The Adaptive Function of Epistemic Ambiguity: When "Good Enough" Truth Builds Reality
The Theory of Adaptive BS
Made with many AI iterations, my own ideas, and some of the literature. A work in progress.
We live in an age of epistemic crisis, or so we're told. Misinformation, post-truth politics, the fragmentation of shared reality — these are the defining anxieties of our moment. But what if we're asking the wrong question? What if the problem isn't that we've lost access to truth, but that we've never been particularly good at acknowledging how much functional ambiguity our psyches require?
Hans Vaihinger, writing in 1911, proposed something radical: that we operate through fictions we consciously recognize as false, yet treat as indispensable. These aren't delusions — delusions require belief. These are strategic deployments of "as-if" thinking. We act *as if* we have free will, *as if* the social contract exists, *as if* mathematical infinity is real. Not because we've proven these things, but because they're operationally necessary.
This brings us to what I'll call the Theory of Adaptive BS (TABS) - a framework for understanding how we iteratively construct workable realities from halfway truths. The key insight here connects directly to Winnicott's concept of the "good enough mother." Just as perfect mothering would be pathological (preventing the child from developing their own psychological resilience), perfect truth might be cognitively and socially corrosive.
The Good Enough Reality Principle
Winnicott understood that the infant needs the mother to fail them - gradually, tolerably, adaptively. These micro-failures create the space for psychological development. The mother who anticipates every need perfectly prevents individuation. The mother who fails catastrophically creates trauma. The "good enough" mother fails in ways the child can metabolize.
Reality works the same way. We need our narratives to be good enough - stable enough to orient action, flexible enough to revise under pressure, ambiguous enough to accommodate uncertainty. Perfect correspondence to some objective truth (even if such a thing exists) would eliminate the interpretive flexibility that allows us to function in complex social environments.
Consider relationships, where TABS has particular relevance. Every long-term partnership operates on layered narratives about who each person is, what the relationship means, what future it's building toward. These narratives are necessarily incomplete, somewhat contradictory, and periodically revised. The couple who insists on total transparency and complete narrative coherence often finds the relationship brittle - unable to absorb the ordinary ambiguities of human experience. It’s too real for most.
Strategic ambiguity isn't dysfunction; it's structural necessity. We maintain face-saving fictions, charitable interpretations, selective attention. Not because we're dishonest, but because relationships require breathing room. The alternative to adaptive BS isn't authentic truth-telling — it's often just unexamined BS that's become rigid, and the “truthiness” of a thing is what gives toothiness to what’s real.
Iteration and Evolution
What distinguishes adaptive from maladaptive BS? The capacity for iteration. Good enough truths are provisional, responsive to feedback, capable of evolution. They're held lightly enough to revise but firmly enough to guide action. This is the pragmatist insight: truth is what works, and what works changes as contexts shift. We are usually shooting behind the target, and at best we are in the moment, the target shoots at itself. If we are “in the future” too much, we may not be shooting in front of the target — we may just be fooling ourselves.
Think of reality construction as analogous to software development. You don't wait for perfect code before deployment. You release the minimally viable product — good enough to function — then iterate based on how it performs in the wild. Each version incorporates feedback, addresses failures, adapts to new constraints. Reality emerges through this iterative process, not through discovery of some pre-existing truth.
The self operates similarly. Our self-narratives are working drafts, constantly revised in response to experience and social feedback. The person who's achieved a "true" self-understanding has likely just ossified around one particular narrative. Psychological flexibility requires holding our self-stories provisionally, as good enough for now.
Implications
In therapeutic contexts, this framework suggests a different relationship to narrative coherence. Rather than helping clients discover their "true" story, we might focus on whether their current narratives are adaptive — whether they enable growth, accommodate complexity, respond to evidence.
Depression and anxiety often involve narratives that have become too rigid, too "true" in their own terms. The depressed person who insists "I'm fundamentally broken" isn't wrong in some absolute sense — they're operating with a narrative that's ceased to be adaptive. The work isn't to replace false beliefs with true ones, but to restore narrative flexibility, to make space for halfway truths that leave possibility open.
Trauma, similarly, can freeze narrative development. The traumatized psyche gets stuck in one story, endlessly repeated, unable to iterate. Healing involves not finding the "real" story of what happened, but developing the capacity to hold multiple, evolving narratives that can be revised as the person grows.
The Honest Position
Here's the paradox: acknowledging that it's "BS all the way down" might be the most honest epistemic position available. Not honest in the sense of corresponding to absolute truth, but honest in recognizing our actual cognitive situation. We're narrative-making creatures operating with incomplete information, constructing workable realities from provisional truths.
Self-aware BS — BS that knows itself as BS yet serves adaptive functions — may be qualitatively different from unreflective BS. The person who says "I choose to act as if I have agency" while acknowledging the philosophical problems with free will is in a different position than someone who's never questioned the assumption.
This doesn't collapse into relativism. Some narratives work better than others. Some fictions are more adaptive than others. The difference isn't truth-value but functional consequences — does this story enable growth, connection, resilience? Does it respond to evidence? Can it evolve?
Embracing Strategic Ambiguity
The Theory of Adaptive BS suggests we might benefit from more conscious relationship to our necessary fictions. Not abandoning them — that's neither possible nor desirable — but holding them with appropriate tentativeness. Reality construction is iterative, provisional, good enough.
The mother who tries to be perfect damages her child. The truth-seeker who demands perfect correspondence damages their capacity to function. What we need are good enough truths, revised regularly, held lightly, adequate to the complexity of lived experience. Keats called this power “negative capability”.
“[S]everal things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.” — John Keats, 1818
It's (adaptive) BS all the way down — and all the way up, and sideways, and in dimensions we don’t perceive spatially, perhaps. The question is whether we can be strategic about it.
References
Negative Capability to Unlock Hidden Potential
John Keats. On Axioms and the Surprise of Poetry: Letter to John Taylor, 27 February 1818]
Vaihinger, H. (1924). The philosophy of ‘as if’: A system of the theoretical, practical, and religious fictions of mankind (C. K. Ogden, Trans.). Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1911)
Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena — A study of the first not-me possession. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34, 89–97.
