We engage the world via models. However, every model is necessarily incomplete: the faculty by which modeling works cannot itself be modeled, and thus, remains opaque to understanding. We thus apprehend the world with tools intrinsically incapable of encompassing it as a whole. I propose that several challenging philosophical problems are in fact expressions of this limitation. Among them is the problem of fundamentals: since every model of the world reduces to some set of fundamental facts, we expect the same thing to hold of the world as a whole. This, however, ultimately confuses the map with the territory.
Jochen Szangolies