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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Adaptive Reorganization or Theoretical Reorganization?

A Critical Review of Joseph Dillard's Response to When Integral Perspectives Become Irreconcilable

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Joseph Dillard's response to my essay "When Integral Perspectives Become Irreconcilable" is an intelligent and, in several respects, genuinely engaging reply. Rather than simply defending his position in the Gaza debate with Ray Harris, Dillard accepts much of my diagnosis and attempts to place it within the broader theoretical framework of his Adaptive Reorganization Theory (ART). The result is more interesting than a conventional rebuttal because Dillard is not primarily arguing that my analysis is wrong. He is arguing that it does not go deep enough.

That move, however, raises a fascinating question. Does ART actually provide a deeper explanation of the disagreement between Harris and Dillard, or does it mainly redescribe a familiar problem—cognitive rigidity, confirmation bias, institutional inertia, and competing conceptual frameworks—in an evolutionary vocabulary?

More intriguingly, Dillard's response may itself illustrate the very phenomenon my essay was describing. He understands my argument, accepts much of it, and then reorganizes it within his own pre-existing theoretical framework. In that sense, the response becomes a small-scale demonstration of the thesis it seeks to extend.

From Political Disagreement to Evolutionary Theory

Dillard begins by summarizing my argument sympathetically. He agrees that the disagreement between Harris and himself is not simply a matter of missing facts. Rather, they organize facts differently, beginning their historical narratives at different points and assigning different causal and moral significance to the same events.

Harris emphasizes Jewish persecution, antisemitism, terrorism, and existential security; Dillard emphasizes dispossession, occupation, and asymmetries of political and military power. Neither necessarily denies the facts emphasized by the other. Instead, those facts are incorporated into different explanatory structures.

This is precisely the point of my original essay. Having an integral vocabulary does not guarantee an integral resolution. People can acknowledge multiple perspectives without agreeing about their relative importance. Integral Theory can encourage us to ask what perspective we are missing, but it offers no universally accepted procedure for determining what to do when two perspectives remain fundamentally incompatible.

Dillard accepts this diagnosis. But then he makes a characteristic theoretical move: ART is said to take the analysis one level deeper. The Harris-Dillard disagreement becomes an example of a much broader evolutionary problem involving organisms, individuals, organizations, scientific paradigms, governments, and civilizations.

The question therefore becomes: why does evolution produce adaptive systems that become increasingly resistant to discovering when they themselves are wrong?

This is certainly an interesting question. But it is not immediately clear that changing the level of analysis constitutes an explanation. Human beings interpreting new evidence through existing conceptual frameworks is already a familiar phenomenon in cognitive science and the philosophy of science. Dillard gives this phenomenon a more elaborate theoretical vocabulary, but he still has to demonstrate what explanatory or predictive work that vocabulary performs.

There is a danger here of explanatory inflation: a familiar phenomenon acquires an impressive new name without necessarily acquiring a new mechanism.

The Response That Proves the Point

The most interesting feature of Dillard's essay is therefore not one of its explicit arguments but its performative quality.

Dillard writes that both Harris and he understand each other's arguments remarkably well, yet neither reorganizes as a result. Perspective-taking, he argues, concerns representation, whereas adaptive participation concerns whether another perspective has sufficient influence to reorganize the system itself.

This is an excellent distinction. But it immediately applies to Dillard's response to my essay.

I argued that Harris and Dillard remain divided because their deeper organizing frameworks differ. Dillard essentially replies: yes, and ART explains why such frameworks become resistant to reorganization.

But he has not thereby escaped the problem. He has incorporated my analysis into ART.

That does not make his response wrong. Indeed, it makes the exchange more intellectually interesting. Dillard has demonstrated that a theoretical framework can be sufficiently flexible to accommodate criticism without necessarily allowing that criticism to transform its fundamental assumptions.

In other words, he has done exactly what he says people do: he has taken new information and reorganized it within an existing adaptive organization rather than necessarily reorganizing the organization itself.

The irony is almost too perfect.

Is “Adaptive Reorganization” Actually Testable?

This brings us to the central problem with ART as Dillard presents it.

The distinction between representation and reorganization is potentially valuable. It is relatively easy to demonstrate that somebody understands another position. It is much harder to demonstrate that the position has actually changed the deeper organization of their thinking.

But how much change constitutes reorganization?

If I modify one important belief, have I reorganized? If I change a secondary assumption but preserve my central causal model, is that reorganization or accommodation? If I refuse to change my conclusion because the new evidence is genuinely insufficient, am I demonstrating rigidity or epistemic discipline?

Dillard does not provide a sufficiently clear answer.

The problem becomes especially important because he ultimately proposes reorganizability as an epistemic criterion. Rather than simply asking who is correct now, ART asks which framework remains most capable of future correction, which assumptions remain open to falsification, and which organization allows disconfirming evidence to have greater influence.

These are sensible questions. Indeed, they may be among the strongest ideas in the essay.

But they require independent criteria.

How do we distinguish a genuinely open framework from one whose adherents merely believe themselves to be open? How do we determine whether a person has reorganized because reality demanded it, rather than because they have strategically accommodated inconvenient evidence?

Without such criteria, “reorganizability” risks becoming another self-confirming concept. The person who changes is adaptive; the person who does not is rigid. But perhaps the person who refuses to change is simply correct.

Correctness and Reorganizability Are Not the Same Thing

This is where Dillard's distinction between correctness and reorganizability becomes both interesting and problematic.

He argues that an organization can correctly interpret present circumstances while becoming progressively incapable of recognizing future error. Conversely, an organization can currently be wrong while remaining highly capable of self-correction.

That distinction is important. Intellectual humility and openness to revision are genuine epistemic virtues.

But they cannot substitute for truth.

A person can be highly reorganizable and nevertheless wrong. Another person can be highly resistant to revision and nevertheless right. Someone who has reached the correct conclusion does not become less correct simply because they refuse to abandon it when contradictory evidence is weak or misleading.

This creates a fundamental problem for applying ART to the Gaza debate.

Suppose Harris is correct about some particular issue and Dillard is wrong. The fact that Dillard is theoretically more willing to revise his position would not make his position more correct. Conversely, if Dillard is correct on another issue, Harris's resistance to revision would not by itself establish that Dillard's argument is superior.

Reorganizability is therefore best understood as a virtue of an epistemic system, not as a replacement for evidence, accuracy, or truth.

Dillard sometimes comes close to making it a higher-order criterion capable of superseding correctness. That move needs much more justification.

The Evolutionary Argument

The evolutionary foundation of ART also deserves more scrutiny than Dillard gives it.

He argues that adaptive systems must balance stability and flexibility. Excessive flexibility can be maladaptive because organisms, organizations, and societies also need continuity, coordination, expertise, and institutional memory. Evolution therefore does not simply reward flexibility; it rewards a balance between persistence and change.

This is plausible enough.

But Dillard then moves from this general observation to a normative epistemology of reorganizability. Evolution, he suggests, favors systems capable of effective reorganization when circumstances change.

The difficulty is that evolution does not intrinsically favor truth, rationality, openness, justice, or long-term self-correction. Natural selection can favor remarkably conservative systems if conservatism happens to work. It can preserve maladaptive traits for substantial periods. It can reward coalition loyalty, defensive aggression, conformity, and resistance to external information.

Indeed, Dillard himself acknowledges that natural selection does not optimize for objective truth but for adaptive success.

That creates a philosophical gap in his argument. If evolution is merely descriptive, why should reorganizability be regarded as normatively superior? An additional epistemological or ethical principle is needed to get from “this enhances adaptive capacity” to “this is how we ought to evaluate competing frameworks.”

ART may therefore have a valuable evolutionary metaphor, but the evolutionary argument by itself does not establish the epistemic norm Dillard wants.

Precipitation: A New Mechanism or a New Name?

Dillard's concept of “precipitation” is another interesting feature of the response. He uses the chemical metaphor to describe how adaptive organizations become progressively stabilized. This stabilization is not inherently pathological. Without it there would be no expertise, institutions, accumulated knowledge, or civilization.

The danger arises when successful structures become so stable that new information is routinely incorporated into the existing framework rather than forcing the framework itself to change.

Again, this is a useful observation.

But it is difficult to see yet what “precipitation” adds to concepts already available in psychology, sociology, organizational theory, and philosophy of science. Cognitive rigidity, belief perseverance, motivated reasoning, institutional inertia, path dependence, paradigm preservation, and identity-protective cognition all describe aspects of the phenomenon Dillard has in mind.

For ART to establish itself as more than a relabeling exercise, it needs to show what its concepts predict or explain that these existing concepts do not.

Otherwise, “precipitation” risks becoming a theoretical metaphor rather than a demonstrated mechanism.

International Law as an External Corrective

The section on international law is perhaps the most ambitious part of Dillard's essay.

He argues that international law represents an evolutionary attempt to externalize corrective feedback beyond the nation-state. He compares it with replication and peer review in science, courts in legal systems, and constitutional checks on executive authority.

There is an important insight here. Human institutions can indeed compensate for the limitations of individual cognition. External procedures can prevent people from being the sole judges of their own conduct.

But the analogy between international law and scientific peer review is not straightforward.

Science possesses elaborate procedures for replication, methodological criticism, competing hypotheses, and empirical testing. Courts operate within defined jurisdictions and procedural systems. International law has institutional mechanisms, but its authority and enforcement remain deeply dependent on states and political power.

More importantly, invoking international law does not make disagreement disappear. It simply moves the disagreement to another level.

Now the parties can disagree about which legal principles apply, how particular facts should be interpreted, what constitutes proportionality, how self-defense should be understood, or what weight should be given to different sources of law.

So international law can certainly function as an external corrective mechanism. But Dillard has not demonstrated that it can serve as the kind of neutral evolutionary tribunal that would resolve the underlying disagreement.

The problem I identified in my essay therefore remains.

The Asymmetry Returns

There is also a subtle asymmetry in Dillard's account.

When describing Harris and himself, Dillard initially maintains admirable symmetry. Harris incorporates evidence into one framework; Dillard incorporates other evidence into another. Both are defending established organizations.

But later the symmetry becomes less stable.

Dillard presents his own appeal to international humanitarian law as part of an emerging evolutionary mechanism of external correction, while Harris is described as giving greater weight to sovereignty, historical legitimacy, self-defense, and political realism.

The implication is hard to miss: Dillard's framework represents the more evolved institutional orientation, whereas Harris's represents a more nationally bounded and therefore more precipitated organization.

But this raises the obvious question: who is making that assessment?

Dillard is.

And this is precisely where a theory of adaptive reorganization can become self-serving. It can easily turn into a vocabulary in which one's own position is characterized as open, adaptive, institutionally corrected, and future-oriented, while one's opponent's position is characterized as rigid, defensive, precipitated, and self-referential.

That would be ironic, because it would reproduce exactly the epistemic asymmetry ART is supposed to overcome.

The Question ART Must Ask of Itself

Dillard's most interesting claim comes near the end, when he applies the same critique to Integral Theory itself. He agrees with my long-standing argument that Integral can respond to scientific criticism by incorporating new information into its existing conceptual structure rather than allowing that information to challenge the structure itself.

This is an important concession.

But it immediately raises the next question: can ART itself recognize when ART is wrong?

That is the crucial test.

A theory of adaptive reorganization that can diagnose the rigidity of Integral Theory, Harris, Dillard's opponents, scientific paradigms, governments, and civilizations, but cannot specify what would falsify ART itself, would have become precisely the kind of precipitated framework it criticizes.

The real test of reorganizability is therefore not whether a theory can explain why other people fail to reorganize. It is whether the theory contains mechanisms by which its own fundamental assumptions can be destabilized by evidence.

That is a much harder standard.

The Paradox of Dillard's Response

Dillard's essay is therefore valuable precisely because it does not resolve the disagreement. It exposes another layer of it.

He has taken my argument seriously. He agrees that perspective-taking does not automatically produce convergence. He agrees that competing frameworks can absorb contrary evidence without being fundamentally transformed. He proposes ART as a theory of why this happens.

But in doing so, he illustrates the phenomenon himself.

My essay says, in effect, that people with different organizing frameworks can understand one another perfectly well without allowing the other's framework to reorganize their own. Dillard's answer is: exactly—and ART explains why.

But ART itself remains the organizing framework through which he interprets the problem.

That is not a refutation of my argument. If anything, it is a particularly elegant confirmation of it.

The deeper lesson may therefore be more modest than Dillard's evolutionary conclusion. We should be cautious about expecting any meta-framework to provide the final solution to perspectival disagreement. The moment a framework becomes sufficiently comprehensive, it acquires the capacity to explain disagreements in terms of its own categories. Its very comprehensiveness can make it harder, rather than easier, to encounter information that genuinely threatens its foundations.

This is a problem for Integral Theory. It may also be a problem for ART.

From “Who Is Right?” to “What Could Change Our Minds?”

Dillard nevertheless leaves us with a genuinely useful question. Instead of asking only who is right about Gaza, perhaps we should also ask what kind of epistemic system each side has constructed: What evidence could change its conclusions? Which assumptions are genuinely falsifiable? How much contrary evidence would be required before the framework itself—not merely one of its subsidiary claims—would have to change?

Those are excellent questions.

But they should be asked symmetrically.

They should be asked of Harris.

They should be asked of Dillard.

And they should be asked of ART itself.

That last question is the one Dillard's essay leaves unanswered.

If ART can tell us how adaptive systems preserve their capacity for reorganization, then the most important demonstration would be ART's willingness to reorganize itself when confronted with evidence that challenges its own assumptions. Until that criterion is established, Adaptive Reorganization Theory remains an intriguing meta-theory of intellectual rigidity—but one that has not yet demonstrated that it is itself immune to the very phenomenon it so effectively describes.

And that brings us back to the original problem. Perhaps the reason the Harris-Dillard disagreement persists is not that one of them has failed to discover the right meta-framework. Perhaps it is that there is no meta-framework capable of forcing incompatible frameworks to converge.

Dillard has offered an interesting theory of why that might be so.

But his response has also provided an unintended case study in the problem itself.