This is a three-part series from philosopher Dionysis Christias, distilling his recent book Towards a Hyperstitional Process Nominalism: Outline of a Fractured Immanent Ontology (2025). He advances a conception of ‘fractured immanence’ in which mind and nature are not ontologically distinct regions of being (they are both ways of being processes) yet diverge in the order of understanding, a tension enabling their ongoing self-correcting interplay as concepts without presupposing transcendence or complete mutual transparency. Drawing on Deleuze, Sellars and Peirce, the book replaces substance metaphysics with an anti-representational, univocal process ontology which throws light on core problems in contemporary analytic metaphysics of powers and emergence. Normativity is embedded in this naturalistic process framework by being understood as an emergent intensive regime whose function is hyperstitional: it stabilizes and projects ideal possible worlds expressed by unactualized universals, and performatively makes them actual over time by collectively treating them as real. [Part 1 Here].
4. Being as an Intensive Darwinian Multiplicity
For processual evolution to be possible — that is, for being to self-differentiate into a plurality of beings — being must be conceived as self-relating and self-affecting. Only in this way, as something that essentially folds upon itself and unfolds into actual beings, and only on the supposition of being metastable, can being be understood immanently (i.e., without the help of an external transcendent force) as becoming: as essentially and ceaselessly self-differentiating. Otherwise, being would be incapable of differentiating itself by its own internal nature into the multitude of actual beings, rendering the relation between (unconditional) being and (conditional) beings external, transcendent, and hence ultimately unintelligible.
Processual becoming must be understood as an immanent relation of folding and unfolding between being and beings. Only on this basis can we make sense of how something unconditional (being) could give rise to something conditional (beings). This reveals that conditionally existing beings are not a mere optional addition ‘created’ by unconditional being, but a necessary dimension of unconditionality itself, for unconditionality can only relate to itself in conditional form.
From our point of view, understanding what being is – understanding the grounding principles of beings – amounts to understanding the mode in which being self-differentiates. Having this in mind, we can say that being, in this sense, is an evolutionarily developed intensive multiplicity. To say that this is the ultimate grounding principle of the becoming of beings is to immanently, internally and reciprocally relate being and beings. Thus, however metaphysical this kind of foundational principle might be, it rejects a traditional conception of grounding according to which such principles function as external, independent explanatory bases that account for being and its relation to beings from outside. Moreover, the rejection of traditional metaphysical grounding from this standpoint becomes even more dramatic if we realize that being conceived as an evolutionarily developed intensive multiplicity does not provide a sufficient reason for the truth of particular propositions, whatever their subject matter might be.
To expect such an account is to misconstrue the nature of the grounding relation between being and beings. This relation is one of immanent reciprocal – yet asymmetric – determination in which the former morphogenetically unfolds actual processes and the latter, as an ever-growing actual history of worldly processes, acts as a filtering constraint on the configuration of virtual multiplicities that are at each moment to be selected as ‘live options’ for morphogenetic actualization. What is entailed by such a conception of grounding is that there is always room for the emergence of new truth-makers and truths at the level of actuality. There is no such thing as a ready-made actual world with eternally fixed truths which our propositions attempt to unearth or correspond to. Truth-makers themselves are internal articulations of being generated through the self-organizing dynamics of expression and differentiation.
Truth, in turn, is best conceived as an emergent property of our semantic practices that arise within those same dynamics and succeed in resonating with and expressing their organization; it is not a static ‘eternal’ relation between propositions and independently given reality.1 From this standpoint the world is an ever-growing plane of self-differentiating and self-fracturing becoming, in which the only thing that is eternally ‘repeated’ is its evolutionarily induced topological variations of the spatiotemporal unfolding of processes, leading to changing adaptational strategies, novel worldly and human habits, emergent worldly, psychological and societal structures and, in general, to novel possibilities, concepts, interests and purposes that cannot be anticipated in advance, but can be best dealt with in what pragmatists called ‘an experimental spirit’, as part of our never-ending striving to strike a dynamic allostatic balance between our internal, external and social environment.
We said above that being is best conceived as an evolutionarily developed intensive multiplicity. Let us now cash out the first, evolutionary-selectional dimension of being. This can account for the ‘form’ and ‘content’ of actual beings, relations and laws without presupposing hylomorphically construed powers, capacities, dispositions or essential forms. As Peirce (1887) characteristically puts this point (about laws of nature): “All laws are results of evolution; underlying all other laws is the only tendency which can grow by its own virtue, the tendency of all things to take habits” (6.101) […] “nothing but a principle of habit, itself due to the growth by habit of an infinitesimal chance tendency toward habit-taking, is the only bridge that can span the chasm between the chance medley of chaos and the cosmos of order and law” (6.262). Note here, importantly, that a globally applied evolutionary model of explanation based on random variation and selection through inheritance of adaptive traits can provide an independent ground of the causal modalities (power, laws, capacities, dispositions), without itself being capable of further grounding.
For the origin, function and scope of the causal modalities can be understood as derivative from an ontology whose ultimate explanatory posits are processes of differential adaptation in which interaction with the environment (other processes) differentially selects (preserves and reproduces) certain elements, while eliminating others. All processes (inorganic, organic, psychological, social), along with their modal features, can be understood as the evolution-by-selection of a population of habits – where habit is understood as the tendency of a process to repeat any activity that has been performed before (Peirce 1989).
In this way, evolutionary explanations make intelligible the contingent emergence of collective order from individual randomness by providing concrete, situated historical narratives of local, contingent, mutable practical reciprocal accommodations of particular ordered structures and their habitats (Peirce 1887, Brandom 2011, 36-37). From this global evolutionary standpoint, what we take to be eternal, immutable, necessary, universal laws of nature, can be understood as themselves, in the broadest sense, ‘habits’ (sufficiently stable patterns/regularities) of the universe – a kind of order that has arisen contingently, but ultimately statistically explicably, by a selectional-adaptational process operating on a population of such regularities, which in turn provides the dynamic habitat to which all must collectively adapt.
We can understand the grounding potential of evolutionary principles if we realize that the ‘survival of the fittest’ is just a special case of the more general principle of the survival of the stable (Dawkins 1976). Indeed, the earliest form of natural selection, already at work in the inorganic realm, was simply a selection of stable patterns and a rejection of unstable ones. The crucial explanatory element here is the fact that the mere preservation and repetition of a minimally stable pattern (that can always arise as a chance event as a result of a phase transition of an inhomogeneous continuous (n-dimensional multitude) is itself a selectional factor that infinitesimally contributes to its gradual entrenchment by shifting the range and mean of variation for subsequent selections2 (Peirce 1887).
Importantly, this shows that chance variation and directive selection are not (always) two independent temporally sequenced factors of evolution: Selection is not only variation-eliminating but also variation-preserving (it preserves previous variations that do not negatively affect stability and adaptation), and even creates the variation that it acts upon (it builds adaptation in stages by preserving, generation after generation, the favorable part of a random spectrum of variation, thereby increasing the probability of novel combinations of rare patterns or mutations if the latter turn out to be beneficial within a certain environment) (Gould 1977, Beatty 2016).
Obviously, at this level of explanation, this understanding of evolution based on random variation and selection through inheritance of adaptive traits, as well as the corresponding concept of ‘habit’ – tendency, is thus functional, and thus broad enough to allow for specifically different realizations of evolutionary processes in organic, cultural, and even non-organic contexts. Each of these evolutionarily developed contexts can be characterized by different kinds of organization, dynamics and material constitution, and it is the task of scientific inquiry – aided by a scientifically informed metaphysics – to determine which of these differences must (or need not) be accounted for by the presence of emergent dynamic regimes in the respective organizational contexts.
Thus, natural selection in the most general sense is not defined in terms of replication of genetic information (Deacon 2013, 315). This latter mechanism is a specific expression of the functional principles of natural selection. Indeed, this suggests that the mechanisms of evolution themselves evolve, as the material structures through which the basic functional principles of evolutionary processes are instantiated become progressively more complex, intricate, and refined.
Note also that these evolutionary grounds provide ultimate why-explanations not in the Leibnizian sense of showing why something is necessarily what it is as opposed to being otherwise, but in the sense of making intelligible the unfolding of increasing complexity and self-organizational novelty of being. The emerging actual structures -including natural laws – remain ultimately contingent, yet not in the sense that ‘they could be otherwise’ (as if there is a ready-made stock or totality of possibilities from which some are actualized while others remain in a state of potentiality), but in the sense that their expression in actuality is unsubordinated to any higher necessity pre-determining their form.
Let us now briefly discuss what it means to understand being as an intensive multiplicity. As we shall see, the basic features of intensive multiplicity make it an ideal grounding principle which overcomes, explains and delimits the traditional fundamental categories of essence, unity, totality and infinity. Multiplicities are fields of variation, self-differentiated systems that are prior to the division between one and many: They are not parts of a greater whole or totality, they do not have ultimate parts (their parts are themselves continua that have continuous parts), and they are not defined by reference to prior unities, forms, ready-made objects, properties or supplementary dimensions (e.g. extrinsically defined space-time coordinates, essences, natural kinds).3
They are continuous, heterogeneous and intensive, as opposed to numerical, homogeneous and extensive ones (Deleuze 1968). In contrast to the case of metric space which can be divided up into equal parts (numerical extensive multiplicity), intensive multiplicities are topologically articulated and cannot be divided up without changing in nature.4 Due to their continuous, heterogeneous and intensive nature, the elements of the multiplicity have neither separate identity (as they are not discrete), nor sensible form (intensity is not itself sensible), nor conceptual signification (since the abstract universalizability of concepts presupposes a non-continuous and homogeneous mode of articulation). They are defined by differential relations, physically expressed as differences in potential, and they are distributions of singularities embedded within one another that can be unfolded by a series of critical transitions.
Intensive multiplicities express the unfolding of processes through an n-dimensional state space (representing the relevant ways in which the processes can change) and their corresponding degrees of freedom. In turn, singularity points (e.g. boiling points5) are physically expressed in the long-term tendencies of the processes in question (e.g. their ‘seeking’ minimal free energy) as described by their attractor, their ‘topological form’, that can be realized in many different physical forms6 (DeLanda 2002, 9-44). As this continuous n-dimensional intensive multiplicity self-differentiates (differentially repeats itself), it immanently produces, through a series of spatiotemporal symmetry breaking cascades (phase transitions) in its singularity points, and under broadly evolutionary principles, the infinite heterogeneity of actual forms.7 Note that the mode of intelligibility here is more akin to a morphogenetic immanent explication (unfolding), rather than to a model of a logical, transcendental or conceptual explanation.
From this point of view, what turns out to be metaphysically necessary (the ultimate ground) is the existence and self-differentiation of being into beings along with the ‘infinitesimal chance tendency toward habit-taking’, as the latter is ‘explicated’ by the unfolding of intensive multiplicities, and self-reinforced, diversified and constrained by broadly evolutionary principles of becoming. And this, of course, is the exact opposite of what an ultimate ground is traditionally conceived to be (one is here reminded of Peirce’s ‘Tychism’ (Peirce 1892)). Conversely, radical contingency, the lack of any kind of real necessity and thus the universal ungrounding at the level of the actual world, proves to be the ultimate essence of every particular actual entity.
Recall that the grounding explanation in our model is a morphogenetic one (e.g. it can come in the form of topological variations of the rates of change of a developmental process or systems of processes), as opposed to a strictly ‘logical’ or ‘conceptual’ understanding of grounding in which the ground structurally resembles the grounded and only accounts for its condition of possibility. In other words, in our model, the explanatory relation of the ground to what is grounded is not construed as a logically mediated subsumptive relation but as a relation of immanent morphogenetic unfolding.
The morphogenetic unfolding of these immanently actualized grounding principles can be understood along the Darwinian Tychistic model developed earlier: As a becoming that lacks causal and logical structure and immanently accounts for the actual natural spatiotemporal order (in evolutionary-selectional-dynamic systems theoretical terms) and the emergence and function of causal and modal necessity (in pragmatic-anthropological terms8) without itself structurally resembling the latter (i.e. without imposing a pre-given form on actual laws-structures-objects).
It can be argued that this way of conceiving the relationship between ground (being as intensive Darwinian multiplicity) and grounded (actual beings) articulates a genuinely novel position about grounding (what we might call a reciprocal yet asymmetric implication between ground and grounded) that offers a viable alternative to and improves upon the much discussed neo-Humeanist, neo-Aristotelian and neo-Hegelian views in contemporary analytic metaphysics of powers (see Christias 2025, 174-190).
5. Hyperstition, Normativity and Ideology
Let me now discuss the last crucially important term of the present metaphysical framework, namely ‘hyperstition’. The term originates in Land (2011) and refers to cybernetically functioning sign-making practices, typically expressing ideas, speculations or narratives able to bring about their own reality through the workings of positive feedback loops, thereby generating new socio-linguistic-economic-psychological attractors. Consider, for example, stock-market speculation in capitalism or the gradual entrenchment of Judeo-Christianity through trust in the truth of gospels. The very fact that a sufficient number of people expect that a state might go bankrupt in the imminent future or treat Jerusalem as a holy city with a special world-historic destiny, might itself function as an affective catalyst that spreads the attitudes in question to even larger numbers of people, thereby gradually turning a mere ‘fiction’ into a ‘truth’.
Importantly, hyperstitional phenomena, as I understand them, are not limited to the cultural sphere, but also find application to the workings of non-conceptual systems of organisms (especially if we construe the latter as predictive processing generative models) and even to the inorganic realm as a result of an evolutionarily entrenched variety of iterative (repetitive, recursive, replicating) processes. Indeed, as we saw in section 4, certain kinds of primitive self-reinforcing loops can be discerned even in the very fabric of being as such (the mere preservation and repetition of a minimally stable pattern is itself a selectional factor that infinitesimally contributes to its gradual entrenchment by shifting the range and mean of variation for subsequent selections).
Why is hyperstition of such central importance to us and why is it needed as a further determination of process nominalism? To my mind, beyond its function as a grounding principle, it also enables us to articulate a successor concept of normativity which places the latter squarely within a process nominalist reality, immanently accounting for its causal efficacy in process, naturalist and nominalist terms (i.e. without positing causally efficacious reasons- or value-universals). In other words, it enables us to draw a picture of normativity as an emergent intensive regime which, by way of we-attitudes as its manner of causally affecting the world, institutes a hyperstitional dynamics which can turn ‘lies into truths’ (i.e. false empirical generalizations into true ones). In this way, normativity is reinscribed in nature without losing its dimension as a unique emergent phenomenon with its own distinctive powers ‘to affect and be affected’.
In my (Sellarsian, Brandomian) view, normativity is best understood in terms of socially instituted and inferentially articulated reasons. Reasons are the ‘currency’ we use to keep track (scorekeeping) one another’s status in the ‘knowledge (and ‘meaning’) game’ (Brandom 1994). They are socially instituted norms that determine what we are permitted to say and what each of our claims entails within a community. Thus understood, in a process framework, reasons would be reconceptualized as (subjectless) processes of reciprocally recognized scorekeeping attitudes of treating or holding one another’s linguistic performances as authoritative or as in need of further examination.
In other words, in a process framework, reasons would be construed as intrinsically characterized doings, namely as acts of attributing authority or responsibility to patterns of publicly (linguistic and non-linguistic) observable behavior. From this point of view, reason-giving is understood as a temporally extended process, where the content and status of reasons is always negotiable and retrospectively reassessable (what we might call an ‘agonistic’ conception of reason-giving).
What does this (social-processual-attitudinal) conception of normativity have to do with hyperstition? To see the intimate connection between the two, we must combine the fact that normative statuses exist only in their enactment in normative we-attitudes, with the pragmatic insight to the effect that the normativity of rules is at bottom something existentially concrete, i.e. “an embodied generalization written in flesh and blood, or nerve and sinew, rather than in pen and ink”, which “tends to make itself true” (Sellars 1949a, 123).
That is, by containing the terms ‘correct’, ‘proper’ and ‘right’, the embodied generalizations in question, though initially false (e.g. ‘people always say what they believe’) tend to inhibit the occurrence of events that would falsify them.9 Under this light, normative phenomena, through the ‘law of effect’ (the role of rewards and punishments in shaping behavior), gradually bring about their own reality in a manner akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy by being performatively enacted in pattern-governed behavior.
This proposal has the following double advantage over the Landian conception of hyperstition: First, hyperstitional phenomena are no longer conceived as applied only to specific domains of culture (religion, capitalism, mob psychology, viral posts etc.) but encompass all social practices, including most importantly their very condition of possibility, i.e. linguistic practices as expressed in meaningful discourse instituted by semantic rules for the correct application of signs in concepts and propositions.
Second, by conceiving even semantic normativity itself as hyperstitional, we bring the ideal dimension of normativity down to earth (we construe it in immanent, materialistic, non-givenist terms) while at the same time accounting for its irreducibility to non-normative facts, its inexhaustibility to the current factual status quo, by highlighting the essentially creative, performative, and enactive dimension of its mode of existence. And, pace Land, we do this by incorporating the radicality entailed by the performative and enactive mode of existence of the normative, without having to literally hold that hyperstition turns ‘fictions’, ‘rumors’ or ‘lies’ into truths. For, obviously, the way in which e.g. our words acquire their meaning through collective hyperstitional practices of attributing and acknowledging commitments and entitlements involving the proper way of using written or spoken signs cannot literally be construed as a process that turns fictions or lies into truths since it is precisely the hyperstitional institution of semantical discourse that makes possible the very existence of fictional stories, narratives, speculations and lies.
Yet the crucial insight of hyperstitional dynamics, namely the fact that predictions and expectations of the future are themselves a causal force for bringing about and entrenching the expected behavioral regularities in the present, is preserved and indeed radicalized since it applies to normativity as a whole, namely to that which makes us persons with sensitivity and commitment to (semantic, epistemic, ethical) norms, whose minds are understood normatively, as loci of normative authority and responsibility. In this way, though hyperstition as a general phenomenon is not distinctively human, it is that through which what makes us persons (normativity) becomes gradually real.
Note that the above account of the causal power of normativity in terms of hyperstitional dynamics is not only a resolutely non-metaphysical way of understanding the distinctiveness of humans as persons endowed with minds (since it does not present humanity as a separate ontological realm within nature), but, more radically, it conceives this distinctive and irreducible normative character of ourselves as persons -and indeed, of any complex material process that can count as playing the normative functional role of personhood – as an always precarious yet potentially ever-entrenching diachronic achievement.
From this point of view, the very reality of persons as a normative status has an essentially performative and processual element: It depends, at any given time, on the achieved thresholds of entrenchment of recognitive we-attitudes of treating ourselves as being bound by rules (for using words in the same way, for keeping our promises etc.), i.e. of trusting that future behavior will conform to present predictions and expectations as incorporated in present normative standards, criteria and demands.
This means that the very being of ourselves as persons – as well as the being of all normatively-laden concepts and categories that are derived from the category of personhood – depends on the activation, sustenance, collective transmission and enhancement of the above recognitive orectic we-attitudes from generation to generation.
This is at once a liberating and potentially frightening and paralyzing thought. On the one hand, it shows that we are the authors of our destiny: We are collectively self-determining beings. Our flourishing as persons-in-the-world depends on our collective commitment to make the natural and social world a place worth living and striving for. Yet, the fact that we are authors of our own destiny, and the abyssal freedom and responsibility that come with the realization that there are no supernatural, natural or social forces to whose authority we can defer, capable of successfully addressing our deepest concerns and problems engender individual and collective existential anxiety: There is no happy-ending cosmic narrative to give us hope and consolation, there are no laws of nature or history that can guarantee the sustainability and meaningfulness of our practices (both in the semantic and in the ethically loaded sense).
Our existential predicament lies precisely in whether we shall prove worthy of our ‘best versions’ of ourselves, in the full knowledge that there is no fixed essence or goal (except the most general one of maintaining a dynamic allostatic balance with the environment) which provides a definite orientation or content to our needs, desires, hopes and interests. This, perhaps, is the most profound hyperstitional wager we have placed upon ourselves: that we, as increasingly self-conscious post-Enlightenment beings, can become worthy of a future that nothing in the fabric of reality guarantees.
The explanatory purchase of the concept of hyperstitional normativity is also shown by the fact that it can illuminate the phenomenon of ideology. For ideology is precisely what we get when we reify the hyperstitional dimension of normativity and mis-recognize normatively laden contents as always already operative essences which function as independent external authorities that impose normative demands on us. In this recognition-through-misrecognition process, we actively make a (normative) fact true by (mis)recognizing it as always already true in a normatively binding way (Kukla 2000). Thus, ideology essentially functions hyperstitionally while its very success in bringing about its own reality depends on constitutively misrecognizing its hyperstitional character (its social and attitudinal dimension).
The paradigmatic case of how this misrecognition process works in constituting normative authority is provided by Althusser (1971): Subjects get induced or enlisted into a normative space through a process of misrecognition, where other authoritative subjects (mis)recognize a (potential) subject as already bound by norms and capable of navigating normative space. The subject, in turn, (mis)recognizes itself as properly identified in that recognition, and as already having been the subject it is recognized as being. In this way, this process brings subjects into existence by placing them within normative space and binding them in the appropriate ways, thereby serving to bring about its own correctness (Kukla 2000, 167).
Of course, this is not to say that this performative dimension of normativity appears only in the form of ideological recognition-as-misrecognition. Indeed, arguably, the aim of inquiry is the minimization of this ideological understanding of normative force and its reconceptualization as a set of patterns of behavior that are not understood as obligations imposed on us by a transcendent force (metaphysical essence), but as cases of immanent communal activity that changes existing physical and social reality so as to promote our common good as sapient and as sentient agents. From this point of view, the very aim of our normative practices is to turn hyperstitional normativity ‘in itself’ into hyperstitional normativity ‘for itself’.10
Moreover, I take it that the action-guiding, performative and anticipatory dimension of hyperstitional normativity, coupled with the fact that these functions are not directly representational, can illuminate the function – and ideological dimension – of social informational networks in general. To understand phenomena such as language, markets, social media, or political systems as hyperstitional is to construe them as performatively instituted, hype-fueled, and feedback-loop-driven forms of world-making. They connect and synchronize otherwise disparate processes – emotions, political commitments, and needs for social belonging – thereby facilitating social coordination in a manner that is not primarily representational.
From this point of view, the we-attitudes that enact informational feedback cycles in informational networks are not primarily concerned with representing the world truly or falsely. Instead, they are modes of (social) world-making that engage reality only indirectly. This indirect engagement occurs through the long-term consequences of bringing behavior — behavior that conforms to the network’s licensed informational patterns — into contact with worldly and social processes. These processes, while ontologically direct, remain epistemically opaque as they impinge upon the behavior in question.
At bottom, the role of information networks (language, markets, social media, political systems) in our lives is primarily social: entrenching social order by synchronizing previously disparate worldly, behavioral and social patterns of activity.
Informational networks perform this function by creating new intersubjectively sustained realities through forging novel interconnected salience patterns, and by endowing these patterns with the abovementioned normative and practical import. The ‘success’ of an informational network lies in its capacity to generate forms of synchronization that enable a community to coordinate its collective engagement with the world effectively enough for the network itself to be culturally reproduced across generations. Crucially, informational networks can well achieve this goal without directly representing the world.
The fact that informational networks that are crucial for the well-functioning of society can be adequate enough for its self-reproduction without adequately representing the world is an expression of the absence of an epistemically Given relation between mind and world: Bereft of a transparently given epistemic access to the world or to the non-conceptual dimension of our sensory/affective bodily processes, we cannot directly compare the generative models of the world or ourselves produced by our informational networks from a neutral external – or a given ‘internal’- epistemic standpoint (the non-conceptual world, neutral sensory data) to uniquely and independently determine if our generative models of the world are correct or incorrect. Our only epistemic access to the structure of the non-conceptual world is indirect, through the disruptions that the application of these generative models to the world effects on our overall allostatic balance, expressed in the form of material incompatibilities between elements and levels of the ‘anticipatory world-stories’ of our conceptual informational frameworks.
Thus, we can only progress in our knowledge of the world and ourselves through self-correcting inquiry, by critically controlled conceptual change and updating that best accounts for the incompatibilities in question. Yet, this progressive increase in the adjustment or ‘resonance’ of our conceptual informational systems with worldly processes is only possible in the long run and only on condition that the self-correcting tools of empirical inquiry are situated within an ambience of democratic social institutions based on an extended network of checks and balances (see also section 6).
This is needed for at least two reasons: First, the absence of a direct method or criterion for comparing a conceptual framework with the world and its holistic and systematic nature, makes it capable of being shielded from empirical refutation as a way of retaining its socially coordinating role, which is its very raison d’être as an ‘anticipatory world-story’. Such shielding can take many forms: interpreting empirical data in ways that conform to the framework’s basic principles, accommodating incompatibilities between its components in an ad hoc manner, tolerating persistent explanatory anomalies in peripheral domains while protecting its hard core from significant revision, or even questioning the reliability of the sources of incoming empirical information.
Second, if this informational network is highly centralized and its patterns are systematically shaped by relations of social power, it may become deeply socially entrenched owing to the short-term cohesion it generates, while remaining opaque to critique from within. For the network may not experience these phenomena as problematic at all, and may even valorize the very features that render them problematic, construing them instead as epistemic and moral virtues.
Thus, for ultimately evolutionary reasons, a conceptual informational network – and the model of the world it generates – can, to a large extent, remain stable and not directly refutable by maintaining a view of the world and ourselves replete with rationalizing ideological elements. Although such elements may at times disrupt our allostatic balance, they can simultaneously generate collective order and provide orientation, a sense of belonging-together, and ‘meaning’ to our lives that compensates, at least in the short term, for this (epistemically opaque) loss of allostatic balance.
So, it is no accident that generative models that systematically project onto the world features that belong solely to the model have repeatedly proliferated throughout human history even when they have culminated in catastrophe: ideologically justified religious wars, totalitarian regimes, genocides, and witch hunts. And this is why the most reliable way of increasing our long-term collective resonance with the environment is by constructing and forging self-correcting epistemic, economic and political institutions based on an extensive network of checks and balances. Such institutions amount to an artificial selective environment that increases the probability that systematically distortive and practically destructive conceptual models will be identified, criticized, and eventually displaced.
In the above I highlighted the a-rational element of hyperstitional processes. Yet, as I use the term, hyperstition is not exclusively connected to irrational or arational natural or social processes, but also, pace Land, to perfectly rational ones. Indeed, as we saw, the game of giving and asking for reasons is itself a conceptually articulated hyperstitional process: The hyperstitional dimension of our reason-giving practices is clearly shown if we conceive of our theoretical and practical commitments as ‘commitments in the making’, which we, as a temporally extended discursive community bound by reciprocal recognition, are responsible for making paradigmatically rational.
Brandom eloquently articulates this hyperstitional regulative ideal of our space of reasons practices as follows: “Recognizing an agent as one of us is practically treating what one did as part of what we all are doing [believing, thinking] now. Adopting that attitude is acknowledging the responsibility to make what was already done come out right, as a constraint on what we have reason to do now. What we must have reasons for, what we must justify doing now, is a deed that includes everything already done by those we recognize as our fellows. It is part of our task to see to it that those earlier doings make positive contributions to the larger whole that subsumes it – a whole that includes and so is partly constituted by our own current and future doings” (Brandom 2019, 735-736).
This shows that the very meaning of our beliefs, thoughts, and actions is hyperstitionally constituted: It is not given in advance but is always negotiable, retrospectively reassessable and progressively determined by a diachronic, temporally and historically extended social process structured by (what Brandom, echoing Hegel, calls) reciprocally recognized scorekeeping attitudes of confession, forgiveness and trust.11
Yet recall that the immanence between mind (reason) and world is fractured: Our reason-giving practice, conceived as a hyperstitional temporally extended process of making a discursive community characterized by relations of reciprocal recognition with respect to believing, thinking and acting, is not a direct structural mirror of the world.
Nevertheless, our reason-giving practice is directly connected to the world in different, non-mirror-like ways: It is a collectively instituted linguistic tool that makes us capable of achieving ever-increasing levels of resonance with natural and social reality by imposing, experimenting with, and self-correcting epistemic norms that guide our perception, thought and action. The very raison d’être of the core norms of our reason-giving practices (objectivity, truth, warranted belief, autonomous action) is to increase our collective attunement with the world by removing all kinds of unjustified cognitive and affective biases that hinder our collective epistemic and practical welfare.
Of course, this does not guarantee that the way these norms actually operate in our practices is purged of these biases – since the infusion of our reason-giving practices with ideological biases may well be advantageous in the short-term survival and reproduction of a community. But it is part of the very point of our reason-giving practices and norms that the entanglement of reason with ideology cannot remain normatively neutral. It is something to be exposed and transformed, to the extent it embodies a partial and distorted perspective that privileges the interests of particular social groups while presenting itself as universally valid or reflects cognitive and affective biases ingrained through our evolutionary-cultural history.
Reason-giving practice is precisely an open-endedly self-relating tool that can take itself and its direct commerce with the environment as an object of investigation (metalanguage). This is what enables reason to constantly reexamine its own presuppositions, by retrospectively making explicit the various conditions that subjectively mediate what we take to be an objective representation of the world and ourselves, thereby questioning their claim to objectivity by revealing their ‘objectivating’ structure and function. Of course, this is a never-ending process: any such condition can be potentially challenged though not all at once (since some such conditions synchronically function as background enabling constraints of the very intelligibility of our conceptual representations). In sections 6 and 7 we shall see in more detail how hyperstitional reason can be enacted in our political practices.
REFERENCES & NOTES
1. What about the truth-makers of ontology’s most fundamental claims, namely those that concern the intensive structure of being itself? I take it that those function as the condition of what a process is or what makes a process intelligible as such, rather than as one of their products. In this sense, they do not serve as foundationalist-like truth-makers, but as the background conditions that must be already in place for talk about truth and truth-makers to have any sense at all.
2. Arguably, this is a primitive form of hyperstitional process (see section 5) imprinted in the very fabric of being. This view is expressed in another characteristic passage from Peirce: “All things have a tendency to take habits. For atoms and their parts, molecules and groups of molecules, and, in short, every conceivable real object, there is a greater probability of acting as on a former like occasion than otherwise. This tendency itself constitutes a regularity and is continually on the increase” (Peirce 1887 I: 245).
3. Thus, the notion of continuous heterogeneous multiplicity can be viewed as a successor categorial concept that replaces the traditional Aristotelian and Kantian categories of quantity, namely unity (one), plurality (many) and totality (all).
4. Thus understood, multiplicities, as particular intensive movements of change inhering in the actual, are the successor concepts of the classical metaphysical concepts of possibility and essence and are situated at a metaphysically deeper explanatory level than the latter.
5. A boiling point is a singularity because what it is to be such a point is to be the difference between the liquid and gaseous state of a chemical substance. Indeed, from this point of view, to be a certain substance is to change in various ways relative to temperature, pressure, etc. It is these differences within a chemical substance’s structure that make it what it is to be that substance.
6. The direction and stability that attractors confer on the unfolding of the processes under their influence, are themselves an outcome of broadly evolutionary processes. Which attractor a system happens to be in at any one time is determined, in part, by its evolutionary-selectional history (DeLanda 2002, 38).
7. Importantly, this process of intensive individuation which accounts for the production of actual objects also brings about their powers and capacities. The latter do not pre-exist as such in virtual multiplicities.
8. From this (evolutionary-anthropological) point of view, the ordinary modal framework of powers is thus in essence a semantic framework condition -at once normative and explanatory- of understanding and predicting the behavior of things and living beings in a way that simultaneously normatively distinguishes the ‘good’ (normal, enabling) cases from the ‘bad’ (abnormal, inhibiting) ones regarding the manifestation of what things are able to do. In this way, by internalizing the modal framework of powers, and by thus coming to represent to ourselves individually and collectively the conditions of their manifestation and the changing contexts and circumstances in which these conditions hold or do not hold, we become capable of registering, systematically controlling and redirecting our behavior towards the paths that we take to be best for the successful actualization of our own conative and cognitive powers.
9. Note that even purely conceptual or regulative principles such as basic mathematical axioms, Newton’s laws, or theological principles about God (God is omnipresent, benevolent) do have an indirect world-guiding function. They structure our conceptual frameworks, regulate our interpretations of experience, and reconfigure our social and interpretive comportment toward reality. The difference from moral rules lies in the fact that whereas the latter aim to directly inhibit falsifying events, these more abstract rules work by transforming the interpretive space and social behavior through which the world is lived and understood.
10. Of course, our initiation into the space of reasons often involves treating norms as if they are just how things are. And indeed, this ‘as-if Given’ dimension may well be unavoidable at the early stages of normative socialization. But it does not undercut the view that normative authority can and should ultimately be understood as immanent and socially instituted, not metaphysically Given. Rather, it underscores the developmental and pragmatic necessity of what we might call transitional ideology. In this sense, ideology might be understood as a ladder we climb to enter the space of reasons, but one we can -and must- learn to throw away.
11. Confession is the acknowledgment that one’s commitments may have been mistaken or incompletely understood. Speakers take responsibility for what they have said while recognizing their own fallibility. Forgiveness is the willingness of others to reinterpret earlier commitments in light of subsequent developments rather than treating every inconsistency as permanently disqualifying. Trust is the reciprocal assumption that participants are genuinely trying to express and develop reasons, so that apparent errors are treated as moments within an ongoing rational enterprise rather than as grounds for exclusion (Brandom 2019).