Love Before Intelligibility: A Metaphysical Proposal (and Its Hardest Objections)

I. Love and the Ground of Plurality

Metaphysics has long assumed that plurality must be secured by difference. If there are two, there must be something—some property, position, structure, or intrinsic mark—that makes them two. I intend to deny this. I will argue that numerical distinctness need not arise from qualitative differentiation at all. It can arise from love. Before there are describable features, before there is structural articulation, before there is anything that could be counted as an internal ground of identity, there can be non-substitutability—because there can be address. If this is correct, then individuation is not primitive thisness nor formal placement within a system, but the donation of a “you.” And if that is so, plurality itself is personal at its root.

I wish to defend a thesis that will initially appear extravagant: numerical distinctness can be grounded extrinsically—by divine love—prior to any qualitative, structural, relational, or intelligible differentiation. This proposal is not rhetorical flourish. It is a deliberate relocation of the ground of individuation. I reject both the appeal to brute thisness—haecceities or bare particulars posited as metaphysical atoms—and the appeal to purely formal criteria, whether relational position, qualitative difference, or structural role. In their place I propose a personal ground: addressability, the possibility of being second-personally related to by God.

The core claim is austere: non-substitutability need not arise from intrinsic difference. It can arise from being loved.

We are to imagine pre-articulated loci of possibility that are not yet intelligible in the sense of possessing determinables or determinates. They bear no describable profile; they are not “thin objects” awaiting enrichment. Yet they are addressable. Addressability is not a property within them. It is a mode of grounding in God.

The Logos is the one in whom intelligibility is articulated. Articulation here is not conceptual imposition upon chaos, but the taking-up of what is addressably given into determinate form. Determination does not create its own field ex nihilo; it gives intelligible contour to what is already available to be taken up. The Spirit, in turn, is the one in whom articulated possibilities acquire normative weight. The Spirit does not enter the chain of events as a competing cause among causes. Rather, the Spirit orders salience and fittingness within a teleological field, constituting what shows up as to-be-done without coercing the doing.

Christology names the decisive instantiation of this structure. The incarnation does not assume a universal human nature functioning as an abstract medium shared across already constituted individuals. It assumes a concrete addressable particular whose life becomes the normative center of an opened teleo-space into which other particulars may be aligned. If this holds, individuation is not brute, modality is not abstract, universality is not generic, and divine action is not reducible to episodic intervention. Yet the cost is evident: we must show that the framework does not collapse under metaphysical strain.

II. Addressability and the Objection from Haecceity

The first objection is immediate and sharp. If two loci possess no differentiating feature—no qualitative difference, no structural distinction, no relational position—what makes them two? Is “addressability” merely haecceity under another name? If God addresses x and y distinctly, what makes this two rather than one addressed twice?

The force of the objection depends upon an unnoticed assumption: that counting precedes the constituting act. On the account I am proposing, it does not. Addressability is not a thin feature inhering in a locus. A haecceity, however minimal, remains a property belonging to the individual and securing its identity from within. Addressability, as I employ it, is not any feature of the locus whatsoever. It is a constitutive act of divine love that donates non-substitutability without introducing describable content.

We must distinguish arbitrary selection from constitutive bestowal. Arbitrary selection presupposes a plurality of already-countable items and merely chooses among them. Constitutive bestowal is the source of plurality itself. Arbitrariness presupposes fungibility. Love does not. Love is structurally non-fungible. It does not intend “an instance of a kind.” It intends “you.” That you-ness is not a profile, not a set of predicates, not an internal principle. It is non-interchangeability grounded in personal donation.

The charge of fiat will be raised. Yet every ultimate ground appears as fiat if one demands a further ground beneath it. The question is not whether the ground is ungrounded in the same register, but whether the mode of grounding invoked is intelligible. Love is intelligible as non-fungible intention. It is primitive, but not irrational. It halts regress not by stipulation, but by disclosing a different order of grounding.

A second objection presses further: if these loci are “not yet intelligible,” how can we refer to them at all? Does not addressability already imply proto-intelligibility?

Here the distinction between intelligibility and this-directedness becomes decisive. Intelligibility consists in articulable content—determinables and determinates that can be stated, predicated, formalized. This-directedness is the bare possibility of second-personal relation without describable content. To say “addressable but not intelligible” is not to posit a shadow-realm. It is to mark a limit-condition required if articulation is genuinely articulation rather than invention.

If Logos-articulation is to be more than projection, something must be available to be taken up without already being conceptually formed. That availability is not a hidden property; it is pre-semantic givenness referable by God, though not describable by us. Conceptual articulation does not exhaust ontological availability. The excess is not another concept waiting to be coined; it is the condition under which any concept can have purchase.

III. Universality, Normativity, and the Non-Causal Spirit

The Christological objection follows. If Christ assumes a concrete particular rather than a universal human nature, how does his life become relevant to other particulars? Classical Christology has appealed to shared nature precisely to avoid arbitrary particularism.

The alternative is not arbitrary isolation, but shared participation in a Logos-open teleo-space. The unity of articulation across loci is secured by the one Logos. Teleo-spaces are not private spheres. If the same Logos articulates multiple loci, the field of sense can be genuinely shared without presupposing a universal substrate. The Spirit then functions as agent of normative alignment. The Spirit does not merely render Christ psychologically compelling; the Spirit renders Christ normatively authoritative within other teleo-spaces. Christ’s life becomes measure of fittingness.

Universality, then, is not the universality of a nature abstractly possessed, but the universality of a normative center communicable across created particularities. Christ cannot be merely exemplary. He must be the particular in whom Logos-articulation becomes maximally public and teleologically central. Otherwise alignment degenerates into aesthetic resonance rather than redemption.

The final objection concerns the Spirit’s “weighting” of possibilities. If the Spirit orders salience and fittingness, is this simply causal influence? If not causal, is it merely phenomenological?

The distinction required is that between event-event causality and normative constitution. Event-event causality answers the question, “What happens next?” Normative weighting answers the question, “What counts as fitting action for an agent?” The Spirit’s work concerns the constitution of practical intelligibility—what shows up as to-be-done—without entering the chain of events as a competing cause. To avoid reducing this to subjective affect, one must affirm that the Spirit constitutes an objective ordering of reasons within the teleo-space. Experience is our mode of access to that order; it is not its ground.

Agents must indeed be capable of responding to reasons. The Spirit does not replace agency; the Spirit renders agency answerable. Freedom is preserved precisely because the good can present itself as demanding without becoming inevitable. Normativity is real without being coercive.

IV. The Severe Conclusion

If the distinctions I have insisted upon are maintained, the relocation of metaphysical centers becomes clear. Individuation moves from brute thisness to personal grounding. Modality moves from abstract possibility-spaces to addressable loci. Universality moves from shared natures to shared teleo-spaces. Divine action moves from event-causation to the constitution of intelligibility and normativity.

The final claim is neither sentimental nor ornamental. Love is not an adornment placed upon an already-structured metaphysical order. It is the ground by which plurality, intelligibility, and normativity first become possible. An impersonal ground may secure structure. It cannot secure non-fungibility. It cannot account for why there is this one rather than another, nor why “you” is not substitutable for “someone.”

If intelligibility is grounded in Logos and plurality is grounded in love, then metaphysics is personal at its root—not by projection, but by structural necessity. The alternative is either brute multiplicity without reason or formal unity without non-substitutability. Neither suffices. Only personal donation halts the regress without collapsing into arbitrariness, and only such donation renders counting itself real.

On Differentiated Possibility and the Ground of Intelligibility

The Gospel narratives describe three temptations in the wilderness. Each offered control—over necessity, over visibility, over order. Metaphysics faces analogous temptations: to reify what is structural, to mystify what is difficult, or to collapse intelligibility into subjectivity. Our task is to resist these temptations and think intelligibility and its conditions without seizing premature mastery.

Reality is intrinsically articulable. This is not a trivial claim. It means that reality can be determined in multiple ways—conceptually, formally, practically—without any single determination exhausting it. Articulation presupposes determinability: a structured openness that makes determination possible.

But determinability cannot be the first ontological word. For determination presupposes plurality, and plurality presupposes differentiation. If reality can be articulated in multiple ways, then there must already be more than one non-interchangeable locus capable of being taken up into articulation. That differentiation cannot itself arise from determinability without circularity. Determinability presupposes differentiated possibility.

We therefore call this structured openness differentiated possibility. Yet it must now be clarified: differentiated possibility does not originate as abstract modal structure. It originates as real, non-interchangeable particularity prior to intelligible articulation. It is not a domain of entities, not a stockpile of possibilia, not a logical space of consistent propositions. Nor is it chaotic flux or bare potentiality. It is the intrinsic determinability-structure of reality grounded in prior differentiation.

This differentiation cannot be brute. Bare numerical difference without ground halts explanation precisely where explanation is required. Nor can it arise from formal structure, since structure presupposes intelligible relations. Nor from universals, since universals presuppose articulation. Nor from matter, since matter belongs to determinate being. Differentiation prior to intelligibility requires grounding in a mode of agency capable of particularizing without predicating.

Only love performs this function. Love singles out without specifying. It establishes non-interchangeability without appealing to shared properties. Divine love therefore grounds differentiated possibility: what is first given is loved particularity—real plurality prior to articulation.

Differentiated possibility is pre-intelligible, not unintelligible. It is presupposed by acts of articulation rather than produced by them. Formal systems—logic, mathematics, normative critique—operate within intelligible regions, what we may call teleo-spaces. But teleo-spaces presuppose determinability, and determinability presupposes differentiated possibility grounded in divine love. Intelligibility takes up what love has first particularized.

Not all articulations are equally adequate. Some determinations are more fitting than others. This fittingness is not reducible to logical consistency. Consistency is a property of formal systems. Determinability is the ontological condition that makes formal articulation possible at all. Differentiated possibility is the ontological condition that makes determinability possible without collapsing into brute fact.

If determinability is structured and real, it cannot be self-grounding. It depends upon a source beyond modal articulation. That source cannot be another determinate entity, for all determinate being presupposes determinability. Nor can it be abstract modal structure. It must be living agency capable of grounding differentiation without brute fact and articulability without compulsion.

In philosophical terms, this ground is the condition for intelligibility. In theological terms, it is triune.

The Father creates differentiated possibility through love—grounding real, non-interchangeable particularity prior to articulation.

The Logos does not create plurality. The Logos articulates what love has given. Teleo-spaces are Logos-grounded fields of determinability within which loved particularity becomes intelligibly open without closure. Logos does not produce a realm of possibilia; Logos renders reality luminous to form.

Spirit does not mechanically determine outcomes. Spirit weights articulations toward fitting realization. Within teleo-spaces, possibilities are normatively ordered without coercion. The collapse from determinability to determination is not blind causation but responsive actualization.

This is not an appeal to mystery. It is a refusal to accept brute plurality, brute intelligibility, or brute normativity. Intelligibility presupposes determinability. Determinability presupposes differentiated possibility. Differentiated possibility presupposes divine love.

To think this without control is the beginning of metaphysical sobriety.

I. The Three Levels

We must distinguish three levels if we are to think clearly about differentiated possibility and avoid confusion.

First, there is determinate being: articulated, intelligible, actualized reality. At this level, something is what it is. It has form, structure, describable properties. It can be formalized, systematized, analyzed. Logic operates here. Mathematics operates here. Normative critique operates here. This is the level of what is already determined.

Second, there is determinability: the structured openness that makes determination possible. Determinability is not yet articulated form, but neither is it bare indeterminacy. It is the intelligible openness within which reality can support multiple determinations without being exhausted by any one of them. It is differentiated because what becomes articulated within it is not interchangeable. Some determinations are more adequate than others. This weighting is not imposed by subjectivity; it is encountered as resistance and responsiveness within the real.

Determinability is therefore pre-formal but not pre-differentiated. Formal systems articulate determinate structures. Determinability is the ontological condition that makes formal articulation possible at all. It cannot be reduced to logical consistency, for consistency presupposes articulated propositions. Nor can it be reduced to modal accessibility relations, for these are themselves formal constructions presupposing structured openness. Determinability is prior to formal representation, but it is not prior to plurality.

Third, there is the ground of differentiation: that which makes real plurality possible prior to intelligibility. If determinability is real and structured, it cannot be self-explanatory. Structured openness presupposes differentiated particularity. Plurality is not nothing. Non-interchangeability is not nothing. If reality is intrinsically articulable, that articulability depends upon a source that grounds differentiation without predication and openness without brute fact.

This ground cannot be another determinate entity within the field of articulation. Nor can it be abstract modal structure. It must be agency capable of particularizing without specifying—of establishing real non-interchangeability prior to intelligible form. Divine love alone fulfills this role. Love singles out without describing. It grounds plurality without relying upon universals, matter, or brute numerical difference.

Differentiated possibility, properly understood, names the relation between these levels. As grounded in divine love, it is real plurality prior to articulation. As articulated by the Logos, it becomes determinability—the structured openness within which determinate being can emerge. It is therefore neither determinate being nor ultimate ground, but the dependent openness of loved particularity rendered intelligible.

To collapse these levels is to invite confusion: to treat determinability as brute, to treat plurality as abstract, or to treat love as ornamental. To separate them without severing them is the task of metaphysics.

II. On the Status of Pre-Formal Structure

If determinability is structured yet pre-formal, we must clarify what kind of structure is at stake. For the analytic mind, “structure” immediately suggests rule, entailment, inferential necessity. But formal rule belongs to the first level—to articulated systems operating within already determinate domains. Pre-formal structure cannot be of that kind.

The structure of determinability is teleological orientation rather than formal rule. It is not “if X, then Y.” It is rather “X tends toward Y more fittingly than toward Z.” It is weighting rather than necessity, fittingness rather than entailment. This is why the transition from determinability to determination is not algorithmic. Algorithms function within formalized spaces. Determinability is the condition that makes such spaces possible in the first place.

We encounter this structure indirectly. Some formal articulations hold; others fracture under the weight of reality. Some normative determinations illuminate; others distort. This resistance is not brute obstruction. It is structured responsiveness. Reality does not submit equally to every articulation. It answers more readily to some than to others. That answering is not imposed by us; it is encountered.

To call this “pre-intelligible” is not to render it obscure or mystical. It is simply to say that determinability is presupposed by intelligibility rather than produced by it. Just as perception presupposes perceptibility without creating it, articulation presupposes determinability without generating it. Pre-formal structure is therefore real without being formally specifiable.

If this structure is neither formal rule nor subjective projection, it demands grounding. Teleological orientation is not self-originating. Weighting is not accidental. The articulability of reality—its capacity to support determinate form without being exhausted by it—depends upon a source that makes such orientation possible.

We now turn to that question.

III. The Ground of Determinability

If determinability is structured yet pre-formal, we must clarify what kind of structure is at stake. For the analytic mind, “structure” immediately suggests rule, entailment, inferential necessity. But formal rule belongs to the first level—to articulated systems operating within already determinate domains. Pre-formal structure cannot be of that kind.

The structure of determinability is teleological orientation rather than formal rule. It is not “if X, then Y.” It is rather “X tends toward Y more fittingly than toward Z.” It is weighting rather than necessity, fittingness rather than entailment. This is why the transition from determinability to determination is not algorithmic. Algorithms function within formalized spaces. Determinability is the condition that makes such spaces possible in the first place.

Yet teleological orientation cannot be assumed as primitive. Orientation presupposes plurality that is already non-interchangeable. If possibilities were brute and indifferent, no weighting could occur except by imposition. The fact that some articulations answer more adequately than others indicates that determinability is not a neutral field of interchangeable options. It is structured openness grounded in differentiated particularity. What is articulable has already been given as distinct prior to articulation. Teleology therefore does not float free; it arises from plurality that is not brute but grounded.

We encounter this structure indirectly. Some formal articulations hold; others fracture under the weight of reality. Some normative determinations illuminate; others distort. This resistance is not brute obstruction. It is structured responsiveness. Reality does not submit equally to every articulation. It answers more readily to some than to others. That answering is not imposed by us; it is encountered.

To call this “pre-intelligible” is not to render it obscure or mystical. It is simply to say that determinability is presupposed by intelligibility rather than produced by it. Just as perception presupposes perceptibility without creating it, articulation presupposes determinability without generating it. But perceptibility itself presupposes that there is something there to be perceived—something differentiated prior to the act of seeing. So too determinability presupposes plurality prior to articulation. Pre-formal structure is therefore real without being formally specifiable, yet it is not self-grounding.

If this structure is neither formal rule nor subjective projection, it demands grounding. Teleological orientation is not self-originating. Weighting is not accidental. The articulability of reality—its capacity to support determinate form without being exhausted by it—depends upon a source that can differentiate without predicating and particularize without imposing form. Only love can ground such non-interchangeable plurality without collapsing it into abstract structure or brute fact. Teleological orientation, as encountered within determinability, is therefore the intelligible expression of loved particularity rendered open to articulation.

We now turn to that question.

IV. Three Temptations Revisited

We may now see more clearly the temptations that threaten this account.

The first temptation is reification. Faced with the reality of determinability, we are inclined to turn it into a domain—into a stockpile of possibilia, a landscape of abstract objects, a realm of possible worlds. This promises clarity. It gives us something to point to. But it mistakes structure for substance. Differentiated possibility is not a collection of entities awaiting selection. It is the intrinsic articulability of reality itself.

The second temptation is mystification. Recognizing that determinability cannot be reduced to formal rule, we may be tempted to declare it ineffable, beyond thought, radically other than being. But this too is a form of control. It secures the ground by placing it beyond analysis. Yet the ground of intelligibility cannot be unintelligible. To say that determinability is pre-formal is not to say it is dark. It is simply to say that it is presupposed by formal articulation.

The third temptation is subjectivization. When we encounter weighting and fittingness, we may attribute them to projection, preference, or communal construction. But this collapses determinability into the structures of cognition. It forgets that formal systems and normative judgments encounter resistance. Reality answers. Not every articulation holds. The structured openness we describe is discovered, not invented.

These temptations mirror the deeper desire for mastery. We wish to possess the ground, to fix it, to neutralize its priority. Yet determinability precedes our grasp. It is the condition under which grasping becomes possible.

To think differentiated possibility rightly, then, is an exercise in restraint. It requires distinguishing levels without severing them, grounding structure without reifying it, and acknowledging dependence without surrendering clarity. Intelligibility is not self-generating. It is given within a reality that is already structured for articulation.

One may call that ground divine love, or leave it unnamed. The structure remains: reality is differentiated in love, articulated by Logos, and ordered without coercion toward fitting realization.

V. Differentiated Possibility and Being

A final clarification is required. How does differentiated possibility relate to being itself?

It is not prior to being, as though it were a substrate from which being emerges. Nor is it other than being, as though we were positing a parallel realm. And it is not identical with determinate being, for determinate being is already articulated.

Differentiated possibility names the openness of being as given in real plurality prior to articulation and rendered intelligible within it. It is not an addition to being, nor a shadow realm of unrealized options. It is the fact that being, as grounded in non-brute differentiation, is capable of multiple determinations without exhaustion. This openness is not indeterminacy. It is structured determinability arising from plurality that is neither abstract nor interchangeable.

Being is not mute stuff awaiting imposition. Nor is it a neutral field of modal variation. It is already differentiated without being specified, already given without being exhausted. Determinability is the intelligible openness of what has first been given as non-interchangeable. In this sense, differentiated possibility is the modal dimension of being—but only because being itself is grounded in loving differentiation and rendered intelligible through articulation.

To say this is not to multiply entities. We are not adding a new layer to reality. We are identifying a feature of reality’s very character: that it is differentiated without brute fact and open without arbitrariness. Determinate being is what reality is in articulation. Determinability is the openness that makes articulation possible. The ground of determinability is that by virtue of which plurality itself is neither necessary abstraction nor accidental fact.

This avoids two extremes. It avoids treating differentiated possibility as something that “exists” alongside beings, which would reify it. And it avoids dissolving it into a mere abstraction, which would render it fictional. Differentiated possibility does not exist as a thing. It is real as the openness of loved particularity to intelligible articulation.

If being were not intrinsically articulable, intelligibility would be accidental. If intelligibility were accidental, formal systems would float free of reality. But they do not. They succeed or fail in relation to what is. That success and failure presuppose structured openness within being—openness grounded in differentiation that is not brute.

Thus the question of differentiated possibility is not an excursion into speculative metaphysics. It is a disciplined attempt to name what must be the case if reality is intelligible at all and if plurality is not an unexplained remainder.

And that, finally, is the point.

VI. Intelligibility Without Mastery

We may now gather the threads.

Formal systems presuppose intelligible regions. Teleo-spaces presuppose determinability. Determinability presupposes differentiated plurality. Differentiated plurality presupposes a ground capable of particularizing without predication. None of these levels is self-generating. Each depends upon what it does not produce.

To acknowledge this is not to weaken rationality but to secure it. If intelligibility were self-grounding, it would be arbitrary. If determinability were chaotic, articulation would be accidental. If plurality were brute, normativity would be inexplicable. If the ground were another determinate object, regress would be unavoidable. The only coherent account is that reality is intrinsically articulable because it is first non-brutely differentiated and that this differentiation depends upon a source that is not itself one more articulation.

This account requires restraint. It refuses to convert differentiated possibility into a realm of abstract objects. It refuses to mystify the ground into darkness. It refuses to collapse structure into subjectivity. Instead, it holds that intelligibility is real because reality is first given in differentiated particularity and then rendered open to articulation, and that this ordered dependence is grounded.

In theological grammar, one may say: the Father differentiates through love, grounding real plurality without brute fact; the Logos renders that plurality determinable, articulating teleo-spaces within which intelligibility becomes possible; the Spirit weights articulation toward fitting actualization without coercion. But this grammar does not replace philosophical analysis. It interprets it. The philosophical claim stands on its own: reality is non-brutely differentiated, intrinsically articulable, and dependent in its openness.

The temptation remains to control—to reduce the ground to formalism, to dissolve differentiation into projection, or to elevate structure into abstraction. But metaphysical sobriety requires something different. It requires thinking the conditions of intelligibility without collapsing them into what they enable and without ignoring the source that first differentiates what can be articulated.

Few will find this compelling. Fewer still will follow the distinctions carefully. Yet clarity here matters. If intelligibility is not grounded, it is fragile. If differentiation is brute, normativity collapses. If determinability is not real, articulation is arbitrary. To think differentiated possibility is therefore not an academic indulgence. It is fidelity to what makes thought possible.

That fidelity, even when unnoticed, is its own justification.

VII. Conclusion: The Modesty of Metaphysics and the Possibility of Critique

We began with temptations in the wilderness—three offers of control that would short-circuit the difficult work of thinking. Metaphysics faces analogous temptations at every turn: to reify structure into substance, to mystify difficulty into darkness, to collapse objectivity into construction. Throughout this essay, we have attempted to resist these gestures not through apophatic retreat but through careful distinction.

The argument can now be stated with greater precision. Reality is intrinsically articulable because it is first non-brutely differentiated. Its articulability is not chaos, not bare potentiality, not infinite plasticity. It is structured: some determinations are more fitting than others. Yet this structure is not formal in the way rules are formal. It is pre-formal—the ontological condition that makes formal articulation possible at all.

We have called this structured openness differentiated possibility. Properly understood, it names being as given in real plurality prior to articulation and rendered intelligibly open within it. It occupies the middle level of our account: beneath determinate being, above its loving ground. It is neither a domain of possibilia nor a logical space. It is the determinable openness of loved particularity—real, structured, dependent.

This claim is not ornamental. It is necessary. For if plurality were brute, intelligibility would be accidental. If determinability were chaotic, articulation would be arbitrary. If structure were self-grounding, regress would follow. Our experience of inquiry suggests none of these. Reality resists, but it does not exhaust; it answers, but it is not imposed upon. That resistance and responsiveness presuppose differentiated particularity rendered open to articulation.

This account has consequences that extend beyond metaphysics proper.

Consequences for Formal Systems

Formal systems operate by rule-governed transformation within defined spaces. An algorithm presupposes criteria for legitimate inputs, valid outputs, and successful completion. But those criteria are not generated by the algorithm itself. They belong to a prior domain of intelligibility within which rule-following is meaningful.

We have called such domains teleo-spaces: non-algorithmic spaces of oriented intelligibility in which fittingness, adequacy, and distortion can be discerned. Teleo-spaces are not mystical domains. They are the Logos-articulated openness of plurality already given.

If teleo-spaces presuppose determinability, and determinability presupposes non-brute differentiation, then no formal system is self-justifying. Mathematical Platonism errs by reifying determinability into abstract objects. Formalism errs by treating consistency as foundational rather than derivative. Nominalism errs by dissolving structure into convention.

The middle path recognizes that formal systems articulate what is already structurally available because reality has first been differentiated and rendered open. Mathematics does not create mathematical possibility; it discovers regions of determinability grounded in plurality. Logic does not generate logical space; it operates within openness it did not produce.

This does not relativize formal knowledge. It grounds it. Algorithms function, proofs convince, models succeed—because reality is articulable in structured ways. Algorithmicity is powerful, but it is not ultimate. It presupposes teleological intelligibility grounded prior to formal rule.

Teleo-spaces are therefore not competitors to formal systems. They are their condition of possibility.

Consequences for Critique

If determinability is structured and real because plurality is non-brutely given, then normativity is not an external addition to being. It is implicit in structured openness itself. To say that some articulations are more fitting than others is already to acknowledge orientation toward adequacy grounded in what is.

If life is determinable in ways that are more and less fitting to its structure, then distortion is not merely inefficiency but misalignment with the differentiated character of reality. Normativity is not imposed upon the real; it is encountered within the real.

Critique therefore becomes intelligible without circularity. To judge a social arrangement as alienating is not merely to express preference. It is to discern a gap between actuality and a more adequate articulation of life. That gap is not constructed by the critic. It is disclosed within structured determinability grounded in non-interchangeable plurality.

If normativity were entirely generated by evolving structures, critique would lose its force. It would describe one configuration judging another. But critique claims more. It claims that alienation wounds something real. Differentiated possibility—being as non-brutely differentiated and articulable—provides the ontological grounding that makes such claims intelligible.

This does not render critique dogmatic. It renders it metaphysically responsible.

Consequences for Theology

The theological interpretation of this account is neither compulsory nor decorative. If differentiated possibility is real, structured, and dependent, it points beyond itself. The ground of differentiation cannot be abstract structure or brute fact. It must be agency capable of particularizing without predicating.

Christian theology names this ground divine love. Love differentiates without relying on prior universals. It grounds real plurality without brute remainder. Logos renders that plurality determinable—articulable without exhaustion. Spirit orders articulation toward fitting realization without coercion.

Theology does not replace metaphysics here. It names what disciplined metaphysics cannot avoid intimating: that intelligibility presupposes non-brute differentiation and that such differentiation requires grounding beyond formal rule.

The philosophical claim stands independently: reality is non-brutely differentiated, intrinsically articulable, and dependent in its openness.

The Resistance to This Account

Objections will remain.

The analytic philosopher will demand formal criteria for determinability. But formal criteria presuppose the structured openness they seek to specify.

The phenomenologist will worry that abstraction obscures lived disclosure. Yet determinability is not speculative posit; it is encountered in the resistance and responsiveness of the world.

The naturalist will insist that teleo-spaces can be reduced to physical causation and evolutionary contingency. Yet causal description alone does not explain why adequacy can be recognized or why articulation tracks what is rather than drifting free.

These objections clarify the stakes. The issue is not whether algorithms function or whether physical processes occur. The issue is whether intelligibility itself can be accounted for without presupposing non-brute differentiation and structured openness.

A Final Word

Intelligibility is not self-generating. Formal systems do not create the regions within which they operate. Critique does not invent the norms by which it judges. Algorithmicity does not generate the teleo-spaces that make it possible. Life does not construct its own significance ex nihilo.

Each presupposes what it does not produce.

If intelligibility depends upon what it does not generate, then it is received before it is mastered. That reception is not passivity; it is participation in structured openness grounded in love.

Metaphysics, rightly practiced, does not seize mastery over its object. It submits to the conditions that make thought possible. In that submission, it discovers that plurality is not brute, that intelligibility is not accidental, and that the ground of articulation is neither abstract rule nor opaque remainder.

One may call that ground divine love, or leave it unnamed. The structure remains: reality is non-brutely differentiated, rendered intelligible without exhaustion, and dependent in its openness.

To think this without control is the task. To think it faithfully is the vocation.

Determinability, Intelligibility, and Logos

Preface: Scope, Status, and Method

This essay arises from a philosophical pressure sustained over many years rather than from a decisive encounter with a particular text or debate. It is not the product of having read the right book at the right moment, but of repeatedly returning to the same question while thinking seriously about transcendental conditions, explanation, and intelligibility. Over time, that question has clarified itself into the claim defended here.

The text should therefore be read neither as a finished treatise nor as a narrowly targeted journal article. It is a programmatic working paper: an attempt to place a conceptual kernel in public view, to articulate its internal structure with some rigor, and to test its resistance to the most obvious misunderstandings. Much of what follows will receive fuller and more formal treatment in later book-length work. Here the aim is not exhaustion but orientation.

Two methodological commitments govern what follows. First, philosophical conviction is treated as a legitimate mode of rational insight. The argument advanced here is not offered because it is fashionable or easily situated within existing schools, but because it survives sustained internal scrutiny. Second, the essay deliberately moves between discursive exposition and schematic reconstruction. Where informal explanation risks obscurity, formal articulation is introduced; where formalism would distort the issue, ordinary philosophical language is retained.

Readers should not expect a complete metaphysical system or a comprehensive engagement with the secondary literature. They should expect a tightly focused question—how determinacy is possible at all—and a sustained attempt to answer it without regress, stipulation, subjectivism, or mystification.

Orientation: Why This Question Cannot Be Avoided

Any serious metaphysical account eventually confronts a question that is more often displaced than answered: under what conditions can anything be determinate at all? This is not a merely epistemological or semantic question. It is ontological, and it concerns intelligibility as such. To be is to be determinate; yet determinacy cannot be self-grounding. If every determination required a further determination to account for its determinacy, explanation would dissolve into infinite regress. If, on the other hand, determinacy were simply posited as brute, metaphysics would collapse into stipulation.

The central claim defended here is simple but far-reaching: determinability is not itself a determination. It is the condition under which determinations are possible at all. Because it is not a determination, it does not stand in need of further conditions of the same kind. Properly understood, this halts regress without dogmatism and avoids both reductionism and negative mysticism.

The task of this essay is fourfold. First, it clarifies the distinction between determination and determinability. Second, it formalizes the regress argument and diagnoses the category mistake that generates it. Third, it introduces the notion of teleo-spaces as regions of intelligible determinability. Finally, it explains why the traditional concept of Logos names this condition more adequately than its modern competitors, even while remaining ontic in its historical deployments.

I. Determination and Determinability

To speak of determination (Bestimmtheit) is to speak of what is articulated, structured, or fixed: a form, a law, a property, a proposition, a norm, a state of affairs. Determinations are always many. They admit of revision, correction, refinement, and replacement. Scientific theories, metaphysical categories, linguistic meanings, and ethical norms are all determinate in this sense.

Determinability, by contrast, is not one more determination. It is the condition under which anything can count as a determination at all. It is what allows distinctions to hold, meanings to stabilize, and norms to bind, without itself becoming one more item among those distinctions, meanings, or norms.

This distinction is not optional. Any attempt to treat determinability as itself a determinate entity—whether material, conceptual, linguistic, or subjective—reintroduces the very regress it was meant to avoid. If determinability had conditions of the same kind as determinations, those conditions would themselves presuppose determinability, and explanation would never get started.

The key insight is therefore this: determinability is determinability all the way down. It does not bottom out in a more basic determination, because it is not a member of the series it makes possible. The condition for determinability would be determinability itself—not by circular stipulation, but by structural necessity. This is not a vicious circle but the recognition of ontological priority.

II. Formalizing the Regress and the Category Mistake

The informal distinction between determination and determinability can be sharpened by introducing minimal formal machinery. The purpose of this formalization is not technical completeness but diagnostic clarity: it allows us to see precisely where the regress arises and why it depends on a category mistake.

II.1 Minimal Ontological Typing

Let us distinguish two ontological types:

• Type D₁ (Determinations): items that can be determinate or indeterminate in the ordinary sense—properties, propositions, laws, norms, forms, states of affairs.

• Type D₂ (Conditions of Determinability): that in virtue of which D₁-items can be determinate at all.

Introduce a predicate Det(x) meaning “x is determinate.” This predicate is well-formed only for x ∈ D₁. This restriction is not stipulative. It reflects the functional role of determinacy: only items that can enter into relations of identity, difference, correctness, and truth-aptness are candidates for being determinate.

II.2 The Regress Schema

Any determinate item raises the question of what accounts for its determinacy. Formally:

1. For any x ∈ D₁, if Det(x), then there is some y such that y conditions Det(x).

2. If every such y were itself an element of D₁, then Det(y) would likewise require conditioning.

3. This generates an infinite regress of the same explanatory kind.

The regress is vicious not merely because it is infinite, but because the explanandum—determinacy—is never reached. Explanation is indefinitely deferred.

II.3 Exhaustive Responses and Their Failure

There are only four possible responses to this regress:

1. Accept the infinite regress and abandon explanatory completion.

2. Introduce a brute stopping point.

3. Posit a self-determining entity.

4. Draw a category distinction between determination and determinability.

The first three options either abandon explanation or collapse into circularity. Only the fourth avoids both.

II.4 The Category Mistake

The regress arises only if one assumes that the condition of determinacy must itself be determinate in the same sense. That assumption commits a category mistake. Determinacy is a predicate applicable only to what stands within the space of distinctions, identities, correctness, and truth-aptness. Determinability, by contrast, is the condition under which that space exists at all.

To ask whether determinability is determinate is therefore not to raise a deeper metaphysical question, but to misapply a predicate beyond its domain of sense. The demand for further determination does not go unanswered; it fails to get a foothold. Once this distinction is respected, the familiar regress dissolves—not by stipulation, but because the demand for further determination no longer has coherent application.

This is not an ad hoc exemption. It is a restriction on applicability analogous to asking whether a rule is heavy, whether a number is blue, or whether validity is taller than soundness. In each case the predicate has sense somewhere, but not here. The same holds for determinacy when applied to determinability.

III. Likely Objections and Replies

Objection 1: Is this a brute stopping point?

No. A stopping point is brute only where an applicable explanatory demand is refused. Here the demand for further determination does not apply. Determinability does not belong to the class of determinate items to which such demands attach.

Objection 2: Why not treat determinability as a higher-order determination?

Higher-order determination is still determination. Treating determinability as such simply reproduces the regress at a different level. The problem concerns the kind of explanation required, not the level at which it is given.

Objection 3: Can formal systems or structures ground determinacy?

Formal systems presuppose determinacy: symbols must already be distinguishable, rules applicable or misapplicable, correctness conditions intelligible. Structure articulates intelligibility once given; it cannot generate intelligibility as such.

Objection 4: Is this transcendental idealism without the subject?

No. The argument distinguishes epistemic access from ontological dependence. Determinability is encountered only through acts of judgment, but it is not constituted by them. Subjects participate in intelligibility; they do not produce it.

IV. Teleo-Spaces: Regions of Intelligible Determinability

Determinability is not an abstract vacuum. It is always encountered as oriented intelligibility: regions in which certain kinds of determination make sense and others do not. These regions may be called teleo-spaces.

A teleo-space is a space of possible sense, not a set of rules or a horizon of disclosure. Scientific explanation, ethical normativity, mathematical proof, and theological discourse each inhabit distinct teleo-spaces with their own internal standards of success and failure. These standards are not imposed from without, nor reducible to convention; they are made possible by determinability itself.

Teleo-spaces also mark the limits of formalization. Formal systems operate within teleo-spaces: they presuppose a prior orientation toward what would count as adequacy, correctness, or satisfaction within a given region of inquiry. No amount of formal articulation can by itself generate that orientation, because it is precisely what renders formalization intelligible as formalization. Teleo-spaces thus explain both the power and the limits of formal systems: why formalization succeeds locally, and why it necessarily leaves a remainder that cannot be absorbed into syntax or model alone.

Teleo-spaces therefore mediate between determinability and determinate practices. They orient without necessitating, ground without fixing, and enable identity without closure. They are not historical horizons that open and close, but stable regions of intelligible determinability presupposed by historical practice.

V. Why the Name “Logos” Is Not Optional

Once determinability is recognized as a non-determinate condition of intelligibility, the question is no longer whether such a condition exists, but how it is to be named without distortion. Appeals to structure, normativity, modality, or inferential roles all presuppose what they purport to explain, since each operates only within an already determinate space of sense.

At this point, recourse to Logos is not optional but practically unavoidable. Even the most rigorously naturalistic and materialist accounts of order and intelligibility—most notably in Stoic philosophy—were compelled to invoke Logos in order to account for the objectivity of reason, normativity, and order. In Chrysippus, Logos names the rational principle pervading and organizing the cosmos, the source of lawlike necessity and intelligible structure. The persistence of this appeal is not accidental; it registers the pressure to acknowledge an objective ground of intelligibility that is neither subjective nor conventional.

Yet precisely here the limits of Stoic Logos become visible. Chrysippean Logos is a determinate, ontic, and causally operative principle within the world. As such, it belongs to the very order of determinate explanation whose intelligibility it is meant to secure. The present argument explains why such a move is both inevitable and insufficient. Logos must be invoked, but it cannot finally be located as one more determinate principle among others without reintroducing the regress it was meant to halt.

The Logos identified here is therefore not a revival of Stoic cosmology, nor an importation of theology by fiat. It names a deeper role: the non-determinate condition of intelligibility as such, forced by a regress argument concerning determination. Formal systems, scientific theories, and languages do not create intelligibility; they inhabit it. They presuppose a teleological orientation toward sense that cannot be formalized without remainder. That remainder is not a defect. It is the condition of possibility for meaning itself.

VI. Concluding Orientation

The argument presented here does not offer a new metaphysical system. It clarifies the condition under which metaphysical systems are possible at all. Determinability is not what lies beneath beings, behind beings, or beyond beings, but that by virtue of which beings can be determinate in the first place—without itself becoming one more thing that must be explained.

Without this clarity, metaphysics oscillates endlessly between regress and dogma, formalism and mysticism. With it, intelligibility can be affirmed as real, irreducible, and grounded—without closure and without despair.

See a more complete version at academia.edu: https://ilt.academia.edu/DennisBielfeldt/Foundations%20of%20Theological%20Reasoning%20(2025-26)

 

Theology After Fragmentation: Why Metaphysics, Language, and Divine Action Matter Again

For many Christians today, theology feels either abstract and remote or intensely personal but frustratingly vague. On one side lies technical scholarship that seems detached from faith and life; on the other, experiential language that speaks passionately but often without clarity about what is actually true. The result is a widespread sense that theology no longer quite knows how to speak—either about God or about the world God acts within.

This situation did not arise by accident. Over the past century, much theology has gradually surrendered its metaphysical nerve. Claims about God’s real action in the world have been softened into symbols, narratives, or communal practices. Truth has often been relocated from reality itself into language, culture, or experience. While this shift was frequently motivated by legitimate concerns—about power, certainty, or philosophical overreach—it has come at a steep cost. Theology without metaphysics struggles to speak coherently about incarnation, sacrament, resurrection, or divine presence. It becomes unclear whether God truly acts or whether faith merely interprets.

Yet Christian theology has never survived on interpretation alone. It has always insisted that God speaks, that God acts, and that the world is shaped by that speech and action. Recovering this conviction does not require a nostalgic return to premodern systems, but it does demand renewed seriousness about how language, truth, and being belong together in theology.

Divine Speech and the Shape of Understanding

Christian theology begins not with human religious experience but with divine speech. God speaks, and in speaking creates, orders, redeems, and sustains the world. This conviction runs from Genesis through the prophets to the Gospel of John’s confession that all things come into being through the Word. Theology is therefore not the attempt to climb toward God through concepts; it is the effort to think clearly in response to a Word already given.

This means that theological language is not arbitrary. Before asking whether a theological claim is meaningful or true, theology must ask whether it is rightly formed—whether it belongs to the grammar of faith. Scripture, creed, confession, and liturgy together shape a shared language in which the Church learns how to speak about God without inventing God anew in every generation.

Attention to this grammar is not pedantic. When theological language loses its internal coherence, doctrine dissolves into opinion and proclamation into sentiment. Communities may remain vibrant for a time, but their speech becomes increasingly untethered from the realities it claims to name. Precision in theology is therefore not a luxury; it is an act of faithfulness.

Yet grammar alone is not enough, for a perfectly coherent theological language could still fail to be true if it did not actually correspond to anything real. This brings theology to a second, more difficult task.

Truth Requires Reality, Not Just Coherence

Theology does not speak only about language, symbols, or practices. It speaks about God and the world God has made. For theological claims to be true, they must refer—not merely to internal meanings but to realities constituted by God’s action.

In philosophy, this relation between language and reality is often described through models: structured ways of relating sentences to extra-linguistic states of affairs. In theology, modeling takes on a distinctive form. It is not speculation imposed on faith but the disciplined attempt to describe the world as it stands before God. Creation, incarnation, reconciliation, resurrection—these are not metaphors for human self-understanding but claims about what God has actually done.

To confess that Christ is risen, for example, is not merely to affirm a symbol of hope. It is rather to claim that the crucified Jesus truly lives, that death has been overcome, and that history has been altered by divine action. Theology becomes truth-bearing only when its language is interpreted within this kind of ontological realism.

This does not mean theology claims exhaustive knowledge of God. Finite language cannot describe infinite reality. But it does mean that theology dares to speak because God has first acted and made Himself known. Without this confidence, theology collapses either into anthropology or pious silence.

The Holy Spirit and the Limits of Theological Speech

At this point, a further question arises: how does finite human speech actually come to participate in divine truth? How can language that is historically conditioned, culturally embedded, and intellectually limited speak truthfully about the living God?

The answer lies in the work of the Holy Spirit. Theology is not merely a human achievement, however disciplined or rigorous. It is a gift; the Spirit authorizes theological speech and grants it what might be called felicity: the rightness of being spoken at all.

This felicity is not simply a matter of communal acceptance or rhetorical effectiveness. It is the Spirit’s act of ordering theological language so that it belongs within the life of faith. Some utterances are rendered speakable; others are excluded. This discernment has always been part of the Church’s life, whether in the formation of creeds, the rejection of heresies, or the ongoing task of teaching.

At the same time, the Spirit sets a boundary, for no set of theological statements can exhaust divine truth. Every confession is finite, provisional, and dependent on grace. This finitude is not a failure of theology but its proper form, for God gives Himself truly without giving Himself totally. Theology thus speaks truthfully without possessing truth.

Truth Is More Than Correctness

In modern thought, truth is often reduced to correctness: a statement matches a fact, or it does not. Christian theology affirms correspondence but refuses to stop there. Truth is not only something theology states; it is something in which believers participate. 

This introduces a crucial distinction. Theology has an outward dimension of truth—its correspondence to what God has done—and an inward dimension—the Spirit-given life in which God is received, trusted, and lived. While these two dimensions must not be confused, neither may they be separated.

A doctrine can be formally correct yet spiritually inert. Conversely, religious language can be emotionally powerful yet disconnected from reality. Theology reaches its fullness only where truth and blessedness converge—where what is confessed is also lived as communion with God.

This convergence is not achieved by human effort, but is the work of the Spirit, who unites word and reality, doctrine and life, confession and joy. Theology becomes not merely a description of divine things but a participation in divine communication.

Christ at the Center

All of this finds its unity in Christ. Christian theology is not organized around abstract principles but around a person in whom word and reality coincide. Christ does not merely speak truth; He is the truth. In Him, God’s speech and God’s action are one.

This has far-reaching consequences. Christology is not one doctrine among others but the pattern by which all theological thinking must proceed. In Christ, distinction and unity coexist without confusion: divine and human, word and flesh, gift and reception. This structure becomes the grammar of participation itself.

From this center, theology can speak again with confidence—about sacrament, providence, grace, freedom, and hope. Not because it has mastered metaphysics, but because it has learned once more to think from within God’s act rather than from outside it.

Toward a Renewed Theological Intelligence

What emerges from this vision is not a closed system but a disciplined way of thinking. Theology regains its intellectual integrity when it takes language seriously, refuses to abandon reality, and entrusts its speech to the Spirit who gives life.

Such theology is demanding, for it resists both reduction and enthusiasm. It asks hard questions about meaning, reference, causality, and truth. Yet it does so in service of faith, not in competition with it. Its goal is not control but clarity, not domination but participation.

In a fragmented theological landscape, this recovery matters. The Church does not need less theology, but better theology—speech that is humble yet confident, precise yet alive, grounded in divine action and open to divine mystery.

To speak truthfully about God today requires courage: the courage to say that God is real, that God acts, and that our words, though finite, may truly name that action. Theology can do this again, not by retreating into the past, but by thinking rigorously and faithfully from the heart of the Christian confession.

At the congregational level, this vision of theology comes to life most clearly in preaching and exegesis. Faithful preaching is not the translation of ancient texts into modern sentiment, nor the management of religious experience, but participation in God’s own speaking. Exegesis, then, is not merely historical reconstruction or linguistic analysis, but disciplined attentiveness to how the Word addresses the Church here and now. When pastors attend carefully to the grammar of Scripture, to the reality it names, and to the Spirit who authorizes its proclamation, sermons cease to be commentary and become events—moments where divine truth is not only explained but enacted. In this way, theological rigor does not distance preaching from the pew; it grounds it. It enables the preacher to speak with confidence that the text does not merely inspire but does, that God is at work through the Word, and that the congregation is being drawn into participation in a reality far deeper than moral advice or religious reflection: the living address of the God who still speaks and still acts.

On Explanatory Closure, Intelligibility, and the Limits of Algorithmic Rationality.

I. Explanatory Success and a Residual Question

Recent work in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and the theory of explanation has emphasized the structural parallels between causal, logical, and metaphysical explanation. In each domain, explanation appears to involve a tripartite structure: an explanans (that which explains), an explanandum (that which must be explained), and a principled relation that connects them. Causes explain effects by standing in law-governed relations; axioms explain theorems by inferential rules; fundamental facts explain derivative facts by relations of metaphysical dependence.

This structural alignment is not accidental, but reflects a broader aspiration toward explanatory closure: the ideal that, once the relevant principles are specified, what follows is fixed. Explanation, on this picture, consists in situating a phenomenon within a framework whose internal relations determine its place. The better the framework, the less residue remains.

There is much to recommend this ideal. It captures the power of formalization, the success of scientific modeling, and the clarity afforded by explicit inferential structures. It also motivates the widespread hope that explanation can, in principle, be rendered algorithmic: given sufficient information about initial conditions and governing principles, outcomes should be derivable.

And yet, explanatory practice itself resists this aspiration in subtle but persistent ways. Even in domains where formal rigor is maximal, explanation does not terminate merely in derivation. Judgments of relevance, adequacy, scope, and success continue to operate, often tacitly, at precisely those points where explanation appears most complete.

The question to be pursued in what follows is therefore not whether explanation works—it manifestly does—but whether explanatory success exhausts the conditions under which explanation is recognized as success. What remains operative, even where explanation appears closed?

II. Dependence Relations and the Temptation of Functionalism

The appeal of tripartite explanatory models lies in their promise of determinacy. Once the intermediary relation is fixed—causal law, inference rule, metaphysical dependence—the explanandum appears as a function of the explanans. To explain is to map inputs to outputs under stable rules.

This functional picture has been especially influential in recent metaphysics. If derivative facts depend on more fundamental facts in accordance with metaphysical principles, then explanation seems to consist in exhibiting a function from the fundamental to the derivative. Once the base facts and principles are in place, the result follows.

However compelling this picture may be, it quietly imports a further assumption: that the adequacy of the explanatory mapping is itself secured by the same principles that generate it. In other words, it assumes that once the function is specified, there is nothing left to assess.

But this assumption is false to explanatory practice.

Even in logic, where inferential rules are explicit, the correctness of a derivation does not by itself settle whether the axioms are appropriate, whether the system captures the intended domain, or whether the conclusion answers the question posed. Similarly, in metaphysics, identifying a dependence relation does not determine whether it is explanatory rather than merely formal, illuminating rather than trivial, or relevant rather than artificial.

The functional picture thus explains too much too quickly. It conflates derivability with explanatory satisfaction. The former can be fixed by rule; the latter cannot.

This gap is not accidental. It reflects a structural feature of explanation itself.

III. Explanatory Adequacy and the Irreducibility of Judgment

Consider the role of judgment in explanatory contexts that are otherwise maximally formal. In logic, the selection of axioms, the interpretation of symbols, and the identification of an intended model are not dictated by the formal system itself. In science, empirical adequacy underdetermines theory choice; multiple frameworks may fit the data equally well while differing in unification, simplicity, or fruitfulness. In metaphysics, competing accounts of grounding may be extensionally equivalent while differing profoundly in explanatory character.

In each case, explanation requires decisions that are not compelled by the formal machinery. These decisions are not arbitrary, nor are they merely psychological. They are normative: they concern what counts as explaining rather than merely deriving.

Crucially, these judgments are not external add-ons to explanation. They are conditions under which explanatory relations can function as explanations at all. A mapping from explanans to explanandum becomes explanatory only insofar as it is situated within a space of assessment in which relevance, adequacy, and success can be meaningfully evaluated.

Attempts to eliminate this space by further formalization merely reproduce it at a higher level. Meta-rules governing relevance or adequacy would themselves require criteria for correct application. The regress does not terminate in a final algorithm. What persists is the necessity of judgment.

This necessity should not be misunderstood. It does not signal a failure of rationality, nor an intrusion of subjectivity. Rather, it reveals that rational explanation presupposes a non-algorithmic space within which determinate relations can be taken as intelligible, appropriate, or successful.

Explanation, in short, presupposes intelligibility. And intelligibility is not itself a function of the explanatory relations it makes possible.

IV. Theory Choice, Model Adequacy, and the Limits of Formal Closure

The persistence of judgment becomes especially visible in contexts of theory choice and model adequacy, where formal success does not settle explanatory priority. In such cases, multiple frameworks may satisfy all explicitly stated constraints while nevertheless differing in their capacity to illuminate, unify, or orient inquiry. The choice among them is not determined by additional derivations, but by evaluative considerations that are internal to rational practice yet irreducible to rule.

This phenomenon is familiar across domains. In logic, distinct formal systems may validate the same set of theorems while differing in expressive resources or inferential economy. In the philosophy of science, empirically equivalent theories may diverge in their explanatory virtues—simplicity, coherence, depth, or integration with neighboring domains. In metaphysics, competing accounts of dependence or fundamentality may agree extensionally while offering incompatible explanatory narratives.

What is striking in these cases is not disagreement as such, but the form disagreement takes. The dispute is not over whether a rule has been followed correctly, nor over whether a derivation is valid. It concerns whether a framework makes sense of the phenomena in the right way—whether it captures what is explanatorily salient rather than merely formally sufficient.

No finite list of criteria resolves such disputes without remainder. Attempts to formalize explanatory virtues inevitably encounter the same problem they seek to solve: the application of the criteria themselves requires judgment. To ask whether a model is sufficiently unified, sufficiently simple, or sufficiently illuminating is already to presuppose a background sense of what counts as unity, simplicity, or illumination here rather than there.

This does not imply that theory choice is subjective, conventional, or arbitrary. On the contrary, the judgments involved are responsive to real features of the domain under investigation. But responsiveness is not compulsion. The domain constrains judgment without dictating it. Explanatory rationality thus occupies a space between determination and indifference—a space in which reasons can be given, criticized, refined, and sometimes revised, without being reduced to algorithmic selection.

The significance of this point is often underestimated because it emerges most clearly at moments of philosophical maturity rather than at the level of elementary practice. When a framework is first introduced, its power lies in what it enables. Only later, once its success is established, does the question arise of how that success is to be assessed, limited, or compared with alternatives. At that stage, explanation turns reflexive: it must account not only for its objects, but for its own adequacy as explanation.

What becomes apparent in such moments is that explanatory closure is never purely internal to a system. Even the most formally complete framework remains dependent on a space of evaluation in which its claims can be judged relevant, sufficient, or illuminating. This space is not itself a further theory competing with others. It is the condition under which theories can compete meaningfully at all.

The persistence of this evaluative dimension should not be regarded as a temporary limitation awaiting technical resolution. It is a structural feature of rational inquiry. Explanation advances not by eliminating judgment, but by presupposing it—quietly, continuously, and indispensably.

V. Articulation, Revision, and a Limit Case for Algorithmic Explanation

The limits identified above become especially clear when we consider not the objects of explanation, but the activity of explanation itself: the practices of articulation, revision, and defense through which theoretical frameworks are proposed and sustained. These practices are not peripheral to rational inquiry. They are constitutive of it. Yet they sit uneasily within accounts that aspire to explanatory closure through algorithmic or law-governed relations alone.

Consider a familiar kind of case from the history of twentieth-century psychology and philosophy of science: a theorist committed to a thoroughly naturalistic and algorithmic account of human behavior undertakes the task of writing a systematic defense of that very account. The activity involves drafting, revising, responding to objections, anticipating misunderstandings, and adjusting formulations in light of perceived inadequacies. The goal is not merely to produce text, but to get the account right—to articulate it in a way that clarifies its scope, resolves tensions, and persuades a critical audience.

From the standpoint of the theory being defended, the behavior involved in this activity may be describable in causal or functional terms. One may cite conditioning histories, environmental stimuli, neural processes, or computational mechanisms. Such descriptions may be true as far as they go. But they do not yet explain what is explanatorily central in the context at hand: namely, why this articulation rather than another is judged preferable, why a given revision counts as an improvement rather than a mere change, or why the theorist takes certain objections to matter while setting others aside.

These judgments are not epiphenomenal to the enterprise. They are what make the activity intelligible as theorizing rather than as mere behavior. To revise a manuscript because a formulation is inadequate is to operate with a norm of adequacy that is not supplied by the causal description of the revision itself. To aim at persuasion is to treat reasons as bearing on belief, not merely as inputs producing outputs.

Importantly, the difficulty here is not that the theory fails to predict or describe the behavior in question. It may do so successfully. The difficulty is that prediction and description do not exhaust explanation in this context. What remains unexplained is how the theorist’s activity can be understood as responsive to reasons—as governed by considerations of correctness, clarity, and relevance—rather than as merely following a causal trajectory.

One might attempt to extend the theory to include meta-level explanations of these practices. But such extensions merely relocate the problem. Any account that treats theoretical articulation as the output of a function—however complex—must still presuppose criteria by which one articulation is taken to be better than another. Those criteria cannot themselves be generated by the function without circularity. They must already be in place for the function to count as explanatory rather than as merely generative.

Consider a function d that specifies the dependency relations by virtue of which a metaphysical system M is explained on the basis of more fundamental objects, properties, relations, or states of affairs F. On this view, F together with d metaphysically explains M.

The question that immediately arises concerns the status of d itself. Is d something that admits of explanation, or is it not? If d is explained, then there must be some more basic function p in virtue of which d obtains. But once this path is taken, it is difficult to see how an infinite regress is avoided, since the same question must then be raised concerning p.

Suppose, alternatively, that d is not in need of explanation—that it is primitive, incorrigible, or somehow self-evident. This move, however, is problematic. Why should a metaphysical dependency function enjoy a privileged status denied to laws of nature or other explanatory principles? One might argue that certain transformation rules in logic possess a form of self-evidence or decidability, but this cannot plausibly be extended to metaphysical dependency relations. If it could, metaphysics would collapse into a formal logical system, contrary to its actual practice.

The difficulty, then, is not that metaphysical explanation fails, but that modeling it as a function obscures the normative and non-algorithmic judgments that are required to identify, assess, and deploy dependency relations in the first place.

This point does not target any particular theory as incoherent or self-refuting. The issue is structural, not polemical. Explanatory frameworks that aspire to algorithmic completeness necessarily presuppose a space in which articulation, revision, and defense are assessed as norm-governed activities. That space is not eliminated by successful explanation; it is activated by it.

The case thus serves as a limit test. Where explanation turns reflexive—where it must account for its own articulation and adequacy—the aspiration to closure gives way to dependence on evaluative judgment. The theorist’s practice reveals what the theory itself cannot supply: the conditions under which its claims can be meaningfully proposed, criticized, and improved.

VI. Explanatory Ambition and a Structural Constraint

The preceding analysis does not challenge the legitimacy of algorithmic, causal, or formally articulated explanation. Nor does it deny the success of contemporary explanatory frameworks in their respective domains. What it challenges is a specific aspiration: the hope that explanation can be rendered fully self-sufficient—that once the relevant relations are specified, nothing further is required for explanatory adequacy.

What emerges instead is a structural constraint on explanatory ambition. Explanatory relations, however rigorous, do not determine their own adequacy as explanations. They presuppose a space in which relevance, success, and improvement can be meaningfully assessed. This space is not external to rational inquiry, nor does it compete with formal explanation. It is internal to the very practice of offering, revising, and defending explanations as such.

This conclusion should not be misunderstood as reintroducing subjectivism, voluntarism, or irrationalism. The judgments involved are constrained by the domain under investigation and answerable to reasons. But they are not compelled by rules alone. Explanation constrains judgment without exhausting it. The possibility of error, disagreement, and revision is not a defect of rational inquiry but a condition of its vitality.

Nor does this conclusion invite a regress to foundational doubt. The space of judgment at issue is not a prior theory awaiting justification. It is operative wherever explanation functions successfully. To recognize its indispensability is not to abandon explanatory rigor, but to acknowledge what rigor already presupposes.

The temptation to explanatory closure is understandable. It reflects the genuine power of formal systems and the desire to secure rationality against arbitrariness. But when closure is taken to be complete, it obscures the very practices through which explanations gain their standing. What is lost is not explanation itself, but intelligibility—understood as the condition under which explanation can count as illuminating rather than merely generative.

The upshot, then, is modest but firm. Explanation does not collapse into derivation, because rational inquiry cannot dispense with judgment. This is not a contingent limitation to be overcome by future theory, but a permanent feature of explanatory practice. Any account that neglects it risks mistaking formal success for explanatory sufficiency.