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?