No Chips for the Game: Disregarding Epistemic Bankruptcy
There is a simple rule in any serious game. You bring chips to the table, or you do not play. The chips are not decoration. They are what make moves binding, outcomes meaningful, and wins distinguishable from noise.
Epistemic discourse works the same way. Truth, justification, warrant, error, correction, prediction. These are the chips. Without them, there is no game, only motion.
Much modern argumentation violates this rule. A common move is to deny objective normativity altogether and then continue issuing judgments as if nothing has been lost. Moral claims are reduced to preferences or social conditioning. Rationality is reduced to neuronal firing. Beliefs are explained causally, not justified normatively. And yet the speaker continues to argue, predict, critique, and correct as though reasons still carry authority.
This is epistemic bankruptcy. The account denies the currency required to participate, then attempts to keep playing.
Consider morality first. If there is no objective grounding for moral oughts, then moral claims are reports of taste or tribal consensus. They may explain behavior, but they do not obligate. Disagreement is no longer error correction; it is preference collision. At that point, moral condemnation has no more authority than disliking broccoli. One may shout, persuade, or coerce, but one may not claim that anyone is actually wrong.
But that concedes too much. The same acid dissolves reason itself.
If reasoning is nothing more than electrochemical activity shaped by evolutionary pressures, then rational norms evaporate. Neurons fire. Beliefs form. Utterances occur. But none of this implies that a belief ought to be held, that an inference ought to be trusted, or that a conclusion ought to be preferred to its negation.
Prediction does not survive this reduction. To say “this model predicts X” quietly assumes that prediction is a truth-tracking virtue, that accuracy matters, and that future-directed inference is rationally binding. Those are normative assumptions. Once normativity is denied, “prediction” reduces to a sequence of events that happened to line up with later events. Reliability becomes a description, not a reason. Success becomes historical accident, not warrant.
The sophisticated naturalist will object here. “I am not denying normativity,” he says. “I am explaining it. Norms are real patterns of social coordination, or evolved heuristics, or emergent regularities. They are just not supernatural.”
But this confuses origin with authority. Explaining how a norm arose is not the same as grounding why it binds. The evolutionary story tells you that certain heuristics survived because they correlated with reproductive success. It does not tell you that you ought to follow them now. The social coordination story tells you that people in groups tend to converge on shared expectations. It does not tell you that those expectations are correct, or that violating them is wrong rather than merely unpopular.
Reliable for what? Reliable according to what standard? The moment you say one causal chain is “better” at tracking reality than another, you have reintroduced the oughts. You have borrowed chips from a bank you claim does not exist.
In that framework, a correct prediction and a delusion are ontologically equal. Both are brain states caused by prior brain states. One cannot say one ought to prefer the former without reintroducing the very normativity that was denied at the start.
This is the self-undermining core. The system cannot justify assertion, inference, correction, or disagreement without borrowing standards it officially rejects. It explains why someone believes something, then treats that explanation as if it licensed belief. It smuggles in chips while insisting the table is cashless.
The poker analogy exposes the confusion cleanly. A player arrives without chips and begins calling, raising, and declaring wins. When challenged, he insists that chips are an illusion, that the game is really about gestures and table positions. But he still wants his moves to count. He still wants outcomes to bind. He still wants to be taken seriously as a participant.
The proper response is not to argue about the hands. It is to clarify the rules. Either bring chips or leave the table.
This is why dismissal is sometimes the only coherent move. Not dismissal of persons, but dismissal of premises. If a framework denies the conditions of intelligibility for rational discourse, it forfeits standing to make rational claims. One is not obligated to refute what has already dissolved its own authority.
This is often mistaken for arrogance. It is not. It is category discipline. You cannot debate normativity with someone who has already declared that norms do not exist and yet continues to issue them. At that point, argument becomes theater.
A puddle has shape, but no structure. It conforms passively to whatever surrounds it. It cannot command because it has no fixed form from which to speak. Treating it as an authority is confusion, not humility.
Get thee behind me, puddle.
This is not written to persuade the bankrupt. They will keep writing checks on an empty account as long as anyone will accept them. This is written for those watching the table.
You have seen the pattern. Someone denies the very standards that make rational discourse possible, then proceeds to argue, correct, and condemn as if those standards were still in force. Now you have a name for it. Epistemic bankruptcy.
So the rule stands. Truth must be something more than what happens. Reason must be something more than chemistry. Ought must be something more than preference. Without that, there is no disagreement to resolve, no claim to assess, no game to play.
When you encounter this move, you are not obligated to keep dealing. Name what is missing. Then wait for the buy-in.
No chips, no ante, no game.