Why There’s No Such Thing as Knowledge

ELI5/TLDR

Two philosophers agree that nobody has direct access to reality, then spend the conversation disagreeing about what that means in practice. Hilary Lawson says we create mental “closures” — ways of carving up the world — and none of them is the correct one, so knowledge in the traditional sense does not exist. Slavoj Žižek mostly agrees but insists there is still such a thing as a “subjective truth” — sometimes the important question is not whether the facts check out, but why someone needs to believe them in the first place. The talk is cut short by a paywall, which feels thematically appropriate.

The Full Story

The Problem: Perspective All the Way Down

Lawson opens by sketching a genealogy of doubt. The Western intellectual tradition assumed we could describe reality as it actually is. Then the cracks appeared. Frazer’s Golden Bough (published about 135 years ago) catalogued the world’s religious and mythical systems side by side. Lined up like that, no single one looked uniquely plausible — including Christianity, which made the book a sensation. The “perspectival genie,” as Lawson puts it, was out of the bottle.

It spread to morality, then to science. Kuhn and Feyerabend showed that even scientific knowledge operates within paradigms — frameworks that shape what counts as a fact. By the time postmodernism arrived, we were adrift in competing frameworks with no obvious way to choose between them.

Lawson frames the core challenge as an inversion of Kant. Kant asked: what must the structure of thought be for knowledge to be possible? Lawson’s version: given that we have discovered we cannot escape our own perspective, how is it possible that we can still intervene in the world at all?

Closure: Lawson’s Big Idea

Lawson’s answer is a concept he calls “closure.” The world, in his view, is not pre-divided into neat objects waiting to be named. It is an undifferentiated “openness” — a space of potential. What we do, at every level, is impose identities on it.

The process starts at the most basic physiological level. Your retinal neurons respond to reality in exactly one way: they fire, or they don’t. They don’t describe anything. They just create a binary identity. One step up, sensation bundles millions of those firings into a single experience — a patch of blue, say. There is no blue “out there,” any more than there is a neuron firing “out there.” These are ways of holding the world. Language is another step up again, creating closures at a higher level of abstraction.

He holds up a glass to illustrate. You see “glass.” But you could also see a weapon, a collection of silicon atoms, a prop in a conversation. There is no limit to the number of ways you can close any bit of the world.

Three properties of closure, per Lawson:

It is unlimited. Any piece of reality can be closed in an indefinite number of ways. Different species do it differently at the physiological level. Different cultures do it differently at the linguistic level. None is correct.
Every closure fails. The closure is never the same thing as whatever is “out there.” You cannot dig down into atoms and find a little label that says “glass.” The identity we impose and the world it is imposed on are different kinds of things.
Closures must be stable. You can see the duck-rabbit illusion as a duck or as a rabbit, but not both simultaneously. We need stability to function, which is why the world around us feels static and obvious even though every element of our visual field could be held differently.

Žižek’s Twist: Subjective Truth

Žižek agrees with the broad outline but wants to complicate it. First, he observes that closure is never just a closed boundary — every closure carries with it an implicit idea of what lies beyond it.

“Closure also always implies a certain idea of what is outside.”

Plato was an idealist, but he still needed khora — a kind of half-spiritualized matter — to account for what lay outside his idealist framework. The boundary is not neutral; it shapes the imagined exterior.

Then Žižek introduces what he calls “subjective truth,” drawing on Lacan. The example: a man is pathologically jealous, convinced his wife is cheating. Suppose he hires a detective. Suppose the detective confirms it — she is, in fact, cheating. Lacan’s point is that the jealousy is still pathological.

“Even if factually it’s all true, your jealousy is still pathological.”

The real question is not “did the detective miss something?” It is: why does this man need to organize his entire identity around the suspicion of his wife’s infidelity? The factual truth is beside the point. The subjective truth — the structural need for the belief — is what matters.

The Nazi Test Case

Žižek escalates the example to Nazi anti-Semitism. Imagine debating a clever Nazi in 1937 Berlin. The Nazi can produce facts that are technically accurate — Jewish representation in certain professions, for instance. If you accept the debate on those terms, Žižek says, you have already lost.

“The moment you accept the debate, what are really the Jews? In some sense, you already sold your soul to the devil.”

The real question is not whether the demographic statistics are correct. It is: why do the Nazis need the figure of “the Jew” to sustain their political identity? In Žižek’s (self-consciously vulgar) Marxist reading, fascism denies basic social antagonism — it imagines society as an organic whole where everyone collaborates. For that fantasy to work, you need an external intruder who supposedly introduced class struggle from outside. The Jew is that figure. The anti-Semitism is structurally a lie, even where individual claims happen to be factually true.

Lawson Responds: Lies Without Objective Truth

Lawson agrees this is a central challenge for his framework. His response: you do not need objective truth to identify lies. A lie is someone saying something they do not themselves believe. That definition does not require a God’s-eye view of reality. Someone can lie while accidentally saying something most people would consider true.

As for Holocaust denial, Lawson’s approach is not to invoke objective truth but to work within the denier’s own closure. You ask: if the Holocaust did not happen, then what about this evidence, and this, and this? The denier can always make moves — “the evidence is faked,” “the witnesses are lying” — but to maintain the denial, they have to build an increasingly preposterous structure. Eventually it collapses under its own weight.

His pragmatic point is sharp:

“Truth doesn’t help. If you’re dealing with a neo-Nazi and you say, ‘Oh, no. It’s just not true,’ that doesn’t convince them.”

The only way to change someone’s mind is to enter their framework and show them its consequences. Not to appeal to an abstract truth they have already rejected.

The conversation is cut off by the platform’s paywall at this point, with a prompt to subscribe for the full talk.

Claude’s Take

This is a fragment of a longer debate, and the paywall truncation is genuinely unfortunate because the conversation was just starting to develop tension. What we get is mostly the opening positions.

Lawson’s “closure” theory is a coherent repackaging of ideas that have been circulating in various forms since at least Kant, through Wittgenstein, Kuhn, and the constructivists. The neuron-firing-as-identity move is elegant as a pedagogical tool but does some real philosophical work by grounding the epistemological point in biology rather than leaving it purely abstract. The three properties (unlimited, failing, stable) are a tidy framework. Whether “closure” adds something genuinely new over existing constructivist and pragmatist accounts, or whether it is primarily a rebrand with a cleaner interface, is a fair question. Lawson would probably say the metaphysical implications are novel. He might be right, but we do not see enough here to judge.

Žižek’s “subjective truth” move is vintage Žižek — Lacanian psychoanalysis applied to political ideology. It is also genuinely useful. The jealousy example is one of those philosophical illustrations that, once you hear it, you cannot unhear. The Nazi example is stronger than it might initially appear: the claim is not that facts do not matter, but that the function a belief serves in someone’s psychic or political economy is more revealing than its factual content. This is not relativism. It is a different axis of analysis entirely.

The weak spot in this conversation is the practical question they are circling but never quite land on: if you reject objective truth but still want to fight Nazis, what exactly is the ground you stand on? Lawson’s answer — enter their closure and show its consequences are undesirable — is pragmatically sensible but raises an obvious follow-up: undesirable by whose standards? If the Nazi is fine with the consequences, the strategy fails. Žižek’s “subjective truth” might offer a stronger foothold, but the conversation gets cut off before they can really test it against each other.

Both thinkers are on solid ground in their critique of naive realism. Where things get speculative is in the positive program — what replaces the old framework. Lawson has a more developed system (the closure theory), but we see only a sketch here. Žižek, as usual, is more interested in destabilizing positions than building them, which makes him a better debater but a harder thinker to pin down.

One thing worth noting: this is a preview clip designed to sell subscriptions. The Institute of Art and Ideas does this routinely — gives you enough to be intrigued, then cuts off at the interesting part. The full talk likely goes somewhere more substantive. What we have is the appetizer.