First year of literature academy (What'd be an english mayor course in the USA, I think) and the question of "What is literature" has come up often, mainly in literally theory, where it's the central question.

And... and it's nothing. Reading and talking about it, it's nothing. There was a single development in the field when estrangement was described and that was like 200 or 300 years ago, and it's laid flat achieving nothing ever since. Entire tomes to ask "What makes a text litelary" and the answer is paragraphs upon paragraphs of shrugging their shoulders because it's a cultural thing so it can't be defined exactly.

I mean, I'm not the type to want to know what I can pull out of a book with a syringe and inject into a newspaper to make it literature, I agree that you can't, but I find it odd that it's such a central, repeated question when the answer is, to put it succintly, "Idk, you know it when you see it.".

Is this just me missing something or is this just a question that hasn't achieved anything yet gets weird amounts of discussion, time, and print? Is this just elitists who want to gatekeep high art and adhd people who's manic about classifying everything into square boxes angry at round pegs?

for a little over half a year now I have been looking into and studying external world skepticism. some responses to the problem seem to be good, others are not; some are interesting and some are rather dull. but, not to pander on, another response I have recently looked into is Thomas Reid’s. in the past I tended to just dismiss Reid because I thought by “appealing to common sense” he was just being dogmatic and somewhat fideistic, but I’ve recently learned his arguments are far more intuitive than that. he accuses skeptics of arbitrarily doubting some things and accepting others, seemingly nitpicking parts of their cognitive faculties to doubt other parts of them. what I am wondering is, in your opinions, how effective is this style of a response to problems of epistemology such as the brain in a vat? have any modern authors used something similar to Reid’s arguments, or been inspired by them? thanks!

Can you know how much you don't know?

The Epistemic Incompleteness Principle says no, because it's structurally impossible.

In attempting to assess how complete your knowledge is, you come up with some estimate and a confidence level in that estimate.

Then you need some procedure for checking whether your estimate is accurate. But that checking procedure is itself something your mind produced, and your mind is the thing whose completeness you're trying to assess. Now you need another procedure to check that one. Regress ensues.

Any tool you use to measure your own ignorance is made of the same material as the ignorance it's trying to measure. You can't step outside your own mind to get an objective reading.

EIP says that no such estimate can be certified as accurate from the inside.

This applies to everything that counts as a knower: human minds, organizations, and artificial intelligence systems, e.g.

Any self-report is generated by the same system whose completeness is in question. EIP's distinctive claim is that no knower can certify, from within, how large the gaps are.

This is a big problem for classical theism, which holds that God knows everything with no gaps at all. EIP argues that the claim "God's knowledge is complete" cannot be internally certified by anyone, including God. God might be able to know everything except that God knows everything.

If a being asserts its own omniscience, that assertion is produced by the same knowing that's being assessed, and EIP applies: whatever grounds that self-assessment is either internal, which generates the regress, or external, which means it's not a self-certification at all.

Some theologians respond that God's knowledge isn't propositional in the first place. That it's a direct, "non-discursive awareness" rather than a set of represented facts. But this doesn't escape the problem. The claim "God's knowledge is complete" is itself a proposition, made by theologians using the ordinary tools of assertion and argument. The moment you assert completeness as a meaningful predicate, you're making an epistemic claim that's subject to EIP.

Michael Holton, The Epistemic Incompleteness Principle - PhilPapers

The distinction between subjectivity and objectivity commonly employed in the modern world can be summarized as follows:

• Subjective = how I perceive or feel.
• Objective = how things actually are.

This distinction presupposes that one's interpretation of the world can never truly coincide with the way the world actually is. To say that "how I perceive" is distinct from "how things really are" is to assume that human beings can never attain an objective, divine perspective.

Accordingly, subjectivity comes to be understood as something possessed only by the individual, while objectivity is redefined as that which is shared among multiple subjective perspectives—that is, what can be commonly affirmed or validated by many people. The subjective becomes a psychological event confined to the individual mind, while the objective becomes an unattainable ideal. As long as all human knowledge begins from subjective perspectives, even the sciences regarded as objective are understood as continually revising themselves and progressively approaching objectivity, yet never becoming objectivity itself.

Within this framework, an individual's experience of God is necessarily classified as subjective, since it cannot be directly shared with others. It therefore remains excluded from the supposedly objective horizon constituted by what many people can publicly verify.

There is, however, a fundamental misunderstanding in this way of thinking.

To receive divine revelation is not merely to experience a private religious feeling. It is to internalize the divine perspective and thereby come to see the world through it. If this definition is accepted, faith is no longer merely a psychological event occurring within the subject; it becomes a transformation of the very standard by which reality is perceived.

In this event, the divine perspective that is internalized is both subjective and objective. It is the event in which how I perceive reality becomes aligned with the way reality actually is. Scripture describes knowing God as having one's mind renewed, one's eyes opened, and one's capacity to discern truth transformed by the Holy Spirit.

If such a transformation is possible, then the conventional distinction between subjectivity and objectivity no longer holds. When the human perspective participates in the divine perspective, the subjective becomes objective.

The claims are

1. competence and knowledge precede morality.

2. competence and knowledge can lead to morally and socially desirable outcomes without having a complete ethical argument.

Why is this relevant. Today in the radio, am NGO was making the case that urban design in terms of mobility should change to be more tender amd empathetic towards its citizens. The premise was not very well defined what was meant by tender. However it was clearly beleived that one major factor that prevents this tenderness from occurring is the necessity to produce and be productive.

I could not see the argument beyond being a greatly subjective claim based on some kind of morality. It was simply given that being more tender would lead to better outcomes although it was not clearly defined what tender was nor what the outcomes would be, it was clear that one important point would be to make walking and using the public transport more desirable or at least with less hurdles.

This is one example, however I tend to see many people that want to change some status quo making moral claims. They immediately dichotomize the world into good and bad. Obviously not everyone, but many NGOs do this and in many occurrences it is demonstrably wrong.

For example, the real economic value of walking and using bikes brings a net benefit in Europe whereas using cars brings a net cost. This is a much stronger argument because it moves people from being evil into showing how a system is inherently inneficient when it incentivizes using automobiles more than walking and cycling. So economics and productivity are not really the enemies of tenderness but rather the terrible urban designs that generate tons of costs.

In this sense, plenty of NGOs and spcial movements can move beyond the moral bases and into epistemological ones but they lack the econonomic literacy to do so. The reason is that they often wrongly c9nfound economics with finance and profits with economic value and economics overall with what they call capitalism. In other words, recognizing the real costs and the dramatic economic inefficiencies as quantitative knowledge can lead to greater changes and better outcomes than using moral bases for change.

Would you agree? Am I missimg something?

Naturally I am not stating that morals or ethics are not necessary for anything, I am stating that good intentions without knowledge lead to failed systems too.

The proof I would like share with you amounts to a trivial extension of Kurt Gödels' and Alfred Tarski's respective Incompleteness and Undefinability Theorems, so those of you already familiar with them, and what they mean[t] for epistemelogy and philosophical discourse will likely find this paper to seem redundant/superfluous. The argument employs three neologisms of my own creation that it could technically do without, but they're included because a) the proof was originally elaborated in the context of this full paper, whose core message they enabled me to elaborate more succinctly and b) I just like them as words and secretly hope one or more of them catches on.

TL:DR this is a proof that it is not possible to construct a theory that explains both itself and everything else, because attempts to do so invariably generate a infinitely descending hierarchy of meta-level explanatory demands.

Definitions:

Let T denote a theory of reality.

Definition 1 (Autological Theory): A theory is autological if it contains an account of itself. In particular, it includes propositions concerning its own structure, operation, and explanatory claims.

Definition 2 (Autotelic Theory): A theory is autotelic if it requires no explanatory resources external to itself. All explanations necessary for its adequacy are contained within the theory.

Definition 3 (Autognostic Theory): A theory is autognostic if it is both autological and autotelic. An autognostic theory possesses complete self-knowledge and complete self-explanatory closure.

Definition 4 (Explanatory Completeness): A theory is explanatorily complete if it accountsfor all truths concerning reality.

Definition 5 (Final Theory): A final theory is a theory that is both explanatorily complete and autognostic.

Proof

Axiom 1 (Self-Explanatory Adequacy): A satisfactory theory of reality should be capable of expressing and establishing all truths relevant to its domain, including truths concerning its own adequacy, truthfulness, consistency, existence, and relation to reality.

Proposition 1: Any autological theory contains propositions concerning its own adequacy.

Proposition 2: Questions concerning the adequacy of a theory generate a meta-level description.

Proposition 3: Incorporating a meta-level account into a theory generates further meta-level demands.

Assumption: Assume- for contradiction- that an autognostic and explanatorily complete theory T exists.

(I) Because T is explanatorily complete, it must account for all truths concerning reality.

(II) Because T is autognostic, it must also contain a complete account of its own adequacy, truthfulness, consistency, existence, and explanatory status.

(III) This requirement generates a meta-level account concerning the adequacy of T.

(IV) To remain autognostic, the theory must incorporate this account.

(V) The enlarged theory now requires an account of the adequacy of the enlarged theory itself.

(VI) Repeating the process generates an indefinitely extending hierarchy of explanatory demands.

(VII) Gödel’s incompleteness theorems prevent sufficiently expressive systems from internally establishing all truths relevant to themselves.

(VIII) Tarski’s undefinability theorem prevents sufficiently expressive systems from internally providing a complete account of their own truth conditions.

(IX) Therefore no stage in the hierarchy achieves complete self-explanatory closure. Consequently, T cannot be both explanatorily complete and autognostic.

(X) This contradicts the original assumption.

(XI) Conclusion: Therefore no such theory exists.

Corollaries

Proposition 4: No final theory exists. Proof: Per our definition of Final Theories and (XI) Conclusion.

Proposition 5: Reality exceeds representation whenever satisfactory representation requires autognosis. Proof: If satisfactory representation requires explanatory completeness together with autognosis, and autognosis is impossible, then no representation can fully satisfy the criterion. Some explanatory residue necessarily remains beyond the representational boundary.

It is strange how a drawing comes to life. How you can imagine something and write down your thoughts and then illustrate it and bring it to life. Then after creating on paper the ideas in your mind, others can help you bring the thoughts to the 3d world. Like Star Wars. It began as a thought, but people liked the story so much, it became something you can now watch on a screen in the real world. What else is there that has been put on paper, and widely accepted as the truth in mass public opinion, that if rejected by the minority, one can seem to be labeled as not in the right mind if they see things differently. You as a person do not reject the chemical makeup of Love yet also see the problem in Loving Everyone. Maybe the meaning of Loving Everyone implies that a person is An addition to the 0.. meaning that the ones you are to Love are not zeroes but More. I don’t know how this comes across, likely you will gather what I mean in your Thoughts. It really is beautiful in these two places that are merging into One.

propose a theory called Reflexive Horizon Epistemology (RHE).
The central claim is that all knowledge exists within a horizon of possible cognition that can never be fully apprehended by the knower.
Traditional epistemology often assumes that a subject acquires knowledge about an object. RHE instead argues that every act of knowing simultaneously reveals and conceals reality. To know something is not merely to represent an object, but to establish a cognitive horizon that determines what can subsequently appear as knowable.
Knowledge is therefore inherently reflexive: every epistemic framework contains assumptions that cannot be fully justified from within that framework itself. Just as a visual horizon recedes as one approaches it, epistemic horizons expand as inquiry progresses.
Three principles follow:
The Principle of Reflexive Limitation: Every epistemic system possesses constitutive blind spots generated by its own conditions of possibility.
The Principle of Horizon Expansion: Genuine knowledge acquisition does not merely accumulate propositions; it transforms the boundaries of possible cognition.
The Principle of Epistemic Asymptosis: Complete knowledge is impossible because cognition approaches, but never reaches, total intelligibility.
Under this view, skepticism and realism are not opposites. Skepticism identifies the permanence of epistemic horizons, while realism affirms that these horizons are horizons of something real that continually exceeds them.
Knowledge, then, is not possession of truth in a final sense, but an ongoing reflexive participation in an inexhaustible reality.
What implications might this have for foundationalism, coherentism, or phenomenological approaches to knowledge?