In this six and a half hour lecture series by David Chalmers, he describes the concept of a minimal set of statements from which all other truths are a priori “scrutable” (meaning, basically, in-principle knowable or derivable).

What are the types of statements in this minimal set required to construct the world? Chalmers offers up four categories, and abbreviates this theory PQIT.

P

P is the set of physical facts (for instance, everything that would be accessible to a Laplacean demon). It can be thought of as essentially the initial conditions of the universe and the laws governing their changes over time.

Q

Q is the set of facts about qualitative experience. We can see Chalmers’ rejection of physicalism here, as he doesn’t think that Q is eclipsed within P. Example of a type of statement that cannot be derived from P without Q: “There is a beige region in the bottom right of my visual field.”

I

Here’s a true statement: “I’m in the United States.” Could this be derivable from P and Q? Presumably not; we need another set of indexical truths that allows us to have “self-locating” beliefs and to engage in anthropic reasoning.

T

Suppose that P, Q, and I really are able to capture all the true statements there are to be captured. Well then, the statement “P, Q, and I really are able to capture all the true statements there are to be captured” is a true statement, and it is presumably not captured by P, Q, and I! In other words, we need some final negative statements that tell us that what we have is enough, and that there are no more truths out there. These “that’s all”-type statements are put into the set T.

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So this is a basic sketch of Chalmer’s construction. I like that we can use these tags like PQIT or PT or QIT as a sort of philosophical zip-code indicating the core features of a person’s philosophical worldview. I also want to think about developing this further. What other possible types of statements are there out there that may not be captured in PQIT? Here is a suggestion for a more complete taxonomy:

p    microphysics
P    macrophysics (by which I mean all of science besides fundamental physics)
Q    consciousness
R    normative rationality
E    normative ethics
C    counterfactuals
L    mathematical / logical truths
I     indexicals
T    “that’s-all” statements

I’ve split P into big-P (macrophysics) and little-p (microphysics) to account for the disagreements about emergence and reductionism. Normativity here is broad enough to include both normative epistemic statements (e.g. “You should increase your credence in the next coin toss landing H after observing it land H one hundred times in a row”) and ethical statements. The others are fairly self-explanatory.

The most ontologically extravagant philosophical worldview would then be characterized as pPQRECLIT.

My philosophical address is pRLIT (with the addendum that I think C comes from p, and am really confused about Q). What’s yours?