Thank you for this piece. The concept of "Worldview Solipsism" is a really clear way to frame it, So many debates, or even conversations, feel like facts often bounce off your partner - not because they are stubborn, but because those facts don't have a conceptual "hook" to land on in their reality. I think Haidt and Kahneman have some very interesting points on that topic in terms of how we actually reason.
Your point about steelmanning was great. I totally agree that if you can't express the strongest form of what someone else believes, it's probably because you don't understand it. Though I would add that people hold beliefs for a complex mosaic of reasons. Often, the explicit argument they present is just one tile in that mosaic. As such, in any conversation, even if you manage to perfectly represent one tile it might not make sense without the rest of the structure. To truly steelman someone, you have to understand their whole mosaic, not just the one argument they are presenting at that moment.
Given your mention of the classic atheist/theist chasm, I can speak as someone who has lived on both sides of the divide. I grew up as a Dawkinsesque Atheist and spent decades in that conceptual framework. My conversion to Christianity wasn't the result of losing a single logical argument, but rather a paradigm shift which resulted in all the the tectonic plates of my worldview shuffling around.
Personally, the catalyst was actually the fine-tuning argument. I initially dismissed it as a kind of awkward puzzle that surely had some alternative solution. But as I began to question whether my materialist presuppositions were the only valid way to view the universe, the "best explanation" suddenly shifted. The "cosmic mind" you mentioned moved from looking like a completely unreasonable question begging to an unlikely hypothesis to the most elegant solution. It was, in a sense, exactly like you described with the oral vs. written traditions: once the conceptual framework shifted, the data points organized themselves into a completely different pattern.
So much of life is about trying to navigate miscommunication and alternative ways of viewing the world. It's a shame that it seems to be a topic so little thought about! I look forward to reading more of your work.
Thanks, and thanks for sharing your journey. Happy to know my description here felt like it captured something for you, even though obviously we've come to different conclusions!
BTW, thanks for mentioning The Beginnings of Western Science! I'm always interested in learning more about the history of science, and just picked up the Kindle edition.
It's a really lovely book. I've always been into history of science but that usually means starting around the time of Galileo, this does a great job of going back further and gives so much context to the scientific history I'm aware of, and history more broadly, in a way that's so sympathetic to the thinkers of the past. I'm not done it yet but I'm absolutely loving it
That's one of the problems with the Scientific Revolution narrative. It makes it sound like Galileo and contemporaries invented science out of nothing. It really was a revolution, but I think mostly due to the printing press, which sped up the conversations. It seems like there's a lot of value in exploring the continuity with previous thought.
Yeah, looking at the conceptual landscape of earlier thinkers puts a lot in perspective. It doesn't even diminish the achievements of the scientific revolution, it just helps you appreciate how hard it was to get to the point where it was possible! We inherit an enormous amount of conceptual tooling that we just take for granted, and it's only when taking that for granted that the ancients look blind (e.g. why didn't Aristotle think to run experiments?)
Classicist here. It's telling that science in the West got going in the same region where "Homer," the poet or poets who first committed the two great orally composed epics to writing, was said to have lived, namely, Ionia. Let's put writing and pattern-detection aside for the moment and focus instead on the truly extraordinary prestige of the Homeric epics. It's easy to imagine someone in the late 7th to 6th century regarding the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey* as the last word on what makes the world go round. There was simply nothing left to say — unless, that is, a person had the audacity to throw out baby and bathwater. On this account (which I'm making up as I go along), the crucial element in the birth of science was not so much cognitive as psychological: an innate human impulse to resist being boxed in, made to submit, told to accept the inevitable. We have to count ourselves lucky that Thales and his crew were cranky, combative, and contrary.
"(though for the record, I’m an atheist)" Whose 'record' is this for? Is it...God's? 😉 Seriously, this is such a useful piece of writing that identifies the ways in which many of us rig the game. Summoning the courage and energy to 'steelman' is contrary to our nature, isn't it? Advocacy appears in infants very early; being a grandfather provides a more distanced look at the phenomena of a child's development. Maybe that's A useful AI prompt: 'give me the best version of of such and such for me to practice arguing against.' Or for me to realize that I'm wrong!
Joe Folley of Unsolicited Advice recently made a video (“Why Atheism is not Nihilistic”) where he not only steelmanned his opponent’s arguments, but he also sent his opponent a draft of the script ahead of time to make sure he wasn’t misrepresenting that person’s views. With all the bad faith arguments/debates you find online these days, it was a really lovely to see that sort of civility and good faith argumentation. It also makes sense to take this approach - if you want to develop the strongest possible argument, you should be responding to the strongest version of your opponent’s argument. Acting like you’re only ever going to have to face weak arguments is foolish and incredibly shortsighted.
By the way, I thoroughly enjoyed your recent video with Joe about the rise of BS neuroscience, and I went ahead and ordered the book you recommended both there and in this post. I’m really looking forward to reading it!
Great read as usual! Hasok Chan also says that ideal conversations require intellectual sympathy and compassion, and I agree. But those things are hard to find when our identity feels at stake in discussions
I think I understand now why I don’t really get heated or excited in debates anymore: it’s because I’ve emancipated my sense of existential meaning from my metaphysical views. And I think that’s probably what leads a lot of people toward metaphysical quietism too. Im still pretty invested in metaphysics, but at this point holding one view over another feels more like a condition than something that gives things meaning. Some people might deny the phenomenal at the conceptual level, but everyone still experiences the thing we call phenomenal. Meaning develops in this individual window of experience.
The more I study, the clearer I can see how unimpactful these things are to my everyday experience. I don’t, however, think that’s the case for a lot of people, as many might “unconsciously” hold metaphysical views that can be directly involved in their meaning-making. Awareness allows to escape that, I think !
How do we convince people that would see "steelmanning" as not having faith in your own argument? Similarly, do abhorrent views (by what metric) also require steelmanning?
I do love your writing here, and generally agree. Im having a cognitive block on when to decide we are in the good-faith debate space again.
I would like people to enjoy good faith debate, but also not kill whatever joy people have in being witty and irreverent (why do those seem opposed to me in this current era?).
I don't know about giving universal rules, everything is context sensitive. I think if you're trying to convince an audience that holds what you see as an abhorrent view, you probably want to show a good faith engagement with the view. But being witty and irreverent has it's place, I just think it is better when it comes from a place of deep understanding rather than one of condescension and shallow understanding
"In the end I care less about convincing people than about improving my understanding of the world and providing other people with bits that I found helpful in that goal. I suspect when understanding deepens, naive views often don’t need to be outright rebutted, they’re simply outgrown. Just as written records opened the eyes of the ancient Babylonians to new patterns, and that led to new conceptual frames for understanding the world, I hope new knowledge will lead to similar revolutions in my own thinking."
Steelmanning! I heard that term for the first time a few years ago and have tried to use it. Last summer when the new Superman (the Man of Steel) movie hit theaters, I took the opportunity to write about steelmanning, because puns and other wordplay make it easier for me to do things 😅
This is great, Tommy! I appreciate how thoughtful you are in considering everyone. Interesting that your pal Walter Veit has a new post, "What to do with a meaningless life?" :-D
I particularly like your conclusion about how your views have evolved. It is why I wrote my third book as I did - a memoir telling the story of going from someone completely different to who I am now, rather than just listing my current views.
Steelmanning is also known as "charity principle" — which I always strive to use and expect, if I ever get into a debate, which I avoid whenever possible
One great way to avoid strawman arguments is to learn from people who actually believe certain ideas defend those ideas.
As J.S. Mill said
"He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if
he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form..."
&
"the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner."
-John Stuart Mill
Unfortunately that is not a common practice.
I remember years ago on Twitter being blocked by Philip Goff because I asked him to please stop strawmanning science and misrepresenting the existing science of consciousness.
I shared with him Francis Bacon's work on the foundations of the scientific enlightenment To show that there was no boundary at all in science when it comes to studying consciousness.
I shared with him Charles Darwin's work in chapters 2 and 3 on mental powers from the descent of man to show that for over 100 years scientists have been studying consciousness from an evolutionary perspective.
I shared with him the psychology today article "what actually is consciousness and how did it evolve" to show that there are existing scientific alternatives to what he was advocating for with panpsychism.
I was blocked specifically for asking him to argue against science rather than lying to his audience that science does not study consciousness because it was designed to exclude it. His framing is not just wrong, it is deceptive and should be considered academic fraud in my view.
If you practiced the JS Mill values I quoted above, you could avoid learning lies from academic frauds altogether. And Philosophers should prioritize honest intellectual engagement with opposing viewpoints. It should take lies to sell your message; if your side is true, it should just take honest representation. That's what I wrote about in my post Panpsychism's Strawman.
The framing of "worldview solipsism" does real work, but I think it understates the asymmetry problem.
When two people share enough conceptual overlap, genuine disagreement is possible — you can identify what the other believes, locate the point of divergence, and argue from there. Worldview solipsism is what happens when that overlap breaks down: you're no longer arguing about the same thing, even when you're using the same words.
What strikes me clinically is that this isn't just a feature of political or philosophical debates. It shows up in the consultation room in a structurally identical form. A patient and a physician can use the same word — "pain," "recovery," "risk" — and mean something so different that the conversation generates the illusion of understanding while producing none. The physician's "risk" is statistical and population-level; the patient's "risk" is experiential, personal, and narrative. Neither is wrong. They're operating from different conceptual maps that happen to share a label.
The deeper problem is that worldview solipsism is largely invisible from the inside. You don't experience your concepts as concepts — you experience them as the world. Which means the solution can't simply be "explain yourself better." It requires the rarer cognitive move of treating your own conceptual framework as an object of scrutiny rather than a transparent window.
That's genuinely hard. And it's not taught anywhere.
Thank you for this piece. The concept of "Worldview Solipsism" is a really clear way to frame it, So many debates, or even conversations, feel like facts often bounce off your partner - not because they are stubborn, but because those facts don't have a conceptual "hook" to land on in their reality. I think Haidt and Kahneman have some very interesting points on that topic in terms of how we actually reason.
Your point about steelmanning was great. I totally agree that if you can't express the strongest form of what someone else believes, it's probably because you don't understand it. Though I would add that people hold beliefs for a complex mosaic of reasons. Often, the explicit argument they present is just one tile in that mosaic. As such, in any conversation, even if you manage to perfectly represent one tile it might not make sense without the rest of the structure. To truly steelman someone, you have to understand their whole mosaic, not just the one argument they are presenting at that moment.
Given your mention of the classic atheist/theist chasm, I can speak as someone who has lived on both sides of the divide. I grew up as a Dawkinsesque Atheist and spent decades in that conceptual framework. My conversion to Christianity wasn't the result of losing a single logical argument, but rather a paradigm shift which resulted in all the the tectonic plates of my worldview shuffling around.
Personally, the catalyst was actually the fine-tuning argument. I initially dismissed it as a kind of awkward puzzle that surely had some alternative solution. But as I began to question whether my materialist presuppositions were the only valid way to view the universe, the "best explanation" suddenly shifted. The "cosmic mind" you mentioned moved from looking like a completely unreasonable question begging to an unlikely hypothesis to the most elegant solution. It was, in a sense, exactly like you described with the oral vs. written traditions: once the conceptual framework shifted, the data points organized themselves into a completely different pattern.
So much of life is about trying to navigate miscommunication and alternative ways of viewing the world. It's a shame that it seems to be a topic so little thought about! I look forward to reading more of your work.
Thanks, and thanks for sharing your journey. Happy to know my description here felt like it captured something for you, even though obviously we've come to different conclusions!
Very well said! Much of philosophy-Substack needs to read this post.
BTW, thanks for mentioning The Beginnings of Western Science! I'm always interested in learning more about the history of science, and just picked up the Kindle edition.
It's a really lovely book. I've always been into history of science but that usually means starting around the time of Galileo, this does a great job of going back further and gives so much context to the scientific history I'm aware of, and history more broadly, in a way that's so sympathetic to the thinkers of the past. I'm not done it yet but I'm absolutely loving it
That's one of the problems with the Scientific Revolution narrative. It makes it sound like Galileo and contemporaries invented science out of nothing. It really was a revolution, but I think mostly due to the printing press, which sped up the conversations. It seems like there's a lot of value in exploring the continuity with previous thought.
Yeah, looking at the conceptual landscape of earlier thinkers puts a lot in perspective. It doesn't even diminish the achievements of the scientific revolution, it just helps you appreciate how hard it was to get to the point where it was possible! We inherit an enormous amount of conceptual tooling that we just take for granted, and it's only when taking that for granted that the ancients look blind (e.g. why didn't Aristotle think to run experiments?)
Classicist here. It's telling that science in the West got going in the same region where "Homer," the poet or poets who first committed the two great orally composed epics to writing, was said to have lived, namely, Ionia. Let's put writing and pattern-detection aside for the moment and focus instead on the truly extraordinary prestige of the Homeric epics. It's easy to imagine someone in the late 7th to 6th century regarding the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey* as the last word on what makes the world go round. There was simply nothing left to say — unless, that is, a person had the audacity to throw out baby and bathwater. On this account (which I'm making up as I go along), the crucial element in the birth of science was not so much cognitive as psychological: an innate human impulse to resist being boxed in, made to submit, told to accept the inevitable. We have to count ourselves lucky that Thales and his crew were cranky, combative, and contrary.
"(though for the record, I’m an atheist)" Whose 'record' is this for? Is it...God's? 😉 Seriously, this is such a useful piece of writing that identifies the ways in which many of us rig the game. Summoning the courage and energy to 'steelman' is contrary to our nature, isn't it? Advocacy appears in infants very early; being a grandfather provides a more distanced look at the phenomena of a child's development. Maybe that's A useful AI prompt: 'give me the best version of of such and such for me to practice arguing against.' Or for me to realize that I'm wrong!
Joe Folley of Unsolicited Advice recently made a video (“Why Atheism is not Nihilistic”) where he not only steelmanned his opponent’s arguments, but he also sent his opponent a draft of the script ahead of time to make sure he wasn’t misrepresenting that person’s views. With all the bad faith arguments/debates you find online these days, it was a really lovely to see that sort of civility and good faith argumentation. It also makes sense to take this approach - if you want to develop the strongest possible argument, you should be responding to the strongest version of your opponent’s argument. Acting like you’re only ever going to have to face weak arguments is foolish and incredibly shortsighted.
By the way, I thoroughly enjoyed your recent video with Joe about the rise of BS neuroscience, and I went ahead and ordered the book you recommended both there and in this post. I’m really looking forward to reading it!
That's awesome, lots of respect for Joe on that. Glad you enjoyed the video, it was a fun conversation! Hope you like the book
Great read as usual! Hasok Chan also says that ideal conversations require intellectual sympathy and compassion, and I agree. But those things are hard to find when our identity feels at stake in discussions
I think I understand now why I don’t really get heated or excited in debates anymore: it’s because I’ve emancipated my sense of existential meaning from my metaphysical views. And I think that’s probably what leads a lot of people toward metaphysical quietism too. Im still pretty invested in metaphysics, but at this point holding one view over another feels more like a condition than something that gives things meaning. Some people might deny the phenomenal at the conceptual level, but everyone still experiences the thing we call phenomenal. Meaning develops in this individual window of experience.
The more I study, the clearer I can see how unimpactful these things are to my everyday experience. I don’t, however, think that’s the case for a lot of people, as many might “unconsciously” hold metaphysical views that can be directly involved in their meaning-making. Awareness allows to escape that, I think !
How do we convince people that would see "steelmanning" as not having faith in your own argument? Similarly, do abhorrent views (by what metric) also require steelmanning?
I do love your writing here, and generally agree. Im having a cognitive block on when to decide we are in the good-faith debate space again.
I would like people to enjoy good faith debate, but also not kill whatever joy people have in being witty and irreverent (why do those seem opposed to me in this current era?).
I don't know about giving universal rules, everything is context sensitive. I think if you're trying to convince an audience that holds what you see as an abhorrent view, you probably want to show a good faith engagement with the view. But being witty and irreverent has it's place, I just think it is better when it comes from a place of deep understanding rather than one of condescension and shallow understanding
Great work! Keep up!
Great points!
"In the end I care less about convincing people than about improving my understanding of the world and providing other people with bits that I found helpful in that goal. I suspect when understanding deepens, naive views often don’t need to be outright rebutted, they’re simply outgrown. Just as written records opened the eyes of the ancient Babylonians to new patterns, and that led to new conceptual frames for understanding the world, I hope new knowledge will lead to similar revolutions in my own thinking."
See also
https://inchpin.substack.com/p/conceptual-technology
and
Grothendieck's Rising Sea metaphor, for other attempts to point at similar ideas.
Steelmanning! I heard that term for the first time a few years ago and have tried to use it. Last summer when the new Superman (the Man of Steel) movie hit theaters, I took the opportunity to write about steelmanning, because puns and other wordplay make it easier for me to do things 😅
‘Steelmanning’ Philosophy & Ideology: https://goodneighborbadcitizen.substack.com/p/steelmanning-philosophy-and-ideology
This is great, Tommy! I appreciate how thoughtful you are in considering everyone. Interesting that your pal Walter Veit has a new post, "What to do with a meaningless life?" :-D
I particularly like your conclusion about how your views have evolved. It is why I wrote my third book as I did - a memoir telling the story of going from someone completely different to who I am now, rather than just listing my current views.
https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
Steelmanning is also known as "charity principle" — which I always strive to use and expect, if I ever get into a debate, which I avoid whenever possible
✌🏻
One great way to avoid strawman arguments is to learn from people who actually believe certain ideas defend those ideas.
As J.S. Mill said
"He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if
he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form..."
&
"the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner."
-John Stuart Mill
Unfortunately that is not a common practice.
I remember years ago on Twitter being blocked by Philip Goff because I asked him to please stop strawmanning science and misrepresenting the existing science of consciousness.
I shared with him Francis Bacon's work on the foundations of the scientific enlightenment To show that there was no boundary at all in science when it comes to studying consciousness.
I shared with him Charles Darwin's work in chapters 2 and 3 on mental powers from the descent of man to show that for over 100 years scientists have been studying consciousness from an evolutionary perspective.
I shared with him the psychology today article "what actually is consciousness and how did it evolve" to show that there are existing scientific alternatives to what he was advocating for with panpsychism.
I was blocked specifically for asking him to argue against science rather than lying to his audience that science does not study consciousness because it was designed to exclude it. His framing is not just wrong, it is deceptive and should be considered academic fraud in my view.
If you practiced the JS Mill values I quoted above, you could avoid learning lies from academic frauds altogether. And Philosophers should prioritize honest intellectual engagement with opposing viewpoints. It should take lies to sell your message; if your side is true, it should just take honest representation. That's what I wrote about in my post Panpsychism's Strawman.
https://open.substack.com/pub/philosophicalrebellion/p/panpsychisms-strawman?r=211fuw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The framing of "worldview solipsism" does real work, but I think it understates the asymmetry problem.
When two people share enough conceptual overlap, genuine disagreement is possible — you can identify what the other believes, locate the point of divergence, and argue from there. Worldview solipsism is what happens when that overlap breaks down: you're no longer arguing about the same thing, even when you're using the same words.
What strikes me clinically is that this isn't just a feature of political or philosophical debates. It shows up in the consultation room in a structurally identical form. A patient and a physician can use the same word — "pain," "recovery," "risk" — and mean something so different that the conversation generates the illusion of understanding while producing none. The physician's "risk" is statistical and population-level; the patient's "risk" is experiential, personal, and narrative. Neither is wrong. They're operating from different conceptual maps that happen to share a label.
The deeper problem is that worldview solipsism is largely invisible from the inside. You don't experience your concepts as concepts — you experience them as the world. Which means the solution can't simply be "explain yourself better." It requires the rarer cognitive move of treating your own conceptual framework as an object of scrutiny rather than a transparent window.
That's genuinely hard. And it's not taught anywhere.