Advocacy Scenario
Someone says: "This just sounds like numerology. You're seeing threes everywhere because you're looking for them. I could see fours, or fives, or sevens if I wanted to." How would you respond? Consider: What's the difference between finding a pattern because you've imposed it and finding it because it's there? What would it take to show that the triplicate pattern is genuinely structural rather than an artefact of selection bias? (Hint: the axioms make specific predictions about the relationships among the three concepts, not just their number. Can "seeing fours" generate similarly precise and testable claims about the relationships among four supposed foundational concepts?)
Discussion Questions
1. The IDM claims that interaction is more fundamental than either existence or creation (Axiom I). Western science has traditionally assumed the opposite — that things exist first, and then interact. What evidence from modern physics (quantum mechanics, in particular) might support the IDM's claim?
What evidence might challenge it?
2. The IDM uses the terms "immanent," "omniscient," and "transcendent" — words with strong religious connotations. Is this a problem? Could the framework use purely abstract labels (like "Type A, Type B, Type C") without losing anything? Or do the connotations of the words carry information that abstract labels wouldn't? 3. Consider the claim that "binary thinking systematically prevents resolution." Can you think of a philosophical debate that has been resolved within a binary framework? If so, does that count against the IDM's claim, or is it a special case?
Epistemology
Chapter Four
What Is Knowledge?
The Oldest Question in Epistemology
You know things. You know that the Earth orbits the Sun, that water is H₂O, that your name is what it is. But what exactly is it to know something? What transforms a mere belief — which could be mistaken — into genuine knowledge? This question goes back to Plato, and the answer Western philosophy settled on for over two thousand years is deceptively simple. The Tripartite Definition: Justified True Belief
Knowledge, according to the classical definition, is justified true belief (JTB). For you to know a proposition P, three conditions must be met: Belief: You must actually believe that P is the case. If you don't believe it, you don't know it, even if it happens to be true. A student who writes the correct answer on an exam but doesn't believe it — just guessed — doesn't know the answer. Truth: P must actually be true. You can't know something false. If you believe the Earth is flat, and you have reasons for that belief, you still don't know the Earth is flat, because it isn't. Belief, however confident, does not create truth. Justification: You must have good reasons for believing P. A lucky guess isn't knowledge even if it's true. If you believe the next card will be the ace of spades, and it is, but you had no reason to think so — that's not knowledge. That's luck. Knowledge requires that your belief be connected to the truth in the right way, through reasons, evidence, or reliable processes. This definition has enormous intuitive appeal. It captures what we ordinarily mean when we distinguish between "knowing" and "just believing." And for 2,400 years, most philosophers accepted some version of it. Then, in 1963, Edmund Gettier published a three-page paper that destroyed it.
The Gettier Problem
Gettier showed, with devastating simplicity, that you can have a justified true belief that clearly isn't knowledge. His examples are technical, so here's one that's easier to follow. You're driving through the countryside and you see what appears to be a barn. It looks exactly like a barn: red paint, white trim, hayloft, the works. You form the belief: "There's a barn over there." Your belief is justified — you have excellent visual evidence. And your belief is true — there really is a barn at that spot. So by the JTB definition, you know there's a barn there. But here's the catch: unbeknownst to you, this stretch of countryside is full of elaborate barn façades — flat movie-set fronts that look exactly like barns from the road but are just painted boards. You happened to be looking at the one real barn in the entire area. Every other "barn" you'd have pointed to would have been a fake.
Do you really know that what you're seeing is a barn? Your belief is justified (it looks like a barn). Your belief is true (it is a barn). But it seems deeply wrong to say you know it's a barn, because your method of forming the belief — looking at things that look like barns — is unreliable in this environment. You got lucky. You could just as easily have been pointing at a façade. The connection between your justification and the truth is accidental. This is the Gettier problem: justified true belief is not sufficient for knowledge, because you can satisfy all three conditions by accident, and accidental truth doesn't feel like knowledge. Here's another classic case. Smith believes his colleague Jones will get the job, and he knows Jones has ten coins in his pocket. He forms the belief: "the person who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket." In fact, Smith himself gets the job — and, unknown to him, he also has exactly ten coins in his pocket. His belief is justified (based on reasonable evidence about Jones) and true (Smith got the job and has ten coins). But it's not knowledge, because the justification points to the wrong person entirely.
The Attempted Fixes
The Gettier problem launched fifty years of increasingly elaborate attempts to add a fourth condition — something that would exclude the accidental cases. The most important attempts include:
The "no false lemmas" condition:
Your justification must not depend on any false intermediate belief. In the barn case, your reasoning doesn't depend on a false belief (you don't believe "all barn-looking things around here are barns"), so this condition doesn't always help. Reliabilism: Knowledge requires that the belief be produced by a reliable process — one that generally produces true beliefs. In the barn country, your vision is normally reliable but is unreliable in this specific environment. This captures the intuition — you don't know because your method isn't working well here — but raises the generality problem : what counts as "the same process" and "the same environment"? Is your process "vision" (generally reliable) or "vision in fake-barn country" (unreliable) or "vision on this particular Tuesday afternoon" (reliable, since you happened to be right)? The answer changes depending on how you describe the process, and there's no principled way to choose the right description. This turns out to be deeply resistant to solution. Infallibilism: Knowledge requires that your justification guarantees the truth — that you couldn't possibly be wrong. This avoids Gettier cases but at a devastating cost: it means we know almost nothing, since nearly all our beliefs could, in principle, be false (as sceptics since Descartes have pointed out). Nozick's tracking condition: You know P only if, had P been false, you wouldn't have believed it, and had P been true (in slightly different circumstances), you still would have believed it. Your belief "tracks" the truth. This is elegant but generates its own paradoxes (it implies, for instance, that you can know P without knowing the logical consequences of P). Each fix solves some Gettier cases while failing on others. New counterexamples are generated. New patches are proposed. New counterexamples defeat the patches. The cycle continues. Fifty years on, there is no consensus. The JTB definition is broken, and nobody has agreed on how to fix it.
Why the Gettier Problem Is Insoluble Within Its Own Framework The IDM says: the Gettier problem can't be solved by adding a fourth condition because the problem is not a missing condition. The problem is that "knowledge" is not one thing . The word "knowledge" is being used to refer to two categorically different epistemic processes — knowing and understanding — and the JTB definition works for one but not the other.
Knowing is third-person, structural, descriptive. It's the kind of epistemic relation you have when you can represent a fact from outside — state it, model it, transfer it to others in language. Scientific knowledge, textbook knowledge, propositional knowledge. When we say "I know that water is H₂O," we're in the knowing mode. JTB works reasonably well here: it describes the conditions under which a representation is connected to the world in a reliable, truth-tracking way.
Understanding is first-person, participatory, interactive. It's the kind of epistemic relation you have when you're in direct contact with the thing itself — when you grasp it from inside the interaction. You understand your friend not by reading a dossier about them but by being in relationship with them.
You understand a musical piece not by reading the score but by listening to it, feeling it, letting it affect you. Understanding is not a representation of a fact — it's a quality of engagement. Gettier cases arise at the boundary between knowing and understanding. In the barn case, you have knowing (a justified true representation: "there's a barn") but you lack understanding (genuine interactive contact with the environment that would tell you whether your perceptual process is reliable here). The unease you feel — "but that's not really knowledge" — is the recognition that knowing without understanding is incomplete. Something is missing, and what's missing is not a fourth propositional condition but an entirely different epistemic mode. This is why no fourth condition works. The fix being sought is propositional — a new clause in the definition of JTB. But the gap isn't propositional. It's modal. What's missing is a different kind of epistemic relation, not a different proposition within the same kind.
What This Means in Practice
The knowing/understanding distinction isn't just a technical resolution to an academic puzzle. It reshapes how you think about knowledge in your daily life. Consider: you can know all the facts about climate change — the CO₂ concentrations, the temperature projections, the ice-sheet dynamics — without understanding what it means. Understanding comes from standing on a beach that used to be wider, from watching the seasons behave in ways your grandparents can't explain, from feeling in your gut that the world your children will inherit is different from the one you were born into. The facts are necessary but not sufficient. Understanding requires participatory engagement, not just information. Or consider: you can know that a friend is struggling — they told you so, you've read the texts, you have the information — without understanding their struggle. Understanding requires being present with them, in the interaction, feeling the quality of what they're going through, not just processing the data. This is why people say "you don't understand" even when you demonstrably have all the relevant facts. They're not saying you lack information. They're saying you lack the kind of epistemic contact that only comes from genuine participation in the interaction. Conversely: you can understand something deeply — have rich, felt, intuitive contact with it — without knowing it in any articulable sense. You understand how to ride a bicycle without being able to give a physicist's account of gyroscopic stability. You understand a piece of music without being able to name the chords. Understanding without knowing is real but incomplete in its own way: it can't be transferred, can't be verified by others, and can't be systematically built upon. Genuine epistemic completeness requires both: knowing and understanding, third- person and first-person, structural description and participatory engagement. Neither alone is sufficient. Neither can substitute for the other. This is the Incommensuration Theorem applied to daily life.
" The knowing/understanding distinction explains why the misinformation crisis is so intractable. The problem is not just that people have false beliefs (a knowing problem). It's that they understand the world through mediated, algorithmically filtered channels that don't provide genuine interactive contact with reality (an understanding problem). Someone who gets all their information about climate change from a social media feed has knowing (information, claims, data points) but may entirely lack understanding (participatory engagement with the actual phenomena). "Do your own research" sounds like good advice. But what kind of research? If it means "read more articles and watch more videos" — that's more knowing. It stays in the third-person, representational mode. What's actually needed is more understanding : direct engagement with the world, real conversations with real people who have genuine expertise, first-person experience that can't be faked by a screen. The crisis of epistemology your generation faces is not a crisis of insufficient information. It is a crisis of insufficient interaction.
Are we living in a simulation? This question — taken seriously by philosophers like Nick Bostrom and a significant number of Gen-Z thinkers influenced by
The Matrix
— is an epistemological question about whether our "knowledge" of reality is genuine. The IDM reframes it. If all you have is knowing (third-person, structural, representational), then yes, you can't distinguish a perfect simulation from reality, because knowledge is inherently a representation, and representations can in principle be simulated. But understanding — first-person, participatory, interactive engagement — is not a representation. It's the interaction itself. And the interaction is real regardless of the substrate. If you are genuinely interacting with a world — genuinely perceiving, genuinely expressing, genuinely being affected and affecting — then the interaction is real, and therefore the consciousness is real, whether or not the world is "simulated" in some deeper sense. The simulation question, from the IDM perspective, reveals the limits of omniscient-modal thinking. If you try to answer "is this real?" from a purely third-person viewpoint — standing outside and looking at the structure — you'll never be sure, because you can't verify the structure from inside it. But from the first-person, immanent perspective, the question answers itself: the interaction is happening. That's what "real" means. Reality is not a structure you can be wrong about (that would be treating reality as a representation). Reality is the interaction you are in. And you're in it.
Connecting to the Canon
The knowing/understanding distinction maps cleanly onto several standard epistemological debates, which the next chapters will explore in detail.
The debate between rationalism and empiricism (Chapter 6) is, from the IDM's perspective, a debate about whether knowing (rational, structural, a priori) or understanding (experiential, participatory, a posteriori) is the primary source of genuine epistemic contact with reality. The IDM says: both are real, both are irreducible, and the debate persists because each side correctly identifies a mode that the other side can't explain away.
The debate about perception (Chapter 5) — whether we perceive reality directly (direct realism) or only our own mental representations (indirect realism, idealism) — turns on whether perception is a mode of knowing (receiving representations of the world) or a mode of understanding (being in direct interactive contact with the world). The IDM says: it's both, and the two modes operate differently.
The debate about scepticism (Chapter 7) — whether we can know anything at all — exploits the gap between knowing and understanding. Every sceptical argument works by showing that our knowing could be wrong (our representations could be inaccurate). But scepticism can't touch understanding , because understanding isn't a representation that could be inaccurate — it's an interaction that is or isn't happening. Descartes' famous "I think, therefore I am" is actually a moment of understanding — a first-person, participatory recognition that the interaction of thinking is occurring — which is why it resists every sceptical assault.
Discussion Questions
1. Construct your own Gettier case — a situation where someone has a justified true belief that clearly isn't knowledge. Then analyse it using the knowing/understanding distinction: what kind of epistemic relation does the person have, and what kind are they missing? 2.
Think about something you understand deeply but can't fully articulate (a skill, a relationship, a piece of music). What would it take to convert that understanding into knowledge? Is the conversion ever complete, or does something always get lost? 3. The chapter claims that the misinformation crisis is an understanding problem, not just a knowing problem. Do you agree? Can you think of a case where someone had all the correct information but still didn't "get it" — where the gap was in understanding rather than in data? 4. The simulation argument is reframed as a question about which epistemic mode you trust. If you could only have one — knowing (structural, representational, verifiable) or understanding (participatory, experiential, direct) — which would you choose? Why?
Advocacy Scenario
Someone says: "The knowing/understanding distinction is just the old distinction between 'knowledge that' (propositional) and 'knowledge how' (practical). Ryle already made this point in 1949. What's new here?" How would you respond? Consider: Ryle's distinction is between two kinds of ability — the ability to state facts vs. the ability to perform skills. The IDM's distinction is between two categorically different epistemic modes that are structurally incommensurable (the Incommensuration Theorem). Ryle might say that knowing-how can in principle be translated into knowing-that (and vice versa, with enough analysis). The IDM says this translation is structurally impossible — the two modes are as irreducible as width and weight. That's a much stronger claim. Is it justified?
Chapter Five
Perception and Reality
You're looking at this page. Light reflects off the paper (or is emitted by the screen), enters your eyes, triggers photoreceptors, sends signals along the optic nerve to your brain, and — somehow — you see words. But what exactly are you perceiving? The page itself? An image of the page in your mind? Something else entirely? The question sounds pedantic until you realise how much depends on it. If you perceive reality directly, then your senses are trustworthy and knowledge of the external world is straightforward. If you only perceive mental representations — images, impressions, sense-data — then you're trapped behind a veil of perception with no guarantee that what you see corresponds to what's out there. And if perception is entirely mental, the external world might not exist at all. Three positions dominate the canon.
Direct Realism (Naïve Realism)
Direct realism says: you perceive objects in the external world directly. When you see a red apple, you're in immediate perceptual contact with a real apple that really is red. There's no intermediary — no mental image, no sense-datum, no representation standing between you and the apple. You see the thing itself. This is the common-sense view. It matches how perception feels : it doesn't feel like you're looking at a mental picture of an apple. It feels like you're looking at an apple. And direct realism has a philosophical advantage: it avoids the sceptical problems that indirect realism creates. If you perceive objects directly, you don't need to worry about whether your representations accurately match reality — you're in touch with reality itself. The problems come from cases where perception goes wrong.
The argument from illusion: A straight stick looks bent when half-submerged in water. A railway track appears to converge in the distance. A square tower looks round from far away. In each case, what you perceive doesn't match the object. You're not perceiving the stick directly — if you were, it would look straight (because it is). So what are you perceiving? Something that represents the stick — a visual experience that fails to match reality. If perception can misrepresent in illusion cases, maybe it's always a representation, and the "direct" contact is itself an illusion. The argument from perceptual variation:
The same object looks different from different perspectives, in different lighting, to different observers. A coin looks circular from above, elliptical from an angle. A dress looks blue-and-black to one person, white-and-gold to another. Food that tastes delicious when you're hungry tastes ordinary when you're full. If you're perceiving the object directly, which perception is the "real" one? The object can't be simultaneously circular and elliptical. So at least some of your perceptions must be of something other than the object itself. Time-lag argument: Light from a distant star takes millions of years to reach you. When you see the star, you're seeing it as it was millions of years ago — it may not even exist anymore. You're not perceiving the star directly. You're perceiving light that left the star in the distant past. Even nearby objects involve a time lag (light from the sun takes eight minutes; light from the book in your hands takes a few nanoseconds), meaning you never perceive the present state of any external object — only its past state. If direct realism means perceiving objects as they are now , direct realism is literally never true. The scientific argument:
Modern neuroscience deepens the case for indirect realism. When you see a red apple, what happens physically is: photons of certain wavelengths strike your retina, triggering electrochemical signals in your optic nerve, which travel to your visual cortex, where they are processed through multiple stages of neural computation before producing the conscious experience of "seeing a red apple." At no point in this chain do you make contact with the apple itself — you interact only with the end product of a complex causal chain.
The experience is a construction of the brain, not a transparent window onto reality. This doesn't mean the experience is false — it's caused by the real apple, and it's generally reliable. But it's a representation, not a direct encounter. The direct realist's response:
The most sophisticated version of direct realism
— sometimes called critical realism or disjunctivism — argues that veridical perception and illusion are fundamentally different kinds of mental state, not variations of the same kind. In genuine perception, you really are in direct contact
with the object. In illusion, something has gone wrong — the causal process has been disrupted — and you're not in direct contact. The existence of illusion doesn't show that genuine perception is also indirect; it shows that perception can fail. A broken compass doesn't prove that working compasses are unreliable.
Indirect Realism (Representative Realism)
Indirect realism says: you don't perceive external objects directly. You perceive sense-data — mental representations caused by external objects. The apple exists. It causes certain patterns of light to enter your eyes. Your brain processes these patterns and produces a mental image — the sense-datum — which is what you actually perceive. You perceive the apple indirectly, through its representation in your mind.
This is Locke's causal theory of perception : external objects cause our perceptual experiences through a causal chain (object → light → eye → nerve → brain → experience). Perception is real and generally reliable, but what you directly experience is the end product of a causal process, not the object that initiated it.
Locke distinguished between primary qualities (properties that belong to the object itself — size, shape, motion, solidity, number) and secondary qualities (properties that exist only in the perceiver's experience — colour, taste, smell, sound, texture). The apple is really a certain shape and size (primary), but its redness and sweetness are products of the interaction between the apple and your sensory apparatus (secondary). Your sense-data accurately represent primary qualities but not secondary ones. Modern neuroscience deepens this case considerably. When you see a red apple, what happens physically is: photons of certain wavelengths strike your retina, triggering electrochemical signals in your optic nerve, which travel to your visual cortex, where they are processed through multiple stages of neural computation before producing the conscious experience of "red apple." At no point in this chain do you make contact with the apple itself. The experience is a construction of the brain — a useful, reliable construction that evolved to help you navigate the world, but a construction nonetheless. The colour red doesn't exist in the apple or in the light — it exists only in the brain's interpretation of certain wavelengths. Colours, sounds, tastes, and textures as you experience them are inventions of your nervous system, not properties of the external world.