ReadingRate · A guide

The limits of your language

Some words end a thought before it has started. This page shows which ones, what they hide, and what thinking looks like past them.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.6

The same sentence, three structures

The Model of Hierarchical Complexity sorts reasoning by how it is organised. Stage 11, Formal, relates abstract variables in a line. Stage 12, Systematic, coordinates many variables into a system. Stage 13, Metasystematic, compares whole systems with each other. Choose a claim and watch it argued at each.

Social media is bad for society.

Formal: a line between variables

Social media encourages comparison. Comparison produces anxiety. Therefore social media harms psychological well-being.

Systematic: a constellation

Social media's effects depend on platform design, age, developmental psychology, peer networks, cultural norms and economic incentives. These variables act on each other and produce different outcomes under different conditions.

Metasystematic: constellations compared

Psychological, economic, technological and sociological models each describe part of social media. Their definitions of well-being, value, agency and harm do not line up. The work is to see how each framework builds the problem, where they contradict or complete each other, and what larger model could hold them together.

Immigration is bad for a country.

Formal: a line between variables

Immigration increases the supply of labour. More labour pushes wages down. Therefore immigration makes workers poorer.

Systematic: a constellation

What immigration does depends on the skills of the people who arrive and of those already there, on housing supply, the age of the population, public finances, how quickly newcomers integrate and how much work there is. These act on each other, so the same arrivals can strain one town and revive another.

Metasystematic: constellations compared

Economics counts output, wages and taxes. Political theory asks who belongs and who decides. Sociology looks at trust and how communities hold together. Each means something different by a country and by bad for it. The work is to see what each framework counts, where they contradict or complete each other, and what larger view could weigh them together.

Patriarchy is the root of our problems.

Formal: a line between variables

Men hold most positions of power. People in power write rules that suit themselves. Therefore our problems come from male dominance.

Systematic: a constellation

Gender hierarchy works together with class, law, religion, family structure, the labour market and culture. Each changes how the others work, so the same hierarchy produces different outcomes for different people in different places.

Metasystematic: constellations compared

Feminist theory, economics and evolutionary biology each explain inequality between the sexes. One treats hierarchy as built, one as the sum of individual trade-offs, one as partly inherited. Each defines power, choice and nature in its own way. The work is to see what each framework can and cannot see, and what larger account could hold their findings together.

Formal: a line between variables. A coherent causal argument. One thread runs from one variable to another, and the argument stands or falls on that thread.

Systematic: a constellation. Many threads at once. No single thread decides the outcome; the pattern of the whole does.

Metasystematic: constellations compared. The systems themselves become the objects. The lines now run between constellations.

Red flags: words that close the question

These words are common, and most of the time they are fine. They become red flags when they carry a hidden claim: that the distinction they make is a property of the world, and that it says everything there is to say about what it names. Their other names are loaded language and, for whole phrases, thought-terminating clichés. Choose a word to see what it can hide.

Moral absolutism

Epistemic absolutism

Identity essentialism

Causal reductionism

Binary thinking

Ideological reification

Rhetorical closure

The reddest flag is the unspoken claim that a distinction exhausts what it describes.

Paste a paragraph

Paste something you wrote: a review, an email, a post. The page underlines every word from the seven groups and counts them. It runs in your browser and nothing you paste is sent anywhere.

This scores sentences, never people. A closure word is a place to ask a question. A paragraph with none can still be closed, and a paragraph full of them can be careful thinking. The check knows words; it cannot read structure.

The assumptions under the words

  1. Ontological closure: Named, so bounded. Because something can be named, it exists as a separate thing with an edge. She is an introvert.
  2. Epistemic closure: Explained, so complete. Because something can be explained, the explanation is the whole story. It's just dopamine.
  3. Causal closure: Happened, so someone did it. Because something happened, there must be an agent or a first cause behind it. Prices rose, so someone raised them.
  4. Normative closure: Evaluated, so one frame. Because something can be judged, one way of judging must govern every case. Lying is wrong, full stop.
  5. Systemic closure: Who watches the watchmen? Because a system explains things well, the system itself needs no explaining. Your doubt is what the system trained you to feel.

The fifth is the hardest to see. Juvenal's question, quis custodiet ipsos custodes, who watches the watchmen, applies to frameworks too. A systematic thinker can understand capitalism, evolutionary psychology or psychoanalysis extraordinarily well and still let the chosen framework judge every claim while nothing judges it. Stage 13 begins when the framework itself is watched: examined, compared with another, and changed.

The list can be a trap too

Calling good, wrong, truth and reality signs of low-level thinking can itself be low-level thinking. A sophisticated thinker can say that torture is wrong, that the Earth is real, that a scientific claim is true. A judgment does not get less sophisticated by being decisive.

And someone can insist that everything is contextual and constructed while never once coordinating two explanatory systems. That is stage 11 dressed in the vocabulary of stage 13.

Complexity shows in the structure of reasoning. A sophisticated vocabulary proves nothing. A real stage-13 account of truth would set correspondence, coherence, pragmatist and constructivist theories side by side, find where each holds, and work out principles for choosing among them. The result might be a firmer claim to truth, held with a clearer sense of what it rests on.

The Model of Hierarchical Complexity scores how a task is performed. It does not score isolated words, and it says nothing about a person's worth.

A novel that breaks stage 11

Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel is set among the V-2 rockets falling on London and the collapse of Germany after the war. It stages the move past linear thinking as plot. Four places to see it:

Pointsman: stimulus and response

Dr Pointsman is a Pavlovian. He believes every effect has a cause that can be found and conditioned, and he wants to explain why Slothrop's map of London matches the rocket strikes. His world is made of switches, on or off, the zero and the one. It is stage 11 at full strength: rigorous, coherent, and sure that one thread explains the event.

Roger Mexico: the Poisson distribution

Roger Mexico, the statistician, maps the strikes across London's grid with a Poisson distribution. It describes the whole pattern of hits without predicting the next one: a square hit twice is no more or less likely to be hit again. He lives in the space between zero and one that Pointsman cannot enter. The two men read the same rockets with different systems, and the novel makes the reader hold both.

They: the search for a mastermind

The book's paranoia is the search for a mastermind made into plot. Somewhere a They arranged it all: the cartels, the rocket, Slothrop's conditioning. Pynchon gives paranoia its due and then names the alternative, anti-paranoia, where nothing connects to anything, a condition few can bear for long. Both are closures. The novel keeps the reader between them.

The Zone: when the map fails

In the Zone, the occupied Germany of 1945, borders, papers and authorities have dissolved. Slothrop goes in looking for the rocket and his own history and comes apart: by the end he is scattered, and the book stops trying to keep him whole. The single explanation fails, and the novel leaves the reader in the space a larger frame would have to hold.

Gravity's Rainbow in the catalogue

Old names for closed thinking

Many of these moves were named long ago, in law, logic and rhetoric. The Latin is worth knowing because it names the move without naming the topic, so it travels to any argument.

Malum in se
Wrong in itself. A legal term for an act that is wrong by its nature, as against one that is wrong because a law forbids it. As a habit of mind it treats good and evil as properties a thing carries, with no one doing the judging.
Res ipsa loquitur
The thing speaks for itself. A doctrine in negligence law: some accidents prove carelessness on their face. In argument it is the work done by obviously, clearly and common sense, which say the evidence needs no reading.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
After this, therefore because of this. Taking what came first as the cause of what came next. Because, caused by and root cause invite it when one earlier event is made to carry the whole explanation.
Tertium non datur
No third is given. The law of the excluded middle: a statement is either true or false. Sound in logic, it becomes a closure when it is carried into always and never, success and failure, us and them, where a third option usually exists.
Ipse dixit
He himself said it. Cicero's phrase for the followers of Pythagoras, who settled arguments by citing their master. It names any claim that rests on the speaker's say-so: simply, just, at the end of the day.
Nomen est omen
The name is a sign. After Plautus: a name foretells its bearer. Ontological closure takes the name for the edge of the thing.
Omne quod movetur ab alio movetur
Whatever moves is moved by another. The premise of the first of Thomas Aquinas's five ways, which ends at a first mover. Causal closure applies it to every event: something happened, so someone or something set it going.
Fiat justitia, ruat caelum
Let justice be done, though the heavens fall. A maxim that puts the rule above every consequence. Normative closure holds one rule over every case, whatever the case.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Who will guard the guards themselves?. Juvenal, Satires VI. Asked of a framework, it is the question systemic closure never puts to itself.
Cum hoc ergo propter hoc
With this, therefore because of this. Taking things that occur together as cause and effect. It is Pointsman's mistake: Slothrop's map matches the rocket strikes, so there must be a conditioning that links them. The novel twists it further. The map comes before the strikes, so even post hoc fails, and Pointsman still wants a cause.
Cui bono?
To whom is it a benefit?. Cicero's question, after the judge Lucius Cassius. A fair question in an investigation; in the paranoid mode it assumes its answer, that whoever benefits arranged it all.
Terra incognita
Unknown land. The blank on old maps. The Zone is where the maps stop working, and the novel asks the reader to stay there.

The one question

What system of assumptions makes this statement look self-evident, and what changes when we look at it from a system with different assumptions?

Books that push past stage 11

Short answers

What is a thought-terminating cliché?

A phrase that ends a line of thought by sounding like a conclusion: it is what it is, that's just human nature, at the end of the day. The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton named them in 1961, in his study of thought reform. This page widens the idea to single words, such as obviously, natural and toxic, that carry a hidden claim.

What are red-flag words in an argument?

Words that claim more than they show: absolutes such as always and never, labels presented as facts such as toxic and narcissistic, and words that end discussion such as obviously and simply. Most of the time they are fine. They become red flags when the distinction they make is treated as the whole truth about what it names.

What does post hoc ergo propter hoc mean?

It is Latin for after this, therefore because of this: the mistake of treating what came first as the cause of what came after. Its relative, cum hoc ergo propter hoc, with this, therefore because of this, treats things that happen together as cause and effect.

What is the Model of Hierarchical Complexity?

A scale developed by Michael Lamport Commons and colleagues that sorts tasks by how their parts are organised, from simple actions up to thinking that relates whole paradigms. It scores how a task is performed. It says nothing about a person's worth.

What is the difference between formal, systematic and metasystematic thinking?

Formal thinking, stage 11 in the current numbering, relates variables in a line: this causes that. Systematic thinking, stage 12, coordinates many variables into one system. Metasystematic thinking, stage 13, compares whole systems, asks where each holds, and looks for a way to join them.

What does “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” mean?

It is proposition 5.6 of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921): what a language can say marks out what a speaker can state about the world. This page reads the line practically. Some words quietly end a thought, and noticing them is the way past them.

The word groups and the checker are a linguistic heuristic. They are not an instrument for scoring stages on the Model of Hierarchical Complexity, and a count of words says nothing reliable about anyone's stage.

Stage numbers follow the expanded numbering, where Formal is 11, Systematic 12 and Metasystematic 13. Older papers number each of these one lower, so Formal appears there as 10.

Michael Lamport Commons, “Introduction to the Model of Hierarchical Complexity and its Relationship to Postformal Action,” World Futures 64 (2008). The Dare Association, which maintains the model and its scoring manuals.