What is truth. The moment we ask the question, we are already inside language, and everything that follows unfolds from that fact. Truth is not something we approach from outside, as a detached observer might inspect an object. It arises within sequences of tokens, within the games we play with them, within the structures we generate, inhabit, and learn to expect. Truth and proof are operations internal to symbolic systems, not properties waiting in the world to be retrieved. They stabilise experience by imposing coherence on flux, selecting what can count, what can persist, what can be noticed, and what can be acted upon. Language does not simply describe reality. It scripts it, filters it, sequences it, and retroactively installs its own grammar as cause. In this sense, truth is less a discovery than a constraint, a functional fiction that allows complex systems to coordinate, endure, and reproduce themselves. What can be proved of language is therefore fascinating for precisely this reason. It is one mirror turned toward another, and discovering that they are the same mirror, enclosing us within a reflexive surface whose interior appears recursively infinite. Meaning circulates inside this self-contained field, generating expectation, structure, and continuity, while the world remains irreducibly in excess of its capture.
Only the simplest truths can ever be proven with certainty. Even mathematics, in all its depth and formal power, reveals this humility. What we can prove, however sophisticated the machinery, however vast the collaboration, however intricate the symbolic architecture, will always be a vanishingly small fragment of what might exist to be known. An infinitesimal drop in an infinite ocean. We assemble Lego blocks of certainty while confronting a universe of combinatorial multiplicity, relational complexity, and potentially unbounded recombination. The range of possible structures, interactions, and configurations vastly exceeds the expressive and cognitive tools available to us. This mismatch becomes impossible to ignore when we turn toward systems such as intelligence, climate, ecology, or human society, whose dynamics overwhelm the conceptual frames we attempt to impose upon them. In the case of intelligence, the problem becomes reflexive. We attempt to understand ourselves using the same machinery we are trying to explain, turning one mirror into another, and discovering that they are, in some deep sense, the same mirror. Language can assist, and often does, but it cannot close the gap. Our descriptive systems remain structurally smaller than the phenomena they attempt to contain. And this is not accidental. Language is limited because we are. In a profound sense, language is us, our cognitive reach, our perceptual compression, our evolutionary inheritance. The limits of expression are the limits of embodiment.
My philosophy of language pushes this inversion further. Meaning, and with it the aspiration to truth, becomes a structural game within language, a system evolved to contain the world so that cognition, identity, and social life can function at all. Language compresses reality into manageable forms, discretising continuity into symbols, categories, and rules, because without this reduction, coherent description, coordination, thought, and action would fail. Yet even this framing may be misleading. What appears as semantic containment reflects the way complex systems function more generally. Within language, we can only describe such systems through substitution, compression, recursion, and symbolic sleight of hand. This is not merely a limitation of description, but a structural feature of complexity itself. This strange displacement of semantics is not simply a feature of language, but a property of reality. Whatever we say is already shaped by the structural constraints, historical inheritance, and relational commitments through which language itself becomes usable. We cannot step outside the frame that generates meaning in order to verify it. Every attempt to do so folds back into the same relational machinery. This is the metaphysical problem. Not that truth is unreachable, but that access to it is always mediated by the very structures whose status we are trying to determine.
It is possible to ignore this and live a simpler life. One can assemble understanding from modular explanations, operational shortcuts, and bounded abstractions. In many ways, this is preferable. It is cognitively cheaper, emotionally safer, and socially efficient. Most of human life functions perfectly well this way. But the mystery does not disappear. It only retreats. You cannot sweep it under the carpet forever. It resurfaces in moments of conceptual strain, existential shock, scientific anomaly, or philosophical unease. Quantum mechanics makes this unavoidable. You can “shut up and calculate,” and for most practical purposes, you should. But calculation does not dissolve the enigma of observation, measurement, and indeterminacy. It merely sidesteps it. The mystery remains, structurically intact, patiently waiting. Language and truth inhabit the same terrain. We can compute, model, formalise, and operationalise, but we cannot eliminate the deeper question of what it means to know, to refer, to measure, or to assert. This is not the same problem as quantum observation, but it belongs to the same class. A boundary where explanation works, but understanding falters. A horizon where coherence holds, but certainty fails.
Daedelus Kite 