Toggle Competence and the Critique of Quantitative Fundamentalism
Defining Toggle Competence as Practical Wisdom
The preservation of human agency in AI‑mediated contexts requires what might be termed toggle competence—a learned capacity to fluidly shift between treating AI outputs as meaningful contributions (adopting what Dennett calls the intentional stance that makes collaboration possible) and maintaining critical awareness that these systems operate through pattern‑matching rather than genuine reasoning. This is fundamentally a balancing act: leaning too far toward enchantment risks outsourcing deliberative agency to algorithmic pseudo‑reasons; leaning too far toward demystification makes productive engagement impossible—like attempting to appreciate cinema by analyzing projector mechanics rather than absorbing the narrative.
Toggle competence is not a static equilibrium but an ongoing, context‑sensitive practice requiring constant micro‑adjustments. When exploring interpretive questions—literary analysis, philosophical inquiry, creative brainstorming—practitioners can afford deeper immersion in collaborative meaning‑making with periodic critical pullbacks. When reviewing AI‑generated medical diagnoses, legal briefs, or governance recommendations, sustained vigilance becomes necessary with only tactical acceptance of algorithmic suggestions. The appropriate balance varies not only by domain but by practitioner and situation—much as an “excellent diet” means something radically different for a sumo wrestler than for a competitive sprinter, even though both exemplify nutritional virtue in their respective contexts.
This toggle competence resists quantification precisely because it exemplifies what Michael Polanyi termed tacit knowledge—the kind of practical wisdom one recognizes in action but cannot reduce to explicit rules or metrics. Practitioners know when they are toggling effectively; they can cultivate this capacity through practice and reflection; but they cannot specify an algorithm for when to shift modes or measure their “toggle rate” in any meaningful way across contexts. The appropriate timing depends on situated judgment about what available evidence can and cannot decide, what conceptual frameworks can and cannot capture, and what questions can be meaningfully posed given one’s epistemic position.
The difficulty of operationalizing toggle competence points to a deeper problem pervading contemporary discourse: what might be called quantitative fundamentalism—the assumption that only measurable phenomena merit serious consideration, that all meaningful questions can ultimately be resolved through metrics and optimization. This orientation appears not only in AI governance discussions that demand precise measurements for inherently qualitative capacities like dramatic rehearsal or narrative coherence, but also in scientific discourse where physicists dismiss philosophical inquiry while simultaneously making metaphysical commitments that exceed empirical evidence.
A crucial clarification follows: the critique of quantitative fundamentalism is not a critique of mathematics, measurement, or modeling as such. In ordinary practice, we routinely use quantitative tools without smuggling in an ontological thesis about what is ultimately real—treating formalism as instrument rather than revelation. The pathology emerges when methodological success is silently converted into metaphysical authority: when “what we can measure” becomes “what there is,” and when the inability to operationalize a phenomenon is treated as evidence of its non‑being rather than as a limit of the current investigative frame.
This is also why toggle competence cannot itself be reduced to a metric without self‑contradiction. It includes the capacity to recognize when quantification is appropriately sovereign (because the question is genuinely quantitative) and when the very demand for quantification constitutes a category mistake—an attempt to force qualitative or interpretive problems to “confess” in a register that cannot, in principle, contain them.
Quantifiable vs. Interpretive Is Not Objective vs. Subjective
Here a distinction sharpened in everyday disputes about “data‑driven” wisdom‑of‑crowds claims becomes essential: quantifiable vs. interpretive is not the same as objective vs. subjective. Many domains that matter most to collective life—criminal sentencing, psychiatric diagnosis, constitutional law, historical evaluation, electoral judgment—have no single discrete right answer that can be scored as one would score a multiple‑choice test, yet they are not thereby arbitrary or epistemically weightless.
Everyday practice already presupposes this. Before there were any theories of wavelengths or optics, people could reliably say “turn right at the red sign two blocks ahead” and be understood; these were factual assertions embedded in shared practices, not mystical projections. Even in physics, as Polanyi emphasized, the scientist ultimately must trust that she has correctly read notch 2 rather than notch 5, or distinguished the red line from the blue line on a graph; one cannot keep appealing to equations to vindicate perception, because equations themselves must be seen and interpreted by someone whose perception we eventually simply trust. Perception, in this sense, is not an embarrassing residue of “subjectivity” but the tacit, intersubjective floor without which our most precise sciences cannot get off the ground at all.
The core mistake of quantitative fundamentalism is to collapse four distinctions into one: measurable vs. non‑measurable; public vs. private; reliable vs. unreliable; objective vs. subjective. Once this conflation is in place, anything non‑quantifiable is easily dismissed as “merely subjective,” and “subjective” is silently equated with “idiosyncratic and error‑prone,” while quantitative outputs are treated as inherently more objective and real. But there are non‑quantifiable yet public and checkable domains—consider historians’ comparative assessments of political leaders, legal reasoning about proportional sentence ranges, or psychiatric debates over evolving diagnostic criteria—that are neither reducible to metrics nor equivalent to unanchored personal preference. They involve comparative reason‑giving under ambiguity, where some positions are more reasonable, better supported, or more coherent with the evidence and with other commitments, even though no single scalar score settles the matter.
This has direct implications for contemporary enthusiasm about the “wisdom of crowds” and “data‑driven” decision‑making. Classic demonstrations—Galton’s ox‑weight estimates, certain prediction markets, game‑show multiple‑choice crowds—work under two conditions: (1) there is a discrete, evaluable right answer; and (2) we have a clear metric of accuracy. When one moves from those contexts to elections (“who is best suited to govern?”), judicial sentencing, or “best candidate” questions more generally, the structure changes: there is no single correct answer in the oxide‑sense, no uncontroversial metric for “best,” and no way to define error the way one defines mis‑guessing an ox’s weight. To treat these questions as if they were of the same kind—because votes produce numbers or because large datasets enable sophisticated aggregation—is precisely to enact quantitative fundamentalism: where quantification fails, the imported frame fails with it.
A parallel point applies to semantics itself. Attempts to insist that a term is meaningful only if it admits of a fixed, non‑circular, metric definition (the old verificationist or non‑cognitivist impulse) would, if applied consistently, declare vast swathes of ordinary language and institutional vocabulary—justice, harm, common good, love, art—“meaningless.” That reductio reveals not the emptiness of these concepts but the overreach of the metric demand. Meaning in these domains consists not in a single pinpoint on a semantic bullseye but in the ability to navigate a structured interpretive space: to broaden terms when cooperation and institutional flexibility require it, and to narrow them when action or clarity demands.
We might think of this as a kind of “breathing” in our conceptual life. Sometimes we broaden—using intentionally open‑textured terms like “general welfare” or “due process” so that constitutional or legal frameworks can adapt to unforeseen circumstances. Sometimes we narrow—specifying “due process” through habeas corpus, notice‑and‑hearing requirements, exclusionary rules. There is no algorithm that tells us, ex ante, when to broaden and when to narrow without reinstating quantitative fundamentalism at a meta‑level; it is precisely here that tacit, situated judgment must guide the management of interpretive space. Toggle competence, on this picture, is as much about knowing when to move between narrow and broad interpretive frames as it is about toggling between empirical and philosophical modes of inquiry.
With this clarified, we can now examine how quantitative fundamentalism manifests in a supposedly “hardest” domain—contemporary physics—and what successful toggling looks like in contrast.
Toggle Failure in Physics: The Case of Quantitative Fundamentalism
Physicist Lawrence Krauss provides an instructive example of this failure to toggle between empirical and interpretive modes. In his 2012 book A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, Krauss explicitly dismisses philosophy as having “no contribution to make” to questions about cosmic origins. He argues that physics can now explain how universes emerge from “nothing”—by which he means quantum vacuum states with fluctuating fields governed by physical laws.
When philosopher David Albert reviewed the book in The New York Times, pointing out that quantum vacuums are emphatically not metaphysical nothingness, Krauss dismissed the critique as mere semantic quibbling. But Albert’s point was precisely about the toggle failure: Krauss was working in empirical mode (describing the physics of vacuum states) while making claims that require interpretive mode (addressing the metaphysical question of why physical laws exist at all). The question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” asks about the ontological status of existence itself, including the existence of quantum fields and physical laws. Answering this question by describing processes within an already‑existing physical framework simply relocates rather than resolves the philosophical puzzle.
Krauss’s toggle failure becomes explicit in his treatment of what counts as legitimate inquiry. He repeatedly asserts that philosophical questions lacking empirical answers are meaningless or uninteresting—a quintessentially philosophical claim about the nature of meaningful inquiry that cannot itself be empirically tested. His position exemplifies quantitative fundamentalism: the assumption that because physics successfully employs mathematical rigor and empirical testing, all meaningful questions must be answerable through these methods.
Stephen Hawking demonstrated a similar pattern in The Grand Design (2010), opening with the declaration that “philosophy is dead” because it “has not kept up with modern developments in science, especially physics.” Yet the book immediately proceeds to defend model‑dependent realism—a philosophical position about the nature of scientific knowledge—and makes claims about the unreality of history before observation that depend entirely on interpretive choices about how to understand quantum mechanics. Hawking rejects philosophy while doing philosophy, unable to recognize when his discourse has shifted from empirical physics (where his expertise is unquestionable) to metaphysical speculation (where philosophical analysis becomes essential).
What makes this failure so recurrent is that physicalism often presents itself as the absence of metaphysics, when in fact it begins with metaphysical axioms of its own—e.g., that all is “matter and energy”—whose boundary conditions are rarely made explicit. Historically, the content of “the physical” has been repeatedly revised: the graveyard of ontologies is real (ether disappears; the furniture of the world is re‑described), and even our best frameworks remain unreconciled in key places (quantum mechanics and relativity). Under these conditions, “physical” can function less like a stable criterion and more like a standing authorization to reclassify anomalies as “physical” whenever the mathematics or the research program demands it.
Dark matter is useful here not as a conclusion but as a diagnostic. One live possibility is that we are “detecting” something real but not yet characterizable; another is that the anomaly is a measure of ignorance or a signal of theory failure (for example, in the gravitational framework). The toggle failure is to treat the label “matter” as a metaphysical solvent that dissolves the problem in advance—to subsume the anomaly under “the physical” before we can even say what it would mean for the anomaly to count against the operative categories. This is precisely the sort of unmarked shift—empirical inquiry sliding into ontological closure—that the concept of quantitative fundamentalism is designed to expose.
Both examples reveal the structure of quantitative fundamentalism’s toggle failure. These physicists possess extraordinary competence in mathematical formalism and empirical investigation. Their failure lies not in technical understanding but in recognizing when their mode of inquiry has reached its legitimate boundaries. They cannot toggle from empirical/quantitative mode (appropriate for physics) to interpretive/philosophical mode (necessary for questions about the ontological status of physical theories themselves) because they do not acknowledge the latter as a legitimate epistemic domain.
The consequences extend beyond individual confusion. When prominent scientists dismiss philosophical inquiry while making philosophical claims, they model toggle failure for broader audiences—suggesting that quantitative rigor alone suffices for all meaningful questions, that interpretive frameworks are merely subjective preferences rather than essential tools for navigating domains where empirical evidence underdetermines conclusions.
Successful Toggling: Feynman’s Epistemic Humility
Richard Feynman provides a striking counter‑example of successful toggle competence in precisely the domain where Krauss and Hawking falter. Feynman made foundational contributions to quantum electrodynamics, work that required extraordinary mathematical sophistication and rigorous empirical grounding. Yet he maintained consistent epistemic humility about interpretive questions that exceeded available evidence.
Feynman famously remarked, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics,” and advised, “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.” This was not anti‑intellectual defeatism but clear‑eyed recognition of the limits of current inquiry. Feynman worked rigorously with quantum mechanical formalism—developing path integrals, contributing to the Standard Model, calculating predictions with extraordinary precision. He remained firmly in quantitative/empirical mode for these technical achievements.
Yet when asked about what quantum mechanics means—whether the wave function represents objective reality, whether measurement collapses genuinely occur, whether hidden variables might restore determinism—Feynman toggled to interpretive/agnostic mode. He acknowledged that these questions, while fascinating, exceeded what the mathematical formalism and experimental evidence could decide. Different interpretations (Copenhagen, Many‑Worlds, Pilot Wave) make identical empirical predictions; choosing among them requires philosophical commitments about ontological parsimony, the nature of probability, and what counts as explanation—commitments that cannot be resolved through further calculation or measurement.
This posture is best described as weak metaphysical agnosticism: a refusal to treat any currently available ontology as authoritative, while leaving open—in principle—the possibility that better future theorizing (conceptual and empirical) could warrant stronger metaphysical commitments. Weak agnosticism is not the same as strong anti‑realism; it does not infer from “we lack a mirror of nature” that “no mirror is possible.” On the contrary, the strong anti‑realist negation invites a performative paradox: to know that no “mirror” can exist in any form would seemingly require exactly the kind of standpoint—comparison to reality “in itself”—that the anti‑realist declares unavailable.
Feynman’s epistemic humility exemplifies successful toggle competence because it recognizes the legitimate boundaries of different modes of inquiry. In quantitative/empirical mode, quantum mechanics is spectacularly successful—its predictions match experimental results to extraordinary precision. In interpretive/philosophical mode, questions about what the theory represents remain genuinely open, requiring suspended judgment rather than premature closure through philosophical preference masquerading as scientific conclusion.
This capacity for productive uncertainty—for dwelling in questions without rushing to answers—represents precisely the toggle competence that quantitative fundamentalism lacks. Feynman could shift fluidly between rigorous technical work (demanding mathematical precision and empirical rigor) and philosophical modesty (acknowledging that some questions exceed current methods’ reach). He neither dismissed interpretive questions as meaningless (Krauss’s error) nor treated them as decidable through technical virtuosity alone (the temptation of mathematical Platonism).
Implications for AI Governance and Human Agency
These examples from physics illuminate why toggle competence proves essential for responsible AI interaction and why it resists the quantification that algorithmic systems privilege. The structure of the challenge remains consistent across domains: practitioners must learn when to immerse themselves in productive collaboration (whether with quantum formalism or AI outputs) and when to step back into critical reflection about what that collaboration can and cannot achieve.
In AI contexts, toggle competence operates through the dynamic management of what this framework has termed the user’s illusion—the tendency to treat AI outputs as intentional, reasoned, and meaningful. As discussed earlier, this illusion is not mere pathology but a precondition for productive engagement. Users cannot interact effectively with AI systems while constantly reminding themselves of the underlying mechanics; doing so would be like watching a film while obsessing over projector mechanisms. The intentional stance enables collaborative flow, allowing users to build on AI‑generated suggestions, explore alternative framings, and develop ideas through iterative exchange.
Yet uncritical immersion in the intentional stance leads to the “labor‑saving” mode of interaction where users treat AI outputs as genuine deliberation rather than sophisticated simulation—outsourcing judgment to algorithmic optimization while retaining only the subjective experience of choice. Toggle competence requires recognizing when to pull back from immersive collaboration into critical awareness that the “space of pseudo‑reasons” differs fundamentally from genuine reason‑giving, that pattern‑matching lacks intentionality despite producing linguistically fluent outputs.
The parallel to Feynman’s approach becomes clear. Just as Feynman worked productively with quantum formalism while maintaining philosophical agnosticism about ontological interpretation, AI users must engage productively with algorithmic outputs while maintaining awareness of their non‑sentient, optimization‑driven nature. Just as Krauss’s toggle failure led him to conflate empirical physics with metaphysical resolution, AI users who lose toggle competence conflate statistically plausible outputs with genuine understanding, convenience with wisdom, optimization with deliberation.
The connection to dramatic rehearsal proves particularly significant. Dewey’s concept captures the distinctively human capacity for imaginative exploration of possible actions and consequences before commitment—a process involving the whole person, not just analytical cognition, and inherently social in its consideration of others’ responses. AI deployment often undermines conditions necessary for genuine dramatic rehearsal: algorithmic solutions’ speed and apparent convenience can short‑circuit deliberative processes, encouraging acceptance of outputs without fully exploring their implications. The opacity of AI systems makes it difficult to imagine meaningfully what delegation involves. As systems become more sophisticated at predicting preferences, they may reduce the felt need for dramatic rehearsal by providing solutions that appear obviously optimal.
Toggle competence becomes the mechanism for preserving dramatic rehearsal in AI‑mediated contexts. By maintaining capacity to shift from immersive collaboration to critical reflection, users can catch themselves before accepting algorithmic outputs that bypass genuine deliberation. The toggle moment—pulling back to ask “What am I outsourcing here? What understanding am I losing? What alternatives am I foreclosing?”—creates space for the imaginative exploration that dramatic rehearsal requires.
This also clarifies why toggle competence resists the metrics‑based assessment that much AI governance discourse demands. One cannot quantify “toggle frequency” in meaningful cross‑context ways because what counts as appropriate toggling varies by domain, practitioner, and situation. A “redirect” in one interaction might be a “misunderstanding” in another; coding such moments requires interpretive judgment that is itself path‑dependent and context‑sensitive. More fundamentally, toggle competence operates at a phenomenological level that may be accessible to practitioners themselves but not reliably detectable through behavioral analysis.
The quantitative fundamentalism critique thus circles back to illuminate the AI governance challenge. Just as Krauss and Hawking could not recognize philosophical questions as legitimate because their epistemology privileged only empirically testable claims, AI governance frameworks that demand metrics for all meaningful capacities risk optimizing what can be measured while neglecting what matters most. Toggle competence, dramatic rehearsal quality, narrative coherence, and the capacity for genuine reason‑giving are real capacities essential to human flourishing, even if they resist the quantification that algorithmic systems privilege.
A mature framework must embrace complementary modes of knowledge—quantitative where appropriate, interpretive where necessary, and attentive to tacit dimensions that resist explicit articulation. This methodological pluralism does not reject measurement but recognizes its limits, acknowledging that some of the most crucial capacities for preserving human agency in AI‑mediated contexts cannot be reduced to the metrics that computational systems can process. Toggle competence itself exemplifies this insight: it is the learned capacity to recognize when measurement suffices and when situated judgment must transcend available quantification—making it simultaneously essential for AI governance and irreducible to the technical frameworks such governance often privileges.
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Sum para for sep. paper on interpretive space: A spinoff for sep. paper
Toggle competence names a practical form of wisdom needed whenever we work at the boundary between quantitative and interpretive domains. It is the learned capacity to shift fluidly between immersive engagement with powerful formal or computational systems and critical reflection on what those systems can and cannot do. In semantics and interpretation, this means recognizing that many of our most important concepts—justice, harm, common good, even ordinary color talk—do not admit of a single, metric “bullseye” definition, yet are neither arbitrary nor merely private. They function instead as structured interpretive spaces: we broaden them when we need big‑tent cooperation or institutional flexibility, and narrow them when action, adjudication, or precise coordination requires sharper edges. No algorithm can pre‑decide when to broaden or narrow without reinstating, at a higher level, the very quantitative fundamentalism the view resists.
The spin‑off for a theory of interpretation is that meaning is better thought of as navigability within such spaces than as successful aim at a unique point. Interpretive competence involves managing this “breathing” of concepts—knowing when to tolerate ambiguity as productive and when to discipline it as obfuscating, when to demand more precise criteria and when doing so would be a category mistake. Toggle competence, in this setting, is the reflective awareness that some questions genuinely are suited to metric resolution, while others remain irreducibly interpretive yet still objective in the sense of being publicly arguable, evidence‑responsive, and better or worse justified. It is precisely this non‑algorithmic sense of when to stay with formalism and when to lean on tacit, situated judgment that any serious semantics or hermeneutics will have to account for, especially under conditions where computational systems tempt us to treat all meaning as if it were ultimately quantifiable.
