Tag Archives: Philosophy

On Viability as Truth:

The ideas discussed here will form part of the second edition of my book, Second Order Cybernetics. The second edition will include a first half where I go into the introduction of cybernetics and related ideas. The post is slightly longer than usual because of that.

In today’s post I am exploring what I think is a fundamental question in epistemology: what does it mean to say something is true? I want to approach this through the lens of cybernetic constructivism, and I will start with a question about pi, which feels fitting given that today is March 14.

What is pi? For most purposes, 3.14 is a very accurate value. But pi is an irrational number. It goes on forever. Should a truthist spend a lifetime reciting its digits? Where should they stop and say: this is pi?

That question is the crux of viability. A correspondence theory of truth has no stopping rule. It is committed, in principle, to the full expansion. But nobody does that, because it does not prove viable for any actual purpose. 3.14 works for most engineering calculations. More decimal places work for orbital mechanics. The stopping point is always set by the task at hand, not by some ideal of complete accuracy.

A correspondence theorist might reply that they can simply know pi is infinite without reciting it. But that reply concedes the point. To know that pi is infinite is already to accept a stopping rule. The question is what determines where you stop. Viability puts the stopping rule at the heart of truth. Correspondence theory treats it as a practical afterthought.

What I find striking is what the history of pi actually shows. The Babylonian engineer used 3. The medieval architect used 22/7. NASA uses 15 decimal places. The mathematician holds the concept of an infinite irrational ratio. Mathematically, there is a unique value of pi. The description that has proved most robust across the widest range of tests is the one that survives. That is viability selecting the winner. Classical correspondence theory has little to say about why our descriptions of pi changed over time or differ across contexts. It treats these shifts as practical side-effects rather than as central to what truth is.

Coping, Not Copying:

Once you notice that every stopping rule is task-relative, you are already moving toward a cybernetic picture: knowledge as regulation under constraint rather than as static mirroring.

Let’s look at the example of a lock. A lock can be opened with a key, a lockpick, or a hammer. All three work. None of them is the one true solution. The opening of the lock is the criterion, not the method. This is what viability means in practice. It does not collapse into the view that anything goes. The lock still has to open. But multiple paths can satisfy the criterion. This is the notion of pluralism.

Correspondence theory assumes that an accurate copy of the world can be made in the mind. But this assumes we have direct access to the world in the first place. Cybernetic constructivism starts from the opposite standpoint. We do not have direct access. What we have is a context, an observer embedded in a situation, acting under constraints. The cybernetician is aware of the trap of relativism that follows if epistemic constructivism is taken too far. The answer therefore is not to abandon external reality but to let it push back. External constraints are not obstacles to truth. They are its guide.

What emerges from this is not a copy of the world but a structural coupling with it. The focus shifts from copying the world to coping with it. It is worth pausing on the word itself. In Old English, “trēowþ” meant faithfulness and keeping one’s word. The narrowing toward factual correctness came much later. Its deepest root means firm and solid, from the same family as tree and trust. This suggests not a mirror of reality but something that holds fast under strain. Even in its language history, truth is less about a disembodied view from nowhere than about reliability in a lived relationship.

Viability, as the cybernetician uses the term, is not a lazy shortcut to truth. It is a different account of what truth is for. Knowledge is not a mirror held up to reality. It is closer to a tool. A tool fits or it does not fit, relative to what you are doing. 3.14 is not first true and then useful. Its usefulness is the ground of its truth-claim.

As I was thinking about this, I could not help but notice how well this connects to a tradition that predates cybernetics. The American pragmatists, Dewey and James in particular, argued that the truth of a belief is inseparable from its consequences in practice. Dewey called knowledge a form of inquiry, not a form of contemplation. James spoke of the cash value of a truth, meaning what practical difference it makes to the person holding it. Cybernetics inherits this instinct and gives it a more precise mechanical account, grounding it in feedback, constraint, and structural coupling rather than in human psychology alone.

Readiness-to-Hand:

This is also what Heidegger points to with the notion of readiness-to-hand. A hammer is not first an object you contemplate and then use. It is defined by its role in a practice. You notice the hammer as an object only when it breaks or goes missing. Otherwise, it is simply part of how you are engaged with the world. In the same way, a number like 3.14 is not something you verify against reality and then apply. It is already inside the practice. Its truth is its grip on what you are doing.

This brings in a second aspect of viability. It is always relative to what we have on our hands. The constraints of the task determine what counts as sufficient. A cybernetic observer is always embedded in a context of action. What counts as a sufficient description depends on what the observer needs to do next. This is why cybernetics reaches for viability rather than correspondence.

Viability, in more precise terms, is about maintaining the ability to act when facing constraints. It is not about removing constraints. It is about sustaining the capacity to continue within them.

King Sisyphus:

The myth of Sisyphus makes this idea vivid. In Camus’s retelling, Sisyphus is condemned to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, again and again, for eternity. The constraint does not change. The boulder always returns. But Camus insists we imagine Sisyphus happy. And this is not a small thing.

The punishment depends on Sisyphus experiencing it as a punishment. The gods are not only constraining him physically. They are constraining him through his own suffering. If Sisyphus finds joy in what he does, the punishment loses its force, because it ceases to be punishment at all. The rock still rolls back. But the meaning of that event changes entirely.

There are two constraints at work here, not one. The physical constraint belongs to the hill and the boulder. The second constraint belongs to the relationship between Sisyphus and his situation. This to me is what Ashby points to when he treats constraint as a relation between an observer’s possible descriptions and what actually happens. The gods were counting on both. They chose this task because they expected Sisyphus to find it intolerable.

When he finds joy instead, the second constraint dissolves. The punishment ceases, not because the rock stops rolling, but because the meaning of the rolling changes. Sisyphus is no longer measuring his situation against an impossible standard, namely the boulder staying at the top. The rolling back is no longer a failure. It is just the next push.

This is also where the line between reframing and delusion holds. Sisyphus dissolves the relational constraint, the one the gods constructed, while remaining fully exposed to the physical one. The rock still rolls back. Delusion works differently. It does not reframe what you measure yourself against. It avoids the test altogether. Reframing and avoidance look similar from the inside but they are not the same thing.

There is something else here worth noting. The gods defined the task as punishment. Sisyphus, by finding joy, becomes his own observer. He steps outside the frame the gods imposed. In second order cybernetics terms, he observes his own observing and chooses differently. Viability, in this reading, is not just functional persistence. It is the capacity to reframe one’s relationship to a constraint.

The Madman of Naranam:

I want to bring in a figure I find even more striking than Sisyphus for this purpose. Consider Naranath Branthan, the madman of Naranam from Kerala. He too rolled a large rock up a hill and watched it roll back down. He did this again and again. But he was not being punished. Instead, he did it for fun. The stories say he would laugh with joy and clap his hands as the rock rolled down. Naranath is not denying the physical constraint. The rock rolls back and he knows it will. His reframing does not change what happens. It changes what he measures himself against. He stops applying a standard that was never appropriate to begin with. He needed no outside observer to imagine him happy. His reframing was self-generated.

The story of Naranath meeting the goddess Kali makes this even more vivid. Kali offered him any boon he wished. He asked only to move his elephantiasis from one leg to the other. He did not ask to be free of it. He had understood the absurdity of demanding that the world be other than it is. That understanding is viability in its deepest form.

Camus’s formulation still requires an observer. We must imagine Sisyphus happy. Naranath does not wait to be imagined. This is, perhaps, the deeper cybernetic point. Viability looks like a property of the organism. But the Sisyphus example reveals it as partly a property of the relationship between the organism and its observer. Naranath collapses that distance. He is the observer of his own condition, and he chooses joy without being told to.

The Community Problem:

If viability is partly about how an individual organism relates to its constraints, the question arises how communities do this collectively. Charles Sanders Peirce proposed that truth is what a community of inquirers would converge on given enough time. But this raises a prior question. Who gets to be in the community? A group that agrees the earth is flat is also a community. Peirce’s community of inquirers works only if the community remains open to the tests imposed by its environment. Without that, coherence collapses into shared delusion. The flat earth holds together perfectly well as a coherent position until you try to launch a satellite. At that point the context decides, not the community.

This is also where viability parts ways with a purely psychological reading of coping. A belief that works by insulating itself from defeat is not viable in the cybernetic sense. It is a closed loop. Popper called this falsifiability: a claim should be viewed as knowledge only if it is open to some possible observation that could defeat it. Viability makes the same demand from a different angle. A viable belief is one that remains genuinely exposed to the push-back of its constraints. Structural coupling requires contact. A placebo, for example, can open the lock once or twice. But a belief that cannot be tested by the lock at all is not knowledge. It is insulation.

Coherence and Its Limits:

When you encounter something genuinely new, you cannot easily make sense of it. This is because you do not yet have a network of understanding into which it can fit. The new observation has no hook to hang on. A claim does not arrive in isolation. It either coheres with the network of details you already hold, or it does not land at all. Reading widely and across diverse domains is one way to build a network rich enough to receive new things.

From this standpoint, truth has two criteria working together. First, it must cohere with what you already understand. Second, it must sustain your viability rather than erode it. The two are not equal. Coherence is necessary: a completely incoherent set of beliefs cannot support action at all. But coherence is not sufficient. A perfectly coherent but closed network will eventually fail you. Viability is the deeper criterion. Coherence is subordinate to it.

Correspondence theory assumes that truth is already out there, waiting to be found. Viability inverts this. Truth is not found. It is enacted in the relationship between an observer and their constraints. The question is not whether something matches reality. The question is whether it allows you to continue.

Frames and Open Questions:

Consider a rocket launch. The rocket either reaches orbit or it does not. That criterion is external and unambiguous. Political and social evaluations are harder because the criteria are themselves contested. Two groups disagreeing about a leader are not just disagreeing about a fact. They are disagreeing about what counts as a good outcome. That is a disagreement about values, not just evidence. It is a disagreement about which outcomes count as success.

I have written about von Foerster’s ethical imperative before in the context of Ackoff. Von Foerster offers one possible criterion that sits outside tribal agreement. His ethical imperative is to act always so as to increase the number of choices available. Choices here means systemic variety and the capacity to respond to constraints not yet encountered, not merely an expanded menu of options. That is at least a criterion that does not depend on who is in the tribe. But even that criterion has to be chosen by someone. The honest cybernetic answer to who decides the context is: the observer does, always. But the observer decides the frame. The universe decides whether the frame survives. These are not the same thing.

Even if truth is a property of propositions, any ascription of truth is made from within a perspective. Every act of saying this is true is an act by some observer under constraints. There is no view from nowhere. Existentialism arrived at this conclusion from a different direction. Kierkegaard argued that the deepest truths tell the individual what to do, not what to know. Nietzsche went further, famously claiming that there are no facts, only interpretations, and that we cannot see around our own corner. Pragmatism made a parallel move, arguing that truth is not a fixed target but a process, something that happens to an idea as it is put to work.

Cybernetic constructivism inherits both traditions and gives them a more precise account of what the corner is made of and what putting an idea to work actually means. What we can ask is whether a perspective is richer, more generative, and more honest about its own assumptions than another. Viability is not a compromise on truth. It is a more honest account of what truth has always been doing.

One question remains open. This post has argued that the universe decides whether the frame survives. But what happens when a community is so digitally insulated that it never has to launch a rocket? When algorithmic walls are thick enough, the physical pushback never arrives. A flat earther, for example, does not need to test their belief if they never have to navigate a satellite. This is perhaps the sharpest challenge viability faces in the present moment.

The answer the cybernetic constructivist would give is that insulation is itself a constraint. A community that never tests its beliefs against the world is not viable in any durable sense. It is merely coherent. And coherence, as this post has argued, is the subordinate criterion.

The Full Arc:

This post began with a simple question. Where should a truthist stop and say this is pi? That question opened into something larger. Truth, from a cybernetic constructivist standpoint, is not a mirror held up to reality. It is a relationship between an observer and their constraints. The stopping point is always set by what you need to do next.

The lock example showed that viability is not relativism. Multiple paths can work, but the lock still has to open. The Peirce detour showed that agreement is not the criterion either. A community can agree and still fail when the context changes. Sisyphus and Naranath showed that viability is not merely functional. It is the capacity to find a relationship to your constraints that allows you to keep going. Naranath, offered any boon he wished, asked only to move his elephantiasis from one leg to the other. He had understood the absurdity of demanding that the world be other than it is.

And the coherence point showed that for something new to register as true, it must first find a hook in what you already understand, and then sustain rather than erode your ability to act. A community that never tests its beliefs against the world is not viable in any durable sense. The universe does not argue. It simply decides which frames survive.

The universe is patient.

Stay Curious and Always keep on learning…

If you liked what you have read, please consider my book “Second Order Cybernetics,” available in hard copy and e book formats. https://www.cyb3rsyn.com/products/soc-book

Notes:

In referencing the work of Martin Heidegger, I want to acknowledge the deeply troubling fact of his affiliation with the Nazi party. This aspect of his life casts a long and painful shadow over his legacy. While I draw on specific philosophical ideas that I find thought-provoking or useful, this is not an endorsement of the man or his actions. Engaging with his work requires ethical vigilance, and I remain mindful of the responsibility to not separate ideas from the broader context in which they were formed.

The Thing About ‘Thing-in-Itself’:

In today’s post, I am looking at Immanuel Kant’s Thing-in-Itself and Hans Vaihangar’s ideas. In Kant’s philosophy, the “Thing-in-itself” (or Ding an sich) refers to the reality that exists independently of human perception or experience. Kant argued that while we can know phenomena (the appearances of things as they present themselves to us), the “Thing-in-itself” remains inaccessible to human cognition, as our knowledge is always mediated by the structures of our mind (such as space, time, and categories of understanding). The Kantian dichotomy therefore is phenomena (things as they appear to us) and the noumena (the “Things-in-themselves”). For Kant, the Thing-in-itself is something that exists independently of human perception, but it is forever inaccessible to us. We can only know the world as it appears to us, not as it truly is in itself. This creates a separation between appearance and reality, and Kant suggests that this gap is unbridgeable for human beings.

I am not a fan of dichotomies. Most often, dichotomies are created as linguistic tools to aid our thinking. But they form a life of their own and cause confusion in our thinking. There are a few ways to think about the thing-in-itself. One is to take the road that reality is indeed accessible to us. This will be the approach of a naïve realist. This notion can be easily disproven by the use of numerous illusions. The second route is to be an idealist. Loosely put, this approach takes the view that everything is in the mind. This notion is also not very useful. This again is another dichotomy – reality is directly accessible out there versus reality is all inside our minds.

It is more useful to take a middle path. Here also, there are different ways to go. One example is Charles Sanders Peirce, who is a realist American philosopher. He believed that reality does exist out there independent of our perception. We may not have direct access to it, but we can gradually make sense of it. He believed that all knowledge is fallible and subject to revision. Instead of positing an unknowable reality, he focused on the continuous process of inquiry and the gradual approximation of truth. In this view, the notion of the thing-in-itself is not value adding since he is proposing that reality or portions of reality are eventually accessible to us. Peirce was a pragmatist (or a pragmaticist as he called himself). As noted above, pragmaticism supports the idea of truth. If there is a practical or pragmatic observable effect, then that becomes truthful. Truth in this case is not absolute since pragmatists support the idea of fallibilism. Truth is provisional. What we have discussed so far moves towards the realist camp.

It is here that I want to introduce the ideas of Hans Vaihinger. At this point in time, I side with Vaihinger’s ideas. Vaihinger was a German philosopher who studied Kant vigorously. His ideas have many familiarities with pragmatism. He proposed the philosophy of “as-if”. He came up with the notion of “useful fictions” instead of “truth” in pragmatism. Similar to pragmatism, he was interested in practical applications in the world. Vaihinger argued that the thing-in-itself is not something we can know, but that it functions as a “useful fiction” that helps guide our thinking and practical action. According to Vaihinger, we can use the concept of the thing-in-itself as a heuristic tool, a fiction that helps us organize our experience and navigate the world, even though it does not correspond to anything directly accessible to human cognition.

In a sense, Vaihinger suggests that the thing-in-itself has practical utility, even if it is ultimately unknowable. It provides a framework for understanding reality, even if that framework is not literally true. For Vaihinger, this “fiction” is necessary for guiding human action and thought, even if it is not an accurate representation of an objective reality. He is not interested in “Truth”. Unlike the pragmatists, he calls his ideas fictions.

Vaihinger discussed his ideas in his magnum opus, “The Philosophy of As-If“. He argues that human thought, fundamentally, is geared not towards metaphysical truth or solving abstract problems, but towards survival and fulfilling the “Life-will” (Arthur Schopenhauer’s term for the fundamental drive to live and survive). This perspective leads Vaihinger to conclude that human cognitive faculties are inherently limited, not because they are defective, but because they evolved for very specific, practical, and existential purposes: to help humans navigate the world and satisfy their basic needs.

Vaihinger views human thought as essentially a tool for life, serving the practical ends of survival rather than speculative exploration of ultimate reality. Human cognition was not designed to uncover metaphysical truths or answer the “big questions” about the nature of the universe. Instead, it evolved as a means to manage and react to immediate environmental challenges—finding food, avoiding danger, securing shelter, reproducing, and so on. From this perspective, thought is a functional tool, not a quest for objective knowledge.

In this way, Vaihinger agrees with Kant that human knowledge is bound by certain limits. But Vaihinger takes Kant’s idea further: instead of viewing these limits as a tragic deficiency (i.e., the inability to access noumena or things-in-themselves), Vaihinger argues that they are the natural result of human thought’s biological and practical function. Thought was never intended to grasp the ultimate nature of reality; it evolved to solve problems relevant to human survival and everyday life.

Given that human thought is limited in this way, Vaihinger proposes that we use certain concepts—like the thing-in-itself—as fictions. These fictions are not intended to describe the ultimate nature of reality but to help us organize and navigate our experience of the world. The thing-in-itself, as a fiction, becomes a useful tool for thought, enabling us to conceptualize reality in a way that facilitates practical action and understanding, even if that concept does not correspond to anything we can directly know or experience.

Vaihinger argues that these fictions are essential because they allow us to deal with phenomena that cannot be grasped directly. The thing-in-itself becomes a placeholder or a symbolic construct that helps us maintain coherence in our thinking and practical activities, even though it does not correspond to any knowable “reality”. In this way, Vaihinger’s approach offers a way to work with limitations in thought while still being able to reason, act, and engage with the world meaningfully. Similar to Peirce, Vaihinger maintained that all knowledge is fallible and provisional. He also emphasized the idea of correcting them when they are no longer viable.

The Paradox of Thing-in-itself:

The notion of the thing-in-itself comes with a paradox. If the thing-in-itself is not accessible to us, then how can we even talk about it? How can we ascertain that what we experience is supposed to represent the thing-in-itself? The very act of trying to access the thing-in-itself proves its inaccessibility. Kant acknowledged the limits of human cognition and left us with the concept of the thing-in-itself to indicate that reality exists beyond our perception. Kant insisted that we cannot know the thing-in-itself because our mind imposes its own structures onto the world. So, the thing-in-itself is something that remains, by definition, unknowable. We humans are separated from the “true” nature of things.

Let us use an example to make things clearer. Imagine the reality of a landscape. Kant originally suggested this is a reality we cannot directly touch, like the landscape is behind a thick fog. We can see outlines, but not the detailed terrain itself. Peirce proposed that we have multiple ways to understand that landscape such as signs, instruments, mathematical models etc. It is not that the landscape is unknowable, but that we approach it through creative interpretation. These are not just representations – they are active ways of constructing understanding. Instead of seeing the thing-in-itself as an impenetrable mystery, Peirce suggests it is more like a dynamic puzzle. We do not give up because we cannot see the whole picture immediately. We use every tool we have – mathematical models, technological instruments, logical reasoning – to progressively understand. Peirce claimed we can access reality through signs and mediation.

If we look at Vaihinger’s ideas, Vaihinger would call Peirce’s signs still fictions we have constructed. The mathematical models, instruments, and interpretive frameworks are themselves useful fictions that help us navigate experience. The key distinction between Peirce and Vaihinger is that Peirce believed that we are progressively accessing reality, and Vaihinger saw us as creating increasingly sophisticated, but still fundamentally, fictional frameworks of understanding. In our example, it is like different ways of mapping an unknown territory. Peirce is thinking that we are gradually revealing the actual landscape. Vaihinger is saying that we are creating ever more useful maps, knowing that they are not the territory itself.

In my opinion, there is a Noumenal gap that realism cannot transcend. No matter how sophisticated our signs, instruments, or mediations, we cannot escape the fundamental epistemological limitation. Our cognitive apparatus always interprets, always mediates, always transforms. Any “progress” is still within our conceptual framework. We are not getting closer to the thing-in-itself. We are often simply creating more complex interpretive structures.

Vaihinger’s idea that the thing-in-itself is a “useful fiction” suggests a very different way of thinking. Vaihinger argues that while we may never have direct access to the thing-in-itself (or any ultimate reality), the concept of the thing-in-itself can still be useful for organizing experience and guiding practical action. According to Vaihinger, the idea of the thing-in-itself is a fiction, but one that is necessary for making sense of the world. It is a construct that helps us navigate and interact with our experiences, even if it does not correspond to any objective reality beyond our conceptual framework.

Vaihinger’s view allows us to maintain the utility of concepts like the thing-in-itself without being trapped in the idea that they correspond to something inaccessible in a metaphysical sense. For Vaihinger, the thing-in-itself is not some unreachable essence, but a concept that functions within human thought in a way that allows us to make sense of the world. It is a fiction that helps us act and think meaningfully, even though we know it does not correspond to something we can access directly.

This is a much more flexible and practical stance than Kant’s and Peirce’s, because it allows for the continued use of concepts like the thing-in-itself without needing to assert that they refer to an objective, inaccessible reality. Instead, we can use them for practical reasoning, action, and understanding, while acknowledging their fictional status.

Vaihinger moves beyond the notion that we are limited by a distance from ultimate reality and suggests that the limitations of our understanding do not prevent us from using concepts that guide our actions. He does not need to answer whether we can access the thing-in-itself in any literal sense because he acknowledges that it is a fiction—yet a necessary one. Vaihinger provides a path forward in that sense: we no longer need to grapple with the unknowability of ultimate reality, but instead can work with useful fictions that help us navigate the world. This gives us a much more flexible, non-dogmatic framework for understanding our place in the world and how we think about things like the thing-in-itself.

If we ask for burden of proof for the various ideas we have discussed here, we see that both realism and idealism carry a significant burden of proof because they are making claims. Even with Peirce, there is a significant burden of proof. He must still prove that signs can access reality. Vaihinger on the other hand avoids any metaphysical commitments. By calling the thing-in-itself as a useful fiction, he sidesteps the burden of proof altogether. His focus is only on the viability of an idea.

I will finish with a quote from Vaihinger:

The world of ideas… we generally call “truth” is consequently only the most expedient error, i.e, that system of ideas which enables us to act and to deal with things most rapidly, neatly and safely, and with minimum of irrational elements.

Note: There are of course numerous other schools of philosophy such as critical realism, radical constructivism etc. that I have not looked at here.