§ 04 Thought and Reality
Through the activity of analysis, we try to grasp the environment conceptually, with ourselves in it, as a collection of objects, conceptually differentiated entities generically called ‘things’, which, together with the properties these things are observed to have, allow us to form conceptually articulated representations of their interacting relations.1
In doing so, we look around us and differentiate ‘things’ from the chaotic manifold that presents itself to us and see how they work together in terms of inferential relationships.
‘Things’ are conceptually distinguished pieces, entities, swaths cut out from the fabric of the universe that we are able to differentiate on the basis of the behaviour we perceive them to have.
For example, a red rose growing against a stone wall behaves redly and rose-like against the background of the stone wall that behaves like a stone wall. The behaviour of red roses and stone walls has become familiar to us through comparable experiences.
We assign things a boundary on the basis of that act of differentiation so that we can point them out and point to what they are not; we attach a name to these things, and assign that name a set of described properties that the thing the name refers to appears to have.
This then allows us to make sense of its workings and behaviour so that we can explore the thing and its relations within a space of implications.2
The recipe for making ‘things’ (conceptualised objects that manifest themselves in space-time and can be pointed out) as described in the previous paragraph, hints at the difficult relationship between our conceptual construction of reality and reality itself, or, put in simpler terms: the world of thought and the world we think about. (see also the section on things)
Reality presents itself to us exclusively through the generative mediation of our perceptual and cognitive apparatus.
Perhaps the relationship between reality and our representation of it is so difficult to fathom because our conceptual ability is part and parcel of the reality it is trying to conceive.
We look at the world we think about from within, so to say, and do so by encoding that reality with values originating in us, which we then ascribe to the things perceived, ignoring a great deal that our body itself is responsible for. Perhaps it is for this reason that the intimate relations between reality and our conception of it are so hard to untangle.
It is on the basis of the properties we assign to an entity or thing that we become inferentially empowered. From that moment of assignation, we can begin to make sense of the implications of those properties in causal and modal terms. To illustrate this, if I know that a stone has certain properties but not others, I shall use it to throw at targets or to build walls with, but I will not use it to make tea with, nor will I have it for breakfast.
The more we know of the properties of a thing in interaction with other things, the better we can assess the implications of a situation or event in which that thing plays a role and so explore and assess the qualities for use that our knowledge of its properties gives us.
As such, everything we come to understand, we come to understand in terms of concepts of ‘things’ and their ‘relations’, each of which can be given names and described conceptually.
The behaviour of the world, which we can imagine as a single continuous manifold, is thus differentiated and divided only by us into conceptual entities called things that can be pointed out, and which have properties that are themselves also things.
And things can be best imagined as conceptualised objects with conceptualized relations called properties.
Analysis provides us with causal and modal competence with regard to the behaviour of things in relation to each other.
With those two competences, causal and modal, we become knowing.
That means we have succeeded in transforming information into knowledge.
Information is all around us; knowledge is purely subjective, it is what each of us individually makes of that information in making it ready for use toward some purpose.
Knowledge is information changed into something we understand causally and modally in its working, and can therefore use.
Through analysis and critique, we become users, clever users and might hope to become good at using, or even wise users.
© jacob voorthuis, 2025. 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.
- An earlier version of this paragraph was 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) ↩︎
- I lean heavily on the work of Robert Brandom in much of my thinking, especially the book Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment, 2nd ed. (Harvard University Press 1998) and his magisterial A Spirit of Trust, A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Harvard 2019). For a more accessible introduction to his work see Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons, An Introduction to Inferentialism (Harvard 2001). I adopt the notion ‘space of implications’ from Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 1, no. 19 (1956): 253–329. (republished in 1997 with an Introduction by Robert Brandom). ↩︎