Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Date:         Fri, 13 Nov 1992 11:14:02 EST
From:         "Bruce E. Nevin" <bnevin@CCB.BBN.COM>
Subject:      Bill: reality of consensus of reality of THIS

[From: Bruce Nevin (Fri 921113 10:39:51)]

[From Bill Powers (921112.0900)]

> RE: interpersonal organization.

> >there does seem to be some supra-individual collective creation
> >that persists over time and is shared across persons.

> This has to be a metaphor. Remember that there is no place to stand from
> which to verify that this is so. Each person has an idea of what is
> shared and to what extent it is "collective." We go on the assumption
> that we share a reality. There are limits to our ability to make this
> assumption believable -- the main limit coming from our knowledge that
> it IS an assumption.

This was my referent when I said (this morning's post) that "seem" is
the operative word here.  "Seem to us" would have been clearer.

> >The consensus-perceptions are felt to be different from the private
> >perceptions, and indeed they are unless one happens to agree with the
> >consensus utterly.

> How do you know what the consensus is but by perceiving it privately?

Yes, then "private perceptions" is a misleading term.  Substitute
"perceptions not subjected to test for consensus" or something similar.

In this we (you and I right now) are of course negotiating agreements
and consensus.  Has such an agreement any status apart from an individual
reader's private perceptions?  I suggest that there are prior agreements
that it does, such as conversational implicatures and the conventions by
which an utterance may constitute an instance of a speech act, and I
believe that you and I both participate authentically in such agreements.

Does agreeing that it is so make it so?  Just how much magical force do
constitutive acts have?  Or, to put it the other way round, on what
grounds can one postulate that physical reality is a Ding an sich "out
there" in Boss Reality, but that social reality is not?

Presumably because we perceive the latter as more malleable, variable,
apparently constituted for the sake of cooperative action, and we
perceive the former as universal and changeless, at least at the level
of physical and chemical regularities or "laws".  But in historical
perspective science seems just as much a constitutive cultural
phenomenon, and several forms of quantum physics declare the
constitutive role of the observer.  A weak argument, it seems to me.

No, the question of veridical correspondence between perception and
perceived seems to me equally moot for both cases.  So all we have are
perceptions, among which are agreements that we shall act as if the
world is as we perceive it in both its physical and its social aspects.

To decline these fundamental agreements is too costly, in terms of
personal ability to control in a social world.  A third option, one
recommended by people like Meister Eckhard and Chuang Tzu, is to
participate as though agreeing, while knowing better.  The chores are
still there to be done, but this inward reversal does inform one's way
of chopping wood and hauling water in remarkable ways.

Speaking of which, I have some chores to do, and hopefully my account on
the development system for the T/10 project is set up so I can grab
those source files now.  I will act on the assumption that those objects
and associated commitments and agreements are really, really there.

        Bruce
        bn@bbn.com
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