V. Truth & Meaning
Meaning as Co-Created
Meaning is not located in objects, nor in isolated minds. It arises in the space between: between speaker and listener, action and interpretation, perception and memory. This process is ongoing, incomplete, and often uncertain — but it is also generative.
To participate in meaning-making is to join the conversation. This can happen in dialogue with others, in interaction with the world, or within the internal multitudes of the self. In all cases, meaning is an emergent product of relation, not a substance to be extracted.
The gaps between selves — their unbridgeable separateness — are not failures. They are the very conditions that make meaning possible. These gaps, while essential for meaning, also highlight the limits of our grasp on truth. This leads us to consider how our understanding evolves asymptotically, always approaching but never fully capturing reality.
Truth and the Asymptotic Nature of Understanding
Liminalism rejects the notion of readily accessible, final, or total truths that can be captured in perfectly closed systems or simple statements. This stance can sometimes be misinterpreted as a descent into radical relativism, where all claims are equally valid and there is no external reality to ground understanding. However, this is not the position of Liminalism.
Rather than denying the existence of truth, Liminalism asserts that our human access to truth is inherently partial, mediated, and incomplete. Truth exists and has a definite shape, but it may be complex, nuanced, and perhaps even fractal in nature, revealing ever more detail the closer we look. Our models and narratives are the tools we use to apprehend this complex reality, but they are necessarily approximations.
Our striving is not to declare an arrived-at, final truth, but to move asymptotically towards a more faithful understanding. We can tighten the noose around where truth lies, refining our models as they encounter the limits of their current form—the "gaps" where reality exceeds our predictions or categories. These gaps are not proof that truth is arbitrary; they are signals pointing towards the complex shape of truth, inviting deeper engagement and revised approximation. Epistemic humility is essential, acknowledging that our perspective is always situated at a specific threshold and cannot encompass the whole. Our access to truth is limited not by truth’s absence, but by our partial location within the system we are trying to understand and the infinite fractal boundary between truth and untruth. The pursuit of truth, in this view, is an ongoing practice of attentive engagement and humble refinement, not the search for a single, static endpoint.
This humble engagement with truth naturally raises questions about our moral agency within such limits. We turn now to how moral responsibility emerges as we tend the aperture of the self.
Incompleteness, Imperfectability, and Surprise
Liminalism rejects the pursuit of total understanding, complete control, or final truth. All models are incomplete. All perspectives are partial. This is not a shortcoming to be overcome, but a feature to be worked with.
It is precisely because the world cannot be fully known that it can still surprise us. Surprise is not a failure of planning — it is a revelation of aliveness. It marks the intrusion of something unpredicted into our patterned expectations, and in doing so, it keeps life open, responsive, and worth attending to.
Surprise gives rise to delight — the brief, bright flare of recognition that the universe still holds more than we imagined. When it deepens, surprise becomes wonder: a pause in the flow of understanding where we marvel at the richness of what exceeds us. At its most profound, it becomes awe — the stunned and reverent acknowledgment that we are part of something vast, intricate, and unfinished.
While surprise can delight, it may also unsettle—Liminalism invites us to sit with this tension as part of growth.
To live well is not merely to tolerate surprise, but to welcome it, to be structured around its possibility. And with surprise comes humor — the sudden collapse of false certainties, the recognition that our grand constructs are partial, provisional, even absurd. Humor is not a betrayal of seriousness; it is a recognition of scale. It is the mark of those who can take a cosmic joke.
Liminalism honors humor not just as entertainment but as epistemic humility in action — the ability to laugh when the universe tips over our carefully arranged models. This laughter is not cynical but affirming. It says: even here, even in the mess, we belong. Imperfectability is not a cause for despair. It is the precondition for growth, for wonder, for surprise — and for the delight of becoming someone new.
Interlude: Taxonomy Is All There Is
Shortly after I was lovingly given the nickname of the Taxonomist, I semi-facetiously made the statement that I was okay with it because “taxonomy is pretty much all there is.” Blank stares made it clear that more explanation was needed. My friends had already seen how handy it was to have taxonomist around, calling me over to rescue several conversations that had gotten bogged down in category errors. But they still didn’t quite get the centrality of the practice.
Not having something prepared in advance – and interrupted by the predictable heckler muttering “a taxonomist would say that, wouldn’t he?” – I had to push off my full explanation to a later date.
So now’s my chance. Why would I have made such an outlandish statement, even tongue somewhat-in-cheek, and what could I have meant by it?
We can start by recognizing that, at least to Ahl al-kitāb, God is the Original Taxonomist. In Genesis, on the very first day, we start off with splitting: “God divided the light from the darkness.” And almost as immediately comes the naming: “God called the light Day and the darkness… Night.” In following days, we get some dividing of waters and separating of firmament from waters and the naming of Heaven and Earth and Seas. All right out the taxonomist’s playbook: start with the big, easily distinguishable things, draw boxes around them, and give them intuitive, appealing names.
Skipping ahead a chapter, we find that the second gift given to mankind, after animal companionship (which is a pretty good one), was the gift of taxonomy. You might think Prometheus’ gift was more practical, but right away we see Adam, the first mortal taxonomist, giving names to “all the beasts of the field” and “whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” And just before this, we also get some foreshadowing about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the careful reader will pick up on the fact that God will not take kindly to being usurped as Taxonomist-in-Chief.
So, at least to adherents of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, I am on somewhat solid footing. I mean, it’s clear that most of Genesis is about taxonomy! And I didn’t even get into the naming of rivers and lands and tribes and people…
In Chinese cosmology, we find yin and yang, the opposing forces of the taiji. the original duality that sprang from the limitless wuji that came before. I’ll have more to say about duality specifically in a future post, but until then we can be satisfied with recognizing more splitting, more naming.
So perhaps my statement is starting to sound a little less ludicrous. Taxonomy is a serious endeavor that humans have been grappling with for thousands of years and taxonomists deserve all the respect they get.
To understand why, we have to start by taking a quick look at what you do when you practice taxonomy. The lumping and splitting definition is apt, but there are several steps you have to go through to produce a useful taxonomy:
- Notice that certain things are “alike” in some ways that matter and “different” in others.
- Group like things together into useful categories, and separate out unlike things.
- Name the groups and give them labels for easy reference.
- Think of and list examples of things that belong in each group, preferably ones that demonstrate the meaning and purpose of having the groups in the first place.
- Apply the taxonomy in novel situations, as a model of the world. Use the names and categories as a shared language, to facilitate communication with others. Expand your definitions of the categories, describing more features of each and the relationships that exist between them.
- Refine the categories over time to be more useful. Split where you find meaningful distinctions between members, lump where you notice commonalities across groups.
My contention, then, is that this is basically a description of the steps required to be an intelligent agent in the world, the steps required to build a model, any model, of the world. It may not feel like we are consciously taking these steps all the time, but in many areas they are going on beneath the surface, hidden away but providing the lens through which we see the world and the language we use to describe it.
People thousands of years ago realized this fact and told stories and built whole frameworks to remind themselves of the importance. Today, judging by the reactions to my statement, people obviously need a reminder.
Interlude: The Conversation
There are a few themes that will pop up here from time to time, foundational ideas that act as attractors for my chaotic thoughts. Or maybe coat hooks, securely fastened somewhere, for me to hang ideas on and know where to look for them later. Or if you like, given the name of this blog, categories for me to put them in, names that I can call them, to help me think about them and how they relate to each other.
I plan on writing one or more posts explicitly about each idea, in addition to weaving them in to other articles, and today I’ll touch on one: the role of the conversation as a creator of meaning and understanding, and its central place in the human condition.
While the idea of a dialogue as the path to truth goes back millennia, it was Gadamer who elevated the conversation to be the source of truth and meaning rather than just the route to it. And in doing so, he claimed that the highest virtue was to be a good conversationalist, which implies listening as well as speaking.
The rationale for this elevation, and the logical consequences of it, have had a profound impact on the way I make sense of the world and interact with others in it.
Modernism – and the subsequent reactions to it – demolished the idea of objective truth and brought with it an often crippling angst over subjectivity, relativism, and authenticity. The rejection of traditional sources of authority and all manner of received dogma opened the door to various forms of nihilism and solipsism, and ultimately to the elevation of knowledge/power over truth. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, the failure of Hilbert’s Program, and Turing’s answer to the Halting Problem, swirled together in the zeitgeist along with the many bizarre consequences of quantum mechanics and special relativity, calling into question the limits of what can be known or proven. Meanwhile Peirce was rejecting a theory of signs that admitted a sign and signified without an interpretant, of meaning without inquiry. In the post-modern world, the quest for truth, meaning and even purpose can feel hopeless.
I consider myself a practical philosopher, someone who thinks about philosophy as a practical guide to life, rather than an academic endeavor, and I find most philosophical works impenetrable and unhelpful, with the probability that one will obfuscate rather than elucidate rising by the decade the more recently it was written. So I’ll stop talking about history and theory, which I know little enough about anyway, and turn to my understanding of the conversation and its importance as a source of meaning and, more importantly, of hope. We are turning to my thinking now and I should warn you that it may be wrong (if we grant that that is a valid category) or not at all what others mean when they use the same words, but this is what I mean and I put it out there for your interpretation.
The conversation is the idea that the creation of meaning is an active process involving two parties – meaning does not exist in the object described or the words used to describe it, in the sign or the signified, nor even in the complete utterances of one party alone. Speaker and listener, author and reader, collaborate to make meaning out of meaninglessness, and the role of attention and interpretation on the part of the receiver is no less important than the choice of words or order on the part of the sender. And through repeated games of alternating communication, of pronouncement and interpretation – in other words, a conversation – we can achieve understanding, even if only partial and imperfect.
But the conversation, being a process, also implies that the work is never done – it brings us understanding, but it is always incomplete, always becoming but never quite being. Non understanding is ultimately unavoidable.
This conception has practical applications for how to make sense of the world, but it also has larger implications for how to live as a human being in the world.
Practically, it shows us the importance of dialogue and exchange in increasing understanding, which is applicable to nearly every endeavor. Too often, colleagues or teams or spouses don’t take the time to really discuss and interrogate each other, to chase down misunderstandings and align on meaning and intent. People assume “I said it, so they understood me” when so often that is not the case.
But beyond the obvious application to actual dialogue with others, I take the idea one step further and believe that we can put ideas in metaphorical conversation with each other, and create new meaning, new understanding from the exchange. A big part of a taxonomist’s job is to define and name a class or category of objects and decide which objects belong in the set – usually because they share one or more features – and which are excluded because they are not the same. By doing so, we essentially create a thesis and its antithesis and by placing them in conversation with each other, within a given context, we can possibly bring about a synthesis that brings new insights, new understanding, new meaning into the world. And so, I sometimes form speculative classes in my mind, draw distinctions between them, populate them with exemplars, place their members in opposition to each other, and let their very existence kick off an inquiry, an investigation, an interpretation of what that opposition might mean or imply. It’s not an exciting Saturday night, but it can be quite fruitful.
But taking a broader view of the human condition, we can learn something deeper about the conversation by returning to Gadamer and the idea of loneliness. The human condition is marked by a deep yearning for connection with other people, a desire to be seen and truly understood, along with a sometimes inconsolable pain when we fail. Gadamer acknowledges the futility of seeking complete connection, recognizing the fact that no conversation, short of an infinite one, can bring perfect understanding, and then only asymptotically. Missed connections and misunderstanding are an inescapable fact of life. An existential loneliness, a hallmark of the human condition, is a byproduct of that futility, those missed connections.
But Gadamer also argues that loneliness, in addition to being the consequence of missed connections, is also a prerequisite for connection and understanding. And more, he claims our inability to fully understand each other is what gives meaning to our individual existences, it’s what keeps us from being mere objects. The price of being an agent, an author, is the risk, or rather the certainty, of being misunderstood.
I think there’s something poetic and beautiful and tragic about the idea that the very thing that makes us unique and valuable and resistant to commodification – namely, our unbridgeable separateness and the incommensurability of our subjective experiences – is also the source of some of our deepest pain, the eradication of which is the object of our greatest longing.
And I think, perhaps, the recognition of that poetry offers us an escape from being crushed by solipsism or nihilism; it can console us in our loneliness and encourage us in our attempts at understanding.
So practice listening and speaking up, become a partner in creating meaning, aspire to the highest virtue of being a good conversationalist, and see the beauty in the struggle for understanding, even though we know it’s futile.
Because the conversation is ongoing and waiting for us to join.