§ 29 Tending your garden: muddling along
It is likely that most people do not have a carefully tended view of the world. It lies half-discarded amid the complications of their quotidian concerns and only emerges in conversations about certain issues. It is often only partially understood, so that on such occasions that it is made to matter, it has to be made to fit with the rest somehow.1
Socrates had already discovered that most of his interlocutors did not really know what it was they purported to know, and he himself knew only that he knew very little.
Not all that much has changed since then.
Views of the world are the result of our muddling along; they tend to be wilful and full of unnoticed inconsistencies, contradictions, and incoherences; they bulge awkwardly where there is a special interest and show an inconceivable and cavernous emptiness where people do not know what it is they do not know.
Moreover, people allow a significant gap between how they actually use words like beauty and goodness and their many variants in conversation and what they come up with when they attempt to reflect on them more deliberately.
The daily usage of words shows a particular kind of profundity. Words spoken without much deliberation whisper of relations that are often lost when we embark on more deliberate and sophisticated reflections upon concepts.
Listen to people using the words beauty, truth, and goodness and all their cognates. Notice how such words are actually used and in what situations. That usage confirms this model. And in a later part of the Theoria project, I shall come back to this in detail.
For now, you will have to do the work yourself. Please try to be aware of each instance of words like lovely, wonderful, fair, gorgeous, beautiful, fact, lie, truth, true, and all the other varieties that are used.
You will discover how truth, beauty, and goodness are the conceptual tools with which we shape the intrinsic dynamism of our lives through judgment: alethic, aesthetic, and ethical judgement about everyday things, that we need to think of or recognise as true and just, or false and lied, as likeable or disgusting, appropriate, as practicable and sensible, as good or bad.
Each person’s world is, in a certain sense, full. A frame of reference works like the concept of the infinite: the hotel is full, but somehow there is always room for one more guest. This is how our conceptual construct of the world works.2
People who know little are not aware of how little they know. They may know something about the knowledge they lack. For instance, they may know that they do not know how to play football or chess, or that they do not know the capital of Indonesia. In other words, they are aware that there are things they do know a little about but not much.
But there is a deeper level of ignorance whereby people lack knowledge without knowing what they lack. Here reigns complete darkness and silence in the guise of fullness: there is nothing and no conception of what is missing.
As a frame of reference develops and grows, it changes with each new concept added and with all the inferential possibilities this allows. With every refinement in our conceptual framework, new questions emerge, new loose ends reveal themselves, which need to be brought into our conceptual structure in terms of their truth, beauty, and goodness.
Human being is an indeterminate kind of being, at least for itself. Its nature is to grow, develop, learn, and move about; it defines itself existentially in the life it leads, it does not know what it is capable of because it is capable of learning. It can learn more about what it knows a little about, and it can have the carpet pulled out from under all it knows by discovering something it knew nothing about.
In this way, it will learn to see things it had never noticed and relationships it had never thought about. We call this kind of earthquake in our frame of reference a paradigm shift.
The development of a proper view of the world is hard work, takes a long time and is not without risk.
Brandom’s beautiful idea about what it is to understand something shows how difficult it is.3
Our everyday understanding of what understanding means does not take us very far. But Brandom takes this idea and unfolds its complicated geometry with great elegance.
Someone who claims to understand something explicitly, he argues, should be able to demonstrate practical mastery of a concept in both discourse and application by being able to describe for each claim made, what that claim is in clear language using the appropriate words, giving the appropriate evidence for that claim, being able to describe what other claims have to already be in place for the person to make that claim and what else the person is committing herself to when making that claim. In other words, the person aspiring to understanding must be able to discuss the further implications of the claim or proposition made… Furthermore, the person should be able to list and describe what other ideas are compatible or incompatible with the claim, describe what they are entitled to (say and do) in committing themselves to that claim; specify and describe what activities become necessary based on that claim and lastly describe what outcomes may be expected based on that claim, what guarantees can be given based on that claim.
How can we manage all that in relation to our overall frame of reference? Most of our conceptions lie untested and only partially understood.
© 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.
- 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) ↩︎
- David Hilbert, David Hilbert’s Lectures on the Foundations of Arithmetic and Logic 1917-1933 edited by William Ewald and Wilfried Sieg, (Heidelberg 2013) ↩︎
- Robert Brandom, ‘How to write clearly’, in Articulating Reasons, an introduction to Inferentialism, (Harvard 2001) ↩︎