A Concise History of Not Knowing

Frank Auerbach 'The Origin of the Great Bear' 1968 (Hampstead Heath, London)

Regardless of how long and how intensively you and I interact, I cannot really ever understand you, and you cannot really ever understand me. It is difficult enough knowing one’s own true thoughts and intentions. Knowing another person’s thoughts and intentions is doubly difficult. 

This is a fact of life. If my action depends on what I think you are thinking and how I think you may respond, and your action depends on what you think I am thinking when I act, the foundations for action and reaction are basically flimsy. 

Our minds are inevitably blurred to one another. Without some intervening signal or basis for improved cognition to assist mutual understanding -- to create some degree of transparency -- our expectations of each other’s actions rest on fragile foundations. In fact, action may be completely paralysed if it depends on an interaction of contingent expectations that are wholly unreliable. 

If the preferences are troublingly unknown, a wise action selection might be to simply walk away from the interaction. How long could society survive such a condition? To be frank, the scale of this problem is frightening. Social order would be improbable if there were not some way of stripping away much of the pervasive uncertainty about goals and motives among interacting participants in society.

How, then, is it possible that we and our designated representatives in society jointly arrive at decisions, solve problems, implement plans, and coordinate actions? This is perhaps the most fundamental question about the social system. 

One possible answer is that the social system is a complex of devices that have evolved for solving the social problem of contingency in the interactions between people. 

Paralysis on the tableau:

How do we recognise these devices that might have developed to facilitate interaction? Allow me to point out a set of well known theoretical manoeuvres, each of which suggest a part answer (afterwards we can speculate about which is appropriate or sufficient in various situations). 

The following are all discovery procedures which provide partial solutions to the interactional contingency problem of ‘not knowing’.

Competition induces uncomplicated rational acquisition and distribution of knowledge in order to survive adversity and scarcity by getting to know one’s peers in order to emulate or outshine them. The market compels all producers and consumers to calculate effective means to ends. The outcomes are revealed by impersonal price and profit signals which supply information about preferences, economic values, and allocations as well as feedback on the accuracy of calculations. [Requires entrepreneurial skills.]

Networking is an intricately personalised means to acquire knowledge of the intentions of people with whom one transacts. An individual’s informal embeddedness in interpersonal networks creates trust that facilitates interaction. The exchange of subjective knowledge might produce objective or socialised knowledge in the aggregate. Repeated interaction generates precedence and reputation, with resulting information about probable meanings of another person’s action. [Requires communication skills.]

Culture or social values prefigure action by establishing stable internalised consensus about the norms that will reliably guide action. Deviance from informal norms is the exception to the rule, and society has methods for containing deviance. Culture solves problems of contingency by reducing uncertainty with the use of symbols or signs and conventions that generate mutual understanding of behavioural norms. [Requires upbringing and socialisation.]

Strategies for interaction can be numerically modelled by systematically working through alternative surrogate action scenarios or games. In this way an actor might be informed that in a limited interaction under defined conditions there is measurable probability that the other party will act and react in predictable or consistent ways. The assumptions of strategic interaction are those of rational choice and utility maximisation. [Requires math and reductive toy-playing cognitive dispositions.]

Institutions can be designed to eliminate sources of unpredictability in interactions by establishing enforceable rules of action. Central state institutions in society -- law, public administration, and political representation -- emerged as deliberately formal efforts to overcome difficulties in establishing and maintaining functional action relations over time. One way of conceptualising an institution is as the formalisation or ‘binding’ of purposively selected cultural norms. [Requires systematising mentality and rules-orientation.]

Motions forward:

Competition, networking, culture, strategies, and institutions -- all of these are procedures we go through endlessly in futile efforts to discover sufficiently complete meaning of action as a prelude to interaction or during the process of interaction. We try to diminish the confusing contingencies of ‘not knowing’ by eliminating some of the factors that make us insecurely dependent on other people’s (mysterious) expectations and (unpredictable) reactions. 

Now I should confess a preference for institutional solutions as superior discovery procedures. Actually, institutions enhance rather than negate the other discovery procedures. Institutions attempt simplifications of interaction, although some men make stupid mistakes in their designs so that their institutions do not simplify but rather have the opposite effect. 

Much of history, I would argue, is a cumulative process of simplification. It will sound counter-intuitive, yet the truth is that the past was more complex than the present. My observation might look crazy to you if you are only considering the increase in quantities of people, organisations, and technologies. If quantities grow then obviously interconnections and interactions also grow, which must surely make life more complicated, especially when intelligence grows too. 

Here’s the point. The quality of the relationships over time has been improved by simplification of particular devices facilitating easier interaction between human beings. 

Specialisation, division of labour, and the development of separated institutional infrastructures like law, administration, and politics mean that basic structural and conceptual forms of social systems have simplified over time. 

But there’s the twist. Progressive simplification moves a system to higher layers of complexity. Solutions to the primitive complexity of warrior chieftaincies or feudal manors allowed societies to advance in the direction of more complex technologies and organisational forms such as democracy and capitalism.  

Looks back:

Take a rudimentary example. In medieval times one high-status person might perform multiple roles as landowner, banker, warrior, justice of the peace, guardian of welfare, spiritual advisor, and administrator. How unpredictable and hard to understand the interpersonal actions must have been back then. 

Now the roles are specialised functions of single individuals who may work in corporations or public organisations with rationally organised management structures. The interactions have become more impersonal and machine-like. They are more transparent and predictable than they were in the past.

On the feudal manorial estate price signalling was uncompetitive. Culture was often cruel and primitive. Institutional rules were uncertain, unwritten, or unenforceable. Informal networks were dyadic, clientelistic, and often violent. 

Medieval zero-sum game strategies were modelled on inquisitional torture boards and pillaged treasure hoards, not on a Morgenstern classroom blackboard or on a Nashian Hex board. 

Much of history has involved ‘clearing the decks’ in order that social interaction can occur at more elevated layers of complexity with less hindrance from the serious complication of ‘not knowing’ how others will act and react. In their advanced forms, democracy and capitalism are under no less evolutionary pressure now to remove opaqueness from human interactions. 

Crooked timbers:

In his essay 'Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose' the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) wrote - “Nothing straight can be constructed from such warped wood as that which man is made of”. Man “is still misled by his self-seeking animal inclinations into exempting himself from the law where he can”, he therefore “needs a correct conception of the nature of a possible constitution”. 

Institutions and constitutions are the so-called ‘rules of the game’. Strategy games are what strategists play, for example policymakers, entrepreneurs, scientists, or warriors. But even the strategist has a pre-strategy incentive to clear the path of branches in order to be able to see the forest through the trees. 

Every strategist is faced routinely in mundane ways with a social imperative to know more or less what is going on and what can be reliably expected in the humdrum interactions he is forced to encounter while proceeding from one action to another. He would undoubtedly prefer the paths of interaction to be made less crooked. 

Institutions have that function of straightening out the interactions within apportioned zones of heightened understanding.

In the canopy of this forest called ‘society’ one experiences a dull compulsion to establish norms or rules that overlay the confusion of ‘not knowing’. A norm or rule is a stage preceding means-end calculation. 

So I return to the question. Why are institutions superior? Look again at the various discovery procedures outlined earlier. Institutions undergird effective competition and reliable signalling in the market. Institutions take the random haphazardness out of face-to-face and terminal-to-terminal networking. Institutions give concrete form to the successful evolutionary advances of culture and values. Institutions, as indicated above, make the strategy game easier to play.  

I am trying to keep things clear and simple. But communication is the problem and the solution in every example of interactional contingency. That’s why communication is probably a future topic here. For here we strive for total transparency. 

Michael G. Heller ©2014