The “tyranny of the propositional” is a crucial concept in John Vervaeke’s work, directly linked to his diagnosis of the “meaning crisis” in Western culture. It describes a historical and cultural over-reliance on one specific type of knowledge—propositional knowing—to the detriment of all others.

In essence, the tyranny of the propositional is the reduction of all valid knowing to the level of facts, statements, and beliefs that can be explicitly stated and argued.

What the “Tyranny” Looks Like

For several centuries, influenced by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, our culture has increasingly privileged propositional knowledge. This is the world of “knowing that”:

Knowing that F=ma.
Knowing that certain doctrines are true.
Believing that specific political or economic policies are correct.

Under this “tyranny,” if something cannot be expressed as a verifiable or falsifiable proposition, it is often dismissed as subjective, irrelevant, or simply not “real” knowledge. We are taught to win arguments, accumulate facts, and hold the “correct” set of beliefs.

Why Vervaeke Calls It a “Tyranny”

He uses the strong word “tyranny” because this obsessive focus on propositions actively suppresses, devalues, and makes us blind to the other essential ways of knowing:

It Ignores Procedural Knowing (Knowing How): We’ve all met people who are book-smart but lack practical skills or common sense. This is a symptom of the tyranny. We prioritise the textbook (propositional) over the apprenticeship (procedural). Real skills, like the intuitive know-how of a master carpenter or the subtle art of listening well, cannot be fully captured in a set of instructions. When we only value what can be written down, we lose respect for embodied skill.
It Crushes Perspectival Knowing (Knowing What It’s Like): The tyranny of the propositional has no room for the rich, subjective texture of consciousness. It struggles to value the wisdom gained from knowing what it’s like to experience profound grief, to be a parent, or to see the world through the eyes of an expert. These perspectives, which shape what we find relevant and meaningful, are dismissed as “mere opinion” because they aren’t objective facts. This leads to a loss of empathy and situational awareness.
It Severs Us from Participatory Knowing (Knowing by Being): This is the most damaging consequence. Participatory knowing is about the deep, identity-level connection we have with our world—being a citizen, being in a family, being part of a tradition.3 It’s the shared reality that shapes who we are. By focusing only on the beliefs about these things, we lose the sense of transformative participation in them. We are encouraged to be observers of our lives, holding beliefs about them, rather than being fully transformed by them.

Consequences of the Tyranny

According to Vervaeke, the tyranny of the propositional is a primary engine of the meaning crisis.4 When our understanding of knowledge is so narrow and detached, we experience a profound sense of alienation:

From the World: The world becomes a collection of objects to be analysed and facts to be memorised, not a reality to participate in.
From Others: Relationships become transactional or defined by shared ideologies (propositions) rather than shared being and mutual transformation.
From Ourselves: We become alienated from our own embodied, intuitive, and perspectival wisdom. We don’t trust our “gut feelings” (a form of procedural/perspectival knowing) unless they can be propositionally justified.

This leads to a world where people can have all the “right” beliefs and all the scientific facts at their fingertips, yet feel a gnawing sense of homelessness, absurdity, and lack of purpose. The very foundation of meaning, which Vervaeke argues is rooted in the deeper participatory and perspectival ways of knowing, has been eroded by our cultural obsession with facts and beliefs alone.

Heidegger

Please tell me about how this relates to Heidegger, Decartes, and Hubert Dreyfus' critiques of AI

That is an excellent and insightful question. The “tyranny of the propositional” is not a new idea unique to Vervaeke; rather, Vervaeke is synthesising and building upon a rich philosophical lineage that critiques this very problem. The connections to Descartes, Heidegger, and Hubert Dreyfus are direct and profound.

Here’s how they all fit together:

1. René Descartes: The Architect of the Problem

Vervaeke often pinpoints Descartes as the key figure who cemented the “tyranny of the propositional” into the bedrock of modern Western thought.

Mind-Body Dualism: Descartes famously separated reality into two distinct substances: res cogitans (the thinking thing, the mind) and res extensa (the extended thing, the physical world).1 Knowledge, for Descartes, belonged purely to the realm of the mind. This created a fundamental split between the knower and the world, turning the world into a mere object to be analysed from a distance. This is the seed of the loss of participatory knowing.
“Clear and Distinct Ideas”: Descartes’ method for arriving at truth was to break problems down into simple components and assent only to “clear and distinct ideas” – which are essentially propositions. His ideal for knowledge was the certainty of mathematics and logic. This enthroned propositional knowing as the ultimate, and only reliable, form of knowledge. The embodied, skillful, and contextual ways of knowing were deemed confusing, animalistic, and untrustworthy.

In short, Descartes created the philosophical framework for a detached, disembodied mind whose sole purpose is to manipulate propositions about an external world. This is the very definition of the “tyranny of the propositional.”

2. Martin Heidegger: The Phenomenological Critique

Martin Heidegger mounted one of the 20th century’s most powerful critiques of this Cartesian legacy. He argued that our fundamental way of being in the world is not as a detached mind thinking about objects.

Ready-to-Hand (Zuhanden): Heidegger said we primarily encounter the world in a state of “readiness-to-hand.”2 We don’t think about the hammer; we skillfully use the hammer to drive a nail. Our knowledge of the hammer is in our hand, in the flow of the activity. This is a perfect description of Vervaeke’s procedural and participatory knowing. We are absorbed in the task, and our identity as “hammerer” is fused with the tool.
Present-at-Hand (Vorhanden): It is only when the tool breaks or something goes wrong (the nail bends, the hammerhead flies off) that we step back and stare at the hammer as an object with properties. It becomes “present-at-hand.” We begin to think about it propositionally: “This hammer is broken,” “Its handle is made of wood.”

Heidegger’s point was that the Cartesian tradition, and by extension Western science, mistakenly treats the secondary, broken-down state of “present-at-hand” (propositional) as the primary reality. For Heidegger, this was a profound misunderstanding of existence that leads to alienation and nihilism – Vervaeke’s “meaning crisis.”

3. Hubert Dreyfus: The Critique of Artificial Intelligence

Hubert Dreyfus, a philosopher deeply influenced by Heidegger, took these ideas and applied them directly to the emerging field of Artificial Intelligence.3 His critique is essentially a modern case study of the failure of the “tyranny of the propositional.”

Critiquing “Good Old-Fashioned AI” (GOFAI): Early AI research operated on a purely Cartesian and propositional model. Researchers believed that human intelligence could be replicated by:
1. Creating a formal representation of the world (a set of facts/propositions).
2. Programming a set of logical rules to manipulate those representations.
Why It Failed: Dreyfus famously predicted in his book What Computers Can’t Do that this approach would fail, and he was largely correct. He argued that AI researchers were trying to build intelligence using only propositional knowledge. They were ignoring the vast, non-formal background of common sense and skillful coping that makes up human expertise.
The Primacy of “Know-How”: Dreyfus used Heidegger’s concepts to show that human expertise (e.g., being a master chess player, a skilled doctor, or even just driving a car) does not rely on consciously processing millions of facts. It relies on an intuitive, embodied “know-how” (procedural knowing) that is shaped by a particular point of view (perspectival knowing). An expert doesn’t follow rules; they have a “feel for the game.”

Dreyfus showed that by trying to build a mind based solely on propositions, AI was demonstrating the exact limitations that Heidegger had identified. You cannot get to genuine intelligence by formal logic alone; you need the messy, embodied, contextual background that Vervaeke’s lower “P’s” describe.

The Synthesis

You can see the direct line:

Descartes establishes the philosophical ideal: a disembodied mind manipulating propositions.
Heidegger critiques this ideal as a misunderstanding of our fundamental way of being, which is engaged, skillful participation (ready-to-hand).
Dreyfus uses Heidegger’s critique to expose the practical failure of this ideal in the field of AI, showing that intelligence cannot be reduced to propositional logic.
Vervaeke takes this entire lineage and integrates it into his 4P cognitive framework, naming the problem the “tyranny of the propositional” and directly linking its cultural dominance to the modern “meaning crisis.”

In essence, Vervaeke is arguing that our entire culture has been operating like a GOFAI project for 400 years, and we are now living through the large-scale societal and psychological failures of that flawed programming.

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The tyranny of the propositional