The Poverty of Logos

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In the first article in our folkish apologetics series, we set out the terms of the ongoing debate between folkish pagans and Christians: Enas Mathetes and other Christian counter-apologists have argued for a universal discursive tribunal. In the second article, we showed the impossibility of the argument: that any argument for a universal tribunal originally depended on tradition-bound axioms that the argument claims to have demolished, thereby demolishing its own warrant. Moreover, we showed the incoherence of the argument: that discourse depends on an agent-relative authority, thereby drawing a boundary around the tradition beyond which no discourse is even intelligible, much less binding. And we have shown the ignorance of the argument: that the account of logos—discursivity as the determinant of authority—is historically and anthropologically illiterate.

The Axial counter-apologetic approach is to repeat the old Platonic argument about the tadpole from Theaetetus in endless, nearly indistinguishable formulations, as though Plato were still relevant to the discussion. The fact that the Axialist believes he could defuse the argument from radical incommensurability with a simple performative argument demonstrates that he is not aware of the state of modern philosophy at all, because incommensurability is a live issue in the actual, living tradition of Western philosophical discourse. Some 2,700 years after the Axial age began in the West, we are witnessing a return to our pre-Axial foundations.

In the second article, we showed how the anti-logos framework, buried by the emergence of Axiality in antiquity, re-emerged in the 20th century along a continuum ranging from logical positivism to generative anthropology. However, it also emerged independently elsewhere in the world of academic philosophy. In this article, to show the true poverty of the logocentric response, we shall look further afield to see just what a minority logos1 constitutes in professional philosophy. Virtually every major thinker in modern times has underwritten the incommensurability of traditions, either implicitly or explicitly, and even those who defended a universal tribunal have done so in defiance of their own deeper commitments.

Nietzsche provides the historical mechanism by which authority determines discourse. Before a tradition can establish a framework for rational discourse, an act of sovereign power must occur. Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals demonstrates that words like “good,” “bad,” and “evil” were forged not by a rational tribunal but in the crucible of concrete historical struggles, such as the rise of the Judeo-Christian tradition. But, in order to stabilize the logocentric worldview, such struggles later had to be forgotten, paving the way for the schizoid historical revisionism we touched on in our first article.

Society does not continuously experience the raw, violent authority that gave rise to its language. Instead, through centuries of habituation, the conflict that shaped our concepts is completely forgotten: a word that was originally a weapon or a social tool with a specific use mutates into an “eternal, objective moral law.” This forgetting is what allows the illusion of logos to persist. We mistake the current stability of our inherited vocabulary for universal, timeless rationality. In so doing, we forget that we are playing a language game whose rules were written by a specific historical winner.

Our vocabulary carries the genetic stamp of its historical origin—even if that origin is forgotten. The child may not know his father, but he nevertheless inherits his father’s biases and partialities. In the same way, any discourse we engage in is inherently biased and partial, whether we admit it or not. We are trapped within the perspective of the tradition that gave us our naming-order—but then, if that tradition inherited its naming-order from its earlier rival, as Christianity did, it too is trapped within the perspective of its rival and precursor. There is no neutral, transparent language available to us. Every moral evaluation or rational argument we make is an unconscious reinforcement of the axiomatic authority we have forgotten. Nietzsche shows us how the naming-order sausage is made:

The lordly right of giving names extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the rulers: they say “this is this and that,” they seal every thing and event with a sound, and, as it were, take possession of it.2

We now move from an essential continental philosopher to an essential analytic philosopher. While Nietzsche explains how and why we forget the origins of our conceptual frameworks, Quine shows that even if we stripped away history, language itself is structurally incapable of anchoring itself to a purely objective reality.

The most common defence of logos is that the physical world acts as a neutral tribunal.3 The logocentrist argues that even if our traditions differ, we all look at the same physical reality (e.g., a rabbit running past) and can anchor our language to that shared experience. To show why this defence does not work, Quine proposed the following thought experiment:

Imagine an anthropologist trying to translate a completely isolated native language from scratch. A native sees a rabbit run by and says “Gavagai.” The linguist might determine that “Gavagai” means “rabbit,” but Quine pointed out that it could just as easily mean “undetached rabbit parts,” “a brief instance of rabbithood,” or “the universal spirit of the rabbit.” The physical presence of the rabbit cannot adjudicate between any of these distinct meanings. The point is that empirical reality is underdetermined; it does not force a single, correct name upon us.

Because reality does not dictate names, something else must—thus axiomatic authority within a tradition becomes structurally necessary. The only reason an English speaker assumes that “Gavagai” means “rabbit” is that he is already trapped within a Western, substance-oriented linguistic tradition that prioritizes whole, enduring physical objects. The meaning of the name is not derived from the animal itself, but from the internal, self-authenticating rules of the speaker’s inherited framework. Thus, Quine considers language and knowledge as a “web of belief.” A name only makes sense because of its position relative to all the other names within the web. You cannot step outside the web to judge it against another web because there is no broader web of belief that joins them.

Returning to continental philosophy and coming back down to earth from pre-history and linguistics, Hans-Georg Gadamer helps us understand how this historicist framework functions in everyday human thought. A devoted student of Heidegger and a factualist before factualism, Gadamer says that thinking without presuppositions is impossible. To discard your inherited framework would not make you objective—it would make you altogether incapable of thought. Gadamer makes the point by rehabilitating the word prejudice (Vorurteil).

In modern parlance, prejudice means a blind bias. But for Gadamer, as for Maistre before him, it literally means a pre-judgment. Prejudices are the initial lenses we receive from our tradition: the background rules that tell us what is important, what constitutes a valid question, how words relate to things, etc. Without these authoritative pre-judgments, we would experience the world as a chaotic wash of data, unable to predicate or make sense of anything.

The logocentrist worry is that if traditions are incommensurable and dictated by authority, they are little more than intellectual prisons—and embracing the concept of “prejudice” does not help sell radical incommensurability. But Gadamer explicitly rejects this misinterpretation. Tradition is not a wall that shuts us in, but the ground we stand on to see the world in the first place. But because this horizon is historically contingent, any trans-traditional tribunal is denied us—you can change your position, your horizon can shift, but you can never stand on a “neutral” mountaintop with no horizon at all.

To establish the universal tribunal that logos requires, the logocentrist must convert traditions (and religions) from an imperative framework of authority guiding action into a series of descriptions of the world.4 Thus, it is no wonder that logos always tends toward secularity and atheism—in the final analysis, all logocentric “traditions” aspire to become science. And if a universal tribunal existed anywhere, it should be found in the hard sciences. By demonstrating that even physics and chemistry are governed by incommensurable, authority-driven traditions, Thomas Kuhn effectively seals the argument against an independent logos.

The standard narrative of science is that it is a pure, linear manifestation of logos—a steady accumulation of objective facts adjudicated by an impartial tribunal of reason. But Kuhn points out that science moves via paradigm shifts. A paradigm is not just a collection of facts; it is an entire axiomatic authority that dictates what counts as science in the first place.

A Newtonian and an Einsteinian both use the word “mass,” but they are not talking about the same thing. For Newton, mass is conserved and constant, but for Einstein, it is convertible with energy. This is not a matter of independent discovery but, per Quine, an attempt to make “mass” better cohere within the web of belief. The word “mass” changes meaning based on the underlying framework, so there is no neutral vocabulary that transcends the paradigms. When two competing paradigms clash (e.g., Aristotelian vs. Newtonian physics), they cannot settle the dispute through impartial debate because the very standards of what physics is supposed to explain, what language to use, etc., are themselves defined by the paradigm. Scientists from rival camps literally inhabit different worlds and are blind to each other’s internal logic, as Kuhn admits: “when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.”5

Kuhn’s contemporary, Paul Feyerabend, makes the incommensurability of scientific paradigms explicit. He is not merely describing how science works, as Kuhn does, but rather drawing the uncomfortable conclusion. Take, for example, Western scientific medicine vs. Traditional Chinese Medicine. These two traditions disagree not just on facts, but on ontologies. Western medicine speaks in terms of pathogens, cellular mutations, and chemical imbalances, whereas Traditional Chinese Medicine speaks in terms of Qi, meridians, and energetic balances. Feyerabend draws out the implications, speaking of science in Sorelian tones:

Science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the many forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not necessarily the best. It is conspicuous, noisy, and impudent, but it is inherently superior only for those who have already decided in favour of a certain ideology.6

We began with Nietzsche’s historicization of logos as an excretion of power dynamics, and after a short epistemic and linguistic detour, we return to political reality with Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the différend.

Modern liberal societies pride themselves on having created an impartial tribunal—the legal system—where disputes can be settled purely through rational discourse. But a court is a linguistic institution built entirely upon the axiomatic authority of a single tradition, not a neutral space floating above traditions.

Due to the modern legal framework of ESG, women are systematically advantaged in the workplace beyond their natural ability, which gives them an artificial level of financial freedom. At the same time, low barriers to exit, such as no-fault divorce and de facto child custody, systematically incentivize women to act on their natural inclinations to “trade up” relationships once they have established their careers and families, since, as individuals, they stand to gain much and to lose little.

As a result, a tragedy plays itself out in courtrooms every day as children are separated from their fathers as a matter of structural inevitability. The mother speaks the language of the court: contractual marriage, de facto partnership, joint property, primary caregiver status. The father speaks the older language of the householder: patriarchy, male headship, marriage as bond, patria potestas. When the father enters the courtroom, the tribunal demands that he translate his claims to authority into the language of consensualism to be considered “rational.” This is the trap. The moment he attempts this translation, he has already lost. You cannot turn a sacred relation into a handshake without destroying its core. The différend is a conflict in which the rules used to settle a judgement belong entirely to one of the parties. As he puts it: “As distinguished from a litigation, a différend would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments.”7

This is the legal manifestation of the reality that all truth and discourse carries the stamp of axiomatic authority. Because there is no trans-traditional tribunal, the court cannot arbitrate between the father’s and the mother’s claims. Instead, it forces its own language game upon the father, stripping him of the very vocabulary he needs to articulate his injury. What is important to note is that, whereas Lyotard somewhat incoherently regarded cases analogous to our family law example as an act of objective ideological violence,8 the folkish worldview sees it as a tragedy precisely because the tradition (the law of the state) has rebelled against its elder, prior, and therefore superior ancestor (the law of the householder). Modern family court, like the Christian apologist, has undermined the very preconditions of its own authority, thereby nullifying any rightful jurisdiction and, as Nietzsche pointed out, relying solely upon the principle of might makes right, while hypocritically denying it.

Lyotard and other continental poststructuralists tended to take a tone of resigned pessimism toward the incommensurability of tradition—they saw no possibility of translation between traditions, and regarded this as a tragedy.9 As a counterpoint to them, Alasdair MacIntyre took a more positive approach—he sees no such possibility and regards it as almost beautiful. While Lyotard leaves us with the tragedy of the différend, MacIntyre formalizes a way to navigate this reality without surrendering to nihilism.

There is no independent, free-floating “Reason” with a capital R. There are only highly specific, historical traditions of rationality (such as Aristotelian-Thomism, Enlightenment Liberalism, or Marxism). Every rational argument must start from a set of baseline premises handed down by a specific historical community. When an outsider tries to sit in judgment over an alien tradition, they inevitably hit the wall of incommensurability. Because there is no “trans-traditional tribunal,” the outsider cannot judge the alternative tradition impartially. Instead, they simply judge it using the hidden, unexamined prejudices (per Gadamer) of their own tradition.

The logic of logos demands that we strip away our traditions to become completely objective observers. But MacIntyre points out that if you strip away all cultural frameworks and language games to achieve a “neutral standpoint,” you achieve not a god-like view of reality, but total intellectual blindness. You have eliminated the names, the predicates, and the grammar required to think at all. To destroy tradition is to destroy reason itself.

The conclusion to which the argument so far has led is not only that it is out of the debates, conflicts, and enquiry of socially embodied, historically contingent traditions that contention regarding practical rationality and justice are advanced, modified, abandoned, or replaced, but that there is no other way to engage in the formulation, elaboration, rational justification, and criticism of accounts of practical rationality and justice except from within some one particular tradition in conversation, cooperation, and conflict with those who inhabit the same tradition. There is no standing ground, no place for enquiry, no way to engage in the practices of advancing, evaluating, accepting, and rejecting reasoned argument apart from that which is provided by some particular tradition or other.10

MacIntyre, somewhat incoherently, as with Lyotard and others, tries to have his liberal cake and eat it too: to maintain traditional Catholicism, he grants some measure of commensurability among traditions. In Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), MacIntyre argues that a tradition proves its superiority not by appealing to an impartial court but by demonstrating that it can understand the internal failures of its rival better than the rival can understand itself. There is something to this argument, but it is clear that MacIntyre’s deeper point about the dependence of reason upon tradition lends itself better to a folkish than a universalist worldview.

The logocentric case has not been abandoned in modern philosophy, although it is most vigorously defended by figures of lesser importance than those we have mentioned so far. But it has been defended. For example, Donald Davidson argued in 2015 that radical incommensurability is logically impossible.

Engaging Quine directly, Davidson challenges his central metaphor: the “conceptual scheme,” or tradition as a closed web of belief that shapes reality from the inside out. He calls this the “third dogma of empiricism” (Quine having named the first two dogmas)—the dualism of a completely neutral, uninterpreted reality on one hand, and an indexical linguistic scheme that organizes it on the other.

Davidson points to what we might call the paradox of recognition: if a rival tradition were truly, radically incommensurable—if its axioms, names, and logic shared absolutely zero common ground with yours—you would be entirely blind to it. For Davidson, translation is not a secondary bridge built between two pre-existing bubbles. Rather, the capacity for translation is the condition of language itself. If you can translate it—even poorly or with great effort—it is not incommensurable.

It seems like the logocentrist has put the folkish pagan in checkmate. So where does Davidson go wrong? The exact mechanics of Davidson’s error lie in the logocentrist move we have repeated throughout this article series: the attempt to shift the linguistic terrain from the imperative (prescription) to the indicative (description). Traditions are not descriptions of reality, but more fundamentally, prescriptions handed down by authority.

To expose the absurdity of the Davidsonian translation when applied to systems of axiomatic authority, let us take two games as an example: Chess and Minecraft. Both are universally recognized as “games.” An observer can watch someone slide a wooden piece or mine a digital block and instantly recognize that intentional, rule-bound human activity is taking place. But what can you actually “translate” between them? What does the Bishop’s diagonal movement translate to in Minecraft? Nothing, because Minecraft operates on a three-dimensional, open-world spatial grid where movement is fluid and continuous, not restricted to turn-based, two-dimensional geometric vectors. What does “checkmate” translate to in Minecraft? Nothing, because Minecraft has no win-state, no king to trap, and no predefined end. To attempt a Davidsonian translation between Chess and Minecraft is a category error. The “games” are not descriptions of an external landscape—the games are the rules themselves. And rules do not describe; they command.

Davidson treats traditions as if they were simply rival encyclopedias—competing collections of propositions that try to describe the same physical reality (e.g., “the rabbit is running”). Because propositions claim to state objective facts about the world, they claim a universal, third-person quality. They can be translated because their truth value does not depend on who utters them. But traditions do not function as descriptions; they function as prescriptions. They are networks of imperatives given by an axiomatic authority—“thou shalt,” “move diagonally,” “suo quisque ritu sacrificia faciat.” As we pointed out in the first article in this series, the grammar of the imperative is fundamentally situational and indexical. It requires a specific commander (the authority) and a specific subject (the follower). You cannot “translate” the command of a specific sovereign into an open-source, universal language without completely stripping away its binding force.

We can make this clear by looking at a medical prescription. If a doctor writes a proposition—“penicillin cures infection”—that statement is translatable because it describes a biological mechanism, even if the terms of the translating language are not quite commensurable. But if a doctor writes a prescription—“take two tablets every eight hours”—that statement is an imperative directed exclusively at you. If an outsider tries to “translate” that prescription into a universal law for everyone to follow, the result is a medical catastrophe. The imperative only makes sense within its rigid, second-person indexical structure: Who spoke it, to whom was it spoken, and under what specific authority?

Since names are concepts and concepts are prescriptions, this has fatal implications for the deep translatability that Davidson wants to defend. As we discussed in the second article in this series, a concept is an illocutionary act. It is a performative instruction issued by an authority that commands the community: “Take this raw data (X) as this meaningful token (Y).” Since concepts are fundamentally prescriptions, Davidson’s claim that we can “translate” them because we share an objective background falls apart.

A doctor writes a prescription for a specific dosage of penicillin, but this cannot be translated. At best, an outsider looking at the medical chart can only abstractly conclude: “well, there is some amount of penicillin that some patient ought to take.” To arrive at a “translatable” core, the logocentric tribunal must violently bleach away the word’s actual meaning—its prescriptive power, its indexical urgency, its historical authority, and its situational execution. What remains is a useless truism. To say that all human traditions share a “common ground” because they all have some way of dealing with food, some way of dealing with ancestors, or some way of dealing with kinship is to say nothing of substance at all.

If X is the right dose, or the right way to think of what our tradition calls “father,” then outside our tradition, we can conclude no more than that X exists. But existence is not a predicate, as per Kant. Since Davidson’s abstract “some”-ness collapses down to the mere claim that a prescription (via a concept) exists, Kant’s rule dictates that this abstract commonality has zero conceptual content. If the only thing the modern family court and the traditional father share is the abstract acknowledgement that the child exists, they share nothing of conceptual substance—they cannot say what is right for the child, who ought to hold jurisdiction over the child, or anything about the child at all. Because existence is not a predicate, Davidson’s “shared baseline” is contentless exactly in proportion as it is universal. It is an empty container stripped of all prescriptive, grammatical, and situational meaning. If existence is not a predicate, then the logocentric act of translation is actually a form of epistemic nihilism. We should not wonder, then, that nihilism is found only in societies in their dotage, only when the secularizing effects of discursivity have worked their way to their civilizational conclusions.

The poverty of logocentric counter-apologetics now becomes clear. None of the Axial apologists engaging with folkishness has engaged with our best philosophy, for if they had, they would know that they disagree with the substance of the best thinkers of our time, who have only formalized the wisdom of the greatest men of archaic times. The best thinkers have all, to a man, rediscovered the pre-Axial, particularist bedrock that underwrites discourse. The Axialist has not even engaged with those who would defend him, such as Davidson. He simply repeats lazy performative arguments that fail to grasp, much less address, still less defeat, the folkish worldview.

If that were not bad enough for the Axialist, he fails even on his home turf, even within that secularized, “universal” domain toward which his “religion” has tended from the beginning. The Axialist disagrees with our best science.

We will spend less time laying out the scientific case for incommensurability. But it is important to note that the rejection of logocentrism is not just a niche textual critique in continental philosophy; it is, among other things, a mathematical property in evolutionary biology.

In 2021, Chetan Prakash, Donald Hoffman, and colleagues advanced the Fitness-Beats-Truth (FBT) Theorem.11 By applying evolutionary game theory and Bayesian decision theory to evolution, the FBT Theorem proves that natural selection favours perceptions not because they accurately depict objective reality. Instead, an organism that perceives the world strictly through the lens of expected-fitness payoffs will consistently out-compete and drive to extinction an organism that attempts to see the “objective truth.”

The claim of logocentrism is that our brains are truth-seeking machines built to map propositions onto an external world. Davidson’s entire critique relies on this confusion: he assumes that, because we live in the same physical reality, our languages must be, at bottom, faithful descriptions of that reality. But the FBT Theorem shows this to be a biological impossibility—the currency of life is survival and reproduction before truth. If a creature wastes metabolic energy trying to calculate the absolute quantum or mathematical state of an object rather than its immediate survival utility, it dies. Our perceptual systems are more a desktop user interface than a window onto objective reality. A file icon on your computer screen is blue and rectangular, but the actual file in the hard drive is not blue or rectangular—it is a chaotic configuration of silicon, voltage, and magnets. The interface actively hides the objective reality because if most of us had to manipulate the raw code just to write an email, the computer would be useless to us.

What we call a percept is better thought of as an incoming command, rather than a representation of something “out there.” When your visual system picks up a shape, and your brain labels it “cliff,” your brain is not making a disinterested topographical claim. It is issuing an imperative: “do not step there.” Our concepts are biological prescriptions that have been compressed and precisely tailored to our evolutionary niche. The FBT Theorem proves mathematically that these prescriptions are completely unanchored from the true state of the objective world—they are given strictly to guide action. A rattlesnake and a Northern Long-Eared Bat have mutually exclusive hearing ranges: each is deaf to the other. Natural selection shapes our brains such that our very neurons are hardwired to process the world as a series of authoritative commands—Searle’s “X counts as Y in context C” becomes “take X to demand that you Y for the sake of survival”—rather than a collection of impartial facts.

When we look through this scientific lens back at Donald Davidson’s paradox of recognition, his error becomes obvious. Davidson argues that if two traditions can see the same world, they must share an ontologically deeper core of objective truth, but this confuses shared fitness payoffs with shared objective truth. Two radically different species—or two radically different human traditions—can navigate the same physical space and recognize each other’s rule-bound behaviours without both accessing a neutral, transparent logos. They can do so because they are both organic entities bound by the rigid, indexical imperatives of survival.

This brings us back to the Kantian trap we identified earlier. If the FBT theorem proves that all our perceptual categories are merely fitness-seeking interfaces, then what happens when a logocentric philosopher tries to find a “common truth” between two cultures? They strip away the specific, survival-critical prescriptions of each tradition until they are left with nothing but the naked assertion that something exists—and we are back to the ultimate, contentless “some”-ness. But by reducing the rich, evolutionary, life-preserving imperatives of a culture to a mere claim of existence, logocentrism completely empties the tradition of its essence, because the essence of tradition is not the contemplation of truth. Our best mathematical models show that we are trapped within highly specialized, authority-driven, incommensurable interfaces designed for action, not contemplation—and it is action that lies at the heart of tradition.

Human reason is not an abstract system of literal, propositional logic, but rather, our entire conceptual network is fundamentally metaphorical and embodied. This was shown in the work of cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson, which culminated in their 1980 book Metaphors We Live By.12 In it, Lakoff and Johnson provide empirical cognitive evidence that concepts are prescriptive, indexical structures generated by our physical interaction with the environment, rather than one-to-one matches to objective reality.

The claim of logocentrism (and of analytical philosophy before Wittgenstein’s late turn) is that meaning is literal, propositional, and objective. It assumes that words are transparent tokens that correspond directly to things in the world—early Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning—and that reason consists of manipulating these literal statements via universal rules of logic. But Lakoff and Johnson dismantle this by showing that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured—rather than thinking abstractly with a literal vocabulary, we map abstract domains onto concrete, physical experiences.13

Take their famous example: “ARGUMENT IS WAR.” This is more than a poetic way of speaking, but dictates how we actually think and act. We attack positions, defend claims, win or lose debates, and use strategy. The concept “Argument” is a prescriptive blueprint, not a match with an external fact, inherited from a specific cultural tradition that commands us to behave in a certain way during an intellectual disagreement.14

We come back once again to Speech Act Theory. That concepts are compressed commands to “take X as Y” is exactly how Lakoff and Johnson describe the mechanics of conceptual metaphors. These metaphors are orientational and ontological prescriptions hardwired into our cognitive architecture through our bodies. To the “ARGUMENT IS WAR” example, we could add “HAPPY IS UP” and “SAD IS DOWN.” We say “I’m feeling up today” or “My spirits sank.” Why? Because when humans are sad, they physically droop, and when they are happy, they stand erect.15 We could also add “TIME IS MONEY.” We spend, waste, save, and budget time. Far from a trans-historical truth, this is a highly specific, industrial, capitalist prescription demanding that the modern mind treat a continuous, abstract phenomenon (X) as a scarce, quantifiable commodity (Y). These are prescriptions for action, not descriptions of reality. They are indexical and situational. They depend entirely on the nature of the human body, which experiences gravity, maintains balance, and has a front-to-back orientation. Moreover, they depend on the axiomatic authority of the tradition that institutionalizes the metaphor, returning us once again to Nietzsche and Lyotard.

Lakoff’s and Johnson’s work completely unravels the logocentric model. Davidson and other Axialists claim that if we can recognize another tradition, we must be able to translate it because we share a deeper core of objective, literal truths. But two traditions can inhabit entirely different conceptual universes, grounded in distinct foundational metaphors.

Imagine a culture where the dominant metaphor is “ARGUMENT IS A DANCE.” In this tradition, the participants are not trying to attack or defeat one another; they are trying to perform a balanced, aesthetically pleasing, cooperative movement.16 If an Axialist observer encounters this culture, how do they translate it? Following Davidson’s “Principle of Charity,” the observer must set aside specific cultural prescriptions to find a “common baseline.” They strip away the dance, the cooperation, and the aesthetic element of the disagreement, reducing the interaction to the hollow, indicative proposition: “Two humans are uttering statements to one another”—once again, no more than that “X exists.” But this logocentric approach has completely missed the cognitive reality of the tradition: a set of commands that dictate cooperation rather than conflict.

Our brains are physically incapable of abstract thought without the scaffolding of metaphorical projection.17 Because different traditions anchor their societies to entirely different networks of foundational metaphors, their worldviews are incommensurable. You cannot translate between them because you cannot translate between the embodied, historical commands that give those metaphors their binding force.18

Another scientific basis that militates against the logocentric view can be found in neurobiology—specifically, the paradigm shift toward Predictive Processing and Active Inference, pioneered by neuroscientists such as Karl Friston and Andy Clark. This framework replaces the traditional view of the brain as a passive mirror that processes incoming sensory data to construct an objective description of the world. Instead, modern neuroscience shows that the brain is an active “prediction engine”—it projects top-down models of reality to anticipate and simulate sensory inputs before they even arrive.19

The brain does not passively receive data from the eyes and ears to build a concept. Rather, our pre-existing, culturally and historically conditioned models—what neuroscientists call “priors”—dictate what we are physically capable of perceiving.20 If a piece of sensory data contradicts a deeply entrenched, high-precision prior (the brain’s model, inherited through the axiomatic authority of biological imperatives), the brain will actively suppress, filter out, or distort that data to preserve the coherence of its internal system. In other words: authority determines discourse. The brain’s top-down axiomatic model dictates what can register as a valid “fact” or “sensation.” Reason does not judge the model; the model dictates what reason is allowed to see.

A real-world example of this neurological process is how our brains perceive optical illusions, specifically the famous “Hollow Face Illusion.” If you look at the inside of a hollow plastic mask—the concave, backward side—your brain forces you to see it as a normal, convex face sticking outward. Even if you know it is hollow, and even if you shine a flashlight directly inside to prove it is concave, you cannot stop the illusion. Your eyes are receiving actual, bottom-up sensory data from light waves, indicating that the mask is hollow and caved inward, but your brain possesses a deeply entrenched, lifelong “prior” expectation shaped by millions of years of evolution and daily experience: all human faces stick outward. This model is held with absolute certainty and high precision. Because the raw sensory data (the representation of a hollow face) violently contradicts the brain’s authoritative model (the expectation of a convex face), the prediction engine refuses to accept it. Instead of updating the model to fit the new facts, the brain actively suppresses, filters out, and distorts the incoming visual signals. It forces the data to conform to its top-down expectations.

When two traditions clash, the Axialist argues that their shared physical environment should guarantee common ground, but predictive processing reveals the Axial error. Two traditions operating with distinct cultural architectures are doing more than holding different opinions about the same world: their brains are running distinct simulation software. Because their top-down priors partition and weigh sensory input differently, they generate different experiences from the exact same input. And because these priors operate at a subconscious level prior to propositional language, they cannot be brought before a universal tribunal. You cannot evaluate a prior in a language that the prior itself has constructed. Different traditions are radically incommensurable because their neurological machinery operates from the inside out.

The predictive processing model goes even further through the concept of Active Inference. When the brain encounters a discrepancy between its internal model and the external world, it has two choices: it can change its mind (“perceptual inference”) or change the world to match its mind (“active inference”). This is how authority enforces its language games, but phrased in neurobiological terms, and it mirrors Lyotard’s différend. When a dominant power encounters an alternative tradition that threatens its predictive framework, it does not engage in dialogue to find common truth. Instead, the dominant system uses active inference to violently reshape the environment—reformatting the father-led household into a joint enterprise between equals, or the language of familial piety into bureaucratic legalism—until the incoming data finally conforms to its top-down expectations.

The “consensus” that Davidson observes is not a discovery of deep ontological truth, but rather, the neurological byproduct of a new system that successfully uses active inference to overwrite the discrepancies of the old system. By forcing the world to match its priors, the winning tradition claims to have found a universal logos, when it has merely executed a successful conquest.

The entire architecture of human cognition relies on the rich, specific, prescriptive predicates generated by our top-down priors—the commands that tell the organism how to navigate its environment. To strip away these predictive lenses in search of an objective, shared baseline is to empty the brain of its capacity to process reality. It trades a functional interface for a state of total cognitive static, a chaotic welter in which impartial discourse is impossible.

If it were not clear before, it is now clear that logocentrism, as a worldview, accords neither with our best rational discourse nor our observations of the world, nor even with our understanding of who we are. Supreme irony, then, that it claims to defend reason as neutral ground, and the objective facts of reality as proof of its validity.

As we showed in the second article in our series, folkishness need not advance its own framework, but can simply show that the Axial worldview fails by its own standards. However, the folkish framework privileges the concrete tradition above the abstract tribunal, above taking the view from nowhere. When we look at the concrete tradition as it exists today—when we say, along with the Axialist, “we are here now”—we find that the tradition agrees with us. We began in an archaic world where man’s thrownness was a gift and an endowment. Through a long historical detour, we came to believe that our thrownness was a curse. Now, by working out the contradictions in that detour, we are returning home. What Tristan Powers says of Christianity, we could as well say of Axiality in general: it is the middle child of history, orphaned between what is ancient and generative, and what is advanced.

In our article How to Destroy Universalism, we stated: “your tradition is not built out of metaphysics, but your metaphysics are built out of tradition.” This caused a scandal at the time, with Platonists chortling over what was, to them, barely intelligible. But this scandalous statement is borne out by the linguistic turn in modern philosophy, the postmodern revolution (albeit without its pessimism), and the latest developments in neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Each in its own domain confirms the dependence of discourse on rules, with the implication that it depends on authority. Put bluntly in our article Toward a Real Folkish Theology:

There is no metaphysics that does not ultimately derive from tradition. Metaphysics cannot presume to correct or dictate to tradition. Metaphysics is the forest and tradition the trees. Where metaphysics disagrees with tradition, metaphysics is wrong. Where tradition disagrees with itself, metaphysics is not in a position to correct it. Only authority can correct it, which derives from tradition.

If you attempt to critique your own tradition, you must use the very language provided by that tradition to accomplish the task. Your “apostasy” is still mapped out by the linguistic possibilities, cultural practices, and biological limitations you inherited, rendering apostasy, strictly speaking, impossible. Is it any wonder, then, that Christianity served to preserve paganism rather than destroy it?

The folkish apologist thus turns the Axial performative argument on its head: “before you can have discourse, thus truth, you must already concede the primacy of tradition-bound concepts just to have a discussion at all, so the fact that we’re talking proves my point.” When you look out into “the world,” you might think everything is made of matter, or ideas, or perhaps relations, but none of this gets near the bedrock. The world is really made of tradition; tradition is made of authority; and authority is authorship.

In the fourth and final article in this series, we will tie up the loose ends and respond to the last two Christian counter-apologetics articles.