Oct 6, 2026 · @Gad
Scoundrels Philosophy Club, Wednesday, September 30 · Saturday Scoundrels, Saturday, October 3
8 Scoundrels + 3 Scoundrels (not counting me and Seth, and you know where I stand on that)
Oh boy, it has been a while since I've done one of these. And this is the first time I'm trying to reflect on two different conversations, with two different groups of people, thinking about the same question. So wish me luck, and be prepared to see this come out a few different ways over the next few weeks (or months) while I figure out how to do it. I'm back, thinkas!
A Second Table
Here's the twist this season: Scoundrels now meets twice a week. The Scoundrels Philosophy Club, our original and longest-running group, still gathers Wednesday nights at Bridge & Tunnel. And now there's Saturday Scoundrels, Saturday mornings from 10 to 11:30 at The Catalyst, our new home on West Marine Drive. Same question, different people, different end of the week. (Saturdays are all ages, too.)
Saturday Scoundrels exists in part because of support from Oregon Humanities and Meyer Memorial Trust, and we're so grateful to both for making room for one more table. Thank you also to Cambium Gallery and Coffee Bar, who keep Saturday Scoundrels caffeinated every single week. Philosophy before noon is its own strong brew, but not quite as material as a cup in hand!
A warm welcome to our newcomers: Mark, Chani, Gabe, Robin, and Teri on Wednesday, and Ethan and Robyn on Saturday. And something that doesn't happen very often: everybody in both groups said something. Javi! We need your strong silence (he never reads these - another silence, lol).
Seth Kicked Us Off (Twice)
Seth admitted he wasn't all that prepared on Wednesday. But three things had him thinking about what makes a good answer to a question.
First, he'd been watching politicians respond to questions without really answering them. Everybody knows politicians make a whole living out of not quite answering, sometimes by dodging entirely, sometimes by putting just enough out there to serve their own purposes. So is that a good answer or a bad one? For the politician, it might be a great one.
Second, he'd been going around in circles with our teenager, trying to understand something that was going on. He asked a series of questions. Our teen answered every single one of them. And still no understanding arrived. Was our teen evading? Processing? How is it that every question got an answer and no communication happened?
Third, he'd been reading Ch'an Buddhist stories, full of answers that don’t seem to fit the bill. They can feel obtuse or absurd, and yet they're also brilliant. Is that a good answer?
On Saturday, Seth offered the same springboard and then read us an excerpt from the Ch'an teachings: an answer that doesn't answer, but still leads toward enlightenment.
And he asked both groups: Where do answers exist within conversations? What, if anything, is universal about conversations? Do we want answers to finish an engagement? To evoke? To evade? To perform? And is there any such thing as a perfect answer?
For someone who wasn't all that prepared, he brought up kind of a lot. Show off.
Same Word, Very Different Animals
Surprise, surprise our lovable shrinking violet Tim had an “unambiguous answer” to our massive question. Is it possible for a tongue to be firmly in cheek while at the same time being completely earnest? He said, a good answer, paired with its question, should form a tautology. Thom wanted to know what a tautology was, so Seth explained (for those of us at home: a statement that's true by its very form, like "it's raining or it isn't" basically, the stuff that makes you say, duh and also that’s not very helpful). Tim unpacked further. What makes a good answer depends on the purpose of the question. Engineers want something unambiguous and specific. In the humanities, the purpose of a question and its answer is to nurture a conversation. Context creates the conditions for what is deemed good.
Seth agreed you certainly want tight logic in some places, and engineering is definitely one of them. But here's what's curious: engineering questions have answers. Humanities questions have answers. Questions that are emotions have answers. We call them all answers, even though they're so damn different. Why are we using the same word? What do they have in common while being so different, seems like there must be something there.
Mark felt society is moving into a yes/no answer mode. Like binary code and you can get pretty far with that. I think Mark was hinting at something bigger: we lean on technology so much for information that maybe we're becoming more binary just by the way information gets expressed and delivered to us. Maybe that was just me musing on his thoughts. His own standard for a good answer is that it gets you far enough to ask another question.
Saturday came at this from another direction. Ethan works in computer science and gets the mundane workplace question "Can we do this?" a lot. His answer is often, "Why do you want to do that?" A request frequently comes from not fully understanding what's possible. Don't bring a solution looking for a problem. Understand the thing you're calling a problem first. Seth saw teaching in this. Students don't always know how to ask the question that would get them where they're aiming, so the question has to be reframed before it goes anywhere.
Ethan thought we're too deferential to the question and answer format. The moment something looks like a question, our instinct is to make a claim and move on. We rarely unpack the assumptions inside either. Seth added that whatever gets put into a question also leaves something out. Wittgenstein suggested we can never ask a question completely, only put forward enough to receive a response. Loren liked responding with another question, since the question-and-answer format can add a lot of stress to a conversation all on its own.
So Wittgenstein turned up in both conversations. On Wednesday he was asking whether we'd agreed on what any of our words meant. On Saturday he was reminding us no question gets asked completely.
“At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty
Ethan offered one more possibility from analytic philosophy: a good answer is one that compels. Then he brought up that famous quantum physics class where the professor says, more or less: I don't understand quantum, and if I do my job right, by the end of this class you'll be confused too. And that will be progress. (Is that what we do at Scoundrels?)
Doors, Hearts, and a Rope
Chani thought a good answer tells you something about the person answering. Politicians give bad answers because they're avoiding Self. They're avoiding telling you anything about who they are. You can get plenty of good answers in math or physics that show you nothing of the person giving them. Seth found that interesting, because part of what the Ch'an stories are doing has to do with the mind giving the answer and the one receiving it. Chani likes to know someone's angle. When she's working on a project with someone, understanding how their mind comes at things helps her figure out who to ask, and what kinds of questions to ask them. Now, I have to ask you guys,what are the chances of Ch’an buddhism getting featured conceptually the first time Chani joins us? There’s probably someone willing to do the math on that, but for those of you eating popcorn, on the edges of your seats reading my many, many words here: those aren’t typos. One’s a kind of Buddhism, the other a very cool lady who joined us on Wednesday.
Jane liked the idea of an exchange you share, like “opening doors.” Her own experience has often been really narrow access for really specific answers. And she wondered with all the knowledge in the world, are answers just waiting around for a question to be asked? Does an answer need a question before it can come out? I loved imagining an answer like a child hiding behind mom or dad, waiting for just the right question before stepping forward.
Seth considered that maybe an answer isn't only a response. Maybe an answer is an action itself.
Gabe was thinking that every time people interact, there's connection and disconnection, and underneath it all there's still a question: can my mind connect with yours? (We didn't know it yet, but the universe was foreshadowing.) In discourse, he said, you have to feel safe. Politics is performance for a grander audience than the person who asked. It's more sophistry and rhetoric than connection. When we agree to connect, it doesn't have to become a battle of wills over the most truthful truth. And when you feel safe, even a truth that isn't the best quality still gives you something.
Seth asked him what it is to be safe? What is safety? Philosophically, of course.
Gabe said small questions shut people down and turn things into a battle narrative. A question or an answer can be a rope thrown to another person. A good question gives something a place to land.
On Saturday, Robyn was thinking along a similar vein as Jane. Answers that, “open doors and hearts” to further exploration are the good ones. Answers that cut off can end relationships. I was struck that she reached for the same words Jane did on Wednesday. Robyn works in counseling, and when she asks a question at work there's always another one underneath: who am I asking this for? Me, or the person in front of me? Ethan said he felt like he got a little glimpse of what Robyn's work is like.
2 + 2 = Not Necessarily
Back on Wednesday, Tim was frustrated by how much comes down to language. He was thinking about Wittgenstein, and how in everything we'd discussed that night, we hadn't agreed on definitions for anything. Exchanging any kind of information at all is exceedingly complex and chaotic.
And then we watched it happen.
The conversation took a quick turn that caught me off guard, and I've thought all week about how I wanted to reflect on it. An exchange between Gabe and Tim that I took at first as playful back-and-forth shifted into accusatory questions, and it took me a moment to recognize the moment had turned. It started with the statement that we can all agree 2 + 2 = 4. Tim, being the math whiz that he is, knows of systems where that doesn't hold. He said not necessarily. Within three or four rapid-fire questions, it had become a game of chicken.
What I could see as teasing or playful bravado in Tim’s responses, Gabe heard as know-it-all, and it set him off. The idea that we could be sure of anything rubbed Gabe the wrong way, and the tone of the questioning rubbed Tim the wrong way. One man leaned in and the other crossed his arms. And here's the thing, Gabe was pointing toward epistemology, one of Tim's favorite areas of philosophy. They weren't far apart in curiosity at all. But tone, pace, and posture crowded out the space for sharing ideas.
This isn't something we have to deal with much at Philosofarian. But we run a conversation group that is very much about practicing how to engage with each other about ideas we know we won't agree on. And some of this was on us. Because Wednesday is our longest-running group, a culture has grown up where people learn over time how we interact. With our newer groups, we always introduce how we proceed. Seth tells everyone we probably won't agree about everything, and rather than calling somebody's idea stupid, we offer a phrase: I'm not sure I see it that way. This is how I see it. It's a couple words that keep us wondering together without sliding into the combative rhetoric modeled everywhere these days.
Gabe challenged what are we sure of anyway? How can we be sure of anything?
Seth took the opportunity to teach a little Wittgenstein. Within tightly defined systems, a question and an answer can be particularly specific, and that's really useful in narrow situations. But there's still… the whole world. And the strength of math comes from the very fact that the system itself can't be complete. Which took Seth back to the questions why do we keep using the same word, answer, for all of it? And could we have a perfect answer?
Chani teased Tim about feeling so certain in the world (she's family, so she's allowed). But she built on it with the idea that you do have to act with certainty just to get along. At some point you cross the street, buy the groceries, decide to experiment with whether gravity truly exists by flinging yourself from dangerous heights. Seth heard pragmatism in that. A good answer opens a way to move forward, and moving forward is what makes it work.
Gabe wanted to know how saying "we know" helps anything. Tim said context makes the difference. When the context is clearly defined, as it is in lots of math, you can know within those constraints. Gabe asked why science was good enough for Tim. Tim: it's the best we have so far. If someone shifts the paradigm, Tim changes his mind.
That was something Gabe could agree with. He also said it felt like a trap to be questioning the questioner, and admitted he didn't feel safe playing language games after we'd been talking about Wittgenstein. So Seth brought it back to safer ground. Gabe wanted to know how common it is for people to believe they might not exist. Seth said there are different ways in: Descartes with "I think, therefore I am," Buddhism with no-self. But we do have to get ideas across to one another. We find a way to meet each other's minds.
Jane saw the whole exchange as a wonderful example of why we need things like Scoundrels: to practice, and to learn assuredness when we find ourselves feeling unsafe in a conversation. She remembered not understanding a word in college and feeling dumb. None of us has complete knowledge. We need each other.
Later in the evening, Tim told Gabe he hadn't meant to set him off with the math. Gabe said thank you for saying it. Tim explained he was trying to show that context changes everything, even for 2 + 2. The whole point of a question and answer has no meaning until you can agree on context. Humans are messy.
And after Scoundrels officially ended, Gabe, Tim, and Robin kept talking together for another half hour. Apparently the conversation wasn't finished just because we were.
Bugles, Sea Lions, and a Green Sky
Jane brought in childhood. Kids shift from survival questions (where's my bottle, where's my blanket) to why is the sky blue? And eventually they start asking things their parents might not know either. She thinks questioning is built into how our brains connect. A basic human survival skill.
To show it, she told us about a birdwatching friend who was out during rutting season when a bull elk snorted and bugled. She froze. What now? The elk was weighing his own choices between a birdwatcher and a cow nearby. A big question with big consequences, and all of the considering and communicating was happening without a shared language between three mammals.
Not the kind of male you want to run into birdwatching.
This reminded Chani of walking past the sea lions and having them stare back at her. There seems to be an exchange. They read some of her body language, and in other cases her body language is a threat. Smiling shows teeth, which lands very differently across species. So how do you know what a good answer is when the one answering isn't human? (Chani, hold that thought for next week!)
Seth noted how far we'd traveled. We started with a narrow proposition, an answer as a tautology, and widened out to exchanges between people, exchanges within ourselves, and exchanges with nonhumans, with words and bodies doing different things at once. One of the things that makes this so hard is how hard it is to know what we're doing.
Which brought to mind for me that we all have different hopes and dreams and desires. What might be a good answer for me could be a terrible answer for someone else, because we're each living our own lives along our own paths. Teri added that our different cultures shape what counts as good, too.
Seth was reminded of the Simpsons episode where Homer accidentally gets Apu fired, a little lesson in the ambiguity of language. But maybe ambiguity is where the possibility lies. Sometimes it prevents coherence, and sometimes it makes things more complete.
Jane wondered whether we delude children when we hand them scores of 100%. She doesn't think so, because we need assurance as we learn how to learn. We have to honor a person's development at the level it's at. Questions can look irritating, especially from kids, and if we tell them they're asking stupid questions, that changes them. So what would happen if we nurtured children to have their own power, and taught them what questioning and answering together can do?
That brought up a parenting moment for Teri. When her kid first asked why the sky was blue, she asked back: how do you know it's blue? What if the sky was green? She wasn't sure it was the right call to complicate certainty for a small child. Personally, I'm delighted she went full epistemology.
And Chani thinks a lot about how many shades of red people can really see. She can't see the way anybody else sees, so she'll never know. How do we agree when we'll never really know another mind?
A Good Faith and a Good Will
Both tables ended up back at the politicians. Teri said her biggest frustration was that the context is known and they still seem deceitful, mollifying crowds. It's become a known and "acceptable" deceit.
On Saturday, Ethan came at the politicians from another direction. They use the ritual of question and answer while undermining the exchange itself. Would Kant call that a lie? Seth: absolutely. According to Kant, you can't take part in an exchange in a way that undermines it and lacks good will.
And Robin gently challenged the idea that context is essential. What role does good faith play? It brought to mind the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Darmok." (For the uninitiated: Picard is stranded on a planet with an alien captain whose people speak entirely in references to their own stories, and the two of them have to find a way to understand each other.
Should we start counting Star Trek references?
Seth shared that his mentor Roger Ames used "Darmok" in his 100-level classes, because communication through will and sentiment is a feature of Mandarin. Gabe was curious whether it was only Mandarin. Seth wasn't sure. That feels like a good place to leave it.
Seth saw the full dynamic of engagement here: we're in a perpetual negotiation. There are probably fewer answers in the world than we believe, and a lot more responses and approaches. And Teri offered that sometimes the best answers are unexpected precisely because the person answering doesn't know the context at all.
Fish Dancing in the Sun
Saturday spent much more time wondering whether an answer has to behave like an answer at all.
Loren lifted up the importance of relationship and awareness. She found it telling that East and South Asian philosophy was recorded as discourses: not just answers, but how the engagement itself went. That larger engagement felt primal to her, a word she kept returning to all morning. It seems like we communicate in ways without much spontaneity, without the freedom to just have questions, and instead we get sidelined with answers. Seth followed her reasoning: spontaneity requires something deep and integral in us.
Ethan was contemplating the authority of a guru as a kind of responsibility. Someone asks: what's the meaning of life? And the answer is: why do the leaves fall? For the person receiving it, that answer would change over three years of contemplation. It would be effulgent. (Effulgence is a word I had to ask Seth to define in our pre-conversation, and then the group just had fun bringing it up over and over, because where else do you get to play with a word like effulgent without sounding pompous? For the record: bubbling up.) The meaning isn't in the question or the answer. A guru can say almost anything. Contemplation is the key.
Seth found the nature of time in this interesting. An answer is discrete; it exists in a particular moment. Math does this too. But most responses between humans, with context and consciousness, do the opposite. Ethan said yes, like reading the same book every ten years of your life.
Seth said that's part of how Philosofarian continues. He has alumni who studied with him 10, 20, 30 years ago who still want to keep talking, and who want to make it possible for others to keep talking too. Those people make a space like The Catalyst possible. Loren saw the relationship of monk and master in that. Seth said it's kind of like that, but the relationship shifts as the conversations and the people grow. John Nygaard, who is giving a talk with Seth this Thursday, is a very different person than young John sitting in Seth's class deciding whether this professor was too liberal for his tastes. Answers and experience over time are intimately related. There's a kind of flickering in them.
Loren brought up Zhuangzi and Huizi watching the fish. How do you know the fish are happy? You can tell by looking. Seth unpacked the story a little more. Rather than participating in a logic that would undo the premise, Zhuangzi shifts to a fundamentally aesthetic response. It short-circuits a logic that consumes its own coherence. Things must be considered on their own terms.
Loren connected the response of the fish are happy because they look like they're dancing in the sun with her musings on the primal relationship she’d been pointing to: a physical, spontaneous world. We're always short-circuiting it to get to answers. Even with friendship it can be hard to remember to relate to each other this way.
Seth was thinking about what happens when we articulate a thought. We take it from the realm of possibility and limit it by giving it words, shape, motion. Articulating is also inherently a loss.
Ethan saw a ritual we're stuck in with questions and answers. It can be manipulated, and it can also just limit us. And then he mused that it's mind-boggling we can talk about food, let alone have a conversation like the one we were having. If everything we know is the contents of our hearts and minds, and conversation is just air vibrating between those contents, then somehow, against the odds, something gets across.
Seth liked wrapping up on that note: the realness of things isn't particles or feelings, but the meaning that comes from them. It brought to mind Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. There's a girl in the book who goes through a monstrous transformation, and when readers ask whether it really happened, the answer is no, it didn't happen, and that's why it's true.
2 Rooms + 2 Groups = One Question
So what happens when the same question goes to two different tables?
There were echoes. Politicians gave everybody trouble (though we're pretty sure they love their own answers). Wittgenstein popped up in different ways. Both groups wanted answers that open doors. And both groups sniffed around the question-and-answer format itself.
And the conversations diverged. Wednesday kept asking what has to be in place before an answer can work: context, shared terms, safety, good faith, some willingness to let another mind get close enough to yours to do something. And then we saw those requirements in action.
Saturday was less interested in making answers reliable and more suspicious of the idea that understanding should arrive in the form of an answer at all. A koan. A guru. A book reread every decade. Fish dancing in the sun.
Is that a Wednesday-night thing and a Saturday-morning thing? A bottle shop thing and a coffee thing? Eight people versus three? I’m Mr. Toad and this is the new wild ride. I’m here for it. Let’s go!
Half-Baked (Two Ovens This Time)
If an answer can be an action, can you answer without saying anything? Jane's birdwatcher friend might have something to say about that.
What does it take to feel safe enough to be questioned?
Are answers waiting around for questions?
What would a spontaneous question and answer look like? Could we have one on purpose?
If putting a thought into words is inherently a loss, is a good answer one that loses less?
Can a nonhuman give us an answer we don't know how to recognize?
And what exactly makes good good? Robin suggested at one point that maybe we should ask instead: what is an answer that works? That may be a whole other Scoundrels.
What We Know We Don't Know
Nobody settled what makes a good answer. What turned up instead were tensions.
An answer can be correct and still fail completely. An answer can be evasive and still work perfectly for the person giving it. Context helps, until someone who doesn't know the context says the most useful thing. Certainty lets us cross the street. It can also make another person cross their arms.
Sometimes a response tells you more about the person than about the question. Sometimes the best thing an answer can do is produce another question. And sometimes it doesn't arrive when it's given. It takes three years. Or ten. Or it turns into a fish dancing in the sun.
And Seth is still wondering whether there's such a thing as a perfect answer. You’re my perfect answer, honey! (mushy, mushy, lol)
Also, a belated happy birthday to Jim! He and Ciera showed up Wednesday thinking Scoundrels started the following week, missed the whole conversation, and stayed to talk with us for about another hour anyway. Apparently even missing Scoundrels results in more Scoundrels.
Your Turn
What's the best non-answer you've ever gotten? Has an answer ever taken years to arrive? Have you ever had a conversation with a sea lion? Leave a comment, reply to the newsletter, or bring your questions to the next session.
No Quiet Corners
Usually this is where I tip my hat to our listeners, the ones who come to think without needing to say a word. This time, every single person at both tables spoke up. Our listeners are always welcome, and so is a room full of talkers.
This week at Scoundrels: Can non-human intelligence ever be understood by humans? The sea lions are already on the guest list.
Scoundrels Philosophy Club: Wednesday, October 7, 5:30pm, Bridge & Tunnel Bottle Shop.
Saturday Scoundrels: Saturday, October 10, 10 to 11:30am, The Catalyst, 264 W. Marine Drive. All ages. Coffee by Cambium Gallery and Coffee Bar.
And if you're still chewing on this one, Thursday's Wit & Wisdom picks it right up: "What is a Conversation, Anyway?" with John Nygaard and Seth, Thursday, October 8, 7pm, Fort George Lovell Showroom.
Bring your questions. Bring your non-answers. Bring your effulgence.
Come think with us.
This program is funded in part by Oregon Humanities with support from Meyer Memorial Trust. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of Oregon Humanities and other sponsors.
