§ 26 Enriching concepts, growing knowledge

Knowledge-finding begins with concepts as pieces in a game of giving and asking for reasons that are poorly endowed with properties, i.e., not connected to the rest of one’s frame of reference, which itself may well be poorly furnished and structured.¹

That is what happens when you hear a new word. The word is just that, a word; it still needs to be dressed with properties which it acquires in our engagement with the word and that which it is made to refer to.

Truths that emerge from working with these poorly dressed concepts inferentially are the seemingly straightforward, convincing outcomes of a small conceptual framework working within a tiny space of implications: ‘if mummy, then food and/or comfort’.

Through trial-and-error, richer inferential possibilities emerge as concepts acquire an array of properties, both properties of the concepts as working parts in a linguistic game, as well as properties pertaining to what the concept is held to refer to.

These, in turn, determine which inferential outcomes are possible.

We gradually improve, often implicitly, our understanding of the way language works.

At the same time, we gradually improve our understanding of the way reality behaves.

These two learning processes go hand in hand. We develop by becoming better at using our conceptual model and begin to grasp the relationship between that and the world we think about, the world our conceptual model models.

The two are so tightly braided that it becomes difficult to keep them distinct. You notice that our language is full of examples where the distinction between our world of thought and the world we think about becomes indistinguishable. And indeed, our world of thought is part of the world we think about.

Their relationship is full of traps; we have explored some here. I explore them at some length in the part of this project that deals more specifically with learning.

It is important to realise that statements using the model can be true or false when measured against the model itself.

The relationship of those truths to the reality they are trying to model can only be judged in terms of accuracy.

Using assumptions that have not been properly analysed and criticised, ideas that thrive on hearsay, and slovenly observations, deliver truths as far as they go, but they are truths that have no accuracy value (although, unfortunately, that does not need to lessen their use value, witness the enormous power of fake news).

They are the truths of those who proclaim them and are consistent only with their own limited and peculiarly shaped frame of reference, shared by no one else.

As such, they are not fallacies, but merely truths within the model with which they are consistent. Only a different model would, if accepted, reveal their falseness.

What one accepts as truth, the other will reject as nonsense.

Even so, if all goes well, truths held by most, through the agonistic process of upbringing in discourse and practice, as well as through education and rigorous research, become more and more reliable as their correspondence to reality gradually increases, so long as the context in which a truth holds remains reasonably stable.

We know things are going well when we can start making accurate predictions based on what we think we know. That is easy with a system as stable as the scales of physics and chemistry; it is fiendishly difficult at the scale of human whimsy.

Opportunism, scepticism, and cynicism occasionally get the upper hand, and we are thrown back onto mad truths based purely on fear and its ever-attendant opportunities for the acquisition of power. Lies and fake news can be usefully camouflaged as truths in the economy of power.

The progress of knowledge is not a necessity for flourishing. We can flourish with very little. However, once knowledge becomes part of the game, progress becomes defined in terms of the use it is put to and the purposes it serves and the virtues which judge both good or bad, wise, or unwise. This might be a nice new view on the episode with the apple in Eden.

Progress places human being with reference to purpose, or the other way around, purpose places human being along a calibrated line of progress towards that purpose. And because we have evolved into mobile, growing and learning creatures, use-finding and purpose-finding are our most successful means of survival.

All the purposes and uses we seek out may serve one final purpose, that we should flourish to accommodate ourselves intelligently, intelligibly, comfortably, securely, and enjoyably; at the same time, the activity of finding purposes and uses is the way most of us flourish most emphatically. ‘Eureka’ was a moment of sheer aesthetic joy for Archimedes.

But it is never enough; we are caught in a double bind: we are creatures seeking to flourish, and we flourish most when seeking.

© 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) ↩︎