Category: Communing

Metaphorically, the collective/cultural bubble is to the individual cognitive bubble as the ancient city wall is to the cell wall, each being an autopoietic construct which defines the community or system. Heraclitus pointed this out long ago:

The people must fight for their law as for their city wall.
Speaking with understanding they must hold fast to what is common to all, as a city holds to its law, and even more firmly. For all human laws are nourished by a divine one, which prevails as it will, suffices for all and surpasses them.
Common to all is Thought (ξυνόν ἐστι πᾶσι τὸ φρονέειν).

— DK 44,113-14; Kahn LXV, XXX-XXXI; Wheelwright 80-81

I translate το φρονέειν here as ‘Thought’ (rather than ‘thinking’) in order to denote a universal (‘divine’) process in which all things are involved, rather than a psychological process that is supposed to happen inside of individual thinkers. This is consistent not only with other fragments of Heraclitus, but also with Peirce’s view ‘that our thinking only apprehends and does not create thought, and that that thought may and does as much govern outward things as it does our thinking’ (CP 1.27, 1909). In another context, he related this to scientific thinking as a communal activity:

There is no reason why ‘thought’ … should be taken in that narrow sense in which silence and darkness are favorable to thought. It should rather be understood as covering all rational life, so that an experiment shall be an operation of thought. Of course, that ultimate state of habit to which the action of self-control ultimately tends, where no room is left for further self-control, is, in the case of thought, the state of fixed belief, or perfect knowledge.
Two things here are all-important to assure oneself of and to remember. The first is that a person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is ‘saying to himself,’ that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language. The second thing to remember is that the man’s circle of society (however widely or narrowly this phrase may be understood), is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of higher rank than the person of an individual organism.

— Peirce, EP2:337-8

The ‘circle of society’ is ‘of higher rank’ in this respect, that ‘all the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the powers of unaided individuals’ (EP1:369). But in another respect, this ‘loosely compacted person’ depends on individual organisms for access to experience – its ‘only teacher’ – just as a biological population or species depends on the survival and reproduction of individuals to continue and evolve. Every means of inquiry is based on making contact, or connecting, with the reality which is independent of conventional belief. Yet the system which makes inquiry possible is made of the connections which constitute the community. The individual who devotes himself to inquiry can do so with integrity only by working both with and against the conventions of the society which he inhabits; and insofar as that society is healthy and evolving, it embodies a diversity of habits.

‘Let us not concur casually about the most important matters,’ said Heraclitus (Kahn XI, D. 47).

‘The first thing that the Will to Learn supposes is a dissatisfaction with one’s present state of opinion,’ said Peirce (EP2:47). (Dissatisfaction with someone else’s present state of opinion, on the other hand, is more conducive to contention than to learning.)

Each time I find something worth saying, it is because I have not been satisfied to coincide with my feeling, because I have succeeded in studying it as a way of behaving, as a modification of my relations with others and with the world, because I have managed to think about it as I would think about the behavior of another person whom I happened to witness.

— Merleau-Ponty (1948, 52)

Anything worth saying is informative because its dialogic involves all three ‘persons’ (first, second and third) in its dissatisfaction.

‘All experiences are subjective’ (Bateson, 1979, 33) – yet they differ in mode. ‘In an observational mode one is detached from that which is the focus of attention; in a non-observational mode one is immersed in it’ (Gallagher and Marcel, in Gallagher and Shear 1999, 281). The mode of experience proper to scientific experimenting isolates the observer’s attention from her intentions. This practice only occurs within the intersubjective context of intentional consensus-building; but the intent to observe isolates attention temporarily even from that, since the process degenerates if the experimenter allows his preferences to interfere with his observations.

Immersion in the social context of science requires the very detachment from the Other, from the dialog partner, which is most inimical to communal practice generally, and to religious practice in particular. This is perhaps why someone who is known to be an acute observer of behavior tends to make people nervous (as Bennett Berger remarked, in his introduction to Goffman 1974).

The scientific method of isolating phenomena from the rest of the world (and especially from the investigator’s intent) is rarely of use in testing the more intimately guiding principles. For that we need a bigger science, a fuller empiricism that includes both participation and observation.

To make the reflection that many of the things which appear certain to us are probably false, and that there is not one which may not be among the errors, is very sensible. But to make believe one does not believe anything is an idle and self-deceptive pretence. Of the things which seem to us clearly true, probably the majority are approximations to the truth. We never can attain absolute certainty; but such clearness and evidence as a truth can acquire will consist in its appearing to form an integral unbroken part of the great body of truth. If we could reduce ourselves to a single belief, or to only two or three, those few would not appear reasonable or clear.

Peirce, CP 4.71 (1893)

Much of our consensus may be confabulated, embodied in fables which, like our intentions, are sustainable insofar as they are not in open conflict with the truth. But until we reach the end of experience, the evidence isn’t all in. We can never be sure that the cognitive bubble will never pop. We can however be sure that it will always be complex.

Every attempt to simplify the bubble is likely to lead to greater complexity. When a new guess (hypothesis) appears, we’re better off knowing that it’s false than relying on it as provisionally true (which is the nearest we can get to knowing that it’s true). The scientist therefore is eager to pop any bubble that can be popped, especially one we are partial to.

A hypothesis is something which looks as if it might be true and were true, and which is capable of verification or refutation by comparison with facts. The best hypothesis, in the sense of the one most recommending itself to the inquirer, is the one which can be the most readily refuted if it is false. This far outweighs the trifling merit of being likely. For after all, what is a likely hypothesis? It is one which falls in with our preconceived ideas. But these may be wrong. Their errors are just what the scientific man is out gunning for more particularly. But if a hypothesis can quickly and easily be cleared away so as to go toward leaving the field free for the main struggle, this is an immense advantage.

Peirce, CP 1.120

Whenever we are confronted by surprising facts or unintended consequences of our actions, we are presented with a learning opportunity. But since we like to feel ‘in control’ of our lives, we often avoid or ignore these opportunities, choosing instead to defend our beliefs against the facts. We are so good at selecting the facts that confirm our beliefs, and ignoring or denying the others, that we have developed an enormous capacity for self-deception. If we keep it up long enough, we can no longer see the difference between fact and opinion; argument becomes a battle of competing opinions, where the strongest (or loudest) wins. Unless we have a healthy respect for truth and a deep sense of our own fallibility, we have no defense against this kind of self-deception. Nor do we have any defense against those who would manipulate our beliefs for their own purposes.

Truths can be expressed only with symbols – and our ability to use symbols gives us the ability to lie. ‘A symbol is defined as a sign which is fit to serve as such simply because it will be so interpreted,’ but since our actual reading of any linguistic symbol is crucially governed by our language-using habits, symbols are ‘particularly remote from the Truth itself’ (Peirce, EP2:307). How informative symbols are for us depends on how they relate to the reality beyond our habits. When we recognize patterns in nature well enough to anticipate (with some degree of accuracy) what will happen in a given situation, we are tuned in to the habits of nature itself – of which human habits are a small and subordinate part, though crucial for humans. Our most systematic way of arriving at common beliefs about natural patterns is the communal quest we call science. But scientific method is just a more rigorous and public version of our common-sense way of critically assessing our own beliefs about the world.

It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which distinct societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.

— Edward Sapir, 1929 (1949, 69)

The worlds in which distinct language-using individuals live are also ‘distinct worlds.’ But by recognizing others as living in distinct worlds, we acknowledge a meta-world which includes all those worlds and the distinctions between them, and we acknowledge the reality of that more inclusive world – the world in which it is true, independently of anyone’s acknowledging the fact, that those worlds are distinct. And at every level of the holarchy, the unexpected can punch its way through the language-woven bubble of a personal or ‘social reality’ from outside that holon, that network of habits. When that happens, no one really doubts the reality of the intruding fact (though some may choose to ignore it). The only question is whether the language can incorporate it into the personal or ‘social reality’ or not, so that the holon can adapt to the more inclusive reality.

Unquestionably, highly complex environments belong to the conditions of possibility for forming communication systems. Above all, two opposing presuppositions must be secured. On the one hand, the world must be densely enough structured so that constructing matching interpretations about the things in it is not pure chance; communication must be able to grasp something (even if one can never know what it ultimately is) that does not permit itself to be decomposed randomly or shifted in itself. On the other, there must be different observations, different situations that constantly reproduce dissimilar perspectives and incongruent knowledges on precisely the same grounds. Correspondingly, one can conceive of communication neither as a system-integrating performance nor as the production of consensus. Either would imply that communication undermines its own presuppositions and that it can be kept alive only by sufficient failure. But what, if not consensus, is the result of communication?

— Niklas Luhmann (1995, 171-2)

The result, according to Luhmann, is to make the system more sensitive to ‘chance, disturbances, and “noise” of all kinds.’ Communication ‘can force disturbances into the form of meaning and thus handle them further.… By communication, the system establishes and augments its sensitivity, and thus it exposes itself to evolution by lasting sensitivity and irritability’ (172).

Communication then presents challenges to the integrity of the social system – challenges which open its collective cognitive bubble to chaos and thus enable it to grow by incorporating matter from outside. The system informs itself by turning noise into signal, enabling it to modify its own habits. But the whole process depends on representation of ‘dissimilar perspectives’ on the same object of attention.

We use words to sort out the world, or carve it up, by naming the types or parts. Is there a difference between discovering and inventing the order of which we speak? You have to believe the difference is real, and act accordingly, in order to find out whether the order is real or not. Whether you call it ‘making a distinction’ or ‘seeing a difference,’ the practice is the same.

In a 1908 letter to Victoria Welby, Peirce defined a ‘true man of science’ as ‘belonging to a social group all the members of which sacrifice all the ordinary motives of life to their desire to make their beliefs concerning one subject conform to verified judgments of perception together with sound reasoning’ (SS 75). As Peirce goes on to explain, acting in this way shows that the scientist implicitly believes in a universe ‘governed by reason,’ i.e. one guided by principles which can be discovered and understood. If her reasoning is really sound, she will be aware that all of her beliefs (and those of her social group) are fallible. Yet in order to carry out her role of questioning, her investigative practice must be governed by those implicit beliefs which are not currently subject to doubt. The pure scientist is the one who devotes himself “religiously” to the quest for truth.

Speaking from experience could mean either speaking from the primal truth or speaking toward the final truth. The primal truth, the very Firstness, can be neither expressed nor questioned within a conventional symbol system. We approach the final truth by means of the public dialog called science, but can never know how close we are to arriving at that ideal end of inquiry. Can the wholly authentic expression of primal truth penetrate the realm of public discourse? Can the public discourse incorporate the intimate on its critical path toward the ultimate?