To me the essence of a flat ontology is that it doesn't accept dualism. Uh there are many forms of dualism but each form of dualism would have two basic uh ontological categories of things. Uh one category would be you know mental things, mind things, consciousness things and the other category would be physical things or maybe things in themselves, hyperhysical things. Uh truth makers are usually in this second uh external category. So you could say that the first category mind or consciousness that would be the internal category and the other category would be the external category. Now in the mind category that's naturally where you you would want to put meaning uh you would put toothaches there, daydreams there but also the pure meanings of words of signs. But since since the the body of signs uh the sounds or the marks uh are you know physical or external you would have to put uh the body of signs uh in the other category. So you have this uh this dualism actually manifest in the conception of signs that many people have. um you have this material vehicle that carries um a passenger and this passenger is pure meaning and and what is the vision of the world that goes with this dualism. So you have something like an icing or a cream uh on the world, a cream on the substrate. Uh and this icing or this cream or this secretion, this would be consciousness. This would be the realm of meaning. Uh and then the substrate it would be very dead. Uh it would be modeled mathematically perhaps. Uh you know in our age people tend to project uh ma the scientific image as sellers called it or mathematical physical models onto a substrate uh reality. So, Democrus was probably uh one of the great early figures who did this. You know, what what really exists. Uh the substrate uh would be these atoms that move around in the void. And and and these atoms would lack uh meaningfulness. They would just be these kind of little little tiny indestructible uh Legos um that the world is made out of. Okay? So, this would mean like spoken words. Um in more modern language, you know, they would be sound waves. Their body would be sound waves. But somehow these uh these sound waves would carry meaning as little passengers. There'd be this, you know, this pure meaning and maybe you would model it with information theory. Um but it would ride in sound waves and sound waves would be its little cars that it would drive um from cartisian bubble to cartisian bubble. So the cartisian bubbles are usually thought to somehow float up out of brains in themselves. not not familiar brains, not the the the familiar mundanely physical brains that we we know about because those brains would be in the bubble. So the bubbles have to come from something like a brain in itself. Um and if you have a theory of primary and secondary qualities, you can sort of get around the initial absurdity of this. Um let's look though what this dualism has done. Uh it's it's you might say that it has taken the familiar life world that we live in pre- theoretically and this familiar life world is just rich with with meaning. Uh we we recognize objects uh we react to turn signals uh people talk to us and those so-called sound waves are immediately meaningful in some sense. Um but this dualist theory it's almost like it takes a broom and and it tries to sweep everything uh meaningful and all sensory presentation to one side. uh and what it hopes to leave behind is a kind of spiderweb or skeleton something like uh the scientific image um you know Democratus's atoms you know these theories are going to to keep changing but basically you have a kind of meaningless substrate that's what you want to leave behind so for Haidiger early Haidiger this would be deworlding uh and it's an undeniably powerful technique like there's no denying in my opinion that uh this kind of uh thinking uh in practical terms can be very powerful. So when you make a mathematical model, you can think about this as as focusing on what is practically relevant. You don't care about the color of the object. You care about its mass and its velocity. And if you if you sort of take an X-ray of the world uh and create this mathematical model, it enables you to do some powerful things. Uh not only prediction, which is obviously useful to humans who have to plan, but also control. It allows us to build devices that uh increase our power not 10fold, not 100fold, not even a thousandfold, but maybe a millionfold. and and you know in a kind of potentially exponential increase of our practical effectiveness and this undeniable triumph of the technology that comes from this uh reductive uh dualism. Of course, it's going to tempt us into absorbing absorbing this technique into a fundamental ontology. Um, one of the problems with this is there's this tacit irrationalism because uh things that are practically effective uh when when you when you sort of take them as techniques and then try to drag them over into a fundamental ontology and and you try to say now this is the story of how things uh really are. um that doesn't really work very well if you examine the claims uh and if you look into um for instance the absence of normativity uh in the scientific image and yet uh existentially or in terms of the way we treat one another the whole idea of being rational or scientific is fundamentally a normative concept but uh you know physical mathematical models don't care about normativity because that is part of the stuff that is swept into the realm that you might call mind uh or representation that is swept into the the secondary realm um of the meaningful. So when you have a physical science and and you're really just trying to predict and control uh these objects that are understood uh as non-normative like we don't ask the stone to explain why it is trespassing. The stone is there. We don't hold it to account. We don't even think of it as having beliefs that it should justify of course but you know the scientists the the ontologists and just any person actually lives uh in a in a richly uh normatively uh structured life world. Um this is something that you can indeed ignore if you're just dealing with non-normative uh things that are for that reason considered uh dead. Um the problem is uh humans uh seduced by the technical triumph uh um you know of this mathematical modeling start to think of themselves uh as like these dead things. So the mind is understood in terms of a machine and and the thing is you might be able to do some powerful things. You might be able to make uh predictions that are good. Uh you might be able to obtain more control over other human beings by thinking of their minds uh as machines. But if you just adopt this uncritically uh as a fundamental ontology and just say that simply uh the mind really is a machine. This isn't only a useful way of of looking at the mind. It really is a machine. Then again you're ignoring the very normativity uh that you would need to appeal to to justify that sort of claim. Um but it's not only the normativity that you're ignoring. Uh you're ignoring uh the existence of meaning or intelligibility itself. This is just an issue uh that can be taken for granted right because we rely on this intelligibility. This is what I call the forum um even to offer uh reductive uh mechanistic um theories of mind. Uh so you can do all kinds of prediction and control without ever really accounting for the shared intelligibility that enables uh this prediction and control. But you don't really have a fundamental ontology if you ignore uh the essential condition for the possibility of a fundamental ontology. And that would be uh sharing in meaning. So what is meaningfulness? uh and you know for someone like Robert Brandham uh and and more generally for in inferentialism uh as a theory of semantics uh meaning itself is largely normative and that concept use uh is governed by inferial norms largely governed by inferential norms and in Sorl's book on on mind he he talks uh often of this objective uh third person point of do and I do think that um science involves the attempt to construct beliefs that are valid for the generic point of view. But there's the third point of view would be a mystification of this project. Uh there is no omniscent narrator. Uh but the omniscent narrator the third person point of view would be be kind of idealized in that uh even if uh empirical objects by definition are always given in in first person perceptions or manifestations the model tries to be uh as independent as possible from any particular perspective. um this scientific model should work anywhere, anywhere and for anybody who is in a position to understand and apply it. But that is the goal. And there's a similar uh problem when people talk about truth. Uh and in my hunch, my feeling is that people really don't generally understand uh the redundancy theory of truth um radically enough. Uh when people talk about truth, I say that ultimately what we what we have is belief. Uh and there's there's only belief in the transformation of belief. Um but what what science tries to do is to create a body of beliefs uh that people um in the position to judge can basically agree on as as reliable beliefs. So you have this set of shared beliefs that have been criticized and tested. Uh but still what you have is belief. Uh and and using the word truth can obscure the fact that the omniscent third person narrator is a fiction. And since you know the scientific personality is is um traditionally very cautious and skeptical and even anti- metaphysical you could say that it's in the scientific spirit uh for me to point out the fictionality of this third person point of view. Um the word objective in a nutshell it means um freedom from bias. It does not mean a view from nowhere. It means freedom a belief that is free of disqualifying bias. Right? Because all belief is situated. All belief is the belief of a particular person uh speaking at least uh one language. Um and it's a situated belief, right? the the world uh as far as we know speaking only from experience is always given first person and it's articulated um in terms of the beliefs of of individual persons but you know experts in a field can come to a consensus they can share some fundamental beliefs but this again this is not a third person omniscent narrator this is the consensus of experts so there is no third person objective point of view there's the consensus of experts who are all still in the first person point of view. And if you want to personify a discipline, you can do that. Uh it's it's fictional, but you can say, you know, uh modern physics believes and then that is still a particular uh perspective. Uh it's very generous uh and audacious to say that that is the omniscent uh narrator. And especially since science is hopefully going to continually uh progress, even this fictional third person point of view is still uh composed of beliefs that are understood to be tentative. Um some people would say fallible. Um but that assumes the correspondence theory of truth. And so I would prefer to say that such beliefs are disposable or tentative. So one of the problems with taking this this fictional idealized uh third person omniscent uh narrator uncritically uh is it goes um it goes along with a projection of what I call hyper hyperhysical transimpirical objects. So a substrate reality is projected uh and it's made out of you know truth maker hyperphysical objects and implicitly um these objects this substrate reality uh these truth makers would be articulated by the idealized belief of the omniscent narrator. So in short the truth is what god believes that is the tacit assumption in a projection of of the hyperhysical substrate. Now, this God is is of course not the Christian God. This would be a philosopher's God. And um it's a little bit edgy for me to use this metaphor, but um I do think that is what is implied with with the notion of a pre-articulated hyperphysical um substrate reality in which truth makers live. So when people uh casually toss around phrases like objective reality and say uh I hate metaphysics. Um, I just I just trust science to to tell me about objective uh reality. Uh, metaphysics, ontology, that's all just opinion. Um, I'm interested in in objective uh reality. Well, you can see the problem that that uh the concept of objective reality is about as theological and metaphysical as it gets.