The Wire Still Holds

Rebuilding Coherent Thought in the Age of Epistemic Collapse or How to Think for Yourself

Photo by Sheila C on Unsplash

I’ve been going back and forth in my mind about how to write what I’m about to write.

My project here has been one of public philosophy—and behind that lies a belief that people can be made, through education, to think for themselves. Indeed, I believe that is the purpose of education: to liberate people so they can pursue their own passions in harmony with a broader humanity, toward a common flourishing.

I have spent the last year writing this Substack, oscillating between various registers. At times I have engaged in political polemic. At times, intra-intellectual critique—internal examination of other intellectual positions. At times, mythopoetic writing. But now I want to try something new.

I just finished reading an incredible book by Steven Pinker, an acquaintance I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with deeply on some of the political and philosophical issues we face today. His book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows... got me thinking about this conversation—about the epistemic crisis we’re in.

Perhaps I should take some time to describe that.

This essay traces how we lost the ability to think coherently together—and how we might rebuild that capacity within ourselves.

---

The Epistemic Crisis

Photo by Wes Hicks on Unsplash

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy focused on how we know things and the structure of knowledge itself. When philosophers and others refer to an epistemic crisis, they mean that our sense of shared reality has been broken and fragmented.

We no longer agree on basic facts. More troubling still, we no longer share the same methods for determining what counts as a fact in the first place. We inhabit different information ecosystems, consume different narratives, operate with fundamentally different frameworks for evaluating truth claims. What one person sees as obvious reality, another dismisses as propaganda. What one community treats as settled truth, another regards as dangerous delusion.

This isn’t simply disagreement about policy or values—that’s the normal stuff of democratic life. This is something deeper: a fracturing of the shared epistemic ground that makes productive disagreement possible. When we can’t agree on what we’re disagreeing about, when we can’t even agree on how we might resolve our disagreements, democracy itself becomes incoherent.

Social media is primarily to blame for this. I’ve written about that separately. The algorithmic curation of reality, the optimization for engagement over understanding, the replacement of shared public squares with personalized filter bubbles—all of this has systematically destroyed the conditions under which common knowledge gets constructed and maintained.

But this piece is not about diagnosing the problem. It’s about rebuilding.

Specifically, it’s about how we can rebuild shared reality individually—by learning how to think, and by teaching others how to think. Not what to think, but how. Not which conclusions to reach, but which methods will reliably lead us toward truth rather than away from it.

This is the work of education in its deepest sense. Not the transmission of information, but the cultivation of minds capable of independent judgment. Not the optimization of human capital, but the liberation of human consciousness.

What Is Common Knowledge?

In his book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..., Steven Pinker explores a concept that sounds deceptively simple but turns out to be essential for nearly every aspect of human coordination: common knowledge.

Common knowledge is not simply information that many people happen to know. It’s something more specific and more powerful: it’s when everyone knows something, and everyone knows that everyone else knows it, and everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows it, ad infinitum. It’s knowledge that has become public, “out there,” part of the shared reality we can all refer to without hesitation or qualification.

This might sound like philosophical hair-splitting, but the distinction matters enormously. Consider the difference between these two situations:

In the first, you and I both know that the meeting room is on fire. We each privately notice the smoke, but neither of us knows that the other has noticed. We might each wait for someone else to take action, uncertain whether our alarm is justified or whether we’d look foolish by overreacting.

In the second, someone pulls the fire alarm. Now it’s not just that we both know—it’s common knowledge. Everyone knows the alarm has sounded, everyone knows that everyone else heard it, and everyone knows that coordinated action is both justified and expected. We evacuate immediately and in unison.

Common knowledge is what makes coordination possible. It allows us to make complementary choices—driving on the right side of the road, using paper currency, coalescing behind a political leader or movement, speaking the same language. These arbitrary but essential conventions only work when everyone knows that everyone else is following the same rules.

It’s also what makes social coordination possible—everything from meeting at an agreed time and place to forming enduring bonds of friendship, romance, or authority. Humans have developed a kind of sixth sense for common knowledge, and we create it through signals like laughter, tears, blushing, eye contact, and blunt speech.

But here’s where it gets interesting for our purposes: people also sometimes strive to avoid common knowledge. Even when everyone privately knows something, they may work hard to prevent it from becoming publicly acknowledged. This gives us rituals like benign hypocrisy, veiled bribes and threats, sexual innuendo, and the shared pretense of not seeing the elephant in the room.

As Jonathan Haidt notes in his endorsement of Pinker’s book, “the transition from various forms of private knowledge to common knowledge is the key cognitive tool for understanding when and how people coordinate to bring about sudden massive change—for better and for worse.”

This is what makes the concept so crucial for understanding our epistemic crisis. Democracy depends on common knowledge—on the existence of shared facts, shared methods for evaluating truth claims, shared confidence that when we speak of reality we’re referring to the same thing. When that common ground fragments, when we can no longer be certain that what we know is also known by others, the possibility of collective action, democratic deliberation, and coordinated response to shared challenges begins to dissolve.

Coherence: The Architecture of Understanding

Photo by Adhitya Sibikumar on Unsplash

What I want to talk about now is coherence—not as an abstract philosophical principle, but as the way an entire sense of reality hangs together.

I consider myself a coherentist in terms of my reasoning. But this isn’t purely about reason in the narrow sense. It’s not about being a master of propositional logic or formal argumentation. Coherence is about how your whole understanding of the world, yourself, and your place within it fits together as a unified whole.

This encompasses more than just facts about the world. It includes your passions, your emotions, how you feel about things, what you value, what moves you. I don’t believe one can hold a coherent understanding of themselves in the world through strict rationality alone. Reason is essential, but it’s not sufficient. A purely rational framework that ignores the emotional and evaluative dimensions of human experience isn’t more rigorous—it’s incomplete.

In this sense, I am what some philosophers would call a Humean, referring to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, one of the most important figures in the history of philosophy.

Hume’s Guillotine

Hume is perhaps best known for identifying what philosophers call the is-ought problem, sometimes referred to as Hume’s Guillotine because it cuts cleanly between two different domains of understanding.

Here’s the insight: you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” No amount of factual observation about how the world actually works can tell you how it should work. No collection of descriptive statements about what people do can logically compel you to any conclusion about what people ought to do.

This isn’t a flaw in reasoning—it’s a fundamental feature of how meaning works. Facts and values operate in different registers. Science can tell us that humans experience pain when injured, that societies with certain institutions tend to be more prosperous, that climate patterns are changing in specific ways. But science alone cannot tell us that we should care about pain, that prosperity is what we ought to pursue, that we have obligations to future generations.

The gap between “is” and “ought” isn’t a problem to be solved by better logic or more complete information. It’s the space where human values, human meaning, human purpose must be constructed through the exercise of our faculties—reason, yes, but also emotion, imagination, moral intuition, aesthetic sense.

The Passions and Abductive Reasoning

Photo by Etienne Boulanger on Unsplash

Hume famously wrote that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” This often gets misunderstood as advocating irrationality or emotional decision-making. But that’s not what Hume meant at all.

His point was that reason is a tool—extraordinarily powerful, essential, indispensable—but it cannot set its own goals. Your passions—your desires, your values, your emotional responses to the world—provide the direction. Reason helps you navigate toward what you care about, helps you distinguish effective from ineffective means, helps you recognize when your beliefs conflict with each other or with observed reality.

But without the passions to provide motivation and direction, reason has nothing to work with. A purely rational being with no desires, no values, no emotional responses would have no reason to do anything at all. It would be paralyzed not by an excess of feeling but by its complete absence.

This connects to what philosophers call abductive reasoning—the process of inference to the best explanation. Unlike deductive reasoning (which proceeds with logical certainty from premises to conclusions) or inductive reasoning (which generalizes from observed patterns), abductive reasoning asks: given everything I know, what explanation makes the most sense of the whole picture?

Abductive reasoning is how we actually think most of the time. We don’t just accumulate facts and deduce conclusions. We build frameworks for understanding that make sense of facts, values, emotions, experiences—all at once. We look for explanations that cohere with everything else we believe and feel and observe.

Coherence as a Holistic Guide

This is what I mean by coherence as a guide to understanding the world holistically.

A coherent worldview is one where your beliefs about facts, your emotional responses, your moral commitments, and your lived experience all fit together in a way that makes sense. Where what you claim to believe aligns with how you actually feel and what you actually do. Where your understanding of how the world works doesn’t contradict your sense of what matters in it.

This doesn’t mean eliminating all tension or doubt. Coherence isn’t the same as simplicity, and it certainly isn’t the same as certainty. A coherent understanding can include ambiguity, can acknowledge complexity, can hold space for uncertainty about specific questions.

What coherence requires is that the various elements of your understanding don’t fundamentally contradict each other in ways that make the whole structure unstable. That your reasons for believing things connect to your reasons for valuing things. That your emotional responses aren’t systematically at war with your intellectual commitments. That your actions in the world reflect what you claim to understand about it.

When you encounter new information, new experiences, new arguments, a coherentist approach asks: how does this fit with everything else I understand? Does it strengthen the overall structure of my understanding or does it reveal tensions that need to be resolved? What adjustments might I need to make to maintain coherence—not by ignoring the new input, but by integrating it honestly?

And this matters profoundly for how we think about rebuilding shared reality in a time of epistemic collapse. Because the crisis we face isn’t just about disagreement over facts—it’s about the dissolution of coherent frameworks for making sense of facts in the first place.

The Discipline of Reason Within Coherence

Photo by TONG KBP on Unsplash

But here’s what’s crucial: acknowledging that reason cannot work alone doesn’t mean abandoning reason’s discipline. Quite the opposite.

Within a coherentist framework, reason plays an absolutely essential role—not as the sole arbiter of truth, but as the mechanism that tests whether our beliefs actually hold together, whether our passions align with reality, whether the story we’re telling ourselves about the world can withstand scrutiny.

Reason is what allows us to check our work. It’s what forces us to confront contradictions within our worldview rather than simply holding incompatible beliefs simultaneously. It’s what demands that we follow implications through to their conclusions, even when those conclusions are uncomfortable. It’s what insists that if we believe X and X implies Y, we cannot simply reject Y because we don’t like it.

This is the heart of abductive reasoning in practice: building the most coherent explanation requires rigorous attention to whether the pieces actually fit. You can’t just assemble a worldview from whatever feels good or confirms what you already believed. You have to test whether your explanation accounts for the evidence, whether it contradicts itself, whether it requires you to ignore inconvenient facts or make special exceptions that undermine the framework’s integrity.

Logical Consistency as Foundation

Let’s be precise about what reason demands within a coherent framework.

First, logical consistency. Your beliefs cannot contradict each other in fundamental ways. If you believe that all humans have equal moral worth, you cannot simultaneously believe that some humans may be treated as mere instruments for others’ purposes. If you believe that truth is objective and discoverable, you cannot simultaneously believe that all claims about reality are equally valid regardless of evidence.

This doesn’t mean you can’t hold tensions or acknowledge complexity. It means that when you discover genuine contradictions—places where belief A and belief B cannot both be true—you have an obligation to resolve them. Not by ignoring one, not by compartmentalizing, but by examining which belief is better supported by evidence and experience, or by finding a more nuanced understanding that preserves what’s true in both while eliminating the contradiction.

Second, empirical adequacy. Your understanding of how the world works must be accountable to observation. If your theory predicts that X should happen but Y consistently happens instead, something in your theory is wrong. You don’t get to simply dismiss evidence that contradicts your preferred narrative.

This is where many people fail in their reasoning—not because they lack intellectual capacity, but because they privilege narrative coherence (the story makes sense to them) over empirical coherence (the story matches observed reality). They construct elaborate frameworks that feel satisfying but require ignoring or explaining away vast amounts of evidence that doesn’t fit.

Third, proportionality of belief to evidence. The strength of your conviction about any claim should be roughly proportional to the strength of the evidence supporting it. Absolute certainty about complex empirical questions is almost always a sign that you’ve stopped thinking rigorously. Conversely, treating well-established facts as mere opinions because they’re politically inconvenient is a failure of intellectual honesty.

Reason as the Check on Motivated Reasoning

Photo by Mario Heller on Unsplash

Here’s why this matters so much: human beings are extraordinarily good at constructing narratives that justify what we want to believe. We’re pattern-recognition machines, and we’ll find patterns even when they’re not there if those patterns serve our emotional needs or tribal identities.

Motivated reasoning is perhaps the greatest obstacle to genuine understanding. It’s the process by which we unconsciously filter evidence through the lens of what we want to be true, accepting uncritically anything that confirms our preferences while subjecting contrary evidence to impossible standards of proof.

We all do this. It’s not a sign of stupidity or malice—it’s how human psychology works. Our passions do and should direct our attention, do and should provide motivation, do and should inform our sense of what matters. But without the discipline of reason to check motivated reasoning, passion becomes mere tribalism.

This is where rigorous thinking becomes an ethical practice, not just an intellectual one. When you commit to following evidence where it leads rather than cherry-picking what supports your preferred conclusions, when you force yourself to articulate the strongest version of arguments you disagree with rather than attacking strawmen, when you actively seek out information that might disprove your beliefs rather than just confirmation—you’re practicing intellectual honesty as a moral virtue.

Formal Logic as Training, Not Truth

This is why studying formal logic, propositional reasoning, and systematic argumentation matters—not because human understanding reduces to logical propositions, but because these tools train you to recognize when you’re making unjustified leaps, when you’re contradicting yourself, when your conclusions don’t actually follow from your premises.

Think of it like physical training. You don’t lift weights because life consists of repeatedly lifting heavy objects in controlled movements. You lift weights because it develops strength and discipline that proves useful in countless real-world situations that look nothing like the gym.

Similarly, you study formal logic not because real-world reasoning consists of syllogisms and truth tables, but because it develops the mental discipline to spot fallacies, recognize when arguments are valid versus merely persuasive, distinguish between correlation and causation, and follow chains of reasoning to their actual conclusions rather than stopping wherever feels comfortable.

The abductive process of building coherent understanding requires this discipline. When you’re trying to determine which explanation best accounts for everything you know—facts, experiences, values, emotions—you need the tools to test whether your explanation actually works or just feels satisfying.

The Integration of Reason and Passion

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

So here’s the synthesis: passion provides direction, but reason provides correction. Emotion tells you what matters, but logic checks whether your beliefs about what matters are consistent with each other and with reality. Values give you purpose, but evidence tests whether your understanding of how to achieve that purpose is grounded in truth or wishful thinking.

A coherent worldview isn’t one that eliminates either dimension—it’s one that allows them to inform and constrain each other. Your passions should be channeled through reason’s discipline. Your reasoning should be directed by genuine concern for what matters.

When these work together, you get something more powerful than either alone: understanding that is simultaneously rigorous and meaningful, precise and purposeful, logically sound and humanly resonant.

When they become separated—when people either try to reason without acknowledging what they care about, or when they follow passion while dismissing reason’s constraints—you get the failures we see all around us. Technocratic rationalism that optimizes for metrics while ignoring what makes life worth living. Tribal emotionalism that privileges feeling righteous over being right.

The epistemic crisis we face isn’t just about losing common knowledge—it’s about losing the capacity for coherent reasoning that integrates both dimensions of human understanding. And rebuilding that capacity requires teaching people not just how to think logically, but how to think coherently about what matters and why.

When Ignorance Becomes Weaponized

Consider what happened this past week with Bad Bunny and the Super Bowl.

Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican artist, was announced to perform at the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show. In response, Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski declared that ICE agents would be deployed to the Super Bowl to find and apprehend “people who are in this country illegally.” The implication was clear: Bad Bunny’s Latino fans would be targeted for immigration enforcement.

There’s just one small problem with this entire narrative: Puerto Ricans are American citizens. They have been since 1917. Puerto Rico is a United States territory. Bad Bunny is an American performing for other Americans at an American sporting event.

Numerous MAGA influencers and commentators revealed, through their reactions, that they genuinely did not know this basic fact about American political geography. They treated Puerto Ricans as foreign. They described an American citizen performing at an American event as somehow suspect, potentially harboring “illegals,” requiring heightened immigration enforcement.

This isn’t a minor gap in knowledge. This is a fundamental ignorance about the basic structure of the American political community—about who counts as American, about what territories are part of the United States, about the constitutional order they claim to be defending.

And here’s what makes this more than just embarrassing: these are people who position themselves as having superior understanding of how American government should work. People who claim that their vision of citizenship, national identity, and belonging should be imposed through federal force. People who have influenced policy, shaped public discourse, commanded millions of followers, and helped elect a president.

They claim expertise in exactly the domain where they revealed staggering ignorance. They present themselves as authorities on immigration, citizenship, and national identity while not knowing that Puerto Ricans are Americans. They demand strict enforcement of laws they don’t understand, governing communities they can’t correctly identify, all while proclaiming themselves guardians of American identity.

This is what coherence collapse looks like in real-time.

The Failure Isn’t Just Factual—It’s Structural

Photo by Susan Q Yin on Unsplash

The problem isn’t simply that these individuals got a fact wrong. Everyone makes mistakes. The problem is that their entire framework for understanding American identity is so incoherent that this error was possible in the first place.

If your understanding of who counts as American is built primarily on cultural markers—language, ethnicity, perceived foreignness—rather than on actual legal and constitutional realities, then of course you’ll assume that Spanish-speaking brown people from Puerto Rico must be from somewhere else. Your framework has no room for the actual complexity of American identity.

If your beliefs about immigration are driven primarily by tribal reaction against people who seem different, rather than by any serious engagement with policy details or constitutional principles, then of course you won’t know basic facts about which territories are part of the United States. You never needed to know. The framework was never about accurate understanding—it was about emotional identification of in-groups and out-groups.

This is motivated reasoning taken to its logical extreme. The framework protects itself from correction by never requiring detailed knowledge in the first place. You don’t need to know that Puerto Rico is part of America if your real criterion for belonging is “speaks English, looks white, feels familiar.” The legal and constitutional facts become irrelevant to your actual decision-making process.

And here’s where it connects to everything we’ve been discussing about coherence: a worldview built on passion without reason’s discipline will inevitably produce these catastrophic failures of basic understanding.

The emotional conviction that America is being invaded by foreigners, that Latino cultural visibility represents a threat, that speaking Spanish is somehow un-American—all of this felt true to people who had never bothered to check whether Puerto Ricans are citizens. The passion provided direction, but because reason wasn’t disciplining that passion, wasn’t checking it against basic facts, wasn’t demanding consistency with constitutional reality, the passion led them straight into incoherence.

The Confidence of Ignorance

What makes this particularly dangerous is the absolute confidence with which this ignorance was expressed.

Lewandowski didn’t hesitate. He didn’t qualify his statement. He announced, with the full authority of a Trump administration adviser, that ICE would target this event. MAGA influencers didn’t express uncertainty—they expressed moral outrage that a “foreign” artist would be honored at America’s biggest cultural event.

This is what happens when you’ve stopped checking your beliefs against reality. When your epistemology runs on tribal signaling rather than empirical verification. When your framework for understanding is evaluated by how it makes you feel rather than whether it accurately maps onto observable facts.

You become supremely confident in claims you’ve never actually verified, because verification isn’t part of your process. You believe things because they fit the narrative, because they confirm your tribal identity, because they provide emotional satisfaction. Whether they’re actually true becomes a secondary consideration at best.

This is the epistemic crisis in microcosm. Not just that people are wrong, but that they’ve lost the cognitive infrastructure that would allow them to recognize they’re wrong, let alone correct themselves.

Common knowledge has collapsed. There’s no shared understanding of basic American civics because people exist in information ecosystems that never required them to learn those basics. There’s no common framework for evaluating claims because tribal affiliation has replaced empirical verification as the primary criterion for belief.

The Stakes of Incoherence

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Why does this matter for our discussion of coherence and education in thinking?

Because these are the people claiming they should run the country. They’re not just random citizens who got something wrong—they’re influencers, advisers, policymakers, and politicians who shape public discourse and government action.

And their entire approach to reasoning has produced a framework so incoherent that they don’t know Puerto Ricans are Americans.

How can you trust someone to design immigration policy when they don’t know which territories are part of America? How can you trust their judgment about who belongs when they can’t correctly identify who’s already a citizen? How can you trust their framework for understanding national identity when it produces errors this fundamental?

The answer is: you can’t. This is what epistemic collapse produces—people with tremendous confidence and zero competence, whose frameworks for understanding are so divorced from reality that they confidently assert obvious falsehoods while claiming expertise.

And this is precisely why rebuilding common knowledge, teaching people how to think coherently, matters so profoundly. Not just for abstract philosophical reasons, but because incoherent thinking produces disastrous results when applied to actual governance.

The Bad Bunny affair is a perfect test case: people who claim superior understanding revealed catastrophic ignorance of basic facts. And rather than prompting reflection, rather than forcing them to question their frameworks, it will likely be forgotten by next week, waved away as a minor error, while they continue to claim expertise they clearly don’t possess.

This is what we’re up against. And this is why simply having the facts isn’t enough. We need to rebuild the cognitive infrastructure that makes it possible to know facts, check facts, update beliefs when facts contradict them, and hold our frameworks accountable to empirical reality.

The Cognitive Technology of Resistance

This brings us to why these concepts—coherence, abductive reasoning, the integration of reason and passion—matter urgently right now, in this specific historical moment.

We live in an age of algorithmic content curation and AI-generated text. The information you encounter is increasingly selected not by human editorial judgment applying consistent standards, but by systems optimized to keep you engaged. And now, much of what you read may be generated by artificial intelligence systems that can produce fluent, confident-sounding text on any topic without any actual understanding or commitment to truth.

This is qualitatively different from previous information challenges. It’s not just that there’s more misinformation—it’s that the misinformation is personalized, adaptive, and produced at machine scale. It’s not just that propaganda exists—it’s that the propaganda learns what works on you specifically and adjusts its approach in real-time.

In this environment, your own coherent framework for understanding becomes the essential defense against manipulation.

Why Facts Alone Won’t Save You

Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash

Here’s what won’t work: memorizing true facts and trying to check everything against authoritative sources.

Not because facts don’t matter—they absolutely do. But because you cannot possibly fact-check everything you encounter. The volume is too high. The sources are too numerous. The claims come too fast. And increasingly, the “authoritative sources” themselves are under attack, deliberately undermined, or have been captured by the very forces of manipulation.

Moreover, the most sophisticated propaganda doesn’t simply assert false facts. It takes true facts and arranges them into misleading patterns. It tells you things that are technically accurate but fundamentally deceptive. It exploits the gap between what you can verify and what you need to understand.

This is where coherent thinking becomes essential.

When you’ve developed a coherent framework for understanding—when your beliefs about facts, your values, your emotional responses, your experiences all fit together in a structure that makes sense—that framework acts as an immune system against manipulation.

How Coherence Detects Manipulation

Here’s how it works in practice:

Someone presents you with a claim. Maybe it’s an AI chatbot giving you confident-sounding information. Maybe it’s algorithmic content selected because engagement data suggests people like you tend to share it. Maybe it’s a sophisticated propaganda operation using real facts arranged to mislead.

If you try to evaluate this claim in isolation, you’re vulnerable. You might not have time to fact-check. You might not know which sources to trust. The claim might be technically true but deeply misleading.

But if you evaluate it within your coherent framework, different warning signs emerge:

Does this claim conflict with other things I know to be true? Not just one or two facts, but patterns of understanding across multiple domains?

Does believing this require me to reject or ignore large amounts of evidence I’ve previously evaluated? Does it require special exceptions to principles I apply elsewhere?

Does this claim make sense given what I understand about how institutions work, how human psychology operates, how political systems function?

Does the emotional response this claim produces in me align with or contradict my considered values? Am I being manipulated through fear, outrage, or tribal signaling?

What would have to be true for this claim to be accurate? And are those underlying assumptions themselves consistent with my broader understanding of reality?

A coherent framework doesn’t just store facts—it maintains the relationships between facts, the patterns that connect them, the principles that govern them. When new information contradicts those patterns in ways that don’t make sense, when it requires you to abandon multiple connected understandings rather than just adjust one belief, your framework signals: something is wrong here.

The Integration of Reason and Emotion

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

This is why we spent so much time on Hume, on the role of passion, on the necessity of integrating reason and emotion rather than privileging one over the other.

Manipulation often works by exploiting the gap between what you think and what you feel. It presents claims that satisfy an emotional need—fear of outsiders, anger at injustice, desire for simple explanations—while short-circuiting rational evaluation.

The Bad Bunny example is perfect: the feeling that Latino cultural visibility represents a threat produced confident assertions that didn’t bother checking whether Puerto Ricans are citizens. The emotion provided certainty without requiring verification.

But a coherent framework integrates both dimensions. Your emotions inform what you care about, where you direct attention, what matters enough to investigate. Your reason checks whether your beliefs actually support those values, whether your understanding is consistent, whether your emotional responses align with reality or contradict it.

When these work together—when passion provides direction but reason provides correction—you’re much harder to manipulate. Because manipulation typically requires you to accept emotional certainty without rational verification, or logical-sounding arguments that contradict your deeper values.

Abductive Reasoning as Pattern Recognition

Remember abductive reasoning—inference to the best explanation, the process of asking what framework makes the most sense of everything you know?

This becomes crucial for media literacy because sophisticated manipulation often involves presenting you with individual claims that might be technically true, but arranged to suggest a false pattern.

Consider how algorithmic content works: it learns what keeps you engaged and shows you more of it. But engagement isn’t the same as truth. Often, content is engaging precisely because it’s outrageous, because it confirms your biases, because it makes you angry or afraid.

Over time, if you’re not thinking abductively—if you’re not asking “what larger pattern would make sense of all these individual claims?”—you can develop a wildly distorted understanding while never believing anything technically false.

You see story after story about immigrant crime. Each story might be factually accurate. But the pattern you’re building—”immigration causes crime”—might be completely wrong because you’re not seeing the base rates, the context, the stories that don’t get selected by the algorithm because they don’t trigger engagement.

Abductive reasoning forces you to ask: What would have to be true for this pattern I’m seeing to be accurate? And is that explanation consistent with everything else I know?

If the algorithm is showing you endless examples of one phenomenon while hiding all the counter-examples, your abductive reasoning should eventually notice: Wait, why am I only seeing evidence that points in one direction? What would explain this pattern of information reaching me?

This is coherence working as designed—not just evaluating individual claims, but evaluating the patterns, the sources, the systems that deliver information to you.

AI and the Industrialization of Manipulation

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

Now add AI to this environment.

Large language models can generate fluent, confident-sounding text on any subject. They can mimic expertise, cite sources (real or fabricated), adjust their tone and approach based on what seems to be working. They can operate at massive scale, flooding every information channel with content optimized not for truth but for whatever goal their operators have programmed.

And here’s the crucial part: they have no coherence themselves. They’re pattern-matching engines that produce text based on statistical relationships in their training data. They don’t have beliefs that need to fit together. They don’t experience the tension between contradictory claims. They feel no need to reconcile what they say now with what they said before.

This means they can produce content that’s internally inconsistent, that contradicts itself across different contexts, that sounds confident about claims that don’t hold together under scrutiny—and they’ll do it with perfect fluency and confidence.

Your defense against this is exactly what AI lacks: coherence.

When you encounter AI-generated content, you can’t always tell it’s AI-generated. You can’t always fact-check it quickly enough. You can’t always find authoritative sources to verify against. But you can evaluate whether it coheres with your broader understanding of reality.

Does this claim fit with other things I know? Does it require me to abandon multiple connected understandings? Does the pattern of information I’m receiving make sense, or does it seem designed to manipulate rather than inform?

The more coherent your framework, the more effective your immune system against manipulation—whether that manipulation comes from traditional propaganda, algorithmic curation, or AI-generated content.

Building the Cognitive Technology

This is why education in how to think rather than what to think matters so profoundly right now.

We’re not going to solve the information crisis by teaching everyone to memorize correct facts. The facts change. The volume is too high. The sources are too manipulated. And increasingly, the boundary between human and machine-generated content becomes impossible to police.

But we can teach people to build coherent frameworks for understanding. To integrate reason and emotion. To practice abductive reasoning that evaluates patterns rather than just individual claims. To notice when new information contradicts multiple connected understandings. To check whether their beliefs actually support their values. To recognize when they’re being pushed toward emotional certainty without rational verification.

These are cognitive technologies—tools for thinking that, once mastered, work across contexts, domains, and changing information environments.

A person with a coherent framework can navigate algorithmic feeds, AI chatbots, propaganda operations, and information overload with much greater resilience than someone who simply knows a lot of facts. Because the framework provides the structure that allows you to evaluate new information, detect manipulation, update beliefs appropriately, and maintain understanding even as specific facts change.

This is the work of public philosophy in our moment: not just telling people what’s true, but helping them develop the cognitive infrastructure to recognize truth when they encounter it, detect manipulation when it contradicts their understanding, and maintain coherent frameworks even in information environments designed to fragment understanding and trigger emotional reactions.

The Stakes

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Without this cognitive technology, we’re all vulnerable. No matter how smart you are, no matter how educated, if you haven’t developed the habits of coherent thinking—if you evaluate claims in isolation rather than within frameworks, if you let passion operate without reason’s discipline, if you don’t practice abductive reasoning that asks whether patterns make sense—you can be manipulated.

The Bad Bunny affair showed this perfectly. People who should have known better, who position themselves as experts, revealed catastrophic gaps in understanding because their frameworks were never coherent to begin with. Their beliefs were driven by tribal affiliation and emotional reaction rather than by any systematic attempt to maintain consistency with empirical reality.

This is what happens without the discipline of coherent thinking. And in an age of algorithmic manipulation and AI-generated content, the consequences are far worse than individual embarrassment. It’s the collapse of our capacity for collective sense-making, for democratic deliberation, for shared reality itself.

The way forward isn’t more facts. It’s better frameworks for evaluating facts. Not more information, but better tools for processing information. Not telling people what to believe, but teaching them how to think in ways that resist manipulation and maintain truth.

This is the cognitive revolution we need: not a revolution in what we know, but a revolution in how we know. In how we build understanding. In how we maintain coherence between beliefs, values, emotions, and experiences. In how we resist the forces—algorithmic, artificial, and all too human—that profit from our confusion and thrive on our incoherence.

The wire still holds. But only if we learn to walk it consciously, with the discipline of reason guiding passion’s direction, with coherent frameworks that resist manipulation, with the cognitive technology that makes genuine understanding possible even in the age of industrial-scale deception.

The Practice of Liberation

This brings us back to where we began: education as liberation.

I said at the start that I believe people can be made, through education, to think for themselves. That this is the purpose of education—to liberate people so they can pursue their own passions in harmony with a broader humanity, toward a common flourishing.

But now we can be more specific about what that liberation requires.

It’s not freedom from facts—it’s the freedom that comes from having a coherent framework for evaluating facts. Not liberation from emotion—it’s the integration of passion and reason that allows you to pursue what you care about without being led astray by manipulation. Not escape from complexity—it’s the cognitive technology that allows you to hold complexity without collapsing into either dogmatism or paralysis.

The people who didn’t know Puerto Ricans are Americans aren’t free. They’re trapped in frameworks so incoherent that they confidently assert falsehoods while claiming expertise. They’re enslaved to tribal affiliation, algorithmic curation, emotional manipulation—all while believing themselves to be independent thinkers.

Real freedom requires the discipline to think coherently. To check your beliefs against reality. To integrate reason and passion. To build frameworks that resist manipulation because they’re accountable to both empirical evidence and genuine values.

This is hard work. It’s much easier to let algorithms decide what you see, to believe what feels right, to follow passion without reason’s discipline, to accept tribal certainties without empirical verification. The path of least resistance leads straight into manipulation.

But the alternative—conscious, coherent thinking—is the only path to genuine agency. To the ability to recognize truth when you encounter it. To resist forces that would think for you, choose for you, optimize you according to their purposes rather than yours.

Teaching Others to Think

Photo by Susan Q Yin on Unsplash

And once you’ve developed these capacities yourself, you have an obligation to help others develop them.

Not by telling people what to believe—that just creates different dependencies. But by modeling coherent thinking. By demonstrating how to integrate reason and emotion. By showing how to evaluate claims within frameworks rather than in isolation. By practicing intellectual honesty as a moral virtue.

This is what public philosophy means in our moment. Not lectures from on high, but participation in the ongoing construction of common knowledge. Not claiming to have all the answers, but demonstrating the process of asking better questions. Not demanding obedience to authority, but helping people develop the authority of their own coherent understanding.

When you encounter someone trapped in incoherent frameworks—whether that’s a MAGA influencer who doesn’t know Puerto Rico is part of America, or a progressive who can’t articulate why their moral commitments require specific policies, or anyone whose beliefs don’t actually cohere with their stated values—your job isn’t to mock or dismiss them. Your job is to model something better.

Ask questions that expose incoherence without attacking identity. Point out contradictions between stated beliefs and actual implications. Demonstrate how to update understanding when evidence contradicts expectations. Show that intellectual honesty strengthens rather than threatens your sense of self.

This is slow work. It won’t go viral. It won’t produce instant conversions. But it’s the only work that actually rebuilds the cognitive infrastructure that makes democracy possible.

The Wire Still Holds

Common knowledge can be rebuilt, but only person by person, conversation by conversation, relationship by relationship. There’s no shortcut, no algorithm that can automate this work, no AI that can replace the difficult practice of thinking coherently together.

The wire still holds. But it requires conscious effort to keep walking it. The discipline to check beliefs against reality. The courage to admit when you’re wrong. The humility to recognize the limits of your understanding. The integration of reason and passion that allows you to care deeply while thinking clearly.

This is the cognitive technology we need to navigate our moment. Not more information, but better frameworks. Not stronger tribal affiliations, but more coherent understanding. Not algorithmic optimization, but conscious human judgment guided by both empirical reality and genuine values.

The epistemic crisis is real. Common knowledge has collapsed. The forces of manipulation—algorithmic, artificial, authoritarian—are powerful and adaptive and operating at machine scale.

But consciousness choosing to remain conscious is more powerful than all the systems designed to replace it with something more predictable. Coherent frameworks maintained through discipline are more resilient than manipulated certainties. And the human capacity to think clearly about what matters is not easily extinguished, even in environments designed to fragment it.

Two plus two equals four. Puerto Rico is part of the United States. There are twenty-four hours in a day. These truths hold not because someone with authority declared them, but because they cohere with reality in ways that resist manipulation.

And if we can hold these simple truths, if we can build frameworks that maintain coherence between facts and values, between reason and passion, between individual understanding and collective knowledge—then we can walk the wire.

Not because the path is easy, but because the alternative is unthinkable. Not because victory is assured, but because the work of thinking coherently is itself valuable, regardless of outcome. Not because we have all the answers, but because we’re committed to the questions that make genuine understanding possible.

This is the project of public philosophy in the age of epistemic collapse. Not salvation, but practice. Not certainty, but coherence. Not escape from the circus, but the conscious choice to walk the wire with discipline, courage, and honest engagement with what’s true.

The song is already playing. The center needs holding. The question is whether enough of us will learn to dance in time with truth—not because it’s easy, not because it’s popular, not because algorithms reward it, but because it’s the only dance worth doing.

You can dance, if you want to. But more than that: you can think. You can build coherent frameworks. You can resist manipulation. You can help others develop the same capacities.

The wire still holds. Let us walk it together, consciously, with the discipline of reason guiding passion’s direction, with coherent frameworks that resist the flood, with the cognitive technology that makes genuine understanding possible even in the age of industrial-scale deception.

For this is, after all, a philosophy blog. And philosophy, in the end, is not about escaping the world but about learning to live in it consciously—thinking clearly, feeling deeply, acting with integrity, and helping others do the same.

May love carry us home. Not as sentiment, but as practice. As the coherence between what we believe and what we do. As the integration of reason and passion. As the commitment to truth that makes community possible and democracy worth defending.

The circus continues. And we continue with it, carrying the flame of conscious thought forward into whatever darkness awaits.