The Starting Point Fallacy

There is a thought experiment embedded in the foundation of most Western philosophy, and it goes something like this: imagine an inquirer stripped of everything prior. No memory, no tradition, no cultural formation, no accumulated knowledge — only the raw faculties of reason and sensation. From this clean starting point, what can be known? What would the inquirer conclude?

The thought experiment has many versions. Descartes places his inquirer alone with a fire and his doubts, systematically dismantling every assumption until something indubitable remains. Rawls places his reasoner behind a veil of ignorance, stripped of knowledge of their own position in society. The analytic tradition runs a thousand variations on the theme: what can be known a priori, from pure reason, without appeal to anything contingent or inherited?

The exercise has produced real insight. Pushed to its edge, it reveals the logical structure of knowledge claims, the conditions that justify belief, the architecture of rational argument. These are not trivial discoveries.

But the thought experiment has also produced a confusion — one so pervasive it has become invisible. The confusion is this: the experiment is productive as an analytical tool, but it has been mistaken for a description of how inquiry actually begins.

No one begins there. No one has ever begun there. The Robinson Crusoe inquirer — stripped of prior commitments, tradition, and history — does not exist. Every actual inquirer wakes up already inside a language, a tradition, a set of background assumptions so deep they are not felt as assumptions at all. This is not a deficiency to be corrected. It is the condition that makes inquiry possible.

The fantasy and its costs

The confusion between an analytical device and an actual starting point has consequences. Three are worth naming.

The first is methodological overconfidence. If you believe you have cleared the decks — that your conclusions derive from pure reason, untouched by prior commitment — you are not suspicious enough of your conclusions. The assumptions that went unexamined are precisely the ones that will determine the shape of the answers. The blank slate was never blank; it only looked blank because the prior commitments were invisible.

The second is the displacement of tradition by imagination. This is an older observation, and a more precise one. The twelfth-century philosopher Maimonides argued that imagination is the faculty most prone to error in metaphysical inquiry — not because it is weak, but because it is too powerful. Imagination constructs plausible-seeming alternatives to actual conditions and presents them as if they were real. The tyrant’s first move, in Maimonides’ account, is always through imagination: paint a vivid enough picture of the world as it could be, and people will mistake the picture for reality and forget to ask about the actual conditions they live in.1

The Robinson Crusoe premise is imagination doing exactly this. It constructs a fictional inquirer — one who has never existed and could not exist — and then asks what that person would conclude. The conclusions look rigorous because the argument from the premise is tight. But the premise itself is a fiction that was never subjected to scrutiny, because the move that introduced it felt like not making an assumption rather than making one.

The third consequence is the erasure of history as evidence. If real inquiry must begin without prior commitments, then history, tradition, and accumulated knowledge enter as potential contaminants rather than as data. They must be justified from scratch, from the imagined baseline. What cannot survive that re-justification gets discarded — not because it was shown to be wrong, but because it could not prove itself to a tribunal it was never designed to appear before.

The blank slate was never blank. It only looked blank because the prior commitments were invisible.

Where inquiry actually begins

If not from a clean slate, then from where?

From here. From where we actually are.

This is not a counsel of relativism or a surrender to prejudice. It is a description of actual inquiry conditions. The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, developing the hermeneutic tradition in the mid-twentieth century, argued that prior understanding (Vorverständnis) is not an obstacle to interpretation — it is the condition for it. You cannot understand a text, a phenomenon, or an argument without bringing something to it. What you bring can be interrogated, revised, and corrected in light of what you find. But the bringing is not the problem. The attempt to eliminate it is.2

Alasdair MacIntyre pushes the point further. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, he argues that there is no such thing as tradition-independent rationality. Every actual exercise of reason takes place within a tradition — a set of prior commitments, canonical texts, paradigm cases, inherited problems, and standards of resolution. What looks like “pure reason” operating above traditions is itself a tradition — one that emerged historically, in specific places, and that has its own unexamined commitments. Claiming to reason from nowhere is not a transcendence of tradition; it is membership in a tradition that has forgotten its own history.3

The starting point for this publication

Business Topologies begins from a specific tradition — the Jewish epistemic tradition, which asks how communities sustain coherent knowledge across long periods of time, under varied conditions, without a central authority to enforce consensus. This tradition supplies the structural vocabulary used here.

Stating this openly is not a retreat from reason. It is an application of the argument above: every inquiry begins somewhere, and intellectual honesty requires naming where.

The tradition is named for two reasons. First, because it should be criticizable. If a reader believes the starting commitments are wrong, they should be able to say so directly rather than having to dig them out from between the lines. Second, because the positions held here are not merely traditional assertions — they are rationally defensible, and the defense does not depend on accepting the tradition. Gadamer arrives at “we cannot begin from a blank slate” through phenomenological hermeneutics. Maimonides arrives at the same conclusion through analysis of imagination and intellect. Mises, studying the epistemology of economics, argues that all knowledge of inner states is mediated through observable action — you cannot reach the clean starting point because you cannot get outside yourself to occupy it. These are independent paths of inquiry converging on a shared conclusion.

The practical implication is this: this publication does not pretend to have cleared the decks. It begins from somewhere real, names that somewhere, and invites scrutiny of it. The claims are meant to be falsifiable — not by whether they survive the Robinson Crusoe test, but by whether they survive contact with actual organizations, actual behavior, and actual data.

That is a harder test. It is also the right one.

1. The argument about imagination appears throughout the Guide for the Perplexed, particularly in Maimonides’ discussion of prophecy and the distinction between intellectual and imaginative cognition. The political application — that imagination is the entry point for tyranny — is developed in Part II of the Guide in the discussion of false prophecy.
2. Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960), Part II. The key concept is the fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung): understanding happens when the interpreter’s horizon and the horizon of the text merge into a new, expanded understanding. The interpreter’s prior horizon is not eliminated — it is what makes the meeting possible.
3. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), especially Chapters 18-20. The tradition MacIntyre is critiquing is what he calls “the Enlightenment project” — the attempt to establish morality on tradition-independent rational grounds. His diagnosis is that the project failed, and that its failure has produced the characteristic irresolvability of modern moral and political debate.