What’s holding it up?
Pick a piece, then tap above the stand to drop it. Tap any piece in the stack to pull it out.
Pieces
Nothing has moved yet.
What changed
“The order of things changes what they can do.”
In 1641, René Descartes tried to find one belief so solid that everything else could be stacked on top of it. He settled on the one thing he couldn’t doubt while doing it: that he was thinking.
Not everyone was convinced there’s a bottom block. Otto Neurath, an Austrian philosopher of the early 1900s, compared knowledge to a ship that sailors must rebuild at sea, plank by plank, with no dry dock to start from. Later, W. V. O. Quine pictured our beliefs as a web: pull on one, and others shift to make up for it.
Some pieces turn out to carry far more than they seem to. Does what we know rest on a foundation, or do the pieces just hold each other up?