Navigating Between Scylla and Charybdis: Mental Models, Oakeshott’s Ignoratio Elenchi, and the Art of Compossible Thinking

With the Odyssey back en vogue this summer, it is worth considering how to navigate past a modern Scylla and Charybdis when applying Charlie Munger’s famous "lattice of mental models."

An Illustration of the Scylla capturing ancient Greek sailors

The first scourge (Scylla) is refusing to do multidisciplinary thinking at all—lacking the ability or courage to look beyond a single "mode" of experience. The second (Charybdis) is engaging in multidisciplinary thinking while crashing into what political philosopher Michael Oakeshott called ignoratio elenchi—the fallacy of irrelevance, or applying the rules and criteria of one domain to a context governed by another.

My introduction to Charlie Munger came from a young man who described Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner as an "investor-philosopher." He told me I’d like him. He was half right. I liked Munger very much—and liked him more the more I read—but he was no philosopher. At least not per Michael Oakeshott’s strict criteria.

Munger would hardly be stung by this conclusion. He was fond of making fun of poetry professors for knowing everything about their narrow corner of academia and nothing about anything else. In his famous 1994 speech at USC Business School, Munger championed drawing on a wide array of disciplines:

"The models have to come from multiple disciplines—because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That's why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don't have enough models in their heads.

Yet, how do we collect these models without committing intellectual chaos? To see the danger—and the solution—we have to look at a damaged thinker in Cleveland.

A Thinker With No Feet

The Cleveland Museum of Art houses one of only ten full-scale bronze casts of Rodin’s The Thinker authorized during the artist's lifetime.

An image of Rodin's 'The Thinker' in front of the Cleveland Museum

On March 24, 1970, a pipe bomb placed at its base severely damaged the monumental cast. Likely executed by the anti-war radical group Weather Underground, the explosion blew off the sculpture's feet, peeled open the bronze base, and knocked the 900-pound statue off its pedestal. Spray-painted near the site was a message: "Off the ruling class."

Art historian Sister Wendy later noted the profound symbolism of the act. Rodin’s figure, she observed, didn't just think with his head; he thought with his whole body, down to his gripping toes. The bomb severed those toes. Yet, Sister Wendy argued, the act of vandalism yielded an unexpected revelation: The Thinker was no longer perched aloof above human conflict. He was plunged into it, exposed as vulnerable and subject to the chaos of the world.

Rather than restoring or recasting it, the Cleveland Museum reinstalled the damaged statue. Its scars transformed it from a mere replica into a historical artifact of 1970s American turbulence.

Rodin's footless Thinker serves as an ideal metaphor for the rift between theoretical philosophy and practical life.

Early Oakeshott and the Radical Disjunct

In his 1933 masterpiece, Experience and Its Modes, early Michael Oakeshott established a radical disjunct between "Philosophy" and "Practice." For early Oakeshott:

• Philosophy aims at abstract, unconditioned, and total explanation.

• Practice aims at modifying real-world situations to satisfy human desires.

A copy of Oakeshott's Experience and its Modes, complete with dust jacket 

Because these modes operate under fundamentally distinct logical criteria, using abstract theoretical claims to dictate practical action is a category error. To early Oakeshott, if you are doing something practical, you are definitionally not doing philosophy. Attempting to blend their criteria results in ignoratio elenchi—the ultimate intellectual sin.

If we stop here, Munger’s project of pulling models from physics or biology to make practical stock-market decisions is dead on arrival—a textbook case of modal confusion.

The Evolution: Late Oakeshott and Auspitz’s "Compossibility"

However, Oakeshott’s thought evolved significantly. As scholar J. Lee Auspitz (who I'm trying to reach--if anyone knows him or has contact information for Lee, please let me know) highlights, late Oakeshott underwent a profound fallibilist shift:

1. From System to Conversation: In The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind (1959), philosophy was dethroned as the supreme arbiter of truth and became simply one voice among many in an open-ended dialogue.

2. From "Philosophy" to "Theorizing": In On Human Conduct (1975), Oakeshott largely abandoned static "philosophy" in favor of the active gerund "theorizing"—an exploratory, self-critical questioning.

3. Reframing Attenuation: In 1933, isolating a partial aspect of reality (attenuation) was viewed as a logical failure. In his mature posture, Oakeshott recognized attenuation as a necessary condition for specialized human understanding.

Modal 'compossibility' was first espoused by German rationalist philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Auspitz terms this late Oakeshottian state the "compossibility" of modal experience. Modes of thought are no longer mutually exclusive enemies competing for metaphysical dominance; they can sit alongside one another as complementary overlays on reality.

Peirce’s Triadic Shield Against Ignoratio Elenchi

How do we practically operationalize Munger's models without falling into a chaotic smorgasbord of metaphors? Auspitz turns to the semiotics and triadic logic of Charles Sanders Peirce.

A common trap in applying mental models is reducing insights to dyadic rules of thumb

. Peirce’s triadic structure—Sign, Object, Interpretant—forces a critical realization:

• A mental model is not the objective reality (Object).

• It is an Interpretant—a contextual, mediating lens.

By utilizing Peirce’s diagrammatic reasoning, we don't import the actual ontology of physics or evolutionary biology into finance. Instead, we map their topological structures. "Inertia" in business isn't literal physical mass; it is a relational diagram describing momentum and resistance to change.

The Verdict: Munger Meets Oakeshott

Through Auspitz’s Peircean lens of compossibility, late Oakeshott would not condemn Munger’s lattice.

Munger never claimed to build an absolute Hegelian science. His framework is explicitly a practical doctrine for judgment under uncertainty. When we treat mental models not as totalizing truths, but as compossible voices in a conversation, Munger’s project meets Oakeshott’s stringent standards.

Like Cleveland’s footless Thinker, the practitioner of mental models is not perched aloof in theoretical purity. Plunged into the chaos of real-world decision-making, they use a disciplined, topological framework of relational logic—navigating safely between the Scylla of narrow specialization and the Charybdis of intellectual irrelevance.