Is hilary lawson a real philosopher?

How can a philosophy claim to rescue us from the abyss of relativism by declaring that every single one of our truths is a fabrication? Hilary Lawson’s *Closure: A Story of Everything* presents a seductive narrative of the human mind carving order out of an untamed "open." Yet, this systemic ambition harbors a fatal vulnerability: it relies on a profound category mistake about the nature of human categorization and physical reality, rendering it a poetic metaphor rather than a viable metaphysics. ## The Myth of the Unstructured "Open" Lawson’s foundational assumption is that reality is "open"—an infinite, unstructured, and pre-conceptual void. However, this radical non-realism is flatly contradicted by contemporary cognitive science and evolutionary biology. Our cognitive architectures do not arbitrarily impose "closure" on a chaotic abyss; rather, they have evolved to track real, objective, and invariant structures in the physical world. As the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues in [*Visual Intelligence*](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262582285/visual-intelligence/), our perceptual systems are finely tuned evolutionary interfaces. While we do not perceive reality in its entirety, the "closures" we construct are strictly constrained by objective physical laws, not mere pragmatic conveniences. If reality were truly unstructured, any closure would be as evolutionarily viable as any other. The brutal reality of natural selection proves that some "closures" correspond to objective physical threats and opportunities, while others lead to immediate extinction. ## The Pragmatic Realist Counter-Attack By treating science as merely one of many "systems of closure," Lawson falls into a sophisticated version of the very postmodern skepticism he claims to transcend. He fails to account for the unique, self-correcting predictive power of the hard sciences. In his classic defense of scientific realism, [*Representing and Intervening*](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/representing-and-intervening/30303E4D197F4CE52857C78E487C0D7F), philosopher Ian Hacking famously formulated the "entity realism" argument: > "If you can spray them, then they are real." Hacking argues that when we use hypothetical entities—like electrons—to manipulate other parts of nature, their reality is no longer a matter of interpretive "closure." It is an intervention in a resistant, structured external world. Lawson's framework cannot adequately explain why engineering works. If a bridge stands, it is not because we have successfully "closed" the open; it is because our mathematical models accurately map the actual, mind-independent physical forces of gravity and tension. ## Alternative Frameworks: Pragmatism and Object-Oriented Ontology Rather than adopting Lawson's dualism of the "open" and the "closed," contemporary philosophy has moved toward frameworks that respect both human agency and objective reality: 1. **American Pragmatism:** Thinkers like Hilary Putnam, in [*Reason, Truth and History*](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/reason-truth-and-history/9C6ED53B2695E68C6EA5F698C85785FA), reject the idea of a completely unstructured "noumenal" world. Putnam argues for "pragmatic realism," where our conceptual schemes are plural, yet still answerable to a real world. 2. **Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO):** Philosophers like Graham Harman, in [*Tool-Being*](https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/tool-being/), argue that the world is not an unstructured "open" waiting for human consciousness to close it. Instead, objects exist independently of us, withholding their inner essences from one another just as much as they do from human minds. Ultimately, Lawson’s "closure" is a solipsistic retreat. It reduces the magnificent, resistant, and highly structured universe to a passive canvas awaiting human projection, ignoring the profound ways the world forces its own truths upon us.