On Test Cases, Dialogue, and Why Worlds Matter
Across the last several series on this blog — from fictional worlds, through Escher, to cosmology — a certain way of thinking has been at work. We have not been advancing a theory by stating it, nor illustrating it with examples. Instead, we have been doing something quieter and, perhaps, stranger: we have been testing ideas by trying to inhabit the worlds they imply, and attending closely to the points at which those worlds fail to hold.
This post is not a manifesto, and it does not introduce a new conceptual apparatus. It is simply a note on method — an attempt to make explicit a practice that has been operating implicitly for some time.
Test Cases, Not Examples
An example is chosen because it behaves. A test case is chosen because it might not.
Much philosophical and theoretical writing proceeds by assertion and illustration: a principle is proposed, then clarified through compliant cases. That approach has its place, but it is poorly suited to examining the limits of worldhood. Worlds do not reveal their structure by behaving well. They reveal it under stress.
For that reason, we have consistently turned to systems that are just coherent enough to be tempting, and just unstable enough to be revealing:
Wonderland, which dissolves meaning without dissolving narrative;
Gormenghast, which over-succeeds at ritual until life becomes secondary;
Prospero’s Books, which sustains worldhood through performance rather than consistency;
Escher’s prints, which obey every local rule while refusing global inhabitation;
Cosmological models that remain locally lawful while producing global artefacts.
These are not illustrations of a prior theory. They are diagnostic constructions. Each one asks the same question in a different register: what fails when nothing goes wrong?
Dialogue as a Constraint Engine
A second feature of the method is dialogic. The work has not been written from a single, uninterrupted point of view. It has been produced through sustained pressure: questions answered, then reopened; claims sharpened, then displaced; apparent conclusions refused until they could survive reframing.
Dialogue matters here not because it is conversational, but because it is structurally constraining. It prevents premature closure. It forces commitments to surface. It exposes where a formulation relies on intuition rather than structure.
Crucially, dialogue is not used to converge on agreement, but to force a position to encounter its own limits. When an idea survives that encounter, it is not because it is elegant, but because it remains inhabitable under constraint.
Why Breakdown Is Productive
Breakdowns are often treated as failures of explanation. In this work, they function differently. A breakdown marks the point at which a system’s assumptions become visible.
Escher’s staircases do not collapse; they over-perform. Dark matter and dark energy do not signal empirical chaos; they arise within highly successful models. In each case, what breaks is not lawfulness but worldhood.
This distinction matters. When lawfulness fails, we revise rules. When worldhood fails, we revise ontology.
By following systems to the point where they can no longer be inhabited — despite remaining internally consistent — we learn something precise about the conditions under which worlds hold together at all.
Why There Is No Final Synthesis
This method resists totalisation by design. There is no final schema into which all cases are folded, no master diagram that resolves the tensions. Each series closes locally, but leaves the larger landscape open.
That openness is not an omission. It reflects a commitment that has been constant throughout: worldhood is an achievement, not a given; closure is contingent, not guaranteed.
The aim, therefore, is not to produce a theory that applies everywhere, but to become more articulate about where and how systems fail — and what those failures make possible.
A Closing Orientation
If there is a unifying stance across the work, it is this: understanding does not require total integration. It requires orientation.
By constructing worlds that almost work, and attending carefully to how they come apart, we gain not mastery, but bearings. And in a landscape increasingly populated by systems that are locally impeccable and globally unstable, bearings matter more than closure.
This has been the method all along. Here, it is simply named.
No comments:
Post a Comment