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.
“Thoughts” are logically coherent and defined mental contents. They are non-temporal, non-spatial, non-causal. However, they are coherent and can be identified.
“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.
“Beliefs” are thoughts which we give the property “true” to.
“Truth” is the totality of all reasons. As per the PSR, “truth” is everything that has a reason.
“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.
A “reason for that truth” is described as a “connector” in the article.