Thursday, May 10, 2012

Thinking Together, One Mind or Many?

I’m interested in how we think together, in why some conceptual work must be done alone, while other work can variously be shared with others.

Without bothering to do more set-up, let’s wade right in, with a passage from Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (1970, 2nd Ed.). We’re in the first chapter, where he’s developing the concept of a paradigm and using optics as his example and noting that various schools of thought and practice had obtained before optics emerged as a mature science (p. 13):
At various times all these schools made significant contributions to the body of concepts, phenomena, and techniques from which Newton drew the first nearly uniformly accepted paradigm for physical optics. Any definition of the scientist that excludes at least the more creative members of these various schools will exclude their modern successors as well. Those men were scientists. Yet anyone examining a survey of physical optics before Newton may well conclude that, though the field’s practitioners were scientists, the net result of their activity was something less than science. Being able to take no common body of belief for granted, each writer on physical optics felt forced to build his field anew from is foundations. In doing so, his choice of supporting observation and experiment was relatively free, for there was no standard set of methods or of phenomena that every optical writer felt forced to employ and explain. Under these circumstances, the dialogue of the resulting books was often directed as much to the members of other schools as it was to nature. That pattern is not unfamiliar in a number of creative fields today, nor is it incompatible with significant discovery and invention. It is not, however, the pattern of development that physical optics acquired after Newton and that other natural sciences make similar today.
Kuhn continues with further examples and eventually comes up with the notion of a paradigm, which in his original formulation was something only possessed by mature scientific disciplines (within a decade or two the concept had been generalized to everything). Thus Kuhn would speak of the pre-paradigmatic phase of a discipline that, upon adoption of a paradigm, became a science.

Because scientists share a certain body of knowledge and assumptions it is possible for scientific work to proceed incrementally. Scientists conduct their observations and write them up in individual and relatively compact articles. Each article assumes a large and mostly unstated body of knowledge which one must know in order to understand the article. These articles each contain relatively narrow bits of observation and insight which accumulate over time in a more or less consistent and coherent fashion. It all holds together.

And that’s what interests me here, patterns of practice and publication: the way knowledge is shared in distributed in a community of practitioners. For not all disciplines are organized in this way. Philosophy is not nearly so atomistic and cumulative in style. Major statements make loose assumptions about what readers know and agree on and tends to build the whole argument, if not from the ground up, from pretty low down. Further, collaborative work is not nearly so common as it is in the sciences.

Why? Why these different styles of disciplinary publication, interaction, and cooperation? What is it about one style of intellectual work that makes it more amenable to collaboration and accumulation than a different style?

While I have half a thought or two on that – certainly no more – I’m not so much interested in answering the question as I am in establishing the nature of the issue as I see it. So here’s different piece of the puzzle, this from Mancour Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Harvard University Press 1965, pp. 53-54):
Professor [John] James found that in a variety of institutions, public and private, national and local, “action taking” groups and subgroups tended to be much smaller than “non-action taking” groups and subgroups. In one sample he studied, the average size of the “action taking” subgroups was 6.5 members, whereas the average size of the “non-action taking” subgroups was 14 members. These subgroups were in a large banking concern. . . . James found that U. S. Senate subcommittees at the time of his investigation had 5.4 members on the average, House subcommittees had 7.8, the Oregon state government, 4.7, and the Eugene, Oregon, municipal government. 5.3. In short, the groups that actually do the work are quite small.
So, here we have one type of task (“non-action taking”) being performed in groups of a dozen or so while another type (“action taking”) requires a group half the size. Why? We could hypothesize that taking action requires a closer level of agreement than not taking action and THAT’s the reason. But still, why? What’s it about a close level of agreement that forces a smaller size?

Ultimately the question, as it interest me, is about brains and nervous systems. What is it about this or that activity that allows nervous systems to interact in this or that way? In the early chapters of Beethoven’s Anvil I argued that, when people make music together, their brains are physically coupled (through sound waves) into a single functioning system. This can happen in groups as small as two or as large as hundreds, if not more. (See, for example, posts on coupling and bees.)

That’s music, which is very different from discursive intellectual work. In music-making, all the actors are present at the same place and time. In discursive intellectual work the actors are not necessarily co-present; in the large, they rarely are. And that – co-presence – is one factor. But hardly the only one. After all participants in a face-to-face discussion are co-present, but such discussions are not necessarily cooperative and collaborative.

Some activities allow the participants to function as though they were of one mind. Others cannot support such functioning. Why?

6 comments:

  1. Interesting. May not be relevant and need to double check but I think I am correct.

    O.E legal texts would define a group of armed men as a gang up to about the level of seven or eight men. At that point it becomes a warband which is a somewhat different and more threatening beast.

    Small size i.e a king with a retinue of that number of armed men, has always been taken just to indicate the small scale face to face nature of early med. society and of course you always have issue of wither the law texts are practical working things or idealised texts.

    They do seem to yield rather a lot of useful information on social organisation.

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    1. And basketball teams have five players, while baseball, football, soccer, and rugby teams field roughly twice as many players, no?

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  2. Yes and the warlord is going to vary depending on style of play and he is involved in a number of different sporting events, needs cheerleaders and a fan base, but all held together by the ability to successfully hit opponents with a large blunt pointy thing.

    The number is the tipping point and core. Its a society that has to be ruthlessly efficient and lean.

    I have no answers just an interesting place to pose such questions.

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  3. 'What is it about this or that activity that allows nervous systems to interact in this or that way?'
    This sounds like a promising field for a Gabriel Tarde type analysis. Presumably, where the object of imitation is clearly defined and the procedure to be imitated has more transparency then the actor network can be much larger.

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    1. Of course, imitation is only one kind of task. For example, the size of a group doing calisthenics is, I suspect, mostly limited by range of visibility. A group that's trying to write a piece of software, however, has a different range of tasks, with imitation only a relatively small component.

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  4. Yes, I think Tarde has this notion of a great plasticity in what he calls 'imitation' and we might call mimetics and relate to mirror neurons and memes and so forth. In particular, the objects of imitation- of the sorts I feel myself tugged by- are actually not clearly defined at all or clearly aligned with my interests, nor do they really provide a transparent template or action schemata. Yet I tend to ignore, or only very reluctantly read, emails which relate to saving money on my utility bills or maximizing my pension pot while happily clicking on anything tagged as 'cool' or 'lol'.
    Why should this be?
    Is it because there's a higher cognitive cost of responding to signals which require one to do a substantive analysis, which would involve a preference re-ordering, or implement a rational procedure, which again means having to do system wide testing, whereas there's a sort of 'buzz', a reward rather than a cost, for falling in with something whose object is not well specified and which isn't transparent at all? If so, does this represent something we might call a hard-wired interessement detection module- similar to a hypersensitive Agency detection module which sees ghosts or gods in everything- which is adaptive because it permits the rapid change in one superficial aspect of behavior without any real change in one's thinking such that things-in-general are conserved and hysteresis effects minimized even though what appears to be something fundamental and universal has occurred?

    Interessement appears to be about leadership and good Social Choice but most interessement is silly, gossipy, anarchic or reversing hierarchical gradients, and though appearing 'revolutionary' (the stockbroker ditches his Brooks Bros suit for a kaftan)actually no such thing (he's started a private equity firm and is still fat, still middle aged, and will vote for Ronald Reagan in a few years time).
    In this connection, the notion of Concurrency as a sort of inertia becomes interesting. Evolution may have the tendency to increase our interessement mechanism detection, to increase our succeptibility to fads which prevent us from making fundamental changes, because 'genetic canalisation' at the level of memes or modes of rationality may not be robustly adaptive.
    In this case, what looks to us like quite spooky examples of Social autopoiesis or 'market' solutions to co-ordination problems- the success of open source software for example, or the very rapid growth in a genre-may in fact be an inertial drag, something preventing fundamental change and disguising the signposts towards it.
    In this case, there will be no fixed rule to say such and such activity is always going to have the property of 'agents acting like they have one mind' while that other type of activity, for these objective reasons, will never function that way.
    Instead, there will be a range within each activity. In some, if a Concurrency deadlock is adaptive- there will be regions of exponential 'one mind' type growth-which are later found to have been mere fads affecting nothing fundamental- but other regions which tend to disappear or get isolated- yet which, by a later audit, are found to have been important or fundamental.

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