My long-awaited full PDF paper is out. “Neither/Nor: a pragmatic philosophy for oscillating between conceptual and experiential knowledge,” co-authored with Isabela Granic, is available here. (PDF)
Jonah Wilberg, who writes The Wider Angle here on Substack, interviewed me on the principles of the paper. We recorded in my living room. The conversation lasted 75 minutes; I made minor edits for fluency.
The core argument: rationality and perception are not two incompatible philosophical positions, but two trainable skills. Then the question shifts from Which is right? to Which should I choose now?
In the podcast, Jonah and I work through what we call “Neither/Nor”: an approach that treats conceptual, abstract reason and embodied, experiential perception not as competing metaphysical positions — neither “rationalism” nor “empiricism” — but as capacities you can deliberately develop and oscillate between.
Western philosophy tends to privilege the conceptual. We call this “latent Platonism”: the often-unconscious tendency to reify abstractions — to treat “capitalism” or “the self” as objects with real existence rather than as useful but provisional constructs. Other traditions, notably Buddhism, push in the opposite direction, treating direct experience as the more reliable guide and concepts as a distraction. Our argument is that neither is sufficient alone. What matters is the oscillation.
Drawing on managing type 1 diabetes, meditation, cooking, sport, CBT versus psychoanalysis, and Kuhn's paradigm shifts applied to personal identity crises, I try to describe when it's most useful to construct a conceptually stable model — and when it's most useful to dissolve one in favour of direct experience or incoming evidence. Neither position is final. The paper also develops related principles around relations and processes over static objects (drawing on Whitehead, Bateson, and complexity science), trial-and-error learning, and what we call conditional historicism over linear causality.
As always, I’d love to hear from you.
Bryan
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