Meta Ontology of Truth
Koen Van Peteghem, Gent, 2025
Truth, in this work, is not a polite word for conviction, consensus, or theoretical elegance. Truth is a structural status that only a very small class of claims can ever reach. The proposal here is that philosophy should reserve the word “truth” for those claims—and for nothing else.
The central thesis is this:
“Truth is the condensed center of the zone of impossible deniability.”
Everything that follows is an attempt to make this sentence precise enough, and strict enough, that it can function as a common tribunal for all future ontologies and theories.
1. Domain and aim
The meta‑ontology of truth situates itself prior to substantive ontology and adjacent to classical epistemology. Its motivating question is neither “What entities populate reality?” nor “How do we justify our beliefs?”, but a more primitive structural question: what must “truth” be, if it is to mark a distinction between what can and what cannot be denied by serious agents?
The domain is therefore truth as status, not truth as set. It does not attempt to catalogue true propositions. Rather, it seeks to articulate the invariant structural features that any proposition must exhibit to count as true in the strict sense—across domains and independently of particular commitments about mind, matter, or society. This aligns the project with a long line of work on the nature of truth, but it introduces a shift of centre: from correspondence, coherence, or consensus to denial‑structure as the decisive object of analysis.
The aim is explicitly dual:
- Descriptive: to recover and formalise a pattern already implicit in serious practices of inquiry and discourse—namely, that some denials are treated as “not really available” except as self‑exclusion from the game of reasons, whereas others are regarded as legitimate, even if mistaken. The meta‑ontology claims that underlying this distinction is a structural fact about how certain propositions are embedded in the logic, practice, and existential orientation of agents.
- Normative: to elevate that structural fact into a criterion. Instead of allowing “truth” to function as a sliding honorific for whatever a given school or community currently affirms, the project imposes a constitutional restriction: only those claims whose denial is structurally impossible in a precise sense are entitled to the title “true”. All other claims, however well supported, belong to a different category (hypothesis, model, framework, narrative).
Thus, the domain is sharply delimited: the work treats “truth” not as a loose label for correctness, nor as a metaphysical primitive, but as a structural property of certain propositions relative to the space of possible denials; the aim is to turn that property into a trans‑theoretical standard that any future ontology must respect if it wishes to count its foundational claims as genuine knowledge.
2. Core definition and structure
The central definitional proposal—“truth is the condensed centre of the zone of impossible deniability”—can be unpacked into three interlocking theses.
1. The field thesis: Any substantive proposition generates around itself a field of possible attitudes for a competent agent: affirmation, suspension, gradated doubt, and outright denial. These attitudes are not symmetrical in cost. The “zone” names this structured space of attitudes, ordered by what it costs an agent (in terms of coherence, action, and existential orientation) to inhabit them over time. Truth is thus located within a topology of doxastic and practical possibilities, rather than being a primitive dyadic relation between sentence and world.
2. The impossibility thesis: Within this field, a subset of attitudes becomes structurally unavailable in the strong sense: a serious, informed agent cannot take them up and live in them without some form of self‑damage. “Impossible deniability” concerns this subset: denials that are possible in grammar but unsustainable in practice, argument, or life. The definition therefore shifts the burden of analysis from “what makes a belief correct?” to “what makes a denial structurally unsustainable?”.
3. The condensation thesis: Propositions do not occupy this status ab initio. They move toward or away from the core as they are exposed to criticism, counterexample, and rival frameworks. “Condensation” names the process by which a claim is refined under pressure until all serious denial attempts either:
- presuppose it,
- lead to systematic practical self‑contradiction, or
- result in existential erosion that the denier cannot stably inhabit.
The “centre” is thus not a metaphysical point but a limit‑position: the outcome of subjecting a proposition to progressively more demanding denial tests and finding that, beyond a certain point, denial is no longer a live option for any agent who satisfies minimal conditions of rationality and humanity.
These theses together yield a structured, non‑circular account: truth is not defined by referring to “facts” or “reality” as unexplained primitives; it is defined by the pattern of denials a proposition can bear without collapsing the denier’s standing as a reasoning, acting, meaning‑oriented subject.
3. Layers of impossibility
The meta‑ontology asserts that impossible deniability is not monolithic. To be analytically tractable, it must be stratified into at least three layers, corresponding to distinct modes in which denial can fail.
1. Logical layer
At this level, impossibility is internal to the practice of reasoning. Some propositions or principles are such that denying them undermines the very machinery required to frame, argue for, or against anything at all. Canonical examples include non‑contradiction and minimal inferential rules. The key feature is performative self‑defeat: the act of rejecting these principles in serious discourse presupposes their validity. The meta‑ontology here draws on and generalises work on self‑referential incoherence, but treats such principles as paradigmatic occupants of the inner zone: their denial disqualifies the denier from the status of “participant in the game of reasons”.
2. Practical layer
Here, impossibility concerns the intelligibility of action. Certain claims are embedded in the grammar of agency itself: that actions have consequences, that there is a world that resists wishes, that others exist as loci of action and reaction. Denying such claims leads not to formal contradiction but to lived inconsistency: the denier’s actual behaviour continually contradicts their stated position. This is not mere hypocrisy; it is a structural impossibility of aligning denial with the requirements of navigating a world of risks, resources, and other agents. The meta‑ontology treats this as a second mode of impossible deniability: denial fails not in the space of inference, but in the space of embodied praxis.
3. Existential layer
At this deepest level, impossibility concerns orientation in meaning and value. Some propositions—e.g. that human existence is oriented toward some conception of meaning, that experienced value differences matter—are not “axioms” in the logical sense, yet their sustained denial produces pathologies: paralysis, chronic bad faith, or a compensatory re‑anchoring in disguised forms. The impossibility here is not that denial cannot be spoken, but that it cannot be stably lived without dissolving the agent’s capacity to continue as a recognisable subject. The meta‑ontology thus extends the analysis of impossibility beyond reason and action into the realm of existential viability.
Truth, as the condensed centre, is then defined as the region where these modes of impossibility converge or strongly reinforce one another. This stratification allows for fine‑grained judgements: some propositions may be logically non‑deniable but existentially thin; others may be existentially non‑deniable but logically contingent. The inventory of truth in the strict sense will be the set of claims whose denial threatens the agent at more than one layer—and ideally at all three.
4. Core and penumbra
On this basis, the work introduces a structural distinction between core and penumbra that is meant to cut across theories and traditions.
- The core (or “inventory”) consists of propositions that occupy, or very closely approximate, the condensed centre. Their denial leads systematically to self‑defeat in one or more of the specified layers. These are candidates for what might be called trans‑framework necessities: constraints that any coherent, practicable, livable conceptual scheme must honour. They are the minimal, hard content of “what we actually know” in the strict sense.
- The penumbra is the surrounding belt of commitments for which denial remains structurally available, even if epistemically costly or dialectically difficult. This includes large parts of what are ordinarily treated as “systems”: metaphysical architectures, historical teleologies, comprehensive theories of mind or society. They can be rejected without thereby forfeiting the status of serious agent; they can be replaced by rival constructions that also respect the core constraints.
The meta‑ontology aims to normalise this distinction as a discipline‑wide sorting device. Instead of asking of a philosophy, “Is it true as a whole?”, it asks:
- Which of its claims belong in the core—i.e. are such that denial is structurally impossible in the defined sense?
- Which belong in the penumbra—i.e. are rich, generative, perhaps even indispensable as heuristics, but never attain the status of impossible deniability?
This reframes much of the canon as a mixture: thin cores of non‑deniable constraints embedded in thick layers of deniable elaboration.
5. Application rule for ontologies and theories
The meta‑ontology then articulates a general application rule designed to discipline future system‑building.
Any candidate ontology or theory that wishes to claim more than heuristic status must:
1. Explicitly identify its foundational claims as hypotheses about necessary structure, not as truths by fiat.
2. Submit them to structured denial testing:
- Logical: Can the denial be articulated and defended without covertly presupposing what it rejects, or without collapsing the practice of argument itself?
- Practical: Can an agent who denies this claim still navigate the world coherently, without their behaviour systematically undermining their stated position?
- Existential: Can an agent live under this denial without sliding into forms of disorientation or bad faith that render their stance unstable over time?
3. Classify each claim according to outcome:
- If denial can be stably maintained by serious agents, the claim is penumbral. It may still be part of a powerful framework, but it is not truth in the strict sense.
- If denial repeatedly fails across these dimensions, the claim qualifies for inclusion in the core inventory.
The explicit ambition is that this procedure function as a common standard of rigour, independent of school affiliation. Analytic, continental, pragmatic, and critical projects can all, in principle, be evaluated by asking: which of your commitments are such that their denial is structurally unavailable in the defined sense?
6. Place and ambition within philosophy
Finally, the meta‑ontology positions itself within the philosophical landscape as an attempt to recalibrate what the discipline takes itself to be doing when it speaks of “truth”.
Its ambitions are:
- Constitutional: to provide a shared “constitution of truth” that any serious ontological or theoretical project must acknowledge, on pain of admitting that it uses “truth” in a merely parochial or rhetorical sense.
- Critical: to offer a tool for re‑reading the history of philosophy, distinguishing sharply between inventory‑level contributions (non‑deniable constraints, tools, structures) and penumbral constructions (systems, narratives, speculative edifices), without thereby dismissing the latter as worthless.
- Regulative: to shift the prestige economy of the field. Instead of rewarding primarily the scale, novelty, or stylistic power of systems, it proposes to reward the identification and articulation of those very few claims whose denial is structurally impossible in the defined sense—claims that any future framework, however innovative, will have to respect or systematically pay the cost of ignoring.
- Integrative: to create a conceptual space in which insights from disparate traditions can be compared in terms of their deniability profile. A phenomenological structure, a formal principle from logic, and a critical theory of power may all contribute to the same core inventory if, under examination, their denial proves equally impossible.
At full strength, the proposal is that philosophy adopt this meta‑ontology of truth as its own internal quality‑control mechanism: a standing reminder that calling something “true” is not a matter of endorsement, but a claim about where that proposition sits in the structured field of possible denials, and about what it would cost an agent, in reason, action, and existence, to walk away from it.
7. Comparative Positioning
Comparative positioning shows how this meta‑ontology of truth both overlaps with and departs from the main existing families of truth‑theories. The aim is not to dismiss them, but to make clear that “truth as the condensed centre of the zone of impossible deniability” is neither a trivial restatement nor a simple variant of any of them.
Correspondence theories
Classical correspondence theories say: a statement is true if it corresponds to the facts.
This meta‑ontology agrees with the intuition that truth is about something independent of our beliefs and preferences, but it does not define that “something” in terms of pre‑given “facts”.
- Overlap: Both views insist that truth is not reducible to mere coherence, consensus, or utility. There is a reality that constrains what can sustainably be said.
- Difference:
- Correspondence theorists typically treat “facts” as basic and then ask how sentences map onto them. The present account treats the pattern of denials as basic and defines truth via the cost of denial for an agent’s logic, practice, and existence.
- Correspondence says little about how we recognise truth beyond pointing to evidence and realism; here, recognition is explicitly tied to the tri‑layered impossibility of inhabiting denial over time.
In effect, this meta‑ontology can be read as a structuralisation of correspondence: instead of positing “facts” directly, it identifies truths by the way the world, plus our nature as agents, make certain denials structurally impossible.
Coherence theories
Coherence theories identify truth with belonging to a maximally coherent set of beliefs.
The present account incorporates coherence as a necessary but not sufficient condition.
- Overlap:
- Any proposition that reaches the condensed centre must be coherently integrated with other non‑deniable claims; blatant incoherence disqualifies it.
- Logical impossibility of denial partly arises from coherence failures (self‑contradiction, circularity).
- Difference:
- Coherence alone cannot distinguish between multiple, incompatible but internally coherent systems.
- The meta‑ontology introduces two extra constraints—practical and existential—so that truth is not just about fitting within a web of beliefs, but about being non‑deniable for agents who must act and live.
Thus, coherence is treated as a background requirement for truth, but the decisive criterion is whether denial remains structurally live once coherence, action, and existence are all taken into account.
Pragmatist theories
Pragmatist accounts (Peirce, James, Dewey) link truth to what would be stably warranted in the long run of inquiry, or to what “works” for navigating experience.
This meta‑ontology is close to pragmatism in spirit but imposes a tighter structure.
- Overlap:
- The insistence on testing through consequences and ongoing inquiry mirrors the “long run” pragmatist picture.
- The practical and existential layers of impossibility reflect a pragmatist sensitivity to what agents can actually live by.
- Difference:
- Pragmatism often treats truth as what would be indefeasibly accepted by an ideal community of inquirers; this remains implicitly social and epistemic.
- Here, truth is anchored in what no agent can deny without structural self‑damage, regardless of communal consensus. A whole community can, in principle, be wrong if its “working beliefs” remain deniable in the required sense.
In short, the present view can be seen as a hardened, non‑communitarian pragmatism: the “long run of inquiry” matters only insofar as it reveals which denials become impossible for agents as such, not just for a particular scientific or cultural community.
Deflationary and minimalist theories
Deflationary and minimalist theories argue that “is true” adds no substantial property: to say “p is true” is just to say “p”; all deep metaphysics of truth is suspect.
The meta‑ontology directly opposes this deflationary stance.
- Overlap:
- It agrees that one should avoid mysterious metaphysical additions to propositions when saying they are true.
- It is compatible with using deflationary schemas in ordinary discourse (“‘Snow is white’ is true iff snow is white”) as shorthand.
- Difference:
- Where deflationism denies that truth names a substantive, interesting property, this work asserts exactly that: truth is a structural property of propositions relative to denial.
- Deflationism often leaves us with no criteria beyond local justification; the proposed meta‑ontology installs a demanding, cross‑context standard.
From this standpoint, deflationism is read as a useful warning against naive metaphysical reification, but as ultimately insufficient: philosophy needs a positive ontology of truth if it is to distinguish inventory‑level claims from penumbral constructions.
Truthmaker and structural realist approaches
Truthmaker theories require that every true proposition be made true by some portion of reality—its “truthmaker”. Structural realists emphasise relational or structural features of the world as what our best theories track.
- Overlap:
- Both lines resonate with the idea that truth is anchored in structure, not just in linguistic or psychological states.
- The meta‑ontology’s focus on what happens when we deny a claim can be seen as indirectly probing the underlying structure that “makes it true”.
- Difference:
- Truthmaker theory typically focuses on ontological correlates (“what in the world makes this true?”), whereas this account focuses on agent‑side constraints: what the world and our nature jointly make impossible to deny without breakdown.
- Structural realism remains tied to the fortunes of empirical science; the impossibility framework is meant to operate at a more general level, across empirical and non‑empirical domains (logic, agency, meaning).
One can read the proposed view as a truthmaker‑agnostic structuralism: it does not specify the exact nature of the underlying reality, but characterises truth by the way that reality constrains denial for finite agents.
Human‑dependence and objectivity
Many existing debates turn on whether truth is “objective” (mind‑independent) or “relative” (culture‑ or framework‑dependent).
The present meta‑ontology cuts across this divide:
- It is agent‑relative in form: truth is defined via what serious agents can or cannot deny without self‑damage.
- But it is not merely subjective or cultural: the constraints are meant to apply to any agent of a certain broad type (finite, embodied, consequence‑sensitive, meaning‑oriented), regardless of specific culture or theory.
So the position is: truth is neither a free‑floating absolute indifferent to all forms of life, nor a mere projection of communal habits. It is a structural property of propositions relative to the basic form of agency we instantiate—and it remains binding on us even when our communities temporarily fail to track it.
What this adds
Taken together, the comparative positioning shows:
- The meta‑ontology preserves the realist intuition of correspondence, the systemic discipline of coherence, the experiential and practical insights of pragmatism, and the structural sensitivity of truthmaker/realist approaches.
- But it reorganises them around a single criterion: the structure of impossible deniability—tri‑layered into logical, practical, existential dimensions.
In that sense, it proposes a new centre of gravity for truth theory. Instead of asking first how sentences map to facts, or how beliefs cohere, or how inquiry would converge, it asks: what happens when we deny this?
Truth is what, after enough honest denial attempts, still cannot be walked away from without losing our grip on reasoning, on the world of action, and on our own capacity to go on.
Methodological examples show how the “impossible deniability” tribunal works on concrete claims. Each example runs a candidate proposition through the three layers: logical, practical, existential.
8. Examples
Example 1: Non‑contradiction
Claim: “A statement and its exact negation cannot both be true in the same respect at the same time.”
- Logical layer
Denial: “Contradictions can be true.”
To argue for this, one must still distinguish acceptable from unacceptable inferences, treat some moves as valid and others as errors. But that already presupposes a background in which not everything follows from everything—i.e. in which contradictions do matter. If contradictions are fully allowed, any proposition and its negation are on a par; the very act of offering a “position” collapses. Denial is thus performatively self‑defeating: it uses the very constraint it rejects.
- Practical layer
In practice, an agent who genuinely treated contradictions as acceptable would have no basis for distinguishing safe from unsafe, success from failure, promise kept from broken. They could neither plan nor revise action coherently. Day‑to‑day agency presupposes that some states of affairs exclude others. To live as if contradictions “don’t matter” is impossible without sliding back into treating them as disallowed.
- Existential layer
A stance that erases all distinction between “is so” and “is not so” leaves no room for oriented commitment. Projects, relationships, and responsibilities require that some possibilities be affirmed and others rejected. Attempting to live in genuine indifference to contradiction drains meaning from choice. Any life that continues will in fact reintroduce non‑contradiction as soon as it undertakes anything.
Result: denial fails across all three layers. Non‑contradiction sits very close to the condensed centre.
Example 2: Existence of other minds
Claim: “Other minds exist.”
- Logical layer
Denial: “Only my mind exists.”
Purely at the level of consistency, solipsism is not formally contradictory. One can, in principle, write down a coherent solipsistic story. So logical impossibility is weak here: the claim is not an axiom of logic in the narrow sense.
- Practical layer
However, the solipsist must act as if others exist: they anticipate responses, avoid harm from others, seek cooperation, interpret speech acts. If they genuinely treated others as mindless automata, they would lose their grip on communication, coordination, and learning. Their practical life continuously presupposes other minds, whatever they say. Denial is thus practically unsustainable without massive, chronic dissonance between word and deed.
- Existential layer
Sustained, genuine solipsism erodes recognisable human existence. The denial of other minds undermines trust, responsibility, gratitude, and guilt—core dimensions of a life with others. Most who flirt with solipsism either slide back into ordinary recognition or fall into forms of alienation that cannot be stably inhabited. The denial tends to collapse into bad faith (acting “as if” others exist while claiming they do not) or into pathology.
Result: Although not logically necessary in the strict sense, “other minds exist” is practically and existentially non‑deniable for any agent living an intelligible human life. It belongs in the core inventory, supported by two layers.
Example 3: “Human life needs some orientation in meaning and value”
Claim: “Human beings require some orientation in meaning and value to live stably as agents.”
- Logical layer
The denial—“Humans can live indefinitely without any concern for meaning or value”—is not a formal contradiction. So logic alone does not settle it.
- Practical layer
Practically, an agent who tried to act without any distinctions of better/worse, important/trivial, to‑be‑done/to‑be‑avoided, would quickly lose the ability to choose at all. Every action implicitly ranks options; orientation in value is built into deliberation. Denial of all value does not yield “neutral” action; it yields paralysis or arbitrary flailing that cannot be maintained without covert reintroduction of preferences.
- Existential layer
Biographical, clinical, and cultural evidence converge: prolonged states in which a person takes nothing to matter are associated with collapse—despair, anhedonia, suicidality, or desperate re‑anchoring in substitute meanings (fanaticism, addiction, etc.). A stance of “nothing has meaning or value” may be articulated in crisis, but it is not a position one can stably live in without ceasing to function as a subject who projects themselves into a future. Over time, the denial either disintegrates the self or is abandoned.
Result: this claim is existentially and practically non‑deniable for human agents. It is a strong candidate for the core: any ontology that denies it must pay with a systematically distorted account of human life.
Example 4: A teleological claim (“History necessarily tends toward a classless society”)
Claim: “Human history necessarily tends toward a classless society.”
- Logical layer
Denial is not self‑contradictory. One can coherently assert that history has no predetermined end.
- Practical layer
Denying historical teleology does not make everyday agency incoherent. People can still plan, cooperate, resist oppression, and build institutions without believing in a guaranteed endpoint.
- Existential layer
Some find such a teleology existentially anchoring; others live, act, and sustain meaning without it, orienting themselves around local goods, finite projects, or other conceptions of justice. Denial may alter one’s narrative self‑understanding, but does not by itself collapse the capacity to live as an agent.
Result: denial remains structurally available. This is a paradigmatic penumbral claim: powerful, historically influential, but not truth in the strict sense. It cannot enter the core inventory.
Example 5: A strong relativist thesis (“Truth is only whatever a culture takes as true”)
Claim: “Truth is nothing over and above what a given culture or community treats as true.”
- Logical layer
Denying objectivity of truth while still arguing across cultures presupposes a standpoint from which one can criticise cultural beliefs as more or less adequate. If “true” just means “accepted here,” cross‑cultural critique loses its footing. The relativist must either abandon serious criticism or smuggle back an independent standard. This creates a self‑undermining tension.
- Practical layer
In practice, agents constantly distinguish between “what we now take to be true” and “what really is the case, whether or not we see it yet” (e.g. in science, law, personal relationships). Denying any gap between belief and truth conflicts with how inquiry actually operates. Working scientists, judges, and ordinary people treat truth as something beliefs can fail to capture.
- Existential layer
A thoroughgoing relativism undermines the sense that one can be genuinely mistaken or genuinely corrected, beyond changes in local fashion. For many agents, this erodes the seriousness of commitment and responsibility; their lives default to performance within a script rather than answerability to something beyond it. That stance tends to be unstable: people either retreat into sceptical irony or, in practice, reintroduce stronger notions of correctness.
Result: the relativist thesis itself fares poorly under the tribunal; it sits in the penumbra and is partially self‑undermining. The meta‑ontology of truth explicitly positions itself against such views by re‑establishing a robust, structural sense of objectivity grounded in impossible deniability.
These examples show the method:
1. Make the claim as clear and structural as possible.
2. Imagine serious denial, not straw‑man rejection.
3. Ask, layer by layer:
- Can the denier still reason without presupposing what they deny?
- Can they still act coherently in a world of others and consequences?
- Can they still live a recognisably human life without sliding into collapse or covert reversal?
If denial survives all three, the claim remains penumbral. If denial systematically fails, the claim moves toward the condensed centre and qualifies as truth in this meta‑ontological sense.
8. Objections
1. “Isn’t this just pragmatism in disguise?”
Objection.
Linking truth to what cannot be denied without practical or existential breakdown sounds like an extreme version of “what works” or “what we cannot help but believe”—i.e. a dressed‑up pragmatism. If so, the proposal adds rhetoric, not substance.
Reply.
There is an affinity with pragmatism, but also a decisive difference.
- Like pragmatism, this view insists that claims must be tested in use, not only in abstract argument: consequences for action and life matter for their status.
- However, classic pragmatism ties truth to what inquiry would converge on or what works for a community in the long run; it remains fundamentally epistemic and often communitarian.
The present meta‑ontology is stricter and more structural:
- It defines truth via impossible deniability, not mere success: a proposition is not true because it works, but because denying it cannot be stably lived or argued without self‑destruction.
- It is not essentially communitarian: a whole community can, in principle, converge on practices that “work” locally yet rest on propositions whose denial is still structurally available. A consensus can occupy the penumbra.
So the view might be called “hard structural pragmatism”: it keeps the pragmatist insight that practice and life are test‑beds for belief, but ties truth to the limit‑case where denial destroys the agent’s capacities, not just their current problem‑solving routine.
2. “Doesn’t this smuggle in a particular (humanist) anthropology?”
Objection.
Truth is defined relative to what finite, embodied, meaning‑oriented agents can or cannot deny without breakdown. That seems to presuppose a specific picture of the human being. If that picture is wrong or parochial, the whole meta‑ontology collapses.
Reply.
Any substantive account of truth must say something about the kind of beings for whom truth is in play. Even classical theories silently assume agents who reason, act, and care about correctness. This meta‑ontology makes that assumption explicit and structural:
- It assumes agents who:
- engage in inferential practices,
- act in a world of consequences and other agents,
- require some orientation in meaning and value to sustain a life.
Those are very weak constraints; they hold across vastly different cultures and outlooks. The proposal is conditional in the following way:
For any being that instantiates these broad features, “truth” is the name for propositions whose denial damages those very capacities across logical, practical, and existential dimensions.
If we encountered radically different intelligences that did not share these minimal structures, the shape of their “truth” might differ. But for us—and for any beings recognisably like us—this meta‑ontology claims to capture what truth must be if it is to play the role we ask of it. That makes the view anthropologically indexed but not narrowly “humanist” or culture‑bound.
3. “Isn’t this circular? You use ‘serious agent’, ‘coherence’, ‘self‑damage’—all of which presume truth.”
Objection.
To say “denial is impossible for a serious, coherent agent” already sneaks in normative notions—seriousness, coherence, self‑damage—that look truth‑laden. The definition then risks circularity: truth is what serious agents cannot deny, and serious agents are those who track truth.
Reply.
The charge of circularity is partly addressed by distinguishing thin from thick uses of those notions.
- “Serious agent” means: an agent who attempts to maintain minimal internal consistency, responsiveness to evidence, and stability of life over time—not an agent already defined as “truth‑tracking”.
- “Coherence” is taken in a strictly structural sense: absence of direct contradiction and of patterns of behaviour that systematically undermine one’s avowed stance.
- “Self‑damage” refers to breakdowns in the capacity to reason, act, and orient—not to moral or ideological judgement.
With those thin notions, the meta‑ontology proceeds in two steps:
1. It identifies, independently of any specific truths, the conditions under which an entity counts as a participant in practices of giving and asking for reasons, acting in a world, and projecting themselves into a future.
2. It then defines truth as what cannot be denied by such participants without eroding those very capacities.
There is a feedback loop (truth and agency co‑shape each other), but not vicious circularity. The account starts from a pre‑theoretical grip on what it is to be a discursive, acting, meaning‑seeking being, and only then narrows down what truth must be for such beings.
4. “What about deep disagreement? Different agents deny different things without apparent breakdown.”
Objection.
History is full of agents who deny each other’s “truths” yet seem to live coherent, meaningful lives—religious vs. secular, Marxist vs. liberal, etc. If denial can be stably inhabited in so many cases, your criterion seems too strong: almost nothing will count as truth.
Reply.
This is, in fact, one of the intended consequences. The meta‑ontology explicitly predicts that very little in the philosophical and ideological landscape will qualify as truth in the strict sense.
Two further clarifications:
- Many disagreements occur entirely within the penumbra. They concern frameworks, narratives, and models that can be denied without structural collapse—hence their persistence. The criterion is meant to flag that fact, not abolish those disagreements.
- Apparent stability of denial is often superficial or short‑term. A stance can be existentially attractive or institutionally supported while still containing deep fractures (bad faith, repressed contradictions, systematic exclusions) that show up only under careful analysis and over time. The meta‑ontology demands that we look beyond surface functioning to ask: what compensations, distortions, or covert imports are required to keep this denial going?
So the presence of deep disagreement does not refute the criterion; it helps to sort which parts of those disagreements are about core constraints (where denial is costly) and which are about penumbral constructions where denial is structurally cheap but emotionally or politically charged.
5. “Isn’t this too demanding? Almost nothing will end up as ‘truth’.”
Objection.
If “truth” is reserved for claims whose denial destroys logic, practice, and existential orientation, then perhaps only a handful of logical principles and very basic anthropological statements qualify. Isn’t that an intolerably thin conception of truth?
Reply.
The thinness is not a bug; it is the point.
- The meta‑ontology distinguishes between what we know (in the maximally strict sense) and what we provisionally accept, model, or believe.
- Most of our intellectual life—science, political theory, ethics, metaphysics—necessarily unfolds in the penumbra: zones of structured uncertainty where models are tested, revised, and replaced.
The ambition is not to inflate the inventory but to stabilise its lower bound: to say, “at least this much cannot be walked away from without ceasing to be recognisably rational, acting, meaning‑oriented beings.” That does not devalue penumbral work; it gives it a clearer status.
If the result is that only a small number of propositions earn the title “truth” in this sense, the gain is a sharper concept, not a loss. It becomes possible to speak honestly about how little is absolutely fixed and how much is open.
6. “Doesn’t this make truth dependent on human fragility (our tendency to ‘break down’)?”
Objection.
If denial is impossible because we are too fragile, that says more about our limitations than about truth. A more robust being might deny what we cannot. So truth becomes an artefact of our weaknesses, not a property of reality.
Reply.
The meta‑ontology explicitly ties truth to the structure of finite, embodied, consequence‑sensitive, meaning‑oriented agency. It does not claim to describe “truth in itself” for all possible beings; it claims to describe what truth must be for beings of our broad kind.
Two points blunt the worry:
- Many of the constraints highlighted (e.g. non‑contradiction, some form of causality, some orientation in value) are not mere weaknesses but conditions of possibility for any discursive, temporally extended form of agency. A hypothetically “stronger” being that did not need them would, by definition, be engaged in a different game than ours.
- Recognising indexicality does not reduce truth to fragility. It is a standard move in philosophy of logic and science to say: given certain forms of life and inquiry, certain principles are non‑optional. This meta‑ontology codifies that in a more systematic way.
So yes, truth here is form‑relative: it is what is non‑deniable for beings who share our basic form of life. That is exactly as it should be if truth is to matter to us in the ways it does.
7. “How is this practically usable, not just a beautiful abstraction?”
Objection.
Even if the framework is coherent, it may be too abstract to guide real work. How does one actually decide, in a non‑hand‑waving way, that denial is “existentially impossible” or “practically unstable”?
Reply.
The meta‑ontology is a regulative ideal paired with a methodological discipline.
Practically, applying it means:
- Working through denial scenarios in detail, as in the methodological examples: tracing what an agent must do, say, and suffer to sustain a denial.
- Using evidence from logic, empirical inquiry, history, and clinical or biographical material to test whether a denial can in fact be lived over time without the predicted breakdowns.
- Being explicit about degrees: some claims are closer to the core than others; we can be more or less confident that denial is impossible.
This is not trivial work, but neither is any serious foundational enterprise. The meta‑ontology does not pretend to automate judgement; it provides a framework and a standard by which such judgement can be argued and criticised.
Taken together, these objections help clarify what the meta‑ontology is and is not:
- It is not a rebranded version of an existing theory.
- It is not a universal metaphysic of truth for all conceivable beings.
- It is a demanding, form‑relative structural account of what “truth” must mean for us if the word is to mark propositions that no serious agent can deny without losing their grip on reasoning, on the world, and on their own continued existence as a subject.
9. Necessity for Ontology
For many intellectual activities, a strict meta‑ontology of truth is not necessary. For ontology, it is. The difference turns on what is being claimed.
Most practices—science in its day‑to‑day mode, politics, ethics, even much of philosophy—can function with fallible, working notions of truth: “best available theory,” “what the evidence currently supports,” “what our community treats as well‑established.” These contexts tolerate, and even require, a degree of openness: models are revised, paradigms shift, values are contested. Doubt about the ultimate status of their claims is built into the practice as a virtue. They do not need to settle what truth is, only to operate with local standards of justification.
Ontology is different. An ontology does not merely offer useful descriptions or models; it claims to say what must be the case—what the world, or some region of it, is like in its necessary structure. When an ontology speaks, it does not intend to say “this is our current best guess,” but “this is how things are, and any adequate account will have to respect this.” That kind of claim cannot rest on a loose or ambiguous notion of truth without becoming unstable.
If “truth” is left as an undefined honorific—something like “what we take seriously at this moment”—then any ontology that invokes it is precarious. Its foundational statements (“It is true that…”) might be carrying one of several unexamined meanings:
- Sociological: “Our community currently treats this as true.”
- Psychological: “I am deeply convinced of this.”
- Instrumental: “This assumption works well in our models.”
- Coherence‑based: “This fits smoothly with what we already think.”
Each of these is compatible with structured doubt: the possibility that a serious agent could, without self‑destruction, deny the claim and adopt a different, equally coherent and functional framework. If ontology takes such claims as its building blocks, it risks erecting “necessary structure” on foundations that are themselves contingent, revisable, and deniable without structural cost. The result is not ontology in the strong sense but sophisticated myth: a world‑picture whose necessity is asserted but not grounded in anything beyond preference, habit, or local success.
The meta‑ontology of truth is introduced to prevent exactly this slippage. It insists: before we declare that some proposition is “part of the necessary structure of reality” or “of the human being” or “of anything,” we must have a clear, demanding answer to the question, “In what sense is this true?” Without that prior work, words like “necessary,” “must,” and “ontology” float.
The argument can be made stepwise:
1. Ontology aims at necessity
By definition, an ontology does not catalogue everything we happen to believe; it proposes what must be there for a given domain to be as it is. That “must” implicitly invokes a strong concept of truth: not just “now justified,” but “non‑deniable for any adequate account.”
2. Necessity requires a non‑loose truth‑standard
If the truth of the defining claims is held only in a weak, fallibilist sense (“true for now,” “true in this framework”), then their purported necessity evaporates. A rival ontology could simply adopt different “truths,” and no common tribunal would exist to adjudicate which set is genuinely non‑negotiable.
3. Without a meta‑ontology of truth, “truth” is equivocal
In the absence of a structural definition, different ontologies may quietly use different, incompatible senses of truth—correspondence, coherence, consensus, usefulness—each sufficient to stabilise its own picture, none sufficient to command recognition from others. The word then becomes a label for commitment, not a shared standard.
4. A shared meta‑ontology furnishes that tribunal
Defining truth as “the condensed centre of the zone of impossible deniability” gives ontology a non‑parochial criterion: a claim belongs in the ontological core only if serious denial by a competent agent leads to collapse—logically, practically, or existentially.
- If denial remains structurally available, the claim may still be part of a powerful theory, but it cannot honestly be presented as necessary structure.
- If denial is impossible in the specified sense, the claim earns a different status: any ontology that ignores it will pay a structural price.
5. Therefore, for ontology, the meta‑ontology is not optional
Other activities can live with blurred lines between “well‑supported belief” and “truth.” They can operate with provisional standards, knowing that their claims are always up for revision. Ontology, if it wants to be more than another provisional model, cannot. It must be able to explain why its foundational propositions belong to a different category than the rest of our beliefs—a category that warrants the language of “must” and “cannot be otherwise.” The meta‑ontology of truth provides exactly that explanation.
In this light, the necessity is conceptual, not bureaucratic. One can, of course, write an ontology without such a meta‑ontology; many have. But in doing so, one leaves unexamined a crucial question: what gives these defining statements their special authority?
Without a prior account of truth that removes doubt about the kind of status those statements have, an ontology is always at risk of mistaking the strong rhetoric of necessity for the weak reality of conviction. The meta‑ontology of truth is proposed as the missing piece that makes it possible to distinguish, within ontology itself, between what is truly non‑deniable and what is merely strongly held.