On choosing models
2024, reworked 2026
A friend once interrupted me mid-argument to ask why I bother with structuralism at all — whether frameworks of that kind are anything more than decoration on questions that are, at bottom, practical. It is a fair challenge, and the honest answer begins with what a framework is for. Structuralism earns its keep by separating form from meaning: its value lies precisely in what it declines to conflate. But the challenge generalises into a better question, which is the one worth writing down. Given competing models of reality, how should one choose?
In the sciences, the choice is largely made on your behalf. Models converge: there is, at any moment, a broad consensus about which approximation is currently best, and the machinery of the discipline exists to update that consensus. All models are wrong and some are useful, as the statisticians say — but science at least agrees on which are useful this decade. The comfort this provides is real, and it is rented rather than owned. The consensus will revise itself without consulting you, and your certainty was never yours; it was borrowed from an institution.
Philosophy offers no such service. Its models do not converge and are not meant to: materialism and phenomenology, structuralism and its post-, each remains permanently contested, and no tribunal is coming to settle the matter. It follows that in philosophy the choice of model cannot be delegated. Whatever lens you look through, you chose it — and if you believe you chose nothing, you have merely inherited a default without examining it, which is also a choice, only a poorly made one.
Two temptations follow from this predicament. The first is to promote one framework to the status of authority and enjoy, in philosophy, the security that only science can actually lease out. The second is a shapeless eclecticism that refuses commitment altogether. Against both, the position I find myself defending is a conscious pluralism: hold several models, choose actively which one to think with on a given occasion, and accept that the act of choosing makes you permanently liable for the consequences. The obligation is the point. A model you selected is a model you can be argued out of.
This is not a comfortable arrangement, and it is not meant to be. It is Neurath's boat: rebuilding the vessel plank by plank while at sea, with no dry dock in prospect. I would rather sail that way — wrong in places, completely lost in others, constantly updating — than travel securely under a sense of truth that was never examined. The misleading feeling of certainty is the one model I decline to hold.