§ 18 Logical thinking: empirical, rational, explorative… and madness

Why should we want to distinguish analysis and criticism at all, if they cannot be separated anyway? Surely this academic bureaucracy is all far too complicated! What benefits does this conceptual model I am proposing actually have?¹

Well, many things that otherwise repeatedly cause problems and confusion in our speech and thinking fall happily into place with ease and grace.

With everything we do, we make analytical moves, objectifying stuff and critical moves, subjectifying our understanding for the purposes of use.

It is, therefore, above all, a beautiful model that is attractive in use because it gives clarity and reliable, more precise outcomes for our sayings.

Moreover, it gives all concepts two sides: one side focusing on the concept as an object, as a thing with working parts, and the other focusing on the concept as a subject, as a being subject to purpose and use, and capable of good use, as we saw in the previous paragraph.

In this way, it provides a clear look at the role of truth versus utility and beauty versus virtue (or goodness).

The nice thing about this approach is that it allows a clear, but not simplistic or naive, distinction between two notions that tend to make our thinking life maddening, namely objectivity and subjectivity.

I have, of course, already mentioned them, indeed dealt with them at some length. Analysis objectifies, whilst critique subjectifies. Both movements are meaningful and indispensable and should not be brought into some absurd form of competition whereby one is thought of as unconditionally better than the other.

To be objectifiable is only useful for using subjects. Without using subjects, the whole endeavour of conceptual objectification serves no purpose whatsoever.

As such, the subject, in becoming conscious of themselves through their becoming conscious of their environment, cannot do so without objectifying both themselves and their environment.

We become subjects by virtue of the fact that we are capable of making (conceptual) objects.

Some of us do so in a happy-go-lucky and sometimes slovenly way, whilst good scientists describe the world by objectifying it through careful removal of the subjective, good writers and artists describe the world by carefully subjectifying the objects they describe through metaphor and empathic displacement.

Analysis allows a concept to achieve a reasonable degree of objectivity because it studies behaviour expressly without reference to our purposes, uses, and virtues, even though it brings the properties it identifies into the space of implications.

Now we might say that, in behaviour, things ‘use’ other things to do what they are doing. And this is a fair point. An atom might be said to use a proton. However, it need not be described in that way. We do not need to unnesessarily subjectify the whole world around us and pretend everything is conscious.

The behaviour of things can be described simply in terms of their doings, without the charge of use or purpose, but rather in terms of their effect, that is as a simple determination of their being in terms of doing; sprockets do what sprockets do and have an effect; to say that they do something with a purpose or that their effect is somehow of use to us is to say that they are working for us. In this way, sprockets are subjectified by being made subject to our will.

But this does not, in fact, stop them from doing what they do. So, analysis need not presume use or purpose; it describes the world in terms of its doings, movements, and their effects. When doing analysis, we can leave use and purpose quite happily to the activity of critique.

The truths admitted by the conceptual framework and its inferential structures within their space of implications should, through proper use analysis, be made to correspond scrupulously to the actual behaviour of things.

It is the purpose of analysis to make our conceptual world correspond as closely and accurately as possible to the real one, to be able to say things that are both true because they are consistent with regard to our conceptual framework, and accurate with regard to the reality they try to describe.

Analysis is well done if, through it, we arrive at the good through beautiful truths.

It is important to understand that a truth is, first and foremost, a consistency that is evident in the space of implications within our conceptual framework.

When that presumed truth is shown to be false through empirical observation, one of two things can happen: we can doubt our observation, or we can doubt the efficacy of our conceptual framework and its inferential operations, our frame of reference.

If we doubt the first, the truth holds, and we have to begin observing anew. If we doubt the second, the truth falls, and we have to repair our frame of reference.

Truths are thus products of our conceptual apparatus. They qualify statements we make about reality in at least two ways: by being consistent with our conceptual framework and by being consistent with our observations.

Truths are valid statements, provided they respect the logic of the space of implications generated by our conceptual framework and its inferential structures.

They are helpful if the space of implications we have built conceptually overlaps with the actual behaviour of things.

Reality is what we try to model accurately to make truthful statements that are logically consistent and coherent, and that accurately describe reality.

This means that a truth is not, in the first place, a qualification of reality itself, but a qualification of our assertions.

The assertion ‘the stone is red’ may thus be thought of as true within the confines of a conceptual framework in which we understand the world to be such that colours inhere in objects.

Moreover, such a description is accurate insofar as it works and gives us useful information which we can sensibly and knowledgeably act upon.

However, reality is the world of behaviours to which we have access only through our perceptual and conceptual capacity, about which we now understand that this access is anything but straightforward. The problems begin when we start work on our metaphysical garden and discover that the ascription of redness is a more complicated affair than was first assumed.

As the model becomes more sophisticated, the statement ‘the stone is red’ loses its alethic value for purposes beyond the everyday and thus becomes less useful for uses that require greater conceptual precision.

The challenge of getting our conceptual apparatus to match reality as closely as possible lies in the fact that we cannot fully know our intellectual limitations in accessing reality, whilst the space of implications actually changes with any change in the structure of our frame of reference.

As such, there will always be a margin of doubt where we have to admit that our understanding is reflexive, conditional, selective, and abstracted.

We cannot be sure whether our conceptual apparatus corresponds to reality on every scale and with respect to every possible facet of its manifold doings. Nor can we ever be sure in what way that correspondence is achieved and what we are missing out on.

The cloud of unknowing may appear to have cleared to some extent, but in fact, we still do not know what we are not seeing.

© Jacob Voorthuis, 2026. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

1. A slightly older version of this paragraph was first published in Jacob Voorthuis, Theoria, use, intention & design, a philosophical reckoning; Analysis & Critique: Gardening in the metaphysics of the beautiful, the true, and the good, AHT, TU/e (2024) ↩︎