Two modes of intersubjective knowing

My first post attempting to deconstruct objective & subjective was 10 years ago, and at that time I tried to fit objective into subjective. It now seems to me like the whole thing is confused. So what are we to make of the nature of knowing? John Vervaeke uses the fancy word “transjective”. Whatever is, it’s relational, it’s perspectival, it’s a kind of interface. I like Don Hoffman’s Interface Theory of Perception a lot, which is one of several inspirations here. Perspective is interfaces all the way fractal.

Thoroughly deconstructing a duality requires, from my perspective, offering a better answer to the sorts of situations that would be inclined to reinvent the duality. Here’s my latest: instead of objective-vs-subjective, consider two modes of relating to intersubjectivity. (By default I’m going to talk about two individual people, but the same dynamics apply to some extent between groups and between parts of a person.) The modes are:

1. 👩‍🔬 we are taking for granted that we’re seeing and framing things in a compatible way (enough for the purpose we have, whether that’s solving some concrete problem, making sense of things in general, or connecting intimately)
2. 🫨 we are grappling with an incommensurate experience of not being able to make our senses of reality meet at all. there’s a breakdown of whatever ad hoc shared reality we had, and we’re in a state of chasm

These are a kind of co-epistemological equivalent to Heidegger’s distinction between how a tool feels when you’re using it—transparent, obvious, unremarkable, like an extension of yourself—vs when it’s broken and you’re trying to fix it—opaque, problematic, exceptional, self-conscious. It’s just here, the “tool” is the conversational interface between you.

These modes are, I think, both necessary, just like breathing in and breathing out (although the latter can be viscerally uncomfortable, sometimes to the point of nauseating). They show up on different levels of abstraction, and to different degrees. On a relatively trivial level, consider this ordinary exchange:

Charles: want to come over on Saturday afternoon?
Sharon: I can’t, I’m spending the day at Katelyn’s.
Charles: wait, huh?? Katelyn is in Minneapolis all month!
Sharon: [any of]
• yeah she is but I said I’d go over and take care of a bunch of her house stuff
• ahh, yeah no, she had to come back early because her kid got sick
• wait really? we made the plans a long time ago, maybe she forgot…
• whaaaa…? ohh, haha! no, Katelyn Jones, not Katelyn MacPherson

Initially, they’re in mode 1, so Charles isn’t guarded towards Sharon, so when she says that she’s spending the day with Katelyn, he lets Sharon’s view of the world into his, and he’s suddenly got double-vision: this Saturday contains Katelyn being both here and elsewhere at the same time. In this particular exchange as written, he still expresses what he knows without doubt: not “I thought Katelyn was…” but just “Katelyn is”. In so doing, he’s putting this double-vision world into the middle of the conversation, to be shared with Sharon.

And then Sharon responds with something that attempts to reconcile the double-vision into one world that once again makes sense. In this situation, it probably only takes a few utterances, whatever the issue is—maybe the confusion lasts a couple minutes, at most. But some are much more complicated, for various reasons.

Mostly I’ve been presuming this is an innocent misunderstanding, but suppose that what Sharon thinks when Charlies says “wait, huh??” is actually “oh shit, wait, the two of them had that weird date and afterwards he was super clingy… did she lie to him and say she was out of town?” In this case, there’s a much deeper reality breakdown, that may not be readily resolvable in this scene, since Sharon may be inclined to lie as well to preserve what she assumes might be Katelyn’s secret. Not the best example, but you get the idea.

(Importantly, this phenomenon occurs to the degree that the people in the conversation are making sense of what they know—Charles’ sense that Katelyn is in Minneapolis is likely not an isolated propositional knowing that he just tacked onto his sense of things—even if it was mostly from something she said, it was also based on the vibe with which she said it, and his sense of her being reliable, and everything else he knows about the situation such that her being in Minneapolis fits with his whole sense of what’s-going-on-in-the-world.)

Relatedly, consider what happens sometimes when someone mentions a party without realizing that someone in the room hasn’t been invited: awkwardness, as the scene adjusts around a shifting sense of the social web’s priorities. Or when news is revealed that someone would have expected to know sooner. A real example: I got married recently, and there was a friend/acquaintance who had known for months that we were engaged, and a few weeks before the wedding they asked if we had a date planned. When I said it was in a few weeks, I watched their face express mild shock and pain—what I interpreted as a revelation not just (a) that they weren’t invited but also (b) that that implied some mismatched sense of the closeness of their relationship with us. We didn’t talk about it at the time but we’ve gotten closer in the months since and so I’ve been meaning to because I think it would be good to hold the situation together.

In these situations, people are still on the same page about the kinds of categories they’re using though: parties, invitations, friends, Minneapolis. Where things get really weird is when people encounter not just different facts the reality that they aren’t even experiencing the world in terms of the same basic primitives, which may not even be able to be named, or maybe we have shared vocabulary but wildly different webs of association. Consider the kinds of tensions that arise when talking about free will, or God, or morality, or coercion, or artificial intelligence, or intelligence in general, or parenting…  or most of what I write about. This can be in the abstract, or it can be about some specific situation that invokes some of these terms.

Our maps are never, ever, the same. They are sometimes similar enough (for a given situation). But the operative question is not how similar they are but how compatible they are. In many situations, we don’t even need to be able to see how they line up—if we can navigate together, that may be good enough! In fact, many areas of human endeavour, from dancing to marriage to corporate teams, involve forms of specialization where people deliberately develop different interfaces with reality, that are designed to interface well with each other.

See it’s interfaces all the way fractal for more on this.

< something about semantic arguments >

“What the fuck is common knowledge?”

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meta on this post:

• it seems like a solid draft as long as it is, and then the question is basically:
  • should it say more and if so what?
    • maybe reference Satanove stuff (which I implicitly do with Heidegger but could have more)
  • I think it would be cool to have more examples:
    • where it gets entrenched rather than quickly resolved
      • (maybe an argument about whether someone is trustworthy?  the recent “sociopath” example comes to mind)
    • one from science or something paradigmatic and impersonal
    • one internal
    • one political / re groups on that scale
• do I want to have NAMES for the two modes?
  • Heidegger’s names are bad
  • they sort of map onto something like “transparent meaning” & “broken meaning”
    • or “transparent frame” / “broken frame”
    • “workable frame” / “frame problems”

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