Functionalist Nominalism: The external world has no propositional content or correspondence adjudication conditions, and categories do not exist as Platonic forms etched in the cosmos; they are actor-authored compressions whose warrant consists entirely in their functional purchase and coercive writ. Human sensory faculties and cognition are bounded, while memory is reconstructive rather than recollective.
Everything is about status—just not always in the sense of dominance or hierarchical rank so much as affiliative position, somatic signals of threat/fitness/contamination, conative alignment, risk profile, reputational intuition, and so forth.
“Status” in this thick sense simply tracks the indexing of an object relative to an actor's position inside a field of socially mediated affordances and liabilities
No human interaction escapes this dynamic.
All human action is precognitively seeded; “beliefs,” “ideas”, and “values” are mostly epiphenomenal just-so stories that exist primarily because such narratives are psychologically / socially adaptive, with the behavioral cause itself ALWAYS being mediated through precognitive status assessment in the aforementioned thick sense, even when ideological constructs get folded back into behavior via institutionalization, habituation, and other feedback loops.
Propositional cognition NEVER occurs in a precognitive vacuum, and propositions are NEVER adjudicated purely as propositions; all objects are indexed to a relational or status position before conscious reasoning begins, determining attention, salience, willingness to entertain an inference, standards of sufficiency, confidence, social uptake, memory, and conative drive toward subsequent action.
Status contest will NEVER present itself as such—either externally or in the mind of a status-contestant—in situations where said contest is easier / more effective when prosecuted in the language of morality, taste, or common sense. Agitation on behalf of one’s own position will likewise ALWAYS be experienced on behalf of some putative victim class more broadly legible or coalitionally impactful than one’s own should a congenial narrative avail itself, and this will likewise be experienced quite sincerely.
Betrayal is seldom experienced as such internally by the betrayer, consisting instead in a mutual breakdown of expectations-fulfilment retrofit after the fact if necessary.
Status currencies are vectoral and not scalar, breaking down intersectionally and opaquely by dominance, moral authority, presumptive dignity, mainstream social legibility, sexual access and exclusivity, aesthetic or intellectual standing, martyr-prestige, subcultural centrality, and so on. These currencies are incommensurable, and there is no neutral balance-sheet numeraire. This allows people to renarrate status exchange post-hoc in whichever manner is most favorable to their current position and experience post-hoc repricings as retroactively sincere.
Modeling a status exchange as extractive when not presently experienced as such is itself experienced as hostile to an interlocutor’s dignity unless it motivates sufficient repricing to materially shift coalitions.
All preferences are copacetic and ecologically endogenous.
Thick Precognitivism claims functional purchase as a compressive heuristic—it predicts behavior, explains systematic sincerity under motivated renarration, survives counterfactual application, and generates useful expectations.
It also applies reflexively.
There is no Archimedean point prior to relational valuation from which actors can perfectly experience the external world and objectively decide “what things mean.”
I'll read this when I'm done playing tavernkeep today