These are not arguments -- they are reminders. Things to say to yourself when you notice your thinking has gotten tangled, when the pull to look away feels stronger than the pull to look clearly. They will not tell you what is true. They will help you stay oriented while you figure it out.
| The steadying feeling of having something to say to yourself when your thinking starts to drift |
| A growing comfort with turning toward what is true, even when it is uncomfortable |
| That quiet shift when a word that felt meaningful stops hiding an empty space, and you can see what was behind it all along |
There are moments when we already suspect what is true -- and feel ourselves pulling away from it. The Litany of Tarski is a quiet commitment you make before you look: if this is true, I want to believe it is true. If it is not true, I want to believe it is not true. It does not tell you what to find. It just asks you to be willing to find whatever is there.
What is true is already so. Owning up to it does not make it worse. Not being open about it does not make it go away. This litany, from psychologist Eugene Gendlin, is a reminder that reality is not waiting for your permission. The things you are afraid to look at are already happening -- and you are already enduring them. Seeing them clearly is not what makes them hard. It is what makes them addressable.
When a story gets more detailed, it feels more real -- but it actually becomes less probable. The Litany of Occam is a reminder that every additional condition you add to an explanation is another way for it to be wrong. It is more probable that A, than that A and B together. This is not a guideline; it is a mathematical fact about how probability works.
Sometimes a word is doing all the work in an argument, and you do not notice until you take it away. Rationalist Taboo is the practice of temporarily banning a confusing or load-bearing word from a discussion -- and then seeing if you can still say what you meant without it. If you can, the conversation gets clearer. If you cannot, you have found the place where the thinking was thin.