry worth pursuing at all.
A cartographer who knows their map is imperfect does not burn it. They keep surveying, keep correcting, keep submitting their lines to the resistance of new terrain. There is something in this that Lawson and Harman both grasp. Lawson is right that our frameworks are not windows onto reality, but instruments we wield, and the best of them are the ones that continue to open onto new experience rather than close it down. Harman is right that the world exceeds any description we give it, and that this excess is not a failure but a feature. But neither of these insights requires us to abandon the aspiration to truth. If anything, they sharpen it. A framework that refuses to be tested is not a closure; it is a dead end.
This is where Misak’s pragmatism feels not like a retreat but like a discipline. The real danger is not that we have reached the edge of knowledge. It is that we give up on the enterprise altogether; retreating into frameworks not because they are illuminating but because they are comfortable, confirming, and ours. That would be the true epistemic surrender. The debate at Hay offers necessary resistance.”
Join Cheryl Misak for the panel Closer to Truth, and Hilary Lawson and Graham Harman at HowTheLightGetsIn Hay 2026 for The Edge of the Known and ask yourself whether, from where you’re standing, you could ever have seen it differently."
